international encyclopedia of informatio - john feather

International Encyclopedia

of Information and

Library Science

International Encyclopedia

of Information and

Library Science

Second edition

Edited by John Feather and Paul Sturges

First published 1997Second edition published 2003

by Routledge11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

# 1997, 2003 Routledge

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprintedor reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter

invented, including photocopying and recording, or in anyinformation storage or retrieval system, without permission in

writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataInternational encyclopdia of information and library science/edited by

John Feather and Paul Sturges. – 2nd ed.Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Information science–Encyclopedias. 2. Library science–Encyclopedias.I. Feather, John. II. Sturges, R. P. (Rodney Paul)

Z1006 .I57 20030040.03–dc21 2002032699

ISBN 0–415–25901–0

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.

ISBN 0-203-40330-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-40984-1 (Adobe eReader Format)(Print Edition)

Contents

List of consultant editorsvii

List of contributorsviii

List of illustrationsxv

Prefacexvii

Acknowledgementsxxi

How to use this bookxxii

List of abbreviationsxxiii

Entries A–Z1

Index662

Consultant editors

Christine BorgmanUniversity of California at Los Angeles, USA

(American Consultant Editor)

Lynne BrindleyBritish Library, UK

Michael KoenigUniversity of Long Island, USA

Tamiko MatsumuraTokyo, Japan

Julie SabaratnamNational Library of Singapore

Peter VodosekHochschule der Medien, Stuttgart, Germany

Trevor Wood-HarperUniversity of Salford, UK

Contributors

Alastair J. AllanUniversity of Sheffield, UK

J.L. AltyLoughborough University, UK

James D. AndersonRutgers State University of New Jersey, USA

John AshmanGlasgow University, UK

Raymond G. AstburyRetired

David AvisonESSEC Business School, France

K.G.B. BakewellProfessor Emeritus, Liverpool

John Moores University

David R. BenderRetired Executive Director, Special Libraries

Association

Raymond BérardÉcole Nationale supérieure des sciences del’information et des bibliothèques, Villeurbanne,

France

H.S. BholaEmeritus Professor, Indiana University, USA

Alistair BlackLeeds Metropolitan University, UK

Barry BloomfieldDeceased, formerly of the British Library, UK

Andrew BoothUniversity of Sheffield, UK

R.T. BottleDeceased, formerly of the City University, UK

Ross BourneRetired, formerly of the British Library, UK

Russell BowdenRetired

Alan BrineLoughborough University, UK

Peter BrophyManchester Metropolitan University, UK

Christine S. BruceQueensland University of Technology, Australia

Philip BryantRetired

Allan BunchFreelance writer/designer, Peterborough, UK

Juan Miguel CampanarioUniversidad de Alcala, Spain

James V. Carmichael, JnrUniversity of North Carolina at

Greensboro, USA

Kenneth E. CarpenterHarvard University, USA

David CarrUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

Roderick CaveRetired

Tony CawkellCitech Ltd, Iver, UK

Andrew ChadwickRoyal Holloway, University of London, UK

Helen E. ChandlerRetired, formerly of LiverpoolJohn Moores University, UK

Michael ChaneyLoughborough University, UK

Liz ChapmanTaylor Institution, University of Oxford, UK

Robert W. Clarida, EsqPartner, Cowan Liebowitz and Latman,

New York, USA

Michèle Valerie CloonanSimmons College, USA

Nigel ClubbNational Monuments Record, English Heritage,

UK

John Y. ColeDirector, Center for the Book, Library of

Congress, USA

Michael CookCentre for Archive Studies, University of

Liverpool, UK

Alan CooperLibrary Association, UK

Gary CopitchManchesterCommunity InformationNetwork,UK

Sheila CorrallUniversity of Southampton, UK

Penny CravenIndependant consultant

Claire CreaserLibrary and Information Statistics Unit,

Loughborough University, UK

M.J. CrumpBritish Library, UK

J.E. DaviesLoughborough University, UK

Maurice DaviesDeputy Director, Museums Association, UK

James DearnleyLoughborough University, UK

Michael DeweRetired

Neil F. DohertyLoughborough University, UK

Harry EastCity University

Tamara EisenschitzCity University, London, UK

Kai EkholmHelsinki University, Finland

David EllisUniversity of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK

Hilary EvansMary Evans Picture Library, UK

John FeatherLoughborough University, UK

Tom FeatherstoneRetired

Stephney FergusonUniversity of the West Indies

Rosa Maria Fernandez de ZamoraBiblioteca Nacional, Universidad Nacional

Autonoma de Mexico

CONTRIBUTORS IX

Guy FitzgeraldBrunel University, UK

Michael P. FourmanUniversity of Edinburgh, UK

Maurice FrankelCampaign for Freedom of Information, UK

Marcia Freed TaylorUniversity of Essex, UK

Thomas J. FroehlichKent State University, USA

John FurlongDirector of Legal Research and Education,Matheson Ormsby Prentice, Dublin, Ireland

Brian K. GeigerUniversity of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA

Ekaterina GenievaM. Rudomino Library for Foreign Literature,

Russia

Alan GilchristCURA Consortium, UK

Peter GoldingLoughborough University, UK

Deborah L. GoodallUniverstiy of Northumbria at Newcastle

G.E. GormanVictoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Ellen GredleyQueen Mary and Westfield College, University

of London, UK

José-Marie GriffithsDoreen A. Boyce Chair and Professor, University

of Pittsburgh, USA

Matthew HallAston University, UK

Sigrún Klara HannesdóttirNational and University Library of Iceland

Stevan HarnadCentre de Neuroscience de la Cognition (CNC),

Universite du Québec à Montréal, Canada

Janet HarrisonLoughborough University, UK

K.C. HarrisonRetired

R.J. HartleyDepartment of Information and Communications,

Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

Ross HarveyCharles Sturt University, Australia

Peter Havard-WilliamsDeceased, formerly of the University

of Botswana

Robert M. HayesProfessor Emeritus, University of California at

Los Angeles, USA

Mark HepworthLoughborough University, UK

Sheila HingleyCanterbury Cathedral, UK

Birger HjørlandRoyal School of Library and Information Science,

Copenhagen, Denmark

Peter HoareFormerly of the University of Nottingham, UK

Susan HockeyUniversity College London, UK

Edward G. HolleyProfessor Emeritus, University of North Carolina,

Chapel Hill, USA

Bob HookEnglish Heritage, UK

Christopher J. HuntRetired, formerly of the University of

Manchester, UK

X CONTRIBUTORSX CONTRIBUTORS

David HuxleyManchester Metropolitan University, UK

Peter IngwersenRoyal School of Library and Information Science,

Denmark

Kalervo JärvelinUniversity of Tampere, Finland

Nimal JayaratnaCurtin University of Technology, Australia

Srećko JelušićUniversity J.J. Strossmayer in Osijek, Croatia

Rosalind JohnsonFreelance Consultant, UK

Simon JonesLoughborough University, UK

W.A. KatzState University of New York, USA

Stella KeenanRetired

Don KenningtonCapital Planning Information Ltd, UK

Shaban A. KhalifaUniversity of Cairo, Egypt

Anis KhurshidPakistan

Margaret KinnellDeMontfort University, Leicester, UK

Joyce KirkUniversity of Technology, Sydney, Australia

Michael KoenigCollege of Information and Computer Science,

University of Long Island, USA

Hannele KoivunenCounsellor for Cultural Affairs, Ministry ofEducation, Science and Culture, Docent at

the Helsinki University, Finland

Christine M. KoontzFlorida State University, USA

Kathleen LadizeskyRetired, UK

Monica LandoniUniversity of Strathclyde, UK

Derek G. LawHead of the Information Resources Directorate,

University of Strathclyde, UK

Yves F. Le CoadicConservatoire National des Arts et Métiers,

France

Peter W. LeaDepartment of Information and Communications,

Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

Diane LeesBethnal Green Museum of Childhood, UK

Ben LightInformation Systems Research Centre, University

of Salford, UK

Paul A. LongleyUniversity College London, UK

Peter Johan LorNational Library of South Africa, ProfessorExtraordinary, Department of Information

Science, University of Pretoria

Mary Niles MaackDepartment of Information Studies, University of

California at Los Angeles, USA

Scott McDonaldUniversity of Sheffield, UK

Alan MacDougallKing’s College, London, UK

Kevin McGarryRetired

Cliff McKnightLoughborough University, UK

CONTRIBUTORS XI

Paul MarettLegal author and Barrister

Ivo MaroevićUniversity of Zagreb, Croatia

Geoffrey MartinUniversity of Essex, UK

Stephen W. MassilHebraica Libraries Group, London, UK

Graham MatthewsUniversity of Central England, Birmingham, UK

Kingo MchombuUniversity of Namibia

Jack MeadowsLoughborough University, UK

Elizabeth A. MelroseNorth Yorkshire County Library Service,

UK

Michel J. MenouDepartment of Information Science,

City University London, UK

Anne MorrisLoughborough University, UK

Ian MurrayLoughborough University, UK

Musila MusembiKenya National Archives

Eisuke NaitoTokyo University, Japan

Alisande NuttallMDA, UK

Ann O’BrienLoughborough University, UK

Pat OddyBritish Library, UK

Sherelyn OgdenMinnesota Historical Society, USA

Robert E. OldroydUniversity of Nottingham, UK

Charles OppenheimLoughborough University, UK

David OrmanJohn Rylands University Library of Manchester,

UK

Elizabeth OrnaOrna Information and Editorial Consultancy, UK

Jim ParkerRegistrar of Public Lending Right, UK

Nicola ParkerUniversity of Technology, Sydney, Australia

John PatemanHead of Libraries and Heritage, London Borough

of Merton, UK

David PearsonVictoria and Albert Museum, UK

J. Michael PembertonUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA

Jean PlaisterRetired

Niels O. PorsDepartment of Library and InformationManagement, Royal School of Libraryand Information Science, Denmark

Martine PoulainUniversity of Paris, France

Alan PoulterUniversity of Strathclyde, UK

Ronald R. PowellWayne State University, USA

Derek J. PriestFormerly of the University of Manchester, UK

Carol PriestleyDirector, International Network for the

Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP),UK

XII CONTRIBUTORSXII CONTRIBUTORS

Lyndon PughManaging Editor, Multimedia Information and

Technology, UK

Claire RavenManchesterCommunity InformationNetwork,UK

Pamela S. RichardsDeceased, formerly of Rutgers State

University of New Jersey, USA

Mickey RisseeuwFormerly of the International Translation Centre,

Netherlands

Louise S. RobbinsUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

William H. RobinsonUS Congressional Research Service, Library of

Congress, USA

Ian RogersonRetired, formerly of Manchester Metropolitan

University, UK

Michael RoperFormer Keeper of the Public Records, UK

Hermann RöschFachhochschule Köln/University of Applied

Sciences, Germany

Diana RosenbergAdviser on Books and Libraries, UK

Ian RowlandsCentre for Information Behaviour and the

Evaluation of Research (ciber),City University, London, UK

Julie SabaratnamNational Library of Singapore

Goff SargentLoughborough University, UK

Ross ShimmonSecretary General, IFLA, The Hague,

Netherlands

Deborah ShorleyUniversity of Sussex, UK

David SleeUniversity of Hertfordshire, UK

Geoffrey SmithLibraries and Book Trade Consultant,

UK

Inese A. SmithLoughborough University, UK

Kerry SmithCurtin University of Technology,

Australia

Linda M. SmithNottingham Trent University, UK

Marek SrokaUniversity of Illinois, USA

Derek StephensLoughborough University, UK

Valerie StevensonFaculty Information Consultant, Social Sciences

and Law, University of Aberdeen, UK

Frederick StielowWayne State University, USA

Penelope StreetUniversity of Liverpool, UK

John SumsionLoughborough University, UK

Elaine SvenoniusProfessor Emeritus, Department of Information

Studies, UCLA, USA

Susan G. SwartzburgDeceased, formerly of Rutgers State University of

New Jersey, USA

Mohamed TaherOntario Multifaith Center, Canada

Anne TaylorBritish Library, UK

James ThomsonRetired, formerly of the University of

Birmingham, UK

CONTRIBUTORS XIII

Takashi TomikuboNational Diet Library, Tokyo, Japan

Briony TrainUniversity of Central England in Birmingham, UK

Daniel TraisterUniversity of Pennsylvania, USA

Gwyneth TsengRetired, formerly of Loughborough University,

UK

Robert UsherwoodUniversity of Sheffield, UK

John van LooUniversity of Sheffield, UK

Sherry L. VellucciSt John’s University, New York, USA

Waldomiro VergueiroUniversity of São Paulo, Brazil

Giuseppe VitielloUniversity of Venezia, Italy

Bill WebbRetired

Sylvia P. WebbConsultant, UK

Sheila WebberUniversity of Sheffield, UK

Darlene E. WeingandProfessor Emerita, University of

Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Gernot WersigFreie Universität Berlin, Germany

R.H.A. WesselsJupiter Bureau, Netherlands

Martin WhiteManaging Director, Intranet Focus Ltd,

UK

Andrew WhitworthUniversity of Leeds, UK

Wayne A. WiegandFlorida State University, USA

Glenys WillarsLibraries and Information Service,Leicestershire County Council, UK

Francis WilsonUniversity of Salford, UK

T.D. WilsonProfessor Emeritus, University of Sheffield,

UK

Kate WoodRetired, formerly of the Library Association,

UK

Susi WoodhousePresident, International Association ofMusic Libraries (United Kingdom and

Ireland Branch)

Hazel WoodwardCranfield University, UK

Irene WormellSwedish School of Library and Information

Science

Patricia Jane WortleyRetired

Zimin WuDe Montfort University, UK

Penelope Yates-MercerCity University, UK

XIV CONTRIBUTORSXIV CONTRIBUTORS

Illustrations

Figures

1 Venn diagram 442 The AND connector 443 The OR connector 454 The NOT connector 455 The Shannon–Weaver model 856 Triangular interaction 857 Value circle of the cultural information society 1158 Value circle of cultural production 1159 Electronic applications of cultural production 11610 Libraries in the cultural production circle 11711 Six parts of a GIS 20812 Staged model of the policy-making process 28113 Information policy concepts 28414 The two components of KM 35215 Expanded definition of KM 35216 Another version of KM 35317 Five major constituents of KM 35418 Domains of KM strategy 35819 The inquiring/learning cycle of SSM 58520 Seven-stage process 585

Tables

1 Fields in a database record 1282 Matrix of entity and process 1593 Illustrative levels of development for information economies 1614 Categories of organizations in the information sector of the economy 1625 US distribution of revenues in percentages of GNP and absolute

dollars I 1636 US distribution of revenues in percentages of GNP and absolute

dollars II 1637 Information production and distribution processes 1638 Importance of forms of distribution 1649 Costs of print-form distribution as percentages 16410 Estimates of functional costs as percentages 16511 Estimated direct costs of searching a reference database 165

12 Distribution of costs at break-even 16613 Time and expenditures by adults in 1981 in selected leisure activities 16614 Different definitions of GIS and types of users 20715 Information policy subdomains 28416 Differences in emphasis between KM and traditional library and

information work 35717 National libraries in the Middle East 421

XVI ILLUSTRATIONSXVI ILLUSTRATIONS

Preface

Librarianship is as old as libraries themselves, and they can be traced amid the ruins of ancient Nineveh.Information science is one of the new stars in the academic firmament; its basic concepts have onlyreached their semi-centenary, and its name is more recent than that. These two disciplines, the ancientand the modern, have been yoked together, not always comfortably, in the names of academicdepartments, degree courses and even professorial chairs. The link is not wholly artificial. In someimportant respects, the discipline of information science grew out of the practice of librarianship, whilethe theories that information scientists, and their close colleagues in cognitive science and the sociologyof knowledge, have developed are now underpinning our conceptual understanding of how informationis garnered, ordered and delivered, a process that lies at the heart of the librarian’s work. As aconsequence, librarianship can be argued to have become a subfield of a broader discipline to whosedevelopment it made a major contribution; this line of argument suggests that information science, withits strong theoretical base and conceptual framework, now overarches the entire domain. There are, ofcourse, other views. Among both academics and practitioners there are proponents of the idea thatinformation systems, or information management, or informatics or, to some extent, knowledgemanagement offer a distinctive conceptual foundation to the discipline. We have sought to give full andobjective exposure to these claims in this revised edition.

The International Encyclopedia of Information and Library Science (IEILS) takes a broad sweepacross this domain. In planning and designing it, and now in revising it for a second edition, we havetaken information itself as the basic unit of the currency in which we are trading. IEILS seeks to expoundthe theory of information, how it is collected, stored, processed and retrieved, and how it iscommunicated to those who seek it. Much of this work still takes place in or through libraries and isundertaken by men and women whose professional designation is ‘librarian’. Consequently, themanagement and organization of libraries, and the skills and techniques of librarianship, form asignificant part of the book. It is, however, fundamental to our understanding of the field, and to thedesign of this book, to recognize that libraries and librarianship are only one part of the informationworld. In the few years that have passed since we planned the first edition, that has become even moreapparent.

At the most mundane level, not all information is sought from, or provided by, librarians and libraries.In the developed world, a multiplicity of agencies, from voluntary organizations to governmentdepartments, have the provision of information as part of their mission; in less developed countries oraltransmission remains the dominant mode. Other collecting and disseminating institutions – museums andarchives, for example – share some (but by no means all) of the characteristics of libraries. Information isdisseminated by broadcasters and by publishers; dissemination is facilitated by sophisticatedtelecommunications systems at one end of the scale, and by the age-old human skill of speech at theother. These agencies and agents use an almost bewildering variety of media and formats to attain theirend: hand-written documents, printed books, sound recording, photography and digitized data storage

are only a sample. Where do we draw the lines? How do we define the discipline to which this book is aguide? What is the epistemology of the subject?The essence of the matter is that we are concerned with information that has been brought under

control in a way which makes it accessible and therefore usable. Raw data is the building block, andknowledge is the construct; information is the cement. The effective management of information allows itto be stored by means that permit it to be systematically and efficiently retrieved in a format that willfacilitate the tasks of the end-user. For the user, however, information is a tool, a means not an end. Itmay facilitate work or leisure, necessity or luxury, education or entertainment; the concern of theinformation professional is to ensure that the user’s reasonable demands are met.The management of information, however, incurs costs of which both provider and recipient must be

aware. How these costs are met is the subject of more discussion now than for many decades past, buteven defining them has caused problems. The mensuration of the cost and value of information is farfrom being a precise science. Part of the cost of information provision lies in the creation, distributionand storage of information media; part lies in the provision of institutions and systems through whichinformation is accessed; part lies in employing the skilled workers who manage the institutions anddesign and operate the systems; and we must try to assess the opportunity costs of the absence ofinformation or of the failure to provide it. Information provision can never be wholly separated eitherfrom the sources from which the information is derived or from the mechanisms through which it issupplied.Effective provision, however, requires a clear understanding of information itself; the theory of

information may not be the daily concern of the practising professional, and yet without a clearconceptual understanding of our basic commodity it is doubtful whether we can fully exploit itspotential. Why and how users seek information can never be convincingly explained outside a clearconceptual framework. Similarly, information provision can never be effective without proper systems ofcommunication; an understanding of the means by which human beings convey facts, ideas and emotionstherefore takes its place among our concerns.Two other factors now come into play: the communication of information to end-users is a social act,

and it is a social act that is, in large part, determined by the availability of methods of communicationwhich can convey the information effectively to that user. The social dimension of information is ofincreasing importance in the self-proclaimed information societies of the West and the newlyindustrialized countries of the Pacific Rim. Governments, which might doubt the priority that is to beaccorded to the provision of libraries, can have little doubt that information policy is one of their properspheres of activity. Public policy may constrain or control the flow of information, through censorship orby a state monopoly of the means of distribution and supply; or it may facilitate it through the absence ofsuch controls and, more actively, by the encouragement or even the provision of the systems andinstitutions that are needed. In either case – and in the majority that fall between these two extremes – theworld of information has a political and legal dimension that cannot be ignored.Finally, we turn to the tools that are used for the management and dissemination of information. The

technology of information storage and retrieval, and the technology of communication, are the last of theboundary markers of our domain. The use of technology by information providers antedates theinvention of the computer by more than a century, but it is, of course, the computer that has transformedalmost everything with which IEILS is concerned. Even our understanding of information itself haschanged as we have contemplated how we are to communicate with machines whose logic is perfect butwhich, for the most part, have no means of making an alogical decision. The linkage of computing andtelecommunications – which, in the strictest sense, is the definition of information technology – willsurely be the late twentieth century’s most influential legacy, for it has changed the paradigms of humancommunications at least as much as the invention of printing, and perhaps as much as the evolution oflanguage itself. No account of the information world could be complete or even remotely adequate if itdid not recognize and expound the profundity of the impact of technological change.It is on this understanding of the discipline of library and information science that we have built IEILS.

We make no pretence of having given equal treatment to every topic; we have made judgements on theirrelative significance, and have designed the book so that those of greatest significance are given the most

XVIII PREFACEXVIII PREFACE

space; they are indeed the foundations on which the book is built. There are therefore twelve articles,each written by leading scholars in the field, which come to grips with the central issues. These are:

. Communication.

. Economics of information.

. Informatics.

. Information management.

. Information policy.

. Information professions.

. Information society.

. Information systems.

. Information theory.

. Knowledge industries.

. Knowledge management.

. Organization of knowledge.

Each of these is supported by many other articles, again written by specialists, which deal with specifictopics, and these again by short entries that define the basic concepts, activities and objects of theinformationworld. In this way, and uniquely, IEILS is notmerely a series of dictionary definitions of terms,but a collection of essays, covering the whole broad sweep of library and information science, each ofwhich can stand alone, but each of which is strengthened by the companion pieces that stand alongside it.The revision of IEILS has involved a number of interconnected activities. Some entries have been

retained in their original form, although even in many of those the citations and readings have beenupdated. Some have been revised by their original authors. A few have been heavily revised by the editorsthemselves, and these are duly indicated. A significant number have been replaced by wholly new entriesboth by named contributors and by the editors. The definitions have been both revised and augmented,and many more now have bibliographical references.Most important of all, the revision has taken account of the developments of the last decade. The first

edition was planned in 1991, commissioned in 1992 and largely written in 1993–5. For this edition – onwhich the work began in 2000 – we have added dozens of entries that relate to the Internet and the WorldWide Web (including new entries on both of those topics), as well as a significant new entry oninformation systems and supporting entries in that domain. At the same time, we have augmented theentries in some other parts of our domain, notably the cultural industries including museums. We havealso increased the coverage of various regions of the world through geographical entries, which have alsotaken account of the great changes of the last decades, especially in Central, Eastern and SoutheasternEurope. At the same time we have tried to reflect the emergent social and economic issues that surroundthe theory and practice of information work, in both the developed and the less developed countries atthe beginning of the twenty-first century.These changes of content, however, are within the structure that we devised for the first edition, which

seems to have served users well. We have constructed an apparatus of references and indexing terms. Thebasic definitions, most of which are unsupported by bibliographical references, will send the user bymeans of cross-references or ‘see also’ references to another entry, often one of the twelve major articles,in which the term is either further defined or put into a broader context, or both. The shorter signedarticles similarly have cross-references between themselves and to the twelve major articles, but they canalso, for some purposes, stand alone. All have either bibliographical references or lists of further reading(using an abbreviated format), and most have both, for any book of this kind must refer beyond itself intothe wider literature on which is it based. Finally, the twelve major articles are fully referenced and havedetailed lists of readings. They are cross-referenced to articles that give fuller – although usually lesscontextual – accounts of some of the topics with which they deal, often in passing. The whole work,therefore, is knitted together by these twelve major articles, and, despite its conventional alphabeticalorder, is far more than a mere listing and exposition of terms.This structure was possible only because of a systematic choice of headings, and a judgement of their

relative importance. We have indicated the theoretical basis on which our judgement was formed, and it

PREFACE XIX

was that which essentially dictated both the pattern of the book, and the selection of the subjects of themajor articles. For the other articles, however, we combed the literature to seek out appropriate topicsand ideas, and the terms commonly used to describe them. Our preliminary listings were refined by afurther search in the literature of both this and related disciplines, and the results were then considered inconjunction with our Editorial Advisory Board. It was only then that a final, or almost final, versionemerged, on the basis of which the signed articles were commissioned.It was at this stage that we compiled a list of additional terms that needed further definition, and began

the process of selecting terms that would be indexed. The definitions were the joint responsibility of theeditors, although with much assistance from some of those listed in the Acknowledgements. The result is,we believe, a comprehensive but intellectually consistent work of reference, written by experts and drivenby a clear vision of the discipline that it explains.

XX PREFACEXX PREFACE

Acknowledgments

The first and greatest debt of the editors is to the authors of this book, for without them it would notexist. We have drawn on our professional contacts and perhaps even exploited our friendshipsthroughout the world to assemble our team. One of the greatest pleasures of the task has been to share inthe knowledge, enthusiasm and commitment of the contributors. Each contributor of a signed article isresponsible for the content of his or her work, although we have augmented the citations and readings insome entries which have been carried forward unchanged from the first edition, and in a few cases wehave indicated that we are responsible for a substantial revision.A reference book is always a collaborative effort between editors, authors and publishers. The

members of our Advisory Editorial Board, and our American Consultant Editor, played a larger part thanthey may realise in the early stages of the planning of the revision. Mark Barragry, formerly SeniorReference Editor of Routledge, was a strong supporter of this book when it was first suggested. Hissuccessors, and especially Dominic Shryane, have been equally helpful. We thank Wendy Styles not onlyfor compiling the index but also for saving us from a gross error. We are indebted to many colleagues atLoughborough, some of whom have lived with this book for as long as we have. A number of them arecontributors, but many others have also been sounding-boards. We are grateful to Adam Warren for hishelp in dealing with issues which arose out of copy editing, and to those authors who responded soquickly to him. Finally, we must thank Claire Sturges for bibliographical research, painstaking work onthe proofs and all her other support during the making of this book.

How to use this book

To find information on a particular subject first look for the term in the alphabetical listing. If you find asimple definition that does not wholly satisfy your needs, follow through the cross-references (incapitals in the text) or ‘see also’ references (at the end of the entry), which will lead you to a moredetailed account, often embedded in a major article that will provide the full context for the subject. Ifthe term does not appear as a heading, turn to the index, which contains hundreds of additional terms, aswell as incidental references to terms also used as headings.For a general introduction to a topic turn first to the most relevant of the twelve major entries (listed

on p. xix). If none seems relevant, use the index to identify which of them deals with a key term orconcept in the subject in which you are interested. From the major entry, you should then, through thecross-references and ‘see also’ references, be able to find more specific details of any aspects of the topicthat seem particularly relevant to you.

Abbreviations

AACR Anglo-American Cataloguing RulesAALS Association of American Library SchoolsAATA Art and Archaeology Technical AbstractsABLISS Association of British Library and Information Science SchoolsACCOPI Access Control and Copyright Protection for ImagesACE Automatic Computing EngineACM Association for Computing MachineryACPM Australian Common Practice ManualACQNET Acquisitions Librarians Electronic NetworkACRL Association of College and Research LibrariesACURIL Association of Caribbean University, Research and Institutional LibrariesADI American Documentation InstituteADSL Asymmetric Digital Subscriber LoopAF2I Association des Intermédiaires en InformationAFAS French Association for Sound ArchivesAFLI Arab Federation for Libraries and InformationAFNOR Association Française de NormalisationAGM Annual General MeetingAI Artificial IntelligenceAIBA Agricultural Information Bank for AsiaAICCM Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural MaterialsAID Associative Interactive DictionaryAIIP Association of Independent Information ProfessionalsAIRS Alliance of Information and Referral Systems, Inc.ALA American Library Association; Associate of the Library Association; Australian

Library AssociationALIA Australian Library and Information AssociationALISE Association for Library and Information Science EducationALP Advancement of Librarianship in the Third World Programme (IFLA)ALPAC Automatic Language Processing Advisory CommitteeALPSP Association of Learned and Professional Society PublishersANSI American National Standards InstituteAPI American Petroleum InstituteAPPM Archives, Private Papers and Manuscripts (USA)ARIST Annual Review of Information Science and TechnologyARL Association of Research LibrariesARLIS/NA Art Libraries Society of North America

ARLIS/UK British and Irish Art Libraries Society& Ireland

ARMA Association of Records Managers and Administrators; American Records Manage-ment Association

ARSC Association for Recorded Sound CollectionsASEAN Association of Southeast Asian NationsASI American Society of IndexersASIS Ameslan Society for Information ScienceASK Anomalous State of KnowledgeASLIB Association for Information Management (previously the Association of Special

Libraries and Information Bureaux); Association of Special LibrariesASM American Society for MetalsASTM American Society for Testing and MaterialsATM Asynchronous Transport ModeAV AudiovisualBAILER British Association for Information and Library Education and ResearchBANSDOC National Bangladesh Scientific Documentation CentreBARC Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council; Bhabha Atomic Research CentreBBC British Broadcasting CorporationBBS Bulletin Board SystemBIDS Bath Information and Data ServicesBINT Biuro Innostranoi Nauki i Tekhnologii [Bureau for Foreign Science and Technology]BIRS British Institute of Recorded SoundBL British LibraryBLDSC British Library Document Supply CentreBLISS British Library Information Science ServiceBLR&DD British Library Research and Development DepartmentBM British MuseumBNB British National BibliographyBPP Books Presentation ProgrammeBSI British Standards InstitutionBT British Telecommunications plcBTEC Business and Technician Education CouncilBUBL Bulletin Board for LibrariesCAB Citizens’ Advice BureauxCAD Commission on Archival Development; Computer-Aided DesignCADIST Centres d’Acquisitions et de Diffusion de l’Information Scientifique et TechniqueCAL Computer-Assisted LearningCARICOM Caribbean CommunityCARISPLAN Caribbean Information System for PlannersCAS Chemical Abstracts Service; Current Alerting ServicesCAS-IAS Current Alerting Services – Individual Article SupplyCAT Computer-Assisted TranslationCB Citizens’ BandCBS Columbia Broadcasting SystemCCT Compulsory Competitive TenderingCCTA Central Computer and Telecommunications AgencyCCTV Closed-Circuit TelevisionCD Compact DiscCDCR Center for Documentation and Communication ResearchCD-I Compact Disc – InteractiveCD-R Compact Disc – RecordableCD-ROM Compact Disc – Read-Only Memory

XXIV ABBREVIATIONSXXIV ABBREVIATIONS

CEC Commission of the European CommunitiesCEE Central and Eastern EuropeCEIS Caribbean Energy Information SystemCEN/CENELEC Joint European Standards OrganizationCENID National Centre for Information and Documentation (Chile)CERN European Centre for Nuclear ResearchCESSDA Committee of European Social Science Data ArchivesCHI Computer–Human InteractionCIA Central Intelligence AgencyCICI Confederation of Information Communication IndustriesCISTI Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical InformationCITED Copyright in Transferred Electronic DataCITRA Conférence Internationale de Table Ronde des Archives [International Conference of

the Round Table on Archives]CIX Commercial Internet ExchangeCLA Children’s Libraries AssociationCLAC Centres de Lecture et d’Animation Culturelle en Milieu RuralCLR Council on Library ResourcesCLSCP Copyright Libraries Shared Cataloguing ProgrammeCOM Computer Output MicrofilmCOMLA Commonwealth Library AssociationCONSAL Congress of Southeast Asian LibrariansCOPICAT Copyright Ownership Protection in Computer-Assisted TwinningCORMOSEA Committee on Deposit Material on Southeast AsiaCOSLA Convention of Scottish Local AuthoritiesCPD Continuing Professional DevelopmentCPU Central Processing UnitCRLIS Current Research in Library and Information ScienceCRS Computerized Reservation SystemsCSCW Computer-Supported Co-operative WorkCSMA Carrier Sense Multiple AccessCSMA/CD Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision DetectionCTI Computers in Teaching InitiativeCURL Consortium of University Research LibrariesDAT Digital Audio TapeDBA Documentation, Library and Archives Department of UNESCODBMS Database Management SystemsDBS Direct Broadcasting by SatelliteDCC Digital Compact CassetteDCE Data Circuit-terminating EquipmentDDC Dewey Decimal ClassificationDES Data Encryption StandardDIN Deutsches Institut für NormungDIP Document Image ProcessingDOS Department of State; Disk Operating SystemDRTC Documentation Research and Training CentreDSE Deutsche Stiftung für internationale EntwicklungDSP Digital Signal ProcessorDSS Decision Support SystemsDTE Data Terminal EquipmentDTI Department of Trade and IndustryDTP Desktop PublishingEAGLE European Association for Grey Literature Exploitation

ABBREVIATIONS XXV

EBLIDA European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation AssociationsECHO European Commission Host OrganizationEDI Electronic Data InterchangeEIIA European Information Industry AssociationEIRENE European Information Researchers NetworkELBS Educational Low-priced Books SchemeEPIDOS European Patent Information and Documentation SystemsEPLA East Pakistan Library AssociationEPO European Patent OfficeEROMM European Register of Microform MastersES Expert SystemsESAIRS European Space Agency Information Retrieval ServiceESPRIT European Strategic Programme for Research in Information TechnologiesESRC Economic and Social Research CouncilESTC Eighteenth-century Short-Title CatalogueESTC-NA Eighteenth-century Short-Title Catalogue North AmericaETC Enhanced Throughput CellularETS European Telecommunications StandardsEU European UnionEUCLID European Conference of Library and Information DepartmentsEUSIDIC European Association of Information ServicesFAIS Foreign Affairs Information SystemFBI Federal Bureau of InvestigationFDDI Fibre Distributed Data InterfaceFIAC Federation of Independent Advice CentresFID Fédération Internationale d’Information et de Documentation/International Federa-

tion for Information and DocumentationFIDA International Archival Development FundFID/CAF FID Regional Commission for Western, Eastern and Southern AfricaFID/CAO FID Regional Commission for Asia and OceaniaFID/CLA FID Regional Commission for Latin AmericaFID/CNA FID Regional Commission for the Caribbean and North AmericaFID/NANE FID Regional Commission for Northern Africa and the Near EastFID/ROE FID Regional Commission for EuropeFLA Fellow of the Library AssociationFOI Freedom of InformationFOIA Freedom of Information ActFSU Former Soviet UnionFT Financial TimesFTE Full-Time EquivalentFTP File Transfer ProtocolG7 Group of SevenGATT General Agreement on Tariffs and TradeGb GigabyteGCI Getty Conservation InstituteGCS Global Cataloguing ServiceGDP Gross Domestic ProductGDSS Group Decision Support SystemsGILS Government Information Locator ServiceGIS Geographic Information SystemGUI Graphical User InterfaceGUIDE Graphical User Interface Design and EvaluationHCI Human–Computer Interaction

XXVI ABBREVIATIONSXXVI ABBREVIATIONS

HDTV High Definition TelevisionHEA Higher Education ActHF Human FactorsHMSO Her Majesty’s Stationery OfficeHSE Health and Safety ExecutiveHTML HyperText Mark-up LanguageIR Information and ReferralIAMIC International Association of Music Information CentresIAML International Association of Music LibrariesIARIL International Association of Rural and Isolated LibrariesIAS Individual Article SupplyIASA International Association of Sound ArchivesIASSIST International Association for Social Science Information Service and TechnologyIATUL International Association of Technological University LibrariesIBBY International Board on Books for Young PeopleIBI Intergovernmental Bureau of InformationIBICT Brazilian Institute for Information in Science and TechnologyICA International Communications Association; International Council on ArchivesICSU International Council of Scientific UnionsID IdentificationIDA Integrated Digital AccessIDRC International Development Research CentreIEC International Electrotechnical CommissionIEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.IFDO International Federation of Data OrganizationsIFLA International Federation of Library Associations and InstitutionsIHAC Information Highway Advisory CouncilIIB International Institute of Bibliography; Institut International de Bibliographie (now

FID)IIC International Institute for the Conservation of Art and Historic ArtefactsIIC-GC International Institute for Conservation – Canadian GroupIIR Intelligent Information RetrievalIIS Institute of Information ScientistsIK Indigenous KnowledgeILA Indian Library AssociationILL Interlibrary Loan/LendingIM Information ManagementINIST Institut de l’Information Scientifique et TechniqueINPADOC International Patent Documentation ServiceINSDOC Indian National Scientific Documentation CentreIPA International Publishers AssociationIPC Institute for Paper ConservationIR Information RetrievalIRC Internet Relay ChatIRM Information Resource(s) ManagementIS Information SuperhighwayISAD(G) General International Standard Archival DescriptionISBD International Standard Bibliographic DescriptionISBN International Standard Book NumberISDN Integrated Services Digital NetworkISDS-SEA International Serials Data System – Southeast AsiaISI Institute for Scientific InformationISMN International Standard Music Number

ABBREVIATIONS XXVII

ISO International Standards OrganizationISRN International Standard Recording NumberISSN International Standard Serial NumberIT Information TechnologyITC International Translations CentreITU International Telecommunications UnionJANET Joint Academic NetworkJASIST Journal of the American Society for Information Science and TechnologyJELIS Journal of Education for Library and Information ScienceJLA Japan Library AssociationJPRS Joint Publications Research ServiceJSC Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACRKb KilobyteKBMT Knowledge-Based Machine TranslationKGB Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti [State Security Committee]KLA Korean Library AssociationKWAC KeyWord and ContextKWIC KeyWord in ContextKWOC KeyWord out of ContextLA Library AssociationLAB Library Association of BangladeshLAC Library Association of ChinaLAN Local-Area NetworkLAP-B Link Access Procedure – Balanced ProtocolLAPL Library Association Publishing LimitedLASER London and Southeast Regional Library BureauLAUK Library Association of the United Kingdom; now the Library AssociationLC Library of CongressLCC Library of Congress ClassificationLCCDG Library Collections Conservation Discussion GroupLCMARC Library of Congress Machine-Readable CatalogingLCSH Library of Congress Subject HeadingsLED Light-Emitting DiodeLINC Library and Information Co-operation CouncilLIP Library and Information PlanLIS Library and Information Science/Service(s)/Studies/SectorLISA Library and Information Science AbstractsLISC Library and Information Services CouncilLML Liaquat Memorial LibraryLOEX Library Orientation Instruction ExchangeLP Long-Playing RecordLSCA Library Services and Construction GrantMA Master of Arts; Museums AssociationMAD2 Manual of Archival Description, 2nd edn (UK)MADAM Manchester Automatic Digital MachineMALA Madras Library AssociationMALMARC Malaysian MARCMAN Metropolitan-Area NetworkMARC Machine-Readable CataloguingMAT Machine-Aided TranslationMb MegabyteMDA Museums Documentation AssociationMeSH Medical Subject Headings

XXVIII ABBREVIATIONSXXVIII ABBREVIATIONS

MHz MegahertzMIDI Musical Instrument Device InterfaceMIInfSci Member, Institute of Information ScienistsMIMOS Malaysian Institute of Microelectronic SystemsMIP Modern Information ProfessionalMIS Management Information SystemsMIT Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyMLA Medical Library AssociationMLS Master of Library Science/StudiesMMI Man–Machine InteractionMMS Man–Machine SystemsMPC Multimedia Personal ComputersMPhil Master of PhilosophyMPM Multimedia Presentation ManagerMS-DOS Microsoft Disk Operating SystemMSS Management Support SystemMT Machine TranslationMUSE Music SearchMWSS Microsoft Windows Sound SystemNACAB National Association of Citizens’ Advice BureauxNACSIS National Centre for Scientific Information SystemsNAG National Acquisitions GroupNARA National Archives and Records AdministrationNASA National Aeronautical and Space AdministrationNATIS National Information SystemNBC National Broadcasting CorporationNBLC Nederlands Bibliotheek en Lektuur Centrum [Dutch Centre for Public Library

Literature]NBS National Bibliographic ServiceNCIP North American Collection Inventory ProjectNCL National Central LibraryNDLP Netherlands Library Development ProjectNEPHIS Nested Phrase Indexing SystemNGO Non-Governmental OrganizationNHS National Health ServiceNIDOC National Information and Documentation CentreNII National Information InfrastructureNISO National Information Standards OrganizationNLB National Library for the Blind; National Library of BangladeshNLG National Libraries GroupNLLST National Lending Library for Science and TechnologyNLM National Library of MedicineNLSFBPH National Library Service for the Blind and Physically HandicappedNNLM National Network for Libraries in MedicineNORDBOK Nordic Literature and Library CommitteeNORDINFO Nordic Committee on Scientific Information and DocumentationNOSP Nordic Union Catalogue of Scientific PeriodicalsNREN National Research and Education NetworkNSA National Sound ArchiveNSDD National Security Decision DirectiveNSF National Science FoundationNSTP New Straits Times PublicationsNTA National Telecommunications Agency

ABBREVIATIONS XXIX

NTE Network Terminating EquipmentNTIA National Telecommunications and Information AdministrationNTIS National Technical Information ServiceNUC National Union CatalogNUCMC National Union Catalog of Manuscript CollectionsNVQ National Vocational QualificationNWICO New World Information and Communication OrderOCLC Ohio College Library Center; Online Computer Library CenterOCR Optical Character RecognitionODA Open Document ArchitectureOECD Organization for Economic Co-operation and DevelopmentOED Oxford English DictionaryOLE Object Linking and EmbeddingOMB One-Man BandOMG Object Management GroupOOS Occupational Overuse SyndromeOPACS Online Public-Access CataloguesOPL One-Person LibrariesOSB Order of St BenedictOSI Open Systems InterconnectionOSS Office of Strategic StudiesPAC Preservation and Conservation Core Programme (IFLA)PAD Packet Assembly/Disassembly DevicePANSDOC Pakistan National Scientific and Technical Documentation CentrePARC Palo Alto Research CenterPASTIC Pakistan Scientific and Technical Information CentrePBWG Pakistan Bibliographical Working GroupPC Personal ComputerPGI Programme Général de l’Information/General Information ProgrammePGP Pretty Good PrivacyPhD Doctor of PhilosophyPIIC Public Interest Immunity CertificatePIN Personal Identification NumberPINFET PIN Field Effect TransistorsPLA Pakistan Library AssociationPLR Public Lending RightPNB Pakistan National BibliographyPPRG Publicity and Public Relations GroupPRECIS Preserved Context Indexing SystemPRO Public Records OfficePSS Packet Switching SystemPSTN Packet-Switched Telephone NetworkPTT Posts, Telegraphs and TelephonesPULINET Provincial University Library NetworkQA Quality AssuranceR&D Research and DevelopmentRAD Rules for Archival Description (Canada)RAM Random-Access MemoryRAMP Records and Archives Management Programme (UNESCO)RATER Reliability, Assurance, Tangibles, Empathy and ResponsivenessRBU Répertoire Bibliographique UniverselRCRC Rural Community Resource CentreRENBU National Network of University Libraries (Argentina)

XXX ABBREVIATIONSXXX ABBREVIATIONS

RGA Readers’ Guide AbstractsRIdIM Répertoire Internationale d’Iconographie MusicaleRILM Répertoire Internationale de Littérature MusicaleRIPM Répertoire Internationale de la Presse MusicaleRISM Répertoire Internationale des Sources MusicalesRLG Research Libraries GroupRLIN Research Libraries NetworkRLS Regional Library SystemRMS Records Management SocietyRNIB Royal National Institute for the BlindRpm Revolutions Per MinuteRSI Repetitive Strain InjurySAA Systems Applications ArchitectureSARBICA Southeast Asian Regional Branch of the International Council on ArchivesSCECSAL Standing Conference of East, Central and Southern African LibrariansSCONUL Standing Conference of National and University LibrariesSDI Selective Dissemination of InformationSGML Standard Generalized Mark-up LanguageSIG Special Interest GroupSIGLE System for Information on Grey Literature in EuropeSILAS Singapore Library Automation SystemSINASBI National System of Library InformationSISA School of Information Studies for AfricaSL Source LanguageSLB Section of Libraries for the BlindSMEs Small and Medium-sized EnterprisesSNA Systems Network ArchitectureSNB Singapore National BibliographySPSS Statistical Package for Social ScienceSQL Structured Query LanguageSTM Scientific, Technical and Medical (book publishing)STS Science, Technology and SocietySTUDIO Structured User Interface Design for Interaction OptimizationSTV Share the VisionSWIFT Society For Worldwide Interbank Financial CommunicationsTCP/IP Transmission Control Protocol/Internet ProtocolTDF Transborder Data FlowTFPL Task Force Pro LibraTL Target LanguageTLTP Teaching and Learning Technology ProgrammeTNAUK Talking Newspaper Association of the United KingdomTQM Total Quality ManagementTREC Text Retrieval Evaluation ConferenceTRIPS Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property RightsTV TelevisionUAI Universal Availability of InformationUAP Universal Availability of Publications Programme (IFLA)UBC Universal Bibliographic ControlUBCIM Universal Bibliographic Control and International MARCUCL University College LondonUDC Universal Decimal Classification; Universal Dataflow and CommunicationsUE User EducationUGC University Grants Commission

ABBREVIATIONS XXXI

UIA Union of International AssociationsUIMS User Interface Management SystemUK United KingdomUKMARC United Kingdom Machine-Readable CataloguingUMIST University of Manchester Institute of Science and TechnologyUNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural OrganizationUNIMARC Universal Machine-Readable CataloguingUNISIST United Nations Information System in Science and TechnologyURL Uniform Resource LocatorUSA United States of AmericaUSSR Union of Soviet Socialist RepublicsUWI University of the West IndiesVAN Value-Added NetworkVAT Value-Added Tax (EU countries)VDT Visual Display TerminalVDU Visual Display UnitVINITTI All-Union Institute for Scientific and Technical InformationVMS Voice Mail SystemsVOD Video On DemandVR Virtual RealityVRAM Video Random Access MemoryWAIS Wide-Area Information ServerWAN Wide-Area NetworkWARC World Administrative Radio ConferenceWHO World Health OrganizationWIMPS Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pull-down menusWIPO World Intellectual Property OrganizationWORM Write Once Read ManyWTI World Translations IndexWWW World Wide WebWYSIWYG What You See Is What You Get

XXXII ABBREVIATIONSXXXII ABBREVIATIONS

A

ABSTRACT

An abstract is a summary of the essentialcontent of another, longer, document. An ab-stracts service is a form of current bibliographyin which contributions to periodicals, othercollections and sometimes books are summar-ized. They are accompanied by bibliographicalcitations to enable the publications to be traced,and are frequently arranged in classified order.They may be in the language of the original ortranslated. Abstracts may be indicative, mainlydirecting the reader to an original item withrelevant content; informative, giving much in-formation about the original, summarizing theprincipal arguments and giving the principaldata; or evaluative, when they comment on thequality of the original. A general abstract is onethat covers all essential points in an article, andis provided where the interests of readers arevaried and known to the abstractor only ingeneral terms. A selective abstract contains acondensation of parts of an article known to bedirectly related to the needs of the clientele andis prepared by a librarian or information officer(1) for the executives, research workers andspecialists within an organization or those nor-mally making use of library services, (2) inresponse to a request for a literature search or(3) to keep the staff of an organization informedof developments revealed in the daily periodicalpress, documents or reports. An author abstractis one written by the author of the originalarticle.

SEE ALSO: abstracting and indexing services;communication; organization of knowledge

ABSTRACTING AND INDEXINGSERVICES

Serial publications that analyse on a continuingbasis the contents of a whole range of periodicaland other titles relating to a common disciplineor to a particular category of material. They arepublished in printed format, in electronic data-bases on CD-ROM, or are accessible via remotehosts, such as DIALOG and DataStar, now partof the Thomson Corporation.

Arrangement

Printed indexing services typically make thisinformation accessible by an alphabetical ar-rangement in the body of the text of subjectheadings, under which appear the bibliographicreferences to the documents relating to thatsubject. Author and other indexes provide addi-tional access points. Abstracting services extendthe bibliographic information by providing asynopsis (abstract) of the cited document.Printed abstracting services differ in their ar-rangement from indexing services in that thedocuments are usually grouped in classified orderon which a sequential numbering system is super-imposed for identification via a subject index.Their electronic counterparts afford the greaterflexibility of both free-text searching of termsor controlled searching of the database fields.

History and purpose

HISTORY

The first indexing service, An Index to Period-ical Literature, the forerunner of the Reader’sGuide to Periodical Literature, was published in1802 and was the work of William Frederick

Poole, one of the pioneers of bibliography, whorecognized that periodical articles were beingoverlooked due to a lack of an effective indexingservice. A significant later nineteenth-century titleis Index Medicus (1879–), the innovation of DrJohn Shaw Billings, a work that, however, under-went a number of subsequent changes of title.The Times Index, although historically signifi-cant in that it dates back to 1790, was originallyan index to a single newspaper, and only in 1974could it be regarded as an indexing service, whenit incorporated a number of newspapers of theTimes Newspaper Group. Indexing services de-veloped over the twentieth century to coverbroad subject disciplines. Examples include ArtIndex (1929–), Bibliographic Index (1937–),Biography Index (1946–), the resumed title ofIndex Medicus and Cumulative Index Medicus,from 1960 under the auspices of the NationalLibrary of Medicine, British Humanities Index(1963–) and Current Technology Index (1981–),retitled from its predecessor, British TechnologyIndex, to reflect its international coverage.Originally, abstracting services developed to

aid research scientists in keeping abreast of anexponential growth in scientific journal publica-tions. In contrast to the broader scope of index-ing services, abstracting services focused oncomparatively narrow subject areas. An earlybroad-based abstracting service was Science Ab-stracts, first published in 1898, but by 1903 thisneeded to be subdivided. The modern publica-tions deriving from Science Abstracts are PhysicsAbstracts, Electrical and Electronic EngineeringAbstracts and Computer and Control Abstracts.The giant in this category is Chemical Abstracts(1907–), with abstracts of over 170,000 articlesfrom more than 12,000 periodicals. From theirorigin as a service to the scientific community,over the twentieth century the number of ab-stracting services has grown to cover a range ofsubjects and the estimated number of abstractingand indexing services today is around 1,450publications.Many abstracting services are now available

online, through providers such as CambridgeScientific Abstracts (CSA) (www.csa.co.uk), andsome have ceased paper publication altogether.The advantages in terms of search facilities areconsiderable. Moreover, some services allowlibraries to build in links to their own cataloguesor to electronic document delivery services. Ithas been argued that traditional abstracting

services may eventually be outmoded becausemore efficient searches can be made using power-ful search engines (Jasco 2000).

PURPOSE

The main purpose of abstracting and indexingservices is to help researchers overcome thedifficulties of tracing potentially useful articlesscattered over periodical and other literature.Abstracts are of especial benefit as they providean overview of the article and thus aid research-ers in their selection of what they consider worthreading. There are three types of abstract:indicative, informative and combined. The indi-cative abstract is similar to a table of contents;the informative abstract aims to supply sufficientdetail to allow the reader to gain an accurateunderstanding of the document as a whole; andthe combined abstract focuses in its informativedetail on the new information, such as thefindings and conclusions of research. Abstractsthat are sufficiently informative can supplyenough detail to keep busy professionals up todate with current research and practice withouttheir having recourse to the original documents,which may be either too time consuming to reador written in a foreign language. Thus, informa-tive abstracts also help overcome the languagebarrier. The art of abstracting is complex, and isbest performed by trained information profes-sionals. Attempts at automatic abstracting haveso far given unsatisfactory outcomes, althoughexperimentation will no doubt continue (Craven2000).

Bibliographic control

Within the scope of this article only a fewrepresentative examples can be provided. For acomprehensive list of current indexing andabstracting services the reader is directed toUlrich’s International Periodicals Directory,published annually by R.R. Bowker. Here thetitles of abstracting and indexing servicesare listed alphabetically at the start of theclassified section, with cross-references to themain entries, which may also be accessed via thetitle and subject indexes. Other bibliographiesthat include indexing and abstracting services,and which in addition are annotated, are theregularly updated Walford’s Guide to ReferenceMaterial, published by the library association(7th edn, 1996–8), and E.P. Sheehy’s Guide to

2 ABSTRACTING AND INDEXING SERVICES

Reference Books, published by the americanlibrary association.

Indexing and abstracting services inlibrary and information science

Library Literature (1934–), published by H.W.Wilson, is an author and subject index providingexhaustive coverage of librarianship periodicals.In addition it covers books, pamphlets, otherselected periodical articles of relevance, films,filmstrips, microtexts, library school theses andresearch papers. A further feature is a citationslisting of individual book reviews. It is nowentitled Library Literature and InformationScience, and is available online from the publish-ers (www.hwwilson.com).

Library and Information Science Abstracts(LISA) (1969–, formerly Library Science Ab-stracts, 1950–68), published by Bowker Saur,abstracts articles from over 500 journals andpapers from major English-language conferenceproceedings. LISA processes material from ap-proximately sixty different countries and pro-vides English-language abstracts of sourcedocuments that have been published in up tothirty-four foreign languages. From 1994 bookshave been indexed on a regular basis and bookreviews have been assigned their own section toassist browsing. LISA is available through theservices offered by CSA. Information ScienceAbstracts (1966–) offers abstracts of articles fromaround 700 journals. The larger proportion ofabstracts is from technical literature and dealswith various aspects of computer systems andsoftware. It is a service that is particularlyappropriate for systems specialists. An enhancedversion became available through DIALOG andSilver Platter in 2001.

References

Craven, T.C. (2000) ‘Abstracts produced with compu-ter assistance’, Journal of the American Society forInformation Science 51: 745–56.

Jasco, P. (2000) ‘A look at the endangered species of thedatabase world’, Information World Review 164:72–3.

Further reading

Lea, P.W. and Day, A. (eds) (1990) Printed ReferenceMaterial and Related Sources of Information, 3rdedn, Library Association, pp. 142–6 (news andcurrent events); pp. 174–82 (periodicals); pp. 185–

203 (reports, theses, conferences, literature); pp.183–203 (indexes).

SEE ALSO: bibliographic control; Bradford,Samuel Clement; communication; indexing;organization of knowledge; scholarlycommunication

HELEN E. CHANDLER

ACADEMIC LIBRARIES

Libraries attached to academic institutions abovethe secondary or high school level, serving theteaching and research needs of students and staff.

Types of academic library

In addition to university libraries other li-braries at tertiary level are classed as academiclibraries and have certain features in common.The libraries of tertiary colleges and of smaller orvocational colleges have similar functions touniversity libraries, but because of their size notall factors apply to them. Most academic li-braries face severe problems because of growthin student numbers and declining financial re-sources; these were partly addressed in Britain bythe Follett Report (Joint Funding Councils’ Li-braries Review Group 1993), which has led torecognition of the problems at government leveland the provision of some additional funding tosupport the development of learning and teachingresources and the maintenance and accessibilityof research collections. Increasingly, informationneeds are met by a variety of agencies in theinstitution, of which the library is only one;convergence of library and computing serviceshas led in many cases to the establishment of asingle ‘information services’ unit.

Purposes

Academic libraries have a primary obligation tomeet the information needs of the members oftheir institution. Functions outside this, such asavailability to the general public, are secondary,though fee-based services are becoming signifi-cant. Academic libraries therefore always havetwo purposes:

1 Providing for the educational needs of stu-dents, both those arising directly from thecurriculum and those of a more generalnature.

ACADEMIC LIBRARIES 3

2 Supporting the teaching staff in their needfor up-to-date material required for theirteaching role.

In most universities, a third purpose can beadded:

3 Providing for research (where the institutionundertakes this), both higher-degree workand research activity of academic staff.

Numerically the students’ needs are paramount,and this aspect of work predominates in mostacademic libraries; but depending on the missionof the institution the other purposes – especiallythe support of research – are also of greatimportance.

Meeting needs

STUDENTS

Students’ needs are largely predictable and thelibrarian should ensure that adequate numbersof books, journals and other informationsources are available within the appropriatesubject areas. This now involves co-ordinationof library and computing resources, includingexperiments in the digital library and thehybrid library (see hybrid libraries). Thegrowth in project-based work and dissertationscalling for research means that students oftenwant a wider variety of material than the librarycan provide, and provision must be made forinterlibrary loan (see interlibrary lending) oraccess to collections elsewhere; but for basicstudent material the library should be more orless self-sufficient. Teaching staff must thereforebe involved in the selection, but not exclusively:librarians have direct experience of students’ useof the library and can often better judge thewhole range of literature and the number ofcopies needed. The widespread adoption ofstudent-centred learning (partly as a strategy fordealing with the growth of student numbers) hasmade new demands on librarians and libraries. Inaddition to providing relevant materials andhigh-quality advice on information searching,libraries have to provide space for group studyand a significant number of public access work-stations.

TEACHING STAFF

The library must support a high standard ofteaching in the institution, providing up-to-dateand wide-ranging material. Teachers may have

their own specialized personal collections ofbooks and journals but still rely on the libraryfor material not in their immediate field ofinterest or too expensive for them to purchase.A good teacher is not restricted to what isalready known about, and a lively acquisitionpolicy on the part of the librarian can enhancethe quality of teaching. current awarenessservices are helpful in ensuring that teaching staffare up to date in their own and in related fields;such provision must include helping teachingstaff to remain abreast of new electronic re-sources, websites and discussion lists in theirdisciplines.

RESEARCH

Providing for research needs is the most difficultand the most expensive part of an academiclibrary’s work. In most fields the primary med-ium for research is the scholarly journal; inmany disciplines in the humanities and socialsciences, however, the library contains the basicmaterial of research, whether in the form ofhistorical source material (including rare-bookand archive collections), literary works or pub-lished statistical data. Libraries outside majorresearch institutions often find it impossible toacquire and house substantial collections acrosswhole disciplines, and have to be more selective.However, alternatives to print-on-paper are nowcommonplace, particularly with the greateravailability of electronic data, whether heldlocally as CD-ROM or accessed over the inter-net, and with improved document deliveryservices. In turn, this needs to be supported bythe provision of abstracting and indexingservices; these also are now typically providedonline by giving access to the appropriate com-mercial databases.

Services

Special services have developed to serve users ofacademic libraries. user education of all kindsis essential as information sources become morecomplex and as students move into new fields ofstudy. Intensive use of lending services is char-acteristic of academic libraries, particularlyshort-loan collections, to ensure rapid circulationof heavy-demand texts, and self-service photo-copiers are heavily used. Long opening hours aredesirable, and growth in part-time and maturestudents, who cannot always use the library

4 ACADEMIC LIBRARIES

during the normal working day, requires moreflexibility. In universities and colleges that offerdistance-learning programmes, some of theminternationally, the library and associated net-work services have to make appropriate provi-sion for this group of students as well. The rightbalance in use of staff resources is necessary toensure that all users are best served. Networkedintegrated systems have allowed libraries to offerfuller services in all parts of the institution and tointerface with campus information systems, giv-ing wider access to catalogues and circulationdata, as well as to electronic information sources,even outside the library.

Administration

The organization of an academic library dependson its size and range of activities; a libraryoperating on several sites, while aiming to meetthe same needs, cannot easily be managed in thesame way as a more compact library. Automatedsystems help in providing equitable levels ofservice across the whole institution and to distantusers, but they are only fully effective when alllibrary staff have the appropriate expertise toexploit them both for users and for administra-tive purposes. Use of subject specialization alsovaries, but most libraries provide services tailoredto the needs of different subject groups. Budget-ary allocation is normally under the librarian’scontrol, within funds allocated by the institution,but consultation with different interest groups isdesirable, through a committee structure or inother ways. Monitoring the library’s activity isimportant, both as a measure of performance forinternal management, and for external purposessuch as statistical series and ‘political’ argumentswithin the institution or more widely.

References

Joint Funding Councils’ Libraries Review Group (1993)Report (chairman: Sir Brian Follett), Higher Educa-tion Funding Council.

Further reading

Baker, D. (ed.) (1997) Resource Management in Aca-demic Libraries, Library Association Publishing.

Coughlin, C.M. and Gertzog, A. (1992) Lyle’s Admin-istration of the College Library, 5th edn, ScarecrowPress [standard, traditional work on running smallercollege libraries – US context].

Dower, L. (ed.) (1997) Gateways to Knowledge. The

Role of Academic Libraries in Teaching, Learning,and Research, MIT Press.

SEE ALSO: archives; libraries; rare-book libraries;university libraries

PETER HOARE

ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY

The acceptable use policy (AUP) is an organiza-tion’s expression of the limits within which itexpects or requires staff, members or the publicto restrict their use of computer and networkfacilities for which the organization has respon-sibility. This is generally set out in a document towhich users may be asked to formally assent bysigning a declaration, or clicking an appropriatebox when the AUP is presented electronically.Within an organization the AUP will concentrateon defining the permitted limits for personal useof facilities, but is also likely to specify the typesof site that should not be accessed and the typesof message that should not be exchanged. Forlibraries and other organizations providing publicaccess, the AUP is likely to contain rules con-cerning booking terminals, the time limits forsessions, age limits, printing and downloading,etc. In policies for any type of user there arelikely to be reminders both about legal restric-tions on use and the avoidance of disruption orharassment to fellow users and staff. The chiefconcern in many AUPs is to prevent usersaccessing pornography and other ‘harmful’ cate-gories of material such as sites inciting hatred orviolence. AUPs are often used in association withfiltering systems and their enforcement re-quires monitoring of use, usually via softwaresystems provided for that purpose.

Further reading

Criddle, S. (c. 2000) ‘Internet acceptable use policies’(www.earl.org.uk/policy/issuepapers/internet.html).

Sturges, P. (2002) Public Internet Access in Librariesand Information Services, Facet Publishing.

ACCESSIONS

The process of adding material, whether it bepurchases, gifts or exchanges, to the stock of alibrary. The records of this process are nowtypically integrated into a library’s integratedmanagement system, often enhancing a recordmade or bought when the item was ordered,

ACCESSIONS 5

which will eventually become the permanentrecord in the catalogue.

SEE ALSO: libraries

ACCREDITATION OF LIS SCHOOLS

The procedure operated by national libraryassociations for approval of institutions offer-ing programmes leading to professional qualifica-tions in library science. Accreditation is generallyaccepted as an indicator of educational quality,and it is often used by employers as assurance ofthe adequate preparation of prospective employ-ees. This process is in addition to that used byinstitutions themselves, and external educationalagencies, for the approval of programmes ofstudy.

SEE ALSO: information science education; libraryeducation

ACQUISITIONS

The operations involved in selecting, orderingand receiving materials for libraries. It includesbudgeting and dealing with outside agenciessuch as library suppliers and publishers. Theobjective of the acquisitions staff is to obtainmaterial as quickly and as economically aspossible in the interests of potential users, andto provide information on the status of allrequests.

Selection

Acquisitions work begins with selection and maybe conducted by specialist subject librariansconsidering publisher and supplier information,or by teams of librarians looking at stock onapproval. In all libraries a proportion of pur-chases will be made following requests andadvice from library users. Selection should bemade following a clear policy as described incollection management. The acquisition ofperiodical material is described in serialslibrarianship.‘Acquisitions’ has traditionally implied the

buying of newly published books but there aremany different formats needed for libraries.Purchasing procedures need to include film,electronic books, multimedia and micro-forms. Different types of material such asgovernment publishing or output from small

presses must be bought as well as material fromother countries. Arrangements need to be madeto buy out-of-print and second-hand books.Some books, such as annuals or monographseries, can be bought on standing order. Someitems can be obtained by exchange pro-grammes and some material will come as dona-tions to libraries.

Pre-order checking

Staff always need to check existing stock andorders before placing a new order, to avoidduplication and to verify details. It follows thatacquisitions staff need to have a familiarity withcatalogues. Some libraries purchase expensiveitems co-operatively via consortia agreements,and, for those that share resources in a systemof co-operation, checks on existing stock andorders will need to be wider, but are oftensimplified by online access. Checks also need tobe made on those materials recently arrived inthe library that may fall between the order fileand the catalogue. In academic libraries read-ing lists for students pose extra checking pro-blems but if received in a timely fashion greatlyhelp in the provision of stock.Having checked current holdings it is impor-

tant to verify and enhance request details. Theinformation sources here are library suppliers,publishers, trade bibliographies (see trade bib-liography) and national bibliographies (seenational bibliography). There are specialistbibliographies or catalogues available for manysubjects and geographical areas, and data fromonline Internet suppliers is also useful.

Ordering

There are many sources of supply available tolibraries, the most obvious being booksellers whospecialize in the area, known as library suppliers.Consideration needs to be given to the variablesof speed, accuracy and service before choosing asupplier. It is not good practice to place all orderswith one supplier, although academic librariesmay have a percentage of business with theircampus bookshop. Tendering for total supply forlibraries is negotiated in some places to maximizediscount. A range of suppliers will be needed forsecond-hand, antiquarian, specialist subject orformat, or international supply, and for these theInternet is increasingly useful for information andsupply.

6 ACCREDITATION OF LIS SCHOOLS

Apart from setting up accounts with suppliers,acquisitions staff need to keep up good commu-nication to ensure smooth supply. Suppliersrequire clear information on requirements suchas servicing (jacketing, insertion of security trig-gers, labelling), invoicing, reporting and how tohandle urgent orders. They also need specificinformation on author, title, edition, binding,number of copies and the international stan-dard book number or other identifier.Acquisitions staff commonly set up brief cata-

logue records for online systems at the orderstage. Online placement of orders is possible andpublishers’ catalogues, supplier databases andlibrary catalogues can also be accessed via theInternet.

Receipt

With reliable suppliers there should be fewproblems, but checks are always necessary onaccuracy/condition of goods and invoicing. Goodrelationships with suppliers will allow for returnsand credit, as well as cancellation of orders.Suppliers will report on items they are unable

to supply (out of print, not yet published,publication abandoned) and the library candecide on action. Acquisitions should claim out-standing orders as a matter of routine.Urgent orders or those reserved for specific

users should be dealt with promptly, but thereshould be no significant delays between receipt ofmaterial, announcement of arrival and catalo-guing.Operational statistics on items ordered, re-

ceived and paid for will need to be collected.Regular reports will also be needed on moneyspent and funds committed.

Budgeting and finance

Acquisitions work revolves around the manage-ment of a budget divided into funds to coverdifferent subjects, materials or formats. As mate-rial is ordered a price commitment is madeagainst the relevant fund so that the libraryknows how much money may be left to spend inthe financial year.Responsibility for the budget, which is likely

to be held by acquisitions on behalf of theLibrary Director, means that there is a require-ment to understand basic accounting methodsand to liaise with institutional accountants andauditors. Checking and authorizing payment of

invoices, credits and reporting on tax liability, aswell as checking supplier statements of accountand estimating future commitments, are all partof acquisitions work. Online systems preferablyneed to be able to communicate between thelibrary and the finance office.In times of budget constraint acquisitions is

often the first area to be cut, causing orders to bestockpiled or cancelled. Conversely, in times ofunexpected affluence acquisitions may benefit.

Professional development

Acquisitions staff can keep in touch with publish-ing and the book trade by attending book fairssuch as those in Frankfurt or London. Meetingsand training courses where matters of currentconcern can be discussed are run by the amer-ican library association and in the UK by theNational Acquisitions Group (NAG). Both ofthese organizations have drawn up codes ofethics for acquisitions staff. Electronic mail listsand journals provide support, information anddiscussion for acquisitions staff, suppliers andpublishers.

Further reading

AcqWeb (1994) (www.library.vanderbilt.edu).Against the Grain (1989) Charleston, SC (quarterly).The Bookseller (1859) Whitaker (weekly).Chapman, L. (2001) Managing Acquisitions in Libraryand Information Services, Library Association.

Library Collections, Acquisitions and Technical Ser-vices (1977) Pergamon (quarterly)

Schmidt, K. (ed.) (1999) Understanding the Business ofLibrary Acquisitions, 2nd edn, ALA.

SEE ALSO: accessions; book trade; collectionmanagement; digital library; grey literature;library suppliers; national bibliography; subjectlibrarian

LIZ CHAPMAN

ADVICE SERVICE

An activity aimed at enabling citizens and con-sumers to obtain their rights, exercise responsi-bilities and access services. It is essentiallylocality-based, available free of charge to allusers and covers all subjects, and a means ofcountering social exclusion (see social exclu-sion and libraries). In practice the majority ofadvice work enquiries relate to social security,

ADVICE SERVICE 7

housing, fuel, consumer, financial, employment,immigration and family matters.

Elements

Advice work covers a range of activities, themain ones being:

. Information-giving, which involves the trans-fer to a client of simple or complex informa-tion obtained from other sources.

. Advice-giving, which is information tailored toindividual need – a more complex process thatcan involve the fairly neutral activity of settingout a course of action or options through toevaluation of available services and help withchoosing.

. Referral, the act of directing clients to anotheragency or facility where they can get furtherhelp, which may involve making direct contactwith that agency, arranging an appointmentand sometimes escorting the client to theagency.

. Action, which can range from simple help withfilling in forms and writing letters on theclient’s behalf to mediation between people indispute and representation (‘advocacy’) attribunal hearings

. Feedback, the reporting and transmission ofinformation, obtained through the advicework process, on how policies, programmes,services or procedures are working in practiceand what gaps exist in provision.

Models

Unlike community work and social work, advicework has little theoretical base. Nevertheless,Thornton has identified ‘three major schools ofthought among advice workers’, which she char-acterizes as the ‘professional’, the ‘community’and the ‘counselling’ approach.

The ‘professional’ approach is often found inlonger-established advice centres. In this modeladvice work is an activity comparable to thetraditional professions, such as medicine or thelaw. The advice worker is the ‘expert’ who isbeing consulted about an essentially technicalproblem. The focus is on the user’s problem;technical excellence is pursued. An adviser’sskill can be measured by the despatch withwhich s/he ‘solves’ problems. The ‘client’ is

dependent on the advice worker for her/hisexpertise.. . .The ‘community’ approach to advice work

emerged in the 1970s and finds its origins incommunity work theory applied to advicework.. . .The underlying principles are those ofequality and collectivity. The dependent ex-pert/client relationship is rejected, and insteadadvice workers are now required to relate toservice users in ways that emphasize theequality of the relationship and enable the userto deal with her/his problem her/himself or(better yet) collectively with others in the sameposition. Collective solutions are more highlyvalued than individual ones.. . .The third approach arrives in the advice

spectrum through the medium of specialistagencies, often those providing a range ofservices to a particular user group. It can beparticularly helpful where the user group istraditionally and institutionally disadvantaged,because unlike the two approaches. . .above, itis person-centred rather than problem-centred.Advisers are likely to spend more time witheach user than in either of the other types ofcentre. What might be defined as the ‘advice’issues (practical rather than personal) are dealtwith in a counselling framework and thisoffers the user the opportunity to work out anapproach to her/his difficulties. There is agreater emphasis on the interpersonal skills ofthe adviser.

(Thornton 1989)

Organization

Most advice work takes place in advice centresor, in the USA, information and referral (I&R)centres and is carried out mostly by a mixture ofpaid professionals, paraprofessionals and volun-teers. Paid workers tend to provide continuity ofmanagement and supervision, handle the moredifficult problems or provide specialist advice inparticular areas. Volunteers, suitably trained, areresponsible for handling the bulk of enquiriesand other aspects of advice work, such as out-reach.The National Association of Citizens’ Advice

Bureaux (NACAB), established in the UK duringthe Second World War, has by far the most highlystructured system for advice work and hasbecome the model for other, mainly BritishCommonwealth, countries. It includes mandatory

8 ADVICE SERVICE

initial and ongoing training, staff assessment,standards for bureau operation and an extensiveand regularly updated information base to ensureaccuracy and consistency of advice-giving. Thethree basic tenets of the CAB service are inde-pendence, impartiality and objectivity, and con-fidentiality.Since the 1960s in Britain there has been a

growth in other advice centres offering a differ-ent style of operation or covering more specia-lized areas, such as housing, fuel, consumer law,employment, legal rights, money and immigra-tion. Many of these are represented by theFederation of Independent Advice Centres(FIAC), an umbrella organization that arrangestraining courses on advice work and issues guide-lines on good practice (Thornton 1989). Agovernment agency, the National ConsumerCouncil, has taken a strong interest in adviceservices over the years and has issued a set ofguidelines on minimum standards for local ad-vice services (National Consumer Council 1986).New services provided through the Internet, suchas the personal health advisory services providedby NHS Direct in the UK (www.NHSdirect.nhs.uk), now supplement traditional face-to-faceservices.I&R services in the USA developed out of the

profusion (and confusion) of new social serviceprogrammes in the 1960s with similar aims toCABs but lacking their structure and centralizedsupport. Umbrella organizations, such as theUnited Way of America and the Alliance ofInformation and Referral Systems, Inc. (AIRS),have issued a variety of materials on programmedevelopment and staff training, and publishedjointly national standards for information andreferral (United Way of America 1983).Initially, advice work was concentrated on

urban areas but there has been a growing interestin ways of delivering such services to ruralpopulations. The British Community InformationProject and the National Consumer Council havebeen instrumental in researching options.Advice work has not escaped the intrusion of

new technology and computers feature stronglyin the work of many advice services, particularlyfor file organization and maintaining statisticalrecords, and as an aid to performing benefitcalculations. Again, the National ConsumerCouncil and the British Community InformationProject have played an active role in promotingsuch use.

References

National Consumer Council (1986) Good Advice forAll: Guidelines on Standards for Local AdviceServices, National Consumer Council.

Thornton, C. (1989)Managing to Advise, Federation ofIndependent Advice Centres, pp. 9–10.

United Way of America (1983) National Standards forInformation and Referral Services, United Way ofAmerica and the Alliance of Information and Re-ferral Systems, Inc.

Further reading

Kempson, E. (1981) On the Road: A Guide to SettingUp and Running a Mobile Advice Centre, London:Community Information Project.

Levinson, R. (1988) Information and Referral Net-works: Doorways to Human Services, New York:Springer Publishing Company.

Levinson, R. and Haynes, K. S. (eds) (1984) AccessingHuman Services: International Perspectives, BeverleyHills, CA: Sage Publications (Social Service DeliverySystems vol. 7) [examines CAB and I&R models indetail and other systems worldwide briefly].

Ottley, P. and Kempson, E. (1982) Computer Benefits?Guidelines for Local Information and Advice Ser-vices, London: National Consumer Council.

Steele, J. (1991) Information Management in AdviceCentres, London: Policy Studies Institute.

SEE ALSO: community information

ALLAN BUNCH

AFRICA

This region comprises the more than fiftyAfrican states that are unified, if at all, by anenduring legacy of colonialism or foreign occu-pation. African countries vary in size from theenormous expanses of Sudan and the Demo-cratic Republic of the Congo to small islandstates in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Inpopulation they vary from Nigeria’s more than100 million and Egypt’s nearly 70 million, tojust a few thousand. Most are extremely poor,with average annual incomes in countries likeBurkina Faso and Sierra Leone being amongstthe very lowest in the world. Despite notableexceptions, their populations tend to be thinlyspread throughout the rural areas. The majorityof people are dependent on subsistence agricul-ture, and are highly vulnerable to the faminesand natural disasters that occur with frequencyin the tropical climates of the region. There isan enormous diversity of languages and culturaltraditions within many of the countries them-selves, as well as in the continent as a whole.

AFRICA 9

Although sectors of some countries, most nota-bly South Africa, are highly developed, ingeneral the information infrastructures and li-brary and information institutions of the regionreflect low levels of national development. Mod-ern library and information work is still apioneer activity in most of the region, despitethe fact that the countries of the Mediterraneanfringe have a documentary tradition going backfor thousands of years.

History

It is important to be aware that written recordshave a much longer history in Africa than inEurope. Clay tablets have been found in parts ofEgypt dating back to before 3000 bc. Thevarious different ages of Egyptian civilizationproduced a wealth of documentation and theMaghreb as a whole can also show riches thatinclude Berber inscriptions, Greek and Romanbooks, Vandal wooden tablets from the fifth andsixth centuries, and great quantities of Arabicliterature after the Muslim conquests and conver-sions of the seventh century. Whether or notancient Egypt had many libraries, as opposed toarchives and ceremonial collections, the Ptole-maic period certainly produced one of theworld’s most famous libraries: that of Alexan-dria. There were Roman libraries scatteredthrough the Mediterranean provinces, and theArabic and Ottoman periods had a comparativeabundance of libraries created for mosques,universities and palaces.The story of modern libraries is the story of

the effects of colonization, which were sufferedby every African country (except Ethiopia, if weignore the brief Italian occupation of the 1930s).Control of the continent fluctuated betweenmany European powers until the first half of thetwentieth century when, for a while, Britain,France and Portugal were the main externalforces. In the Maghreb, French, Spanish andItalian linguistic influence did not supplant apowerful Arabic written culture, and Egypt,which fell in the British sphere of influence,remained an important centre for Middle East-ern, Islamic and secular Arabic culture, withcomparatively large and significant libraries. Insub-Saharan Africa, settlers and Christian mis-sionaries were chiefly responsible for givingorthographies to African languages so that theBible and other religious writings could be made

widely accessible. This did not mean that sub-Saharan Africa had sufficient books in Africanlanguages to form libraries. The first libraries inthe region seem to have been on its geographicalfringes: in the Sahara itself, with mosque librariesin cities like Timbuktu and Djenne in thesixteenth century; along the east coast in tradingcommunities like Mombasa, Zanzibar or Kilwa;and in South Africa, where in 1761 a smallpublic library was set up by European settlers.In fact, during the colonial period, which

ended for most African countries in the 1960s,administrations paid little attention to libraryand information services for the general popula-tion. Libraries (often for the exclusive use ofwhite people) were sometimes set up wherethere were large numbers of settlers, as inKenya, Zimbabwe and Algeria. It was not,however, until preparations were being madefor the independence of some of the Britishcolonies that much attention was given to moreaccessible information and library facilities. InGhana, for instance, the Ghana Library Boardwas established in 1950, seven years beforeindependence. Several former British colonies,such as Tanzania in 1963, also passed legislationto set up and support library services very earlyin their independent existence. In francophoneAfrica, the pattern of library provision in thecolonial period was usually more tentative,though Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria show anArabic tradition overlain by French colonialinfluences. Some of the most positive initiativesin francophone Africa were in the formerBelgian colonies, but independence does notseem to have brought quite the same enthusiasmor opportunities as in English-speaking Africa.Likewise, the Portuguese colonies could onlyshow a few old-established libraries like theBiblioteca Municipal de Luanda (1873) and anetwork of early twentieth-century researchlibraries.

The information environment

Indigenous African culture was, and is, richlyoral, with history, religion, medicine, geographyand works of the imagination, nowadays oftenreferred to together as indigenous knowledge(IK), held in the human mind. Africa’s oralsociety should most definitely not be treated asif it were a problem for those wishing to createeffective information institutions. It does, how-

10 AFRICA

ever, raise a set of questions that have not neededto be answered in countries, such as those ofEurope and North America, where large propor-tions of the population were both literate andprint-oriented before libraries were widely avail-able. One issue is that of how governments andtheir agencies communicate with citizens. News-papers, despite low literacy levels, are a popularsource of information, but they are often govern-ment-controlled or censored, and their economicbase is frequently precarious. Newsprint is cripp-lingly expensive, advertising revenue is limitedand unreliable, and distribution networks seldomstretch much beyond the cities, even if sufficientcopies could be printed to sell more widely.Radio is more or less ubiquitous, but receiversand batteries are expensive in relation to people’sincomes and it is unrealistic to claim that accessto radio is truly universal. What is more, use ofradio by governments as an information mediumis not merely unidirectional (top down) butusually clumsy and ineffective. Not every countryhas a television service, and, where there is one,the signal often does not reach far beyond themain centres of population. Ownership of recei-vers is also very low, with just a few thousandsets in many countries. Local programme contentis rare and not of a high standard, so much ofwhat is broadcast is the cheaper product of theUS broadcasting export trade. Satellite transmis-sion is in the process of transforming the scope oftelevision reception, but at present this, too, hasa comparatively limited audience in Africa.

Problems of information service in Africa

In practice, most formal information servicessuffer from crippling problems, and few realizetheir full potential. Budgetary constraints affectlibraries, public broadcasting, extension ser-vices, other information agencies and infrastruc-tural services in virtually every African country.The availability of printed material of all kinds isseverely limited because of shortages of paper,limited printing capacity and underdevelopeddistribution channels. National publishing indus-tries that produce fewer than one hundred titlesper year are the norm. Although Egypt producesabout 10,000 titles, in sub-Saharan Africa, apartfrom South Africa with about 2,500 titles, onlyNigeria reaches a figure of 1,000 titles per year.censorship is often one of the most efficientactivities of government, and the suppression of

unacceptable opinion or information is fre-quently brutal. Imported publications are expen-sive in local terms, and foreign currency topurchase them is severely rationed in mostcountries. Import dues and customs restrictionsalso contribute to the expense. Locally producedgrey literature is a resource of more thanusual value when conventional publishing is soweak, but is often even more difficult to acquirein some African countries than it is in other partsof the world because of practices such as officialsretaining copies in the hope of personal profit.Postal services, both internal and external,

tend to be slow and unreliable. Likewise, internaltelephone communications are often very ineffi-cient, although satellite links to other countriesare usually highly effective. Levels of access totelephones have been extremely low, with seldommore than an average of one telephone line perhundred inhabitants and more commonly one pereach thousand people. The deregulation of tele-communications in many African countries andthe licensing of new cellular networks is, how-ever, transforming the situation. The number ofmobile subscribers is expected to exceed thosewith fixed connections during 2002 and bettertelecommunications access opens the way forbetter online access. Computers, whilst almostubiquitous in banks, businesses and governmentoffices, are relatively expensive to buy in the firstplace, and to maintain and to run subsequently.Whilst the endemically unreliable electrical sup-ply of most African countries may no longerprovide quite the same threat to computer files asit used to, it does make effective use of compu-ters somewhat difficult. Despite this, the numberof home computers and of computer literatepeople is rising at a swift rate. There now seemto be genuine indications that some sectors ofAfrican society are entering the information age,but this also serves to increase the divide betweeninformation haves and have-nots

Library and archive services

SPECIAL LIBRARIES

The first sector in which consistent, positivelibrary developments can be observed across thecontinent is that of special libraries anddocumentation centres. Geological libraries, be-ginning with that at Khartoum, Sudan, in 1904,and agricultural libraries, such as the ForestryDepartment Library and Herbarium, Entebbe,

AFRICA 11

Uganda, also in 1904, were often the earliest tobe founded. In 1910 administrative libraries wererequired by law in the former Belgian Congo,and the number of special libraries of varioustypes across the continent increased steadily,although not swiftly, thereafter. Today speciallibraries and documentation centres continue tobe important and comparatively flourishing in-stitutions. Many form part of government minis-tries, parastatals and NGOs, and are thus able toappeal for support very directly to the decision-makers. They serve small but influential clien-teles, whose activities can be seen as affecting theeconomic prospects of the country. Although thelibraries need expensive imported monographsand journals, their most significant stock isprobably grey literature, which is difficult, butnot expensive, to acquire. They often have usefullinks with overseas institutions that may supplymaterials as gifts or exchanges. Special librariesincreasingly exploit online access and the re-sources of the World Wide Web, and this tendsto raise the profile of information work withinthe institution.

ACADEMIC LIBRARIES

The academic library (see academic libraries)has a long pedigree in Africa and some of theworld’s oldest universities are found there. Al-Azhar University, Cairo, was founded in 970 andQuarouine University in Fez, Morocco, in 1400.However, in sub-Saharan Africa few academiclibraries, such as those at Fourah Boy College,Sierra Leone (1827), and Liberia College, Mon-rovia, Liberia (1862), date from as long ago asthe nineteenth century. Most African universitiesand their libraries were founded in the periodsince the Second World War. African countrieshave invested extremely high proportions of theirpublic revenue on education and this has in-cluded at least one university in almost everystate. Many of these have sizeable and sometimesarchitecturally impressive library buildings,which express the vision of the founders of theimportant role that the library would play in theuniversity. The sad reality is that the expense ofdeveloping and maintaining collections to sup-port teaching and research has proved beyondthe resources found in most African countries.Up-to-date, well-selected and well-cared-for col-lections are the exception rather than the rule, sothat researchers and teachers lack the essentialsfor progressive scholarship, and students are

often forced to rely exclusively on their ownlecture notes. school libraries frequently suf-fer even greater degrees of deprivation, someexisting in name only. The possibility that elec-tronic information services may open up a newform of access for the staff and students ofeducational establishments, replacing conven-tional library service almost entirely, seems likeone of the most hopeful possibilities in manycases.

NATIONAL AND PUBLIC LIBRARIES

These two forms of library are deliberatelylinked, since the arrangements in many Africancountries are different from those in other partsof the world. National library (see nationallibraries) services are not usually a nationalresearch collection rooted in legal deposit acqui-sitions, as would be expected elsewhere, thoughsuch libraries do exist. For instance, the formerKhedive’s Library of 1870, in Cairo, which isnow the national library of Egypt, has a greatwealth of Arabic books and manuscripts as-sembled from various neglected earlier collec-tions. There are also more recent stirrings. A finemodern national library building was opened inWindhoek, Namibia, in 2001, and in 2002 theUgandan government drafted a law instituting anational library. However, by far the mostsignificant national library development, andprobably the most significant library project intwenty-first century Africa, is the new library ofAlexandria. Work towards this joint project ofthe Egyptian government and unesco began in1995 and its official inauguration was in April2002. It is to be both a modern national libraryand a centre for Egyptian and regional studies.Much more commonly, national libraries take

the form of a national public library service, witha central headquarters co-ordinating branches invarious parts of the country. Some services dohave legal deposit collections, but in othercases the depository centre might be the nationalarchives, the national university or a separatebibliographical agency. The national biblio-graphy, where it exists, may emanate from anyof these institutions. Perhaps of all the types oflibrary to be found in Africa, national/publiclibraries have had the hardest struggle to adaptto need. The European or North American modelof the public library (see public libraries) isposited, first and foremost, on the existence of alarge well-schooled population of adult readers.

12 AFRICA

Whereas in Africa, where such a group hardlyexisted until recently, the public library tends tobe marginalized. It is seen to best advantage incommunities, like the high-density suburbs(townships) of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, where thenumber of readers is high and the stock reason-ably well adapted to their needs. Simple observa-tion shows that the demand for public libraries isstrongest amongst children of school age, butvery few libraries recognize this by gearing theircollections and services, at least for the mediumterm, to this manifest need.

ARCHIVE SERVICES

Although one or two countries, notably Maur-itius, had archive services during the nineteenthcentury, the main period of development prob-ably began with the setting up of services inFrench colonies: Senegal and Niger in 1913, andBenin in 1914. The Portuguese possessions werealso quite advanced: a National Historical andResearch Centre was founded in Angola in 1933,and the Historical Archives of Mozambique in1934. The first major service in a British colonywas founded in the then Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) in1935. This particular service has since beensomething of a leader, as the Central AfricanArchives for the Rhodesias and Nyasaland (after1946), and now as the National Archives ofZimbabwe. Archives in Africa have tended to bequite outward-looking information institutions,rather than stressing their purely historical func-tion. Whilst libraries have struggled because of,among other things, lack of material to providefor users, archives have naturally been therecipients of a constant flow of documentationfrom their parent bodies. Several of them, such asthe National Archives of Zambia and of Zim-babwe, have also been designated for the receiptof legal deposit copies of published materials.Recognizing the value of much of what they holdfor immediate practical purposes, services likethose of Kenya and Zimbabwe have promoteduse of their collections by planners and business-men, as well as researchers and academics, togood effect.

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITY AND EDUCATION FORINFORMATION AND LIBRARY WORK

More than half of the African states now havesome form of library and information associa-tion. At first, such organizations were regional,with the West African Library Association,

founded in 1954, the pioneer. The membercountries dissolved this is 1962, and single-country associations are the norm, althoughsome countries, like Nigeria and South Africa(because of its apartheid legacy), have more thanone. The membership of most associations maybe small, but they do succeed in carrying out arange of professional activities despite theirdifficulties. Journals such as the Botswana Li-brary Association Journal and Maktaba fromKenya are important sources of professionaldevelopment information, as are the meetings,seminars and conferences that the associationsorganize. An outstanding example of the latter isthe biennial meeting of the Standing Conferenceof East, Central and Southern African Librarians(SCECSAL), which since the early 1970s hasprovided marvellous opportunities for the ex-change of professional information and opinionto library personnel from the English-speakingeastern half of the continent. African librariansalso provide a growing input to the activities ofinternational organizations such as the Interna-tional Federation of Library Associations (ifla),at conferences, on committees and through pro-grammes such as IFLA’s ALP (Advancement ofLibrarianship in the Third World). This comple-ments the activities of development organizationswith African programmes, such as Germany’sDeutsche Stiftung für Internationale Entwicklung(DSE), or Canada’s International DevelopmentResearch Centre (IDRC), which have organizedmany valuable programmes and publications.African librarians, particularly those of Nigeria,are now prolific writers on professional topicsand their articles will be found throughout theliterature.All this has been achieved in a comparatively

short time, whilst coping with difficulties of thekind outlined above. Much is owed to theprogress in library education that has beenachieved during this time. The University ofIbadan began the first African programme, atnon-professional level, in 1950, followed by aprogramme at professional level in 1960, butbefore then, and since, great numbers of Africanlibrarians have studied in Britain, France, theUSA, Russia and elsewhere. These graduates offoreign institutions have provided staff for awhole series of schools subsequently establishedacross the continent. Some had a regional func-tion, like the school set up at Dakar in Senegal in1962 for francophone Africa, the school set up in

AFRICA 13

Morocco with UNESCO assistance in 1974, orthe East African School of Librarianship estab-lished at Makere University in Uganda in 1963.More recently, the School of Information Studiesfor Africa (SISA), set up at the University ofAddis Ababa with considerable financial assis-tance from the IDRC, has claimed a continent-wide role. Increasingly, the schools are beginningto be staffed by teachers with degrees, includingPhDs, from African universities and the potentialfor an educational agenda generated from withinthe region becomes stronger all the time.

New directions for information work inAfrica

One consistent theme from writings and publicstatements by African librarians is the need foran agenda for library and information work thatderives from the distinctive needs of Africa’speople. Those needs already include, and willincreasingly include, the provision of electronicinformation via networks or from stand-alonesystems like CD-ROMs. There is also a clearneed for conventional libraries, documentationcentres and archives, particularly for planning,research and education. However, what is onlynow being fully addressed is the need for betterinformation for those within the oral culturethat is still so much part of the African way oflife. Add to this the poverty, geographicaldispersion and cultural and linguistic isolationof the individuals and groups who could benefitfrom better information on farming and small-scale industry or health and hygiene, and thereis clearly a need that conventional forms ofservice have not answered. At present there ismore analysis of the problem and intellectualexploration of possible solutions than there arepractical steps to solve it. However, experimentswith simple reading rooms providing shelter,light and a few essential printed materials arewidespread, and indeed amount to a fullyfledged system in some countries like Tanzaniaand Malawi. Multifunction centres, such as theCentres de Lecture et d’Animation Culturelle enMilieu Rural (CLAC), are being tried under theaegis of IFLA’s ALP programme in francophonecountries such as Benin, Senegal, the IvoryCoast and Burkina Faso. Rural CommunityResource Centres (RCRC) also exist on a semi-experimental basis in Sierra Leone and otherWest African countries. Such centres – acquiring

materials whether oral, printed or in some otherform, and disseminating information orally,pictorially, on tape, through drama, dance andsong or any other viable form, including print –offer exciting possibilities for a new form ofinformation work to address an old and intract-able set of problems.

Further reading

Amadi, A.O. (1981) African Libraries: Western Tradi-tion and Colonial Brainwashing, Scarecrow Press.

Issak, A. (2000) Public Libraries in Africa: A Reportand Annotated Bibliography, INASP.

Sitzman, G.L. (1988) African Libraries, ScarecrowPress.

Stilwell, C., Leach, A. and Burton, S. (eds) (2001)Knowledge, Information and Development: An Afri-can Perspective, University of Natal.

Sturges, P. and Neill, R. (1998) The Quiet Struggle:Libraries and Information for Africa, 2nd edn,Mansell.

Wise, M. (ed.) (1985) Aspects of African Librarianship:A Collection of Writings, Mansell.

SEE ALSO: agricultural documentation andinformation; communication; communicationtechnology; development co-operation in supportof information and knowledge activities; distancelearning; information policy; Islamic libraries;library associations; mass media; Middle East;oral traditions

PAUL STURGES

AGRICULTURAL DOCUMENTATIONAND INFORMATION

Agriculture-related publications form a substan-tial literature. Over 300 reference works inagriculture, fisheries, forestry, horticulture andfood were listed in Walford’s Guide to ReferenceMaterial (Mullay and Schlicke 1993), includingmajor guides to the literature, as well as direc-tories, dictionaries, etc. Numerous secondaryservices for agriculture are described by Keenanand Wortley (1993). Current Contents Agricul-ture provides details of journal contents immedi-ately after publication.A characteristic component of agricultural

literature is non-conventional material. Authorslike Hutchinson and Martin (1994) and Posnettand Reilly (1986) have demonstrated how it canbe handled. Methods of dealing with extensionliterature are described by Johnson (1988) and byMathews (1987). Advisory leaflets and trade

14 AGRICULTURAL DOCUMENTATION AND INFORMATION

literature abound at demonstrations and agricul-tural shows and are important for updatingfarmers. A very large organization like FAOgenerates enormous numbers of reports, workingpapers, etc.Information exchange networks are discussed

by Nelson and Farrington (1994). Niang (1987)has drawn attention to the importance of doc-umentation networks (like those in Zaire andSenegal) and the exchange of information andexperiences. The International Association ofAgricultural Information Specialists (IAALD) isthe professional association with worldwidemembership. IAALD, like FAO library, CABInternational and IDRC, has had a significantrole in training. There have been many initiativesto assist in the provision of agricultural informa-tion for developing countries. Olsen and Ken-nedy-Olsen (1991) described their coreagricultural literature project. FAO and CABInternational have SDI and document deliveryservices. Fisher et al. (1990) listed agriculturalinformation resource centres worldwide.Computers have brought significant changes in

the way that researchers, farmers, publishers andinformation specialists work. Drew’s Guide toInternet/Bitnet Resources (1994) showed theirgreat potential.

References

Drew, W. (1994) Not Just Cows: A Guide to Internet/Bitnet Resources in Agriculture and Related Sciences.World Wide Web Version, SUNY College of Agri-culture and Technology.

Fisher, R.C. et al. (1990) Agricultural InformationResource Centres: AWorld Directory, IAALD/CTA.

Hutchinson, B.S. and Martin, D.J. (1994) ‘Building aninformation resource on famine mitigation: A lessonin accessing non-conventional literature’, QuarterlyBulletin of IAALD 39: 305–11.

International Union List of Agricultural Serials, CABInternational.

Johnson, R.M. (1988) ‘Extension literature in UKagriculture: Its bibliographic control’, QuarterlyBulletin of IAALD 33: 99–104.

Keenan, S. and Wortley, P.J. (comps) (1993) Directoryof Agricultural Bibliographic Information Sources,Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Coop-eration, CTA.

Mathews, E. (1987) ‘Bibliographic access to stateagricultural experiment station publications’, Quar-terly Bulletin of IAALD 32: 193–9.

Mullay, M. and Schlicke, P. (eds) (1993) Walford’sGuide to Reference Material, 6th edn, vol. 1, Scienceand Technology 63, Agriculture and livestock, pp.553–95, Library Association.

Nelson, J. and Farrington, J. (1994) Information

Exchange Networks for Agricultural Development,CTA.

Niang, T. (1987) ‘The CTA’s Q and A service: Forwhom and for what?’, Quarterly Bulletin of IAALD32: 104–5.

Olsen, W.C. and Kennedy-Olsen, J. (1991) ‘Determin-ing the current core literature in the agriculturalsciences’, Quarterly Bulletin of IAALD 33: 122–7.

Posnett, N.W. and Reilly, P.M. (1986) ‘Non-conven-tional literature in tropical agriculture and a nationalbibliography: An assessment’, Quarterly Bulletin ofIAALD 31: 27–33.

Further reading

Frank, R.C. (1987) ‘Agricultural information systemsand services’, Annual Review of Information Scienceand Technology 22: 293–334

Lendvay, O. (1980) Primer for Agricultural Libraries,2nd edn, PUDOC for IAALD [also French, Portu-guese and Spanish editions].

Niang, T. (1988) ‘Improving the diffusion of scientificand technical information in ACP countries’, Quar-terly Bulletin of IAALD 33: 170–1.

Wortley, P.J. (1981) ‘Tropical agriculture’, in G.P. Lilley(ed.) Information Sources in Agriculture and FoodScience, Butterworths, pp. 357–406.

PATRICIA JANE WORTLEY,

REVISED BY THE EDITORS

ALGORITHM

Instructions for carrying out a series of logicalprocedural steps in a specified order; now usedespecially in computing and related disciplines.

ALPHABETIZATION RULES

Alphabetization rules govern the arrangement ofwords (as in the entries in a catalogue (seecatalogues)) in an order primarily determinedby the position of their constituent letters in thealphabet. The principle of alphabetization, onceestablished, is both simple and highly adaptable.Its purpose is to allow systematic reference tobodies of material too large or complex foreffective casual access. It can be used alone, as itgenerally is in the index of a book, but it canreadily be combined with other modes of classi-fication. Its widespread and enduring use sug-gests that it is particularly well suited to theprocesses of the human eye and brain.The technique of strict alphabetization (taking

account of every letter in sequence, and thusplacing analyst before analytical) appears to havebeen invented by the Greeks. By the third century

ALPHABETIZATION RULES 15

bc it was used in compiling bibliographies (seebibliography) relating to, and therefore concei-vably in the arrangement of, the library attachedto the Temple of the Muses at Alexandria. Thereis, however, no striking evidence of its use in theRoman world. The Romans acquired alphabeti-cal lists in Greek texts, but seem to have made noconsistent use of the principle and to have beencontent with first-letter indexing. The practice isnotably absent from the documented organiza-tion of the army, the most potent and sophisti-cated of Roman institutions. Under thecircumstances, it is probably significant that theRomans appear to have had no consistent namesfor the letters of the alphabet, which wereprobably memorized in the form of voicedsyllables, rather than in the rhythmic chants ofancient Greece and modern Europe.The precarious survival of literacy in the

early Middle Ages greatly reduced the volume ofwritten material in use. Except in England, wherethere was a vernacular literary tradition that theNormans destroyed, literacy remained a matterof Latinity and confined to the clergy. At thesame time the oral tradition (see oral tradi-tions) in the barbarian societies of the West gaveeven the literate a capacity for memorizing andrecalling verse and prose (especially verse), whichit is difficult now to imagine.The need for aids to recall and study was

correspondingly reduced. Libraries were rare,and commonly small: even in the thirteenthcentury a shelf of nine books could constitute alibrary for a Cistercian abbey. The clergy wereprovided with service books, but constant repeti-tion made both the liturgy and the prescribedlessons from the Vulgate familiar to the leastaccomplished reader. Scholars consulted morecomplex texts, thematically arranged, with asimilar assurance. Library catalogues, corre-spondingly, were commonly shelf-guides, or find-ing-lists from which the completeness of thecollection could be checked, rather than surveysof scholarship. When authors’ names were alpha-betized, as they sometimes were, it was by initialletters.However, as the power of the papacy and the

scope of the canon law grew, so the writtenrecords of the international church multiplied.The clergy developed their literary and adminis-trative skills, and lent them to kings and otherlaymen. Accumulations of intricate and unfami-liar material demanded new styles of reference

and management. Early in the fourteenth centuryrecords in the English exchequer were classifiedand registered, to be filed in boxes distinguishedby symbols and icons that illiterate messengerscould recognize.About the same time papal clerks were com-

piling indexes both to current and to some olderrecords in order of initial letters. There are someisolated examples of a similar but more tentativearrangement in accounts kept in France fiftyyears earlier, but we do not know how thepractice spread. The records of the HustingCourt of London include registers of documentsthat show the clerks progressing in the course ofthe fourteenth century from symbols to initialletters in the margin marking names in the text,and then to compiling an alphabetical list oftestators arranged in the chronological order oftheir probate.Individuals probably developed more elaborate

schemes of their own at all periods, but thesubject still needs research. However, accountbooks and manuals of practice from Italy suggestthat mercantile houses there, the most accom-plished and sophisticated region of Europe, didnot progress beyond first-letter indexing duringthe Middle Ages. It was the advent of printing,and the multiplication not only of texts but alsoof kinds of texts, that stimulated the exploitationof full alphabetical order.The availability of cheap paper for indexing

slips probably also played its part. Parchmentwas expensive in the Middle Ages, and wassparingly used. From the late fifteenth centurypaper was abundant, and the change encouragedthe spread of informal written memoranda.Intensive indexing is made much simpler, and onany large scale is only possible, if the entries canbe reviewed and manipulated individually. Therewas, however, no mechanical sorting until Her-man Hollerith devised his machine in the 1880s.The full alphabetical index therefore emerged

as the printed book established itself as an engineof scholarship. Alphabetization also came into itsown as a guide to the contents of the greatlyexpanded libraries that printing made both pos-sible and necessary to the advancement of learn-ing. Thomas James’s first catalogue of theBodleian Library (1605) was an early and nota-ble work of a kind that has, with the biblio-graphy, sustained two revolutions in humanelearning, science and technology in the course offour centuries.

16 ALPHABETIZATION RULES

In modern libraries the formal assessment ofaccessions has largely given place to reference tobibliographical databases, a practice anticipatedby the cataloguing service that the library ofcongress made available to subscribers overseveral decades. Alphabetical sorting itself cansimilarly be left to the computer, though the cardcatalogue still needs individual attention. Thoseand other devices, however, have extended ratherthan displaced the basic principles of alphabeti-zation, which are well into their third millen-nium.

Further reading

British Museum (1940) Guide to the Arrangement ofHeadings and Entries in the General Catalogue ofPrinted Books.

Daly, L.W. (1967) Contributions to a History ofAlphabetization in Antiquity and the Middle Ages,Collection Latomus, 90, Brussels.

Martin, G.H. (1990) The Husting Rolls of Deeds andWills: Guide to the Microform Edition, Cambridge.

SEE ALSO: organization of knowledge

GEOFFREY MARTIN

AMERICAN LIBRARYASSOCIATION

As the oldest and largest of library associa-tions in the world, the American Library Asso-ciation (ALA) works to promote and improvelibrarianship and library service.The ALA was founded in 1876, the year of the

USA’s centennial. Responding to the call of suchearly library leaders as William Frederick Poole,Melvil dewey and Justin Winsor, ninety men andthirteen women, from as far away as Chicago,Illinois and England, gathered in Philadelphia, inOctober. At the end of their conference theyvoted to form the ALA. From these humblebeginnings, by 1995 the Association had grownto 56,954 members and had an endowmentvalued at $5,493,000 and an annual budget of$28,731,000.The organizational structure of the ALA has

been aptly described as ‘an association of asso-ciations’. The ALA is divided into eleven divi-sions. Each division represents a different type oflibrary or library service and each maintains itsown executive director, officers, programmes andbudget. Furthermore, there are discussion groups,round tables and committees within both the

Association and the divisions. The Associationhas ties to fifty-three independent state andregional library associations, called chapters,and to twenty-four national and internationalaffiliates, such as the Medical Library Associa-tion and the Canadian Library Association,which have purposes similar to those of theALA. The Association is governed by a councilconsisting of 175 members, including one hun-dred elected at large. It is managed by anexecutive board comprised of the elected officersand eight members elected by council. The ALAExecutive Director and a staff of about 250 workin the main Chicago office and other offices inWashington, DC, and Middletown, Connecticut.According to its charter, the ALA was founded

for ‘the purpose of promoting library intereststhroughout the world’. To fulfil this mission theAssociation has established certain goals andpriorities, including improving library and infor-mation services, ensuring appropriate legislationand funding, protecting intellectual freedom andstrengthening the library profession.The ALA has sought to increase public use and

support of libraries since its first conference in1876. In 1975 the Association gained an impor-tant public relations tool when it assumed con-trol of National Library Week (NLW), a week inApril dedicated to promoting libraries. The ALAhas made NLW the cornerstone of its year-roundcampaign to increase public visibility of librariesand librarianship.NLW also plays an important role in the

Association’s political activities, which are largelythe responsibility of the ALA Washington Office.Two of that office’s achievements have been thepassage of the Library Services Act (1956), whichsecured federal aid for public libraries, and theLibrary Services and Construction Act (1964),which improved library buildings and ser-vices. Every year during NLW the WashingtonOffice co-sponsors Legislative Day in order togive librarians an opportunity to meet withfederal legislators.The ALA has also been politically active in its

long-standing effort to protect intellectual free-dom. In 1939 the Association adopted theLibrary Bill of Rights, its own version of theFirst Amendment to the US Constitution. In 1953the ALA, in co-operation with other organiza-tions, issued the ‘Freedom to Read Statement’,largely in response to the attempted censorshipof library materials by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION 17

Today the Office for Intellectual Freedom co-ordinates efforts to encourage libraries to shelveand circulate materials representing differentpoints of view.Another goal of the ALA is to encourage

professional innovation and improvement. Oneway it works to meet this goal is by accreditationof library schools. Since the Association beganaccrediting library schools in 1924, the Mastersin Library Science (MLS) has become the stan-dard degree for library professionals, with manyschools now also offering the Doctor of Philoso-phy (PhD) degree. Today the ALA’s Committeeon Accreditation is the sole agency authorized bythe US Government to evaluate and accreditgraduate programmes in library science.The ALA also works to help improve the

profession through its publishing programme,one of the largest programmes for library-relatedmaterials in the world. The enormously popularGuide to Reference Books – a standard referencesource since 1902 – is just one of many bookspublished by ALA. The Association also pub-lishes numerous periodicals, including Booklist, aselection journal covering print and non-printmaterials, and Choice, a book review journal foracademic libraries.In order to honour individuals and institutions

for innovation and achievement in the profession,the ALA has established an extensive awardsprogramme that covers numerous and diverseareas such as authorship, library architecture andpublic relations. Probably the best known of theawards are the prestigious Newbery Medal andCaldecott Medal, both given annually to distin-guished authors of children’s literature.In almost all of its activities the ALA has

worked mainly within the USA, despite its self-proclaimed international scope. Nonetheless,since its inception the Association has maintainedan interest in international librarianship. In 1877a number of US librarians were in London forthe formation of the library association (LA)of the United Kingdom. Fifty years later, in 1927,the ALA helped establish the International Fed-eration of Library Associations (ifla). During theperiods 1943–9 and 1956–72, the ALA dedicatedan office to international relations. Workingthrough the Committee on International Rela-tions and the International Relations RoundTable, numerous committees and boards con-tinue to promote library interests around theworld.

The ALA holds two conferences each year. TheMidwinter Meeting is usually held in Januaryand is dedicated to business matters. The AnnualConference, held in June, is devoted to educa-tional and professional programmes and attractsthousands of people from around the countryand abroad. The main ALA headquarters arelocated at 50 E. Huron Street, Chicago, IL60611, USA.

Further reading

ALA Handbook of Organization and MembershipDirectory, 1994–5.

Holley, E. G. (1976) ‘ALA at 100’, The ALA Yearbook(centennial edition).

Sullivan, P. (1976) Carl H. Milam and the AmericanLibrary Association, HW Wilson.

SEE ALSO: freedom of information; informationprofessions; library education

BRIAN K. GEIGER AND EDWARD G. HOLLEY

AMERICAN SOCIETY FORINFORMATION SCIENCEAND TECHNOLOGY

The mission of the American Society for Infor-mation Science and Technology (ASIST) is toadvance information professionals and the fieldof information science.ASIST is a non-profit professional association

boasting around 4,000 members. The member-ship is drawn from a variety of disciplines,including librarianship, computer science,management and chemistry. ASIST aimsto provide methods of communication andcontinuing education for information profes-sionals, encourage research and developmentin the information science field and increasepublic awareness of the information sciencediscipline.

History

ASIST owes its origins to the American Docu-mentation Institute (ADI), which was charteredas a non-profit organization in March 1937.Originally, membership was confined to nomi-nated representatives of affiliated organizationsand government agencies. In 1950 the ADI firstpublished its journal American Documentation,and in 1952 individual members were admittedto membership. With advances in computer

18 AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

technology in the 1950s and 1960s, membershipof the ADI increased rapidly – by 1967 theInstitute had over 2,000 members. To reflectchanges in its activities a vote was taken in1967 to change the name of the ADI to theAmerican Society for Information Science; ADIbecame ASIS on 1 January 1968. A furtherchange occurred in 2000 when the name becameAmerican Society for Information Science andTechnology (ASIST) to recognize the changinginterests of the membership.

Publications

ASIST produces two well-respected publicationsin the information science field. The Bulletin ofthe American Society for Information Scienceand Technology covers news of the Society aswell as opinions and analysis of present andfuture advances in the field. The Journal of theAmerican Society for Information Science andTechnology (JASIST) aims to be the leadingpublication on current research and theoreticalwork on future information science develop-ments. In addition to its publications, ASIST hasa thriving student membership and offers mem-bers participation in twenty Special InterestGroups (SIG).

Further reading

American Society for Information Science and Technol-ogy (www.asis.org).

SEE ALSO: information science

JAMES DEARNLEY

ANGLO-AMERICANCATALOGUING RULES

A set of rules for the standard description of allmaterials which a library may hold or to which itmay have access, and for the formulation ofstandard forms of names and titles to provideaccess to and grouping of those descriptions.The Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules

(AACR) is the dominant bibliographic standardregulating descriptive cataloguing in the English-speaking world. First published in 1967, AACRmarked a departure from previous cataloguingrules, which had grown haphazardly into merecompilations of regulations to handle specificbibliographic cases. The second edition of

AACR, which appeared eleven years later in1978, was an even more radical departure fromthis tradition, due largely to the pioneeringwork of its principal editor, Michael Gorman.By using a set of principles derived from theInternational Standard Bibliographic Description(ISBD) and by explicitly covering all librarymaterials, the rules are able to produce neutralcataloguing that is not dependent on either thephysical form of the item being catalogued orthe country or institution where the cataloguingtakes place.AACR falls into two parts. Part 1 is concerned

with the creation of a bibliographic descrip-tion of the item being catalogued and consists ofa chapter giving general rules applicable to allmaterials, followed by chapters covering thediffering physical forms taken by communicatedinformation and knowledge: sound recordings,music, graphic materials, cartographic materials,computer files, for example. Each chapter, re-gardless of the medium with which it is con-cerned, follows the principles of the ISBD bygrouping the elements of the description intoeight discrete areas. These areas are given in aset and invariable order in the bibliographicdescription and are separated from each otherby prescribed punctuation. The effect of applica-tion of the rules is to produce a standard patternthat is recognizable to catalogue users and whichenables the easy exchange of records created bydifferent agencies.Part 2 gives rules for the choice and form of

access points. These headings provide access tothe bibliographic descriptions from the name of aperson or corporate body related to the item andfrom the standard title of the work, of which thephysical item may be one of many manifesta-tions. The first chapter in Part 2 is concernedwith the choice of a main entry heading.Although no longer required in a fully developedautomated catalogue, where all access points areof equal value, the concept of a main entry is stillof practical use in single-entry listings of librarymaterials and is enshrined in all of the majormachine-readable cataloguing (MARC) for-mats used to communicate computer-readablebibliographic records. The chapter on choice ofmain entry also marks the abandonment byAACR of the concept of corporate authorship,whilst continuing to recognize that on certainoccasions main entry under a corporate name is

ANGLO-AMERICAN CATALOGUING RULES 19

the most useful way of retrieving an itemdescription.Further chapters give rules for the creation of

headings for personal names, corporate namesand geographic names. It is a fundamentalprinciple of AACR that the form of name onwhich the heading is based is that by which theperson or body is commonly known or identified.When the name has been chosen, the rules thenprovide guidance on choice of the entry elementof the name and on additions that may be neededto distinguish the name from an otherwiseidentical heading for another bibliographic iden-tity. A separate chapter deals with the creation ofa uniform or standard title for a work that mayhave had many manifestations differing in formand content. For example, the work commonlyknown as Othello may have been published notonly under several different titles, but also as afilm and as a sound recording, as well as a videorecording of a stage production. Linking thedescriptions of all these distinct physical items toa single standard title facilitates access to allmanifestations of the work that are available tothe library user. Finally, there are chapters con-taining rules for the creation of references fromvariant and differing forms of the name oruniform title.AACR is a living standard, and is responsive

to changes and developments in media and theways in which knowledge and information arecommunicated. The creation and maintenance ofAACR is a matter of international collaboration.The content of the rules is the responsibility ofthe Joint Steering Committee for Revision ofAACR (JSC), which consists of representativesfrom the american library association, thelibrary association, the british library, thelibrary of congress, the Australian Committeeon Cataloguing and the Canadian Committee onCataloguing. Numerous committees and institu-tions at the national level in the anglophonecountries feed suggestions and proposals forchange to AACR into the JSC machinery.Changes that are agreed by the JSC are publishedat irregular intervals by the three AACR publish-ers: the Library Association, the American Li-brary Association and the Canadian LibraryAssociation. The Committee of Principals exer-cizes executive responsibility for all matters con-nected with AACR on behalf of its authorbodies.

References

Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (1988) 2nd edn,Library Association Publishing.

ISBD(G): General International Standard BibliographicDescription (1977) IFLA International Office forUBC.

Further reading

Gorman, M. (1978) ‘The Anglo-American cataloguingrules, second edition’, Library Resources and Tech-nical Services 22: 209–26.

Maxwell, M.F. (1989) Handbook for AACR2 1988Revision, American Library Association.


PAT ODDY

ANOMALOUS STATE OFKNOWLEDGE

A model for information retrieval based onthe assumption that the formulation of a queryby a user signifies the recognition by the enquirerof some anomaly (or incompleteness) in theirstate of knowledge. The anomalous state ofknowledge (ASK) model is based on the under-standing that, given such an anomaly, the user isprobably unable to state precisely what is neededto resolve the lack of information. The modeltries to describe the user’s ASK with respect to agiven query rather than requiring the user tostate the query precisely. The ASK can then beused to formulate an appropriate search strategy.

Further reading

Belkin, N.J. (1982) ‘ASK for information retrieved, partI: Background and theory’; ‘part II: Results of designstudy’, Journal of Documentation 38: 68–71, 145–64.

SEE ALSO: information seeking research;information theory

ARCHIVAL DESCRIPTION

The creation of an accurate representation of aunit of description and its component parts, ifany, by the process of capturing, collating,analysing and organizing any information thatserves to identify archival material and explainthe context and records systems that produced it.Archival description is the equivalent in archi-

vology to cataloguing in librarianship. There are

20 ANOMALOUS STATE OF KNOWLEDGE

important differences of principle and practicebetween these two fields, and in the relativeimportance of description in professional prac-tice. The above definition from the GeneralInternational Standard Archival Description(ISAD(G)) makes use of important conceptsunderlying archival management.

. The principle of representation. Because origi-nal archival materials cannot be organized fordirect physical access by users (they are usuallykept in boxes in closed storage areas) theyhave to be managed and retrieved by usingrepresentations. These representations have tocontain the right data to allow for theireffective use in the various functions of man-agement.

. The unit of description: the basic unit inarchival management is taken to be the group(fonds in international usage; also oftentermed collection). Most often a group is alarge body of materials that can be subdividedinto subordinate entities. It would be normal,therefore, for an archive group to have adescription representing the whole group, fol-lowed by a number of interlinked descriptionsof its components.

. Generally, archival descriptions must containinformation on the provenance, backgroundand context of the materials. It is in principlenot possible to describe archival materials interms of their contents and physical formalone. Provenance information includes a his-tory of the administration or activity thatcaused the archives to be created and explainshow they were used during the period whenthey were current records.

Archival descriptions therefore reflect the princi-ples of provenance and original order, containelements that correspond to the recognized levelsof arrangement, and conform (ideally at least) tonational and international standards.

Levels of arrangement and description

Levels of arrangement are the physical sets intowhich archival materials are sorted after analysis.These levels are transformed into levels of de-scription when representations are made of theseorganized materials. Archival descriptions can beset in the context of an internationally recognizedhierarchy of levels, summarized as follows:

MANAGEMENT GROUPS

These are groups brought together in descriptionfor convenience, e.g. municipal archives, privatepapers.

GROUPS (INTERNATIONALLY ‘FONDS’)

These are the whole of the documents, regardlessof form or medium, organically created and/oraccumulated and used by a particular person,family or corporate body in the course of thatcreator’s activities and functions (ISAD(G), glos-sary).

SUBGROUPS (INTERNATIONALLY ‘SUBFONDS’)

These are a subdivision of a fond containing abody of related documents corresponding toadministrative subdivisions in the originatingagency or organization or, when that is notpossible, to geographical, chronological, func-tional or similar groupings of the material itself.When the creating body has a complex hierarch-ical structure, each subgroup has as many sub-ordinate subgroups as are necessary to reflect thelevels of the hierarchical structure of the primarysubordinate administrative unit (ISAD(G), glos-sary).

CLASSES (INTERNATIONALLY ‘SERIES’)

These are documents arranged in accordancewith a filing system or maintained as a unitbecause they result from the same accumulationor filing process or the same activity; have aparticular form; or because of some other rela-tionship arising out of their creation, receipt oruse (ISAD(G), glossary).

ITEMS (INTERNATIONALLY ‘FILES’)

These are the physical units of handling andretrieval (MAD2, glossary).

PIECES (NOT USED INTERNATIONALLY)

These are basic single, indivisible documents.Levels that are not appropriate to particularcases (since all archives are by definition unique)may be left unused. However, the level defini-tions remain valid even when left unused. Forexample, there may be a group that contains nosubgroups or classes, only items. In this casethere will be a description of the group, followedby linked descriptions of items. The hierarchy oflevels must remain linked to the level definitions;the levels are absolute and not relative. Extensiveconsultation has demonstrated that these levels of

ARCHIVAL DESCRIPTION 21

arrangement and description are observable in allsocieties. Fuller explanation of this usage is inCook (1993).

The purpose of description

Archival descriptions are used for all the pur-poses of an archives service. Particular purposesdemand particular types of description. Thereforedescriptions have many forms. An archives ser-vice puts these together as systems of findingaids.

Traditionally, archival finding aids are used toestablish administrative and/or intellectual con-trol over the archives, these two categoriescomprising the whole range of activities fromphysical conservation to exploiting the content.

Archival description standards

At the time of writing, there are four nationaldescription standards available in English. Theseare the Manual of Archival Description, 2ndedition (MAD2) for Britain; Archives, PrivatePapers and Manuscripts (APPM) for the USA;Rules for Archival Description (RAD) for Ca-nada; and the Australian Common PracticeManual (ACPM). Other national standards arelisted in Toward International Descriptive Stan-dards for Archives (1993). The InternationalCouncil on Archives (ICA), through its Ad HocCommission on Archival Description, has pro-duced ISAD(G), referred to above, which wasadopted at the International Congress on Ar-chives, Montreal, 1992, and published by theICA in 1994. Work on further internationalstandards (initially on authority records) is con-tinuing. Technical standards that apply to ar-chives are listed in Walch (1994).

References

Cook, M. (1993) Information Management and Archi-val Data, Library Association Publishing.

Cook, M. and Procter, M. (1990) Manual of ArchivalDescription, 2nd edn, Gower.

Rules for Archival Description (1992, in progress)Ottawa: Bureau of Canadian Archivists.

Toward International Descriptive Standards for Ar-chives (1993), papers presented at the ICA Invita-tional Meeting of Experts on Descriptive Standards,National Archives of Canada (4–7 October 1988),Ottawa: K.G. Saur.

Walch, V.I. (comp.) (1994) Standards for ArchivalDescription: A Handbook, Chicago: Society ofAmerican Archivists.

Further reading

Australian Common Practice Manual (1992, in pro-gress), Australian Society of Archivists.

Hensen, S. (1989) Archives, Personal Papers andManuscripts: A Cataloging Manual for ArchiveRepositories, Historical Societies and ManuscriptLibraries, Chicago: Society of American Archivists.

International Council on Archives (2001) ISAD(G) –General International Standard Archive Description,ICA.

SEE ALSO: catalogues; information professions

MICHAEL COOK

ARCHIVAL LIBRARY

A library whose principal function is to preserve,in perpetuity, the documents that it contains. Itmay be an entire institution, or part of a largerlibrary or other institution. national librariesand the larger research libraries usually un-dertake some function of this kind.

SEE ALSO: libraries

ARCHIVES

Archives is a plural noun with a variety ofmeanings. It refers to both a type of repositoryand the written materials held there. Technically,these are the records of enduring value of aninstitution, but the phrase has also come toembrace manuscript collections of personalpapers.The term was originally synonymous with

libraries and a copying tradition that literallydefined the birth of history. Scribal enterpriseshelped codify the words of the gods and servedas civic monuments, as well as the more mun-dane functions of recording business transac-tions, entertainment and government enact-ments. The printing press eventually intervenedto alter this comfortable model. Archives stroveto continue the traditional roles, while librariesbecame separate institutions for published mate-rials.Our present conceptions are largely based on a

nineteenth-century Western model. The expand-ing bureaucracy of the modern nation-statecombined with scholarly interests and culturalmotives to redefine an often secretive institutioninto a public institution. The founding of theFrench Archives Nationales and later of the

22 ARCHIVAL LIBRARY

public record office in the UK helped set offa minor fad for national archives.In the 1830s, the French went on to form the

first modern archival training centre at the Ecoledes Chartes. This school drew on the scholarshipof palaeography and diplomatics with afocus on authenticating documents. In the1840s, the French codified one of the two keyarchival principles, Respect des Fonds. The Prus-sians followed to take the lead with AddedOrder. They formalized the French doctrine intotheir Provenienzprinzip. The archivist wouldmaintain records physically together and retrievethem by their provenance or agency of creation.In the 1880s, they produced the second andallied postulate of Registraturprinzip, or OriginalOrder. Records would maintain their arrange-ment. Instead of library classification and re-slotting into rigid taxonomies, archivists hadadopted relativistic and Aristotelian approaches.These techniques were widely disseminatedthrough the 1898 Dutch manual of Muller, Feithand Fruin, and the British Sir Hilary jenkinson’s1937 volume.The USA had developed a hagiographic inter-

est in manuscripts and signatures in the earlynineteenth century. However, US interests inmodern collecting were delayed until the earlytwentieth century. Southerners looked to statearchives for celebratory aspects to a culture lostduring the Civil War. The library of congress(LC) played a significant role in both manu-scripts and modern archives. In the early twen-tieth century, its Manuscripts Divisioncontributed the Register – a work diary or book-let with narrative history/summary and inventorythat became the basis for archival description.LC’s immediate post-World War Two effortslooked to holdings information through theNational Union Catalog of Manuscript Collec-tions (NUCMC).Members of a budding historical profession

were also lobbying for access and the preserva-tion of public records. Their influences culmi-nated in 1934 with the founding of the NationalArchives and Records Administration (NARA)and the subsequent opening of the nationalarchives of the united states. The newagency would borrow from LC and adapt Regis-ters into institutional Inventories. NARA es-chewed diplomatics, but partially adoptedEuropean practices to the US scene. The synthesiswas a pragmatic school of archival management,

which was best reflected in the later publicationsof T.R. schellenberg.NARA also quickly begat the Society of Amer-

ican Archivists (SAA), the major professionalassociation. During the Second World War, theagency also gave birth to the practice of recordsmanagement, a field that remained with ar-chives until a political split in the 1970s. NARA’sNational Historical Publications and RecordsCommission pushed documentary editing andtook the lead in identifying the location ofarchives. With the assistance of the State Depart-ment and unesco’s RAMP projects, such USapproaches spread around the world after 1945.In the 1960s and especially the 1970s, the

number of institutions expanded and US archivistsprofessionalized. NARA set SAA free, and USarchivists sought an identity separate from histor-ians. Registers and inventories spread as a quasi-standard, generically encompassed by the termfinding aid. Governmental largesse spread withthe National Endowment for the Humanities andother funders. The US Bicentennial acceleratedinterest in the documentary heritage. Businessesand universities embraced the trend. Formerlysacrosanct temples to the establishment also addednew hues. Special collections on minorities, tradeunions and other non-elites rose to prominence.Significantly, too, Americans launched graduateeducation courses. Generally taught by practi-tioners, classes were housed first in history depart-ments. Library schools entered the picture in anuneasy alliance, but their MLS degrees would riseto become the major professional credential.The US field reached a level of maturity in the

1980s. Multicourse archival education concen-trations with regular faculty lines appeared.Diplomatics entered with an Italian slant by wayof Canadian education programmes. An Acad-emy of Certified Archivists appeared to attemptto define professional criteria. NARA, which hadbeen reduced to a subsidiary federal agency,gained its freedom from the Office of Manage-ment and Budget. Automation also reared itshead. With some trepidation, archivists adopteda new marc-AMC (Archival and ManuscriptsControl) format and parallel APPM Guidelinesto catalogue finding aids into library biblio-graphic systems. Also, the PC-revolution helpedset the stage for another potential redefinition ofthe field in the era of the Web.During the 1990s, the Web stimulated a wave

of standardization and globalization. The Bureau

ARCHIVES 23

of Canadian Archivists issued its Rules forArchival Description. The International Councilon Archives produced the general ISAD(G)guidelines and ISAAD set for authority records.American archivists turned to SGML for theirfinding aids. Despite mislabelling as a Webtechnology, the resulting Encoded Archival De-scription (EAD) provided significant descriptivestandards to unify an idiosyncratic field.The information highway is also eliminating

the age-old problem of identifying repositories.Researchers are gaining online access to findingaids. Most importantly, archival materials arebeing democratized and made widely availablethrough digitization. The Web’s HTML andXML protocols reduce the age-old problem oflocating archives, as well as potentially solvingmigration problems for electronic records andother preservation dilemmas.Yet, significant research on information sto-

rage and retrieval techniques for archives, the useof artificial intelligence and advanced searchengines, and even the most basic analysis ofusers is only beginning. Additional forms ofdescription are needed to capture interactivemedia. Outside forces must also be recognized.The term has expanded into the verb ‘to archive’as a synonym for long-term computer storage. Inaddition, scholars and citizens are creating theirown digital archives independent of the experts,and ‘heritage tourism’ is rising on the economicscene.In sum, archives are undergoing another re-

definition. Their potential for information man-agement, education and as cultural icons hasstood the test of time. Archives will continueduring the era of the information highway asthey have since the dawn of history.

Further reading

The key sources will now be found on the Web:ACA (http://certifiedarchivists.org).EAD (www.loc.gov/ead).ICA (ISAD(G) and ISAAD) (www.ica.org).NARA (www.nara.gov).NUCMC (http://lcweb.loc.gov/coll/nucmc).SAA (www.archivists.org).UNESCO Portal (www.unesco.org/webworld/portal_archives).

SEE ALSO: archival description; informationprofessions; library education

FRED STIELOW

ARCHIVIST

Information professional whose role is to estab-lish and maintain control, both physical andintellectual, of records that are judged to havepermanent value.Professional archivists are first really identifi-

able in the nineteenth century, when great accu-mulations of archives arising from governmentand other administrative activity began to beseen as requiring specialist care. The first twoschools to train archivists, the École Nationaledes Chartes, in Paris, and the Bayerische Ar-chivschüle, München, were both founded in1821. Education for archive administration re-volved around an appreciation of the organicnature of the archive accumulation, and concen-trated on the selection of records for retention asarchives, their preservation and the preparationof findings aids. Expertise in the historicalsciences (such as palaeography) has, untilcomparatively recently, been very stronglystressed, but the modern archivist is much morea manager of collections, personnel and budgetthan the old scholarly image, and shares thelibrarian’s concern to make collections availableand to encourage their effective use. Membershipof the Society of American Archivists in the USA,the Society of Archivists in the UK or equivalentsin other countries is the basic test of membershipof the profession.

Further reading

Dollar, C.M. (1993) ‘Archivists and records managersin the information age’, Archivaria 36: 37–51.

SEE ALSO: information professions

ART LIBRARIES

Libraries whose primary function is to identify,acquire, organize and provide access to informa-tion relating to all aspects of the visual arts.

Context

Traditionally art libraries have been seen to standapart from all other types of library. There arethree main reasons for this: first, the huge scopeand heterogeneous nature of the fields encom-passed in the broad term ‘visual arts’ (taken hereto include not only traditional fine art and arthistory but also design, architecture, crafts andother related topics); second, the diverse and

24 ARCHIVIST

frequently unpredictable needs of art libraryusers; and, third, the bewildering physical varietyof the materials handled. (In his much-quotedarticle on the subject, Fawcett (1975) expands onthese differences at some length.) For these threereasons, which are considered in greater detailbelow, the development of art libraries has his-torically been independent of the mainstream andart librarians have always regarded their profes-sional role as fundamentally different from that oftheir colleagues in other areas of librarianship.

Historical development

Although it could be argued that art librarieshave existed for well over 300 years, the term aswe currently understand it was probably firstapplied to the San Francisco Art Association’slibrary, founded in 1871 and followed by anumber of similar institutions throughout theUSA in the latter part of the nineteenth century.By 1908 Jane Wright, Librarian of Cincinnati ArtMuseum, was making an impassioned plea forart libraries to be taken as seriously as publiclibraries (Wright 1908). Art libraries have con-tinued to flourish ever since, especially through-out Western Europe and North America, and theperiod since the mid-1960s has seen particularlyvigorous growth. It is no coincidence that theBritish and Irish Art Libraries Society (nowARLIS/UK & Ireland) was founded in the UnitedKingdom in 1969 and its North Americanequivalent, the Art Libraries Society of NorthAmerica (ARLIS/NA) in 1972. As with manyother types of library, development elsewhere inthe world has been far more patchy.

Types of art library

The term ‘art libraries’ here includes smallmuseum or art college libraries, special or profes-sional practice libraries, the art sections of publiclibraries or larger academic libraries and thelargest autonomous libraries that, although nom-inally attached to larger institutions, are ofnational or international significance in theirown right (for example, the National Art Libraryof the UK based at the Victoria and AlbertMuseum in London).

Professional guidelines

Although there are inevitably wide variations inpractice, guidelines covering stock, staffing and

the general management of art libraries, pub-lished by both ARLIS/UK & Ireland (1990) andARLIS/NA (1983), have in the past helped artlibrarians devise their own dedicated standards asappropriate. Such guidelines (now badly in needof updating) emphasize above all the need torespond sensitively to the widely varying needs ofusers, who range from art historians or curators,professional architects and designers to practisingartists, art students and members of the generalpublic. For many of these users the foremostneed is for visual references rather than writteninformation, and it is for this reason above allthat art librarians develop and exploit theircollections in very different ways from theircolleagues in other areas of librarianship.

Art information resources

As well as the books and periodicals that can beexpected to form the bulk of all paper-basedlibrary collections, art libraries may, in responseto the needs of their readers, stock a wide rangeof other printed material: exhibition catalogues,printed ephemera, artists’ books, patents andregistered designs, and other more or less greyliterature. The bibliographic control ofsuch items has always caused particular difficul-ties, many of which remain broadly unsolvedtoday. In addition art libraries frequently stock alarge variety of audiovisual materials, such asillustrations, photographs and slides, microforms,films and video-recordings, all of which areespecially valuable for the provision of visualreferences so often sought. The acquisition,storage and exploitation of material of thisnature is inevitably problematic and requiresspecialist knowledge and experience. Art librariescan also serve as archives for unique items suchas plans, drawings, artwork and trade samples,all of which demand special treatment.

The ICT context

Meanwhile the rapid technological advances ofrecent decades have been of particular benefit toart libraries. Much relevant material has beenavailable in digital format for the past severalyears and the Internet is now an essential tool inmost areas of the visual arts, as the electronictransmission of high-quality images becomes evereasier. The potential for innovation in this fieldremains tremendous.

ART LIBRARIES 25

Professional co-operation

The historical isolation of art librarianship fromthe mainstream of the profession has encouragedenergetic co-operation among art librarians, bothformal and informal, at local, national andinternational levels. The energetic professionalsocieties that flourish all over the world bearwitness to this generous spirit of practical colla-boration. ARLIS/UK & Ireland and ARLIS/NAcontinue to be extremely active in the areas ofbibliographical control and there is an evergrowing number of similar societies elsewhere inthe world. The International Federation of Li-brary Associations (ifla) Art Libraries Sectionprovides an international focus, and its tradi-tional meeting immediately prior to the annualIFLA Conference ensures that as far as possibleart librarians speak with a common voice to theirprofessional colleagues and governments, as wellas to the world at large.

References

Fawcett, T. (1975) ‘The complete art librarian’, ARLISNewsletter (UK) 22 (March): 7–9.

Guidelines for Art and Design Libraries: Stock, Plan-ning, Staffing and Autonomy (1990), ARLIS/UK &Eire.

Standards for Art Libraries and Fine Arts Slide Collec-tions (1983), occasional papers no. 2, Art LibrariesSociety of North America.

Wright, J. (1908) ‘Plea of the art librarian’, PublicLibraries (November): 348–9.

Further reading

The ‘Annual bibliography of art librarianship’ pub-lished in the Art Libraries Journal provides acomprehensive record of recent writings on relevanttopics from all over the world.

SEE ALSO: image retrieval; picture libraries

DEBORAH SHORLEY

ARTEFACT

Anything made by human invention and work-manship: an artificial product. They are collectedin museums, and occasionally occur in librariesand archives, because of their knowledgecontent. Museum objects include artefacts inaddition to naturally occurring items; all booksand documents, including multimedia products,are also artefacts. The value of an artefact is

generally for its information content, althoughsome are also of aesthetic or cultural interest.

SEE ALSO: museology; museum; museumdocumentation

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is:

concerned with the study and creation ofcomputer systems that exhibit some form ofintelligence: systems that learn new conceptsand tasks, systems that can reason and drawuseful conclusions about the world around us,systems that can understand a natural lan-guage or perceive and comprehend a visualscene, and systems that perform other types offeats that require human types of intelligence.

(Patterson 1990)

AI, as a separate computer discipline, startedin the 1950s, although its roots, the study ofintelligence and cognitive science go backmuch further. During the 1950s it was realizedthat electronic computers could have a muchwider application: they could handle symbolsand logic, and not just numbers. Much of theimpetus for the early AI work stemmed from theDartmouth Conference of 1959 in the USA.Some progress was made in the UK but theLighthill Report of 1969, which was scepticalabout the value of AI, effectively stopped allgovernment funding for several years (Barrettand Beerel 1988). The early work concentratedon formal reasoning methods and on generalproblem solving. However, the thrust of AIresearch changed direction in the mid-1970swhen it was realized that systems needed to bemade much more specific and that knowledgewas a more important issue than problem sol-ving. Another milestone in AI research wasreached in the early 1980s when the Japaneseannounced their plans to build a so-called ‘fifth-generation’ computer having natural-languagecapabilities, and processing and reasoning cap-abilities far greater than any developed so far.This spurred researchers and funders in both theUSA and Europe into action. Since then AI hasgrown rapidly and today encompasses manydifferent areas of research, including knowledge-based systems – of which expert systems are themost well known – natural language understand-ing, machine vision, computer games, robotics,

26 ARTEFACT

automatic programming and computer-assistedlearning. It is also an interdisciplinary fieldinvolving not only computer science, but alsomathematics, linguistics, philosophy, psychologyand cognitive science.The application of AI techniques to informa-

tion and library work peaked in the late 1980sand early 1990s, mostly in the expert-systemsfield. Success has not yet been achieved, becausemuch of the work either has been theoretical orhas resulted in the production of a prototype;very few commercial systems have been devel-oped. Investigations have covered a broad spec-trum of topics including online informationretrieval, reference work, cataloguing, classifi-cation, indexing, abstracting (see abstractingand indexing services) and document selec-tion.Online information retrieval is probably the

most researched topic. Many efforts have beenmade to simplify the process of searching anddifferent approaches have been adopted (seeHaverkamp and Gauch 1998). Some have con-centrated on improving the interface design,while others have prototyped intelligent infor-mation retrieval (IIR) systems to explore newand better ways to store, describe and retrievedocuments. Several researchers have also devel-oped prototype systems to aid one or more‘intelligent’ – rather than just procedural –aspects of the searching process such as identify-ing databases, constructing search statements,modifying search statements and interpretingresults.Reference services were developed in the late

nineteenth century to help readers find relevantand pertinent information sources. As the num-ber of information sources has grown so too hasthe demand for reference services. Expert systemsare seen by some researchers as a possible way ofmeeting this extra demand and freeing staff forother duties. Preliminary work has been done onidentifying the rules of reference, modelling thereference process, constructing user models andidentifying the types of knowledge that expertsystems need to contain. Some prototypes havealso been built to give advice in specific areassuch as horticulture, agriculture, patents and USgovernment sources.The costly and time-consuming process of

cataloguing material has been identified as onearea that could benefit from the use of knowl-edge-based systems techniques. Three directions

of research have emerged: the development ofadvisory systems that give users guidance onwhich rule to use, prototype systems that gobeyond this and create records, and attempts toautomate the whole process using optical char-acter recognition.Some progress has been made in the field of

indexing. A number of indexing prototypes havebeen built that attempt to analyse the subjectcontent of documents and suggest associatedsubject relationships. A few commercial systemsare also now appearing. Reuters, for example,use AI techniques to index news stories auto-matically. Some progress has also been made indeveloping systems that help to classify docu-ments.Producing an abstract can be extremely time

consuming. Not surprisingly, attempts have beenmade to apply AI techniques to aid the process.Much of the research has concentrated on thepracticalities of extracting and aggregating sen-tences and evaluating different techniques.Although much still remains to be achieved,advances in the fields of linguistics and naturallanguage make automatic abstracting an interest-ing and promising research area.Research papers coupling document selection

with AI appeared in the 1990s. A few prototypesystems have been built to aid journal selectionand monographs. Further progress in this field,however, will probably be dependent on gainingdirect access to publishers’ electronic catalogues.Although much progress has been made al-

ready, the AI library field is still very young. Nodoubt future library users will be able to discusstheir information needs with intelligent interfacesusing natural language and be presented ondemand with relevant references based on somekind of user modelling, abstracts and a synthesisof the contents of selected documents. Librarieswill become knowledge warehouses accessed vianetworks; even the physical browsing of shelvesmay also be a thing of the past as users opt to useintelligent virtual reality programmes. AI is anexciting discipline and one that will help steer theinformation society of the future.

References

Barrett, M.L. and Beerel, A.C. (1988) Expert Systemsin Business: A Practical Approach, Chichester: EllisHorwood.

Haverkamp, D.S. and Gauch, S. (1998) ‘Intelligentinformation agents: Review and challenges for

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE 27

distributed information sources’, Journal of theAmerican Society for Information Science 49(4):304–11.

Patterson, D.W. (1990) Introduction to Artificial In-telligence and Expert Systems, London: PrenticeHall.

Further reading

Artificial Intelligence. (http://library.thinkquest.org/2705/ Accessed 30 May 2002.)

Morris, A. (1992) The Application of Expert Systems inLibraries and Information Centres, London: BowkerSaur.

Weckert, J. and McDonald, C. (eds) (1992) ‘A specialissue on artificial intelligence, knowledge systems,and the future library’, Library Hi Tech 10: 37–8.

Zainab, A.N. and De Silva, S.M. (1998) ‘Expertsystems in library and information services: Publica-tion trends, authorship patterns and expressivenessof published titles’, Journal of Information Science24(5): 313–36.

SEE ALSO: informatics; informationmanagement; organization of knowledge

ANNE MORRIS

ASSOCIATION FOR LIBRARY ANDINFORMATION SCIENCEEDUCATION

The Association for Library and InformationScience Education (ALISE) is a not-for-profitcorporation, organized and existing under thelaws of the State of Delaware, USA, with amission to promote excellence in research, teach-ing and service for library and informationscience education. An elected Board of Direc-tors governs the organization and consists ofPresident, Past President, Vice-President/Presi-dent-Elect, Secretary-Treasurer and three Direc-tors. An Executive Director is ex officio to theBoard. Programmatically, ALISE operatesthrough standing committees and special interestgroups (SIGs) that represent a fluid range ofinterests, such as research, curriculum, teachingmethods, continuing education, gender issues,library history, preservation education, youthservices, doctoral students and international li-brary education. ALISE publishes the Journal ofEducation for Library and Information Science(JELIS), a refereed research-based quarterlyjournal.

History

The first recorded gathering of representativesfrom library schools in North America tookplace in 1907 at the american library associa-tion conference. This group organized into aRound Table of Library Schools and held regularmeetings until 1915, when twenty-five interestedindividuals representing nine schools met andvoted to form a more permanent organization:the Association of American Library Schools(AALS). The Association operated under thisname until 1983, when the name was officiallychanged to the Association for Library andInformation Science Education (ALISE).The Association’s primary purpose was fellow-

ship and the discussion of issues facing profes-sional education, such as the recruitment offaculty, curriculum and instruction, internal mat-ters of professional education and the role ofprofessional education in higher education and inthe university.

Goals

These areas of interest are represented in the fivegoals of the Association that were officiallyadopted in 1989:

1 To articulate the scope of the field andrelationship to other fields and the require-ments thereof.

2 To formulate and promote positions onmatters related to library and informationscience education.

3 To promote the local, national and interna-tional development of library and informa-tion science education.

4 To foster the strength of institutional mem-bers within the university and the profession.

5 To support the professional growth of itsindividual members.

Policies

Policies and position statements of the Associa-tion are organized into three categories andrepresent significant professional consensus onmajor topic areas:

EDUCATIONAL MATTERS

. The role of graduate programmes in libraryand information science education.

28 ASSOCIATION FOR LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE EDUCATION

. The accreditation process.

. Guidelines for student field experiences.

. Standards for the development of sixth-yearprogrammes.

. The PhD in library and information science.

. The role of ALISE and its member schools incontinuing education.

. Continuing library and information scienceeducation.

GOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS

. Elements of a federal legislative programmefor LIS education in the USA.

. Access to government information.

. Higher Education Act, Title II-B.

ORGANIZATIONAL MATTERS

. Practitioner/ALISE membership education-related communication.

. Affiliation between ALISE and other groups.

. Endorsement of joint sponsorship of projectsand activities.

. Distribution of questionnaires or other materi-als to ALISE members.

. External sponsorships.

Membership

ALISE is a dynamic organization and the mem-bership categories of the Association have chan-ged over time: current categories include personalmembers (open to anyone having an interest inthe goals of the Association); institutional mem-bers (schools in the USA or Canada that offer agraduate degree in library and informationscience, or cognate field, which is accredited bythe appropriate authority); and internationalaffiliated members (schools outside the USA andCanada that offer a programme to educatestudents for practice at the professional level, asdefined by the country in which the school islocated).

Conference

ALISE presents an annual conference each year,structured around a theme. Each ALISE Vice-President/President-Elect establishes priorities(which must be approved by the Board) for his/her year as President and also recommends atheme for the conference in that year. In recenttimes conferences have included such themes as

intellectual diversity, international interdepen-dence, relationship of schools to parent institu-tions, politics of higher education and matters ofchanging curriculum and research. The confer-ence is also a centre for the recruiting andinterviewing of prospective faculty members.

Awards

A variety of awards are presented at the annualconference, following a competitive process.These awards are presented for research (theALISE Research Award for proposed research,the Research Paper Competition, the HanniganResearch Award and the Doctoral Student Dis-sertation Competition) and for individualachievement (Professional Contribution to Li-brary and Information Science Education, theAward for Teaching Excellence and the ALISEService Award).

Liaison

In order for ALISE to serve as a means ofcommunication between the ALISE communityof educators and individual practitioners andorganized practitioner groups, formal liaisonrelationships are maintained with the followinggroups: American Association of School Li-braries, american library association, ALAAccreditation Study, ALA International RelationsCommittee, ALA LAMA Statistics Section, ALACommittee on Education, american societyfor information science and technology,Association of Records Managers and Adminis-trators, Coalition on Government Information,Documentation Abstracts, Inc., InternationalFederation of Library Associations (ifla) (includ-ing the Sections on Education and Training,Statistics, and Information Technology, as wellas the US Members Committee), Network Ad-visory Committee, Office of Educational Re-search and Improvement, Society of AmericanArchivists, and Special Libraries Association.

Further reading

Davis, D. (1991) ‘Seventy-five years of education forthe profession: Reflections on the early years’,Journal of Library and Information Science Educa-tion 32 (fall–winter): 157–77.

Sineath, T. (1991) ‘Trends in library and informationscience education: An overview’, in Proceedings ofthe International Conference on New Frontiers inLibrary and Information Services, Taipei, p. 799.

ASSOCIATION FOR LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE EDUCATION 29

SEE ALSO: accreditation of LIS schools;continuing professional development; libraryeducation

DARLENE E. WEINGAND

AUDIOVISUAL MATERIALS

A generic term to describe information contentheld in storage and transmission media, andformats that use images and sound rather than,or sometimes in addition to, textual matter. Thisincludes: audio CD, records and tapes; photo-graphs, slides, film and video; and formats thatcombine two or more of these such as tape–slidedisplays. Many of the formats are now comple-tely outmoded, but some libraries, especiallyresearch libraries and academic libraries, stillretain them, and must therefore keep equipmenton which they can be played in working order ifat all possible. The term, however, is still quiteuseful, and has not been entirely displaced bymultimedia, which is often – wrongly – used asa fashionable synonym for it.

AUTHOR

The person, persons or corporate body responsi-ble for the writing or compilation of a book orother work, usually in textual form. The authoris usually distinguished from an editor, translator,copier, etc., although these are sometimes treatedas authors for purposes of cataloguing. In awider sense the concept of authorship can in-clude artists, composers of musical works orphotographers who are creators of original con-tent. An author is legally responsible for a work,and also acquires the copyright in it.The idea of authorship rests in turn on the

concept of originality, whereby it is maintainedthat individuals may produce written or unwrittencontributions to human knowledge or ideas,whether through scientific investigation, scholar-ship or philosophical exploration, which areuniquely their own. Originality is the root of anindividual’s claim to the role of author. It is theunderpinning for the legal concept of intellec-tual property, which in turn is central to theoperation of the knowledge industries, cul-tural industries and librarianship and in-formation science.The medieval view of the writer was as a

collector, continuator, interpreter and contribu-

tor. Writers paid tribute to the authority ofearlier texts, did not make claims to originalityand frequently did not attach their names to thetexts of which the modern interpretation wouldregard them as author. Subsequently it has cometo be widely accepted that individuals may haveunique inspirations, can make totally fresh dis-coveries and should therefore be recognized ascreators, and, indeed, be rewarded accordingly.The reality of claims to be original is much morecomplex than this might suggest.Ideas are potentially original in the sense that

they are new and unique. However, it is almostimpossibly hard to identify ideas that meet thiscriterion. It is much more common for ideas tobe original in the sense that they have beenarrived at independently by an individual butare not entirely new or unique to that individual.In recognition of the near impossibility of identi-fying totally original ideas to protect, intellectualproperty law in the English legal traditionawards copyright to works on the grounds, notthat they are original, but merely that they arenot copied. Thus it only excludes works that arebased on plagiarism, and protects in turn againsta range of unauthorized copying including piracy.The continental tradition of law takes a moreexalted view of authors as creators and concen-trates on their moral rights first and foremost.

Further reading

Foucault, M. (1979) ‘What is an author?’, in J.V.Hariri, Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-struc-turalist Criticism, Cornell University Press.

SEE ALSO: copyright; intellectual property;publishing

AUTHORING SYSTEMS

Used both in optical media, as a general term forthe hardware and software needed for authoringinteractive compact discs, and in computer-aidedlearning, to indicate a computer system capableof executing an authoring language.

SEE ALSO: computer-assisted learning in libraryand information science

AUTHORITY FILE

1 A list of all personal and corporate names,titles of anonymous works and the headings

30 AUDIOVISUAL MATERIALS

for series cards that are used as headings ina catalogue. The entries are made when aheading is first established. It gives subjectcataloguers a record of the form that hasalready been used in the catalogue.

2 A list in classified order of classificationsymbols or numbers that have been allocatedto books, with their corresponding indexentries.

SEE ALSO: catalogues

AUTHORITY FILE 31

B

BANDWIDTH

The capacity of a cable or wireless network tocarry data, measured in bits per second (bps),often described as narrow or broad. broadbandhas the highest capacity.

BARCODE

A visual code representing alpha-numeric sym-bols arranged in a series of vertical parallel linesor bars, representing data. It is read by a barcodescanner as digital signals for entry in a computerdatabase. It is used in many forms of automatedlibrary circulation systems, as well as in manyother contexts such as supermarket (and indeedbookshop) checkouts.

SEE ALSO: information and communicationtechnology

BAREFOOT LIBRARIAN

A library or information worker providing in-formal, community-based services, usually inrural areas. A term given prominence, almostincidentally, by Wijasuriya (1975) in relation toSoutheast Asia, and used by him to signifyprofessionals with a rural rather than urbanorientation. It has since been used to refer tonon-professional or paraprofessional helpers re-cruited in the community to staff reading roomsor rudimentary libraries and information centres.This is exemplified by the practice of TanzaniaLibrary Service, which hires local residents with aminimum of primary-level education, gives themshort training courses and pays them a monthlyhonorarium. The term echoes similar ones refer-

ring to other providers of services in rural areas,such as the Chinese barefoot doctors (Cheng1988).

References

Cheng, T.O. (1988) ‘Barefoot doctors’, Journal of theAmerican Medical Association 259: 3,561.

Wijasuriya, D.E.K. (1975) The Barefoot Librarian,Bingley.

Further reading

Yocklunn, J. (1988) ‘The barefoot librarian: A modelfor developing countries?’, Libraries Alone 1: 13–20.


BERNE CONVENTION

The International Convention for the Protectionof Literary and Artistic Works, known as the‘Berne Convention’, was adopted by an interna-tional conference held in Berne, Switzerland, in1886. It was designed to protect in as uniform amanner as possible the rights of authors in theirliterary and artistic works. It was revised in Parisin 1896, and again in 1908, 1928, 1948, 1967and 1971. The USA, although bound by theUniversal Copyright Convention since 1955,joined only in 1988. The protection of the BerneConvention applies to authors who are nationalsof any of the countries of the Union establishedby the Convention, for their works, whetherpublished or not, and also to authors who arenationals of non-Union countries for their worksfirst published in one of those countries. Theduration of the protection provided by the BerneConvention is determined by national law. Workspublished in any signatory state are protected in

all other signatory states on the same terms asbooks first published there. Historically, this hastypically been for the author’s lifetime and fiftyyears thereafter, but in the European Union it isnow seventy years.

SEE ALSO: copyright

BERNERS-LEE, TIM (1955–)

The inventor of the world wide web and itsvarious component parts and more recentlydeveloper of the semantic web.Born and brought up in London, he took his

degree in Physics from Queen’s College, Oxford,in 1976. During six months in 1980 asconsultant software engineer at CERN, theEuropean Particle Physics Laboratory inGeneva, Switzerland, he developed a programthat he called Enquire for his own use. Thisprovided the conceptual basis for his proposal,in 1989, of a global hypertext project usingthe internet, to be known as the World WideWeb. For this he developed the mark-up lan-guage HTML (see mark-up languages), theaddressing system of uniform resource loca-tors (URLs), the protocol HTTP and the firstweb browser (Mosaic). The Web was intro-duced on the Internet in 1991 and has providedthe means by which it has become a mediumaccessible to all, rather than a specialized toolfor an elite. In 1994 he joined the Massachu-setts Institute of Technology, from where hedirects the World Wide Web Consortium, whichseeks to move the Web forward through thedevelopment of standards. His achievementshave been recognized by the award of manyhonours, including Fellowship of the RoyalSociety (2001).

Further reading

Berners-Lee, T. (1999) Weaving the Web. San Fran-cisco: Harper.

World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3.org/).

BESTERMAN, THEODORE (1904–76)

Bibliographer and Voltaire scholar.Born in Poland and, after his family had

moved to London, educated mostly at home.During the 1930s he worked for ASLIB, estab-

lishing the Journal of Documentation in1945 and planning the British Union Catalogueof Periodicals (BUCOP). From 1945 to 1949he was head of the department for the inter-national exchange of information at UNESCO.He later became a prolific Voltaire scholar,first at the Institut et Musée Voltaire, createdin Voltaire’s own house, Les Délices, in Geneva,and officially opened in 1954. He later movedhis Voltaire publishing activities to Englandand established in Oxford the Voltaire Founda-tion, which he bequeathed to the University.His interest in the discipline of bibliography

followed his own compilation of publishedauthor bibliographies, and he published TheBeginnings of Systematic Bibliography in 1935.His magnum opus, World Bibliography of Bib-liographies and of Bibliographical Catalogues,Calendars, Abstracts, Digests, Indexes andthe Like, was first published in 1939–40, revisedin 1955–6 and revised again in four volumeswith a separate volume of index in 1965–6.Compilation of this immense work set highstandards of scholarly dedication, and involvedthe personal handling of more than 80,000volumes in the Library of Congress andthe British Museum Library. His enormouscontribution to enumerative bibliography isrecognized by the library association throughits Besterman Medal, awarded annually foran outstanding bibliography or guide tothe literature published in the United Kingdomduring the year. There is an annual BestermanLecture at Oxford University, usually deliveredby a distinguished scholar with interests ineighteenth-century French bibliography.

Further reading

Cordasco, F. (ed.) (1992) Theodore Besterman, Biblio-grapher and Editor, Scarecrow Press.

SEE ALSO: bibliography

BIBLIOGRAPHIC CLASSIFICATION

Bibliographic classification may be defined as aset of organizing principles by which informationis arranged, usually according to its subjectmatter. The subject divisions identified are gen-erally assigned a coded notation to represent thesubject content. Individual items are placedwithin the appropriate subject area, either as an

BIBLIOGRAPHIC CLASSIFICATION 33

arrangement of physical items or they are de-scribed in a catalogue or database.

Theoretical considerations

Bibliographical classification groups ‘things’ to-gether by seeking out similarities or likenesseswithin them. These ‘things’ may be either con-crete or abstract and may be discerned eitherintuitively or by conscious reasoning. Classifica-tion also shows the relationships between‘things’; this exposition of the subject contentusually leads to a formal structure such as abibliographic classification scheme (Buchanan1979). Originally, bibliographic classificationwas closely linked to scientific and philosophicalclassification – at a time when it was possible toequate knowledge with the printed product inwhich it appeared. There is a constant tension inbibliographic classification between the one-dimensional linear order that is necessary foruseful shelf arrangement and the more complex,multidimensional set of relationships that existbetween concepts in real life. Thus, a trulyeffective bibliographic classification scheme mayneed to reveal links and relationships that areimpossible to show when books are placed onshelves.

Components of a bibliographicclassification scheme

The central part of any scheme is the classifica-tion schedules. This consists of the systematicarrangement of the subject concepts according tothe fundamentals of the particular scheme. Thus,in the dewey decimal classification (DDC),where there are ten main classes, the schedulesare a detailed listing of elements within theseclasses. There is normally an alphabetical ar-rangement or index that acts as a verbal entrymechanism to the schedules showing the linksand relationships between terms and concepts.The novel device that characterizes bibliographicclassification is the notation (coding system)devised to represent the subject concepts. A codeor notation (usually called the classificationnumber or classmark) is used as a shorthandversion of the subject concept. It may be writtenon the book to facilitate retrieval from theshelves or it may act as an access point in acatalogue or database. The notation may consistof numbers, letters, symbols or a combination ofthese. In DDC, the notation is almost totally

numerical, e.g. the classification number for abook about ‘tennis’ is 796.342 (where the deci-mal point acts simply as a separator betweenthree digits with no mathematical value).

Bibliographic classification – approachesand schemes

Most major library classification schemes havetheir origins in the nineteenth century and reflecteither (1) an ideology that thought it possible torepresent the whole world of knowledge or (2) apragmatic attempt to group similar documentstogether on the shelves of a major library. TheDDC and the library of congress classifica-tion Scheme (LCC) have elements of both ofthese considerations and both are widely usedthroughout the world. The ‘world of knowledge’is divided into suitable classes, and new subjectconcepts may be added to each class whennecessary. These schemes are referred to asenumerative schemes. Seriously dated in theirfundamental conceptual approach to knowledge,they survive because libraries can still make themwork effectively for shelf arrangement. The uni-versal decimal classification (UDC) is adevelopment of DDC that allows for morecomplex relationships to be shown with lessenumeration.It was, however, with the development of

faceted classification by S.R. Ranganathan(1892–1972) that an innovative approach ap-peared. In faceted classification, subjects areanalysed into ‘their component elemental classes’rather than by starting with the whole world ofknowledge and dividing it up into useful seg-ments. Thus, a concept is classified by assemblingits component elemental classes, e.g. the activityof building may be composed of the facets ‘thingbuilt’, ‘building materials’, ‘method of building’,etc. This leads to a more rigorous, as well as amore economical, approach to devising schemes.Faceted schemes work best in small-scale focusedsubject areas. In the UK, the ClassificationResearch Group was responsible for much re-search and development in this area in the latterhalf of the twentieth century.

Bibliographic classification as a tool ininformation retrieval

With the advent of online public access catalo-gues (opacs), cataloguing, indexing and classifi-cation data have increasingly been bought in by

34 BIBLIOGRAPHIC CLASSIFICATION

libraries from specialized cataloguing agenciesand as a result a diminishing amount of in-houseclassification now takes place. This has resultedin consolidation around the larger enumerativeclassifications (DDC and LCC) as the data forthese schemes predominates in automated re-cords.

Recent experience has shown that very fewonline catalogue searches involve classification,as the notational code is now too great a barrierto users. The main function of bibliographicclassification is, therefore, the systematic ar-rangement of physical objects (often referred toas ‘marking and parking’). In public libraries,there is also some disenchantment with theusefulness of classification. In many cases, popu-lar material, e.g. fiction, cookery, war, gardening,etc., may be arranged in loose categories similarto arrangements in bookshops, using the ap-proach usually described as categorization,rather than a formal classification scheme On amore positive note, classification has recentlyfound a significant role in the organization ofdigital information on the Internet and in knowl-edge-based systems. Increasing dissatisfactionand frustration with excessive recall and lack ofprecision from search engines has led to arenewed interest in a structured approach toinformation organization and retrieval. Hierarch-ical classification schemes, in particular DDC,have been used as the framework for organizingselected resources in directory indexes and onportals and gateways, as a scheme such asDDC provides a ready-made and tested informa-tion structure. Bibliographic classification sys-tems (as well as the use of a thesaurus) arealso currently in vogue as the subject foundationfor taxonomies in knowledge managementsystems.

References

Buchanan, Brian (1979) Theory of Classification,Bingley.

Further reading

Chan, L.M. (1994) Cataloging and Classification: AnIntroduction, 2nd edn, New York: McGraw Hill.

Meadows, J. (2001) Understanding Information, Saur.Taylor, A. (1999) The Organization of Information,Libraries Unlimited.

SEE ALSO: Dewey, Melvil; indexing; information

retrieval; organization of knowledge; Otlet, Paul-Marie-Ghislain

ANNE O’BRIEN

BIBLIOGRAPHIC CONTROL

The means and methods by which publicationsare listed on a systematic basis in bibliographicfiles. In this context, ‘publications’ include notonly printed books and serials (i.e. journals,magazines, annuals, newspapers, etc.) but alsoworks in other media, e.g. microforms, computerfiles, audio cassettes, optical disks.Bibliographic control covers a range of library

and information disciplines. These may includethe following: bibliographic description, sub-ject access by classification schemes, subjectaccess by controlled vocabulary subject headings,name authority control and coding for machine-readable cataloguing (MARC). A variety ofsystems and schemes have been developed forthese disciplines. Those in common use in theEnglish-speaking world include the following.

Description

The provisions of the International StandardBibliographic Descriptions (ISBDs), developedand published by the international federa-tion of library associations (IFLA) andcovering most media and bibliographic condi-tions, have been incorporated in the anglo-american cataloguing rules (AACR 1988).A description will record the physical and identi-fying characteristics of a publication, includingtitle, imprint and pagination/size/binding infor-mation.

Classification schemes

Schemes in common use include the deweydecimal classification, the library of con-gress classification and the universaldecimal classification. Characteristically, al-phabetical and/or numeric notation, which mayreflect subject hierarchies, is used to represent theoverall subject of a publication both for lineararrangement in published bibliographies andcatalogues, and for library shelf arrangement.

Subject headings

These may or may not complement the use of aclassification scheme in a bibliographic file. In

BIBLIOGRAPHIC CONTROL 35

order to maintain consistency, subject headingsemploy a controlled vocabulary with referencesto broader and narrower terms within a subjecthierarchy and from unused or non-preferredterminology. Lists of subject headings may alsobe referred to as thesauri. Those lists in com-mon use include Library of Congress SubjectHeadings (often used in research libraries) andSears List of Subject Headings (mostly used insmaller libraries). In the UK, the british libraryhas used, successively, its PRECIS and COMPASSsystems, not only for subject access within itsbibliographic records but also as a subject indexto the British National Bibliography.

Name authorities

Authority control ensures that names (personaland corporate names, series and uniform titles)are always presented in precisely the same form,mostly for the purposes of linear arrangement inbibliographies and catalogues but also for overallconsistency within the bibliographic file. Lists ofauthority-controlled names are produced by theBritish Library, the library of congress andother bodies.

Machine-readable coding

Where bibliographic information is manipulatedthrough automation, the various bibliographicelements may be individually coded to facilitateaccess and enable particular routines, such aslinear filing, to take place. The most commonsystem in use is MARC, based on ISO 2709 (ISO1981); this is manifested in various nationalformats such as ukmarc and usmarc, and inIFLA’s international format unimarc.

The use of standards in bibliographic controlis intended to impose overall consistency onthe records contained in bibliographic files.These files may include individual library cata-logues, union catalogues representing theholdings of more than one collection, currentand retrospective national bibliographies as pro-duced by national bibliographic agencies, selec-tive bibliographies based on author, subject orother topic for the purposes of scholarly re-search and in- and out-of-print trade bibliogra-phies (see trade bibliography) produced byand for the book trade. Bibliographic controlmay, therefore, be independent of particularlibrary collections.

Access to bibliographic files may be either pre-co-ordinated or post-co-ordinated. The former isrepresented by printed or microform bibliogra-phies and catalogues, and traditional card cata-logues housed in cabinets; the latter by onlinefiles and those in CD-ROM format.Until the 1960s co-operative cataloguing in

bibliographic control was spasmodic and to alarge extent impractical. However, the develop-ment by the Library of Congress in the 1960s ofthe MARC format has subsequently enabled co-operation to take place on an international basisand led indirectly to the establishment by IFLAof its programme for Universal BibliographicControl (UBC). While not tied to automatedprocesses, the UBC programme facilitatedgreater sharing of bibliographic data throughits development of appropriate standards suchas the ISBDs and UNIMARC, and hence theultimate target of a global network of biblio-graphic data.

References

AACR (1988) Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2ndedn (1988 revision), Ottawa: Canadian LibraryAssociation; London: Library Association PublishingLimited; Chicago: American Library Association.

ISO (International Organization for Standardization)(1981) Documentation: Format for BibliographicInformation Interchange on Magnetic Tape, 2ndedn, Geneva: ISO (ISO 2709–1981).

Further reading

Anderson, D. (1974) Universal Bibliographic Control:A Long-term Policy, a Plan for Action, Pullach beiMünchen: Verlag Dokumentation.

Davinson, D. (1981) Bibliographic Control, 2nd edn,London: Bingley.

Gredley, E. and Hopkinson, A. (1990) ExchangingBibliographic Data: MARC and Other InternationalFormats, Ottawa: Canadian Library Association;London: Library Association Publishing Limited;Chicago: American Library Association.

SEE ALSO: bibliographic description;bibliography; classification; libraries; Machine-Readable Cataloguing; organization ofknowledge; Universal Bibliographic Control andInternational MARC

ROSS BOURNE

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION

Description of library materials to facilitateretrieval, as specified, for instance, in the

36 BIBLIOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION

anglo-american cataloguing rules. A de-scription will typically include areas such as: titleand statement of responsibility, edition, physicaldescription, series, standard number, etc. Each ofthese areas is likely to be further divided into anumber of elements, which vary according to thetype of material.In a specialist sense, the term ‘bibliographic

(or, more often, ‘bibliographical’) description’is applied to the very detailed descriptionof the physical and bibliographical characteris-tics, printing and publishing history and visualmanifestation of early printed books associatedwith the work of Fredson bowers and hisfollowers.

Further reading

Bowers, F.T. (1948) Principles of Bibliographical De-scription, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chan, L.M. (1994) Cataloging and Classification: AnIntroduction, 2nd edn, New York: McGraw Hill.


BIBLIOGRAPHIC INSTRUCTION

Also known as user education. It is widelypractised in academic and special libraries, andless often in public libraries. It begins withorientation programmes for new users and cango on to include training in the use of the wholerange of catalogues, bibliographies, collectionsand online services that the library offers. Theterm is falling out of use and is being replaced bytraining in information skills as part of aprogramme in which users, especially students,are initiated into the skills of informationliteracy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The systematic listing and analytical study ofbooks, manuscripts and other documents.A bibliography is compiled with the intention

of providing comprehensive coverage of itschosen field. This field might be defined chron-ologically, geographically, by subject, by authoror by format of publication, or by somecombination of one or more of these. This formof bibliography is known as enumerative biblio-graphy, a term which encompasses almost allbibliographies. There are three types of enu-

merative bibliography that are commonlydistinguished:

. Author bibliographies.

. Subject bibliographies.

. National bibliographies.

Author and subject bibliographies are self-expla-natory. A national bibliography is a record ofthe publications of a country, typically publishedby its national library (see national libraries).In some countries works about the country and/or works by authors resident and/or born in and/or ethnic nationals of the country are alsoincluded.Bibliographers, as the compilers of bibliogra-

phies are normally known, seek to achievecomprehensive coverage as well as completeaccuracy. In practice, the former is extremelydifficult to attain. Even a superficially simple tasksuch as the compilation of a list of the works of adead author can be complicated by such things asfugitive pieces published in magazines, unpub-lished works that have survived in manuscript,anonymous, pseudonymous and unacknowledgedwork, and so on. The bibliographer must alsodecide whether to include, for example, transla-tions of the author’s works into other languages,second and subsequent editions, works about anauthor or adaptations of the author’s works (ashort story as a play, for example, or a play as amusical). All of this precedes key decisions aboutthe form and content of entries, the level of detailto be provided, the order of the bibliography, theprovision of indexes and the like. With subjectbibliographies, or bibliographies that purport torecord the whole printed output of a particularcountry or a particular period of time, the issuesbecome even more complicated.Not all bibliographies are retrospective. Some,

including national bibliographies, are serial innature: they are published at regular intervals(usually annually) and record new works in theirfield of coverage, usually with a separate listingof works from previous years that have beenaccidentally omitted. It is increasingly commonfor bibliographies to be published in electronicformats. This allows for greater currency, andalso for more frequent updating.Underlying the compilation of bibliographies

lies a substantial body of theory and practiceabout the forms of entry. It is the essence of abibliography that entries should be uniform with

BIBLIOGRAPHY 37

each other, to achieve consistency in the record.The International Standard Book Description,which has, either as a whole or in part, beenadopted by most national bibliographies, wasdesigned to achieve international uniformity. Ithas been a particular concern of unesco,through its PGI programme, and of ifla, throughits universal bibliographic control andinternational marc (UBCIM) Core Pro-gramme, to prescribe and, where possible, toenforce uniform standards of this kind.Bibliography is also the study of books. In this

sense it is used in the rather specialized applica-tions called historical and analytical bibliogra-phy. Historical bibliography is a broader subjectthan the term suggests. In addition to beingconcerned with the compilation of bibliographiesof older books, historical bibliographers are alsoscholars of the history of the book trade and ofbook production, of the history of reading andthe use of books and the history of the book as aphysical and cultural object. In recent years thephrase has been partly displaced by other termssuch as ‘history of the book’ or simply ‘bookhistory’. Analytical bibliography is also a histor-ical study, based upon the assumption thatbooks, especially those printed by hand beforethe first quarter of the nineteenth century, con-tain a great deal of evidence about their ownproduction. Bibliographers analyse the typogra-phy, printing and format of the book, and thusclaim to reveal its printing history, and even, insome cases, to cast light upon the history andauthenticity of the text that it contains. The termdescriptive bibliography is used for bibliogra-phies that give extended descriptions based on afull bibliographical analysis. Bibliography be-came a major field of endeavour for some literaryscholars in the middle decades of the twentiethcentury, and was particularly influential in thedevelopment of new and more accurate styles ofediting literary texts for scholarly use.Bibliography, both as a word and as an

activity, is of Greek origin. It was practised inthe ancient world and in medieval Europe butbecame more common after the middle of thesixteenth century, when the rapid proliferation ofprinted books forced librarians and scholars todevelop more effective systems of bibliographiccontrol. catalogues were developed as an-other response to the same need, but cataloguesrecord only the contents of a single library ordesignated group of libraries, while bibliogra-

phies seek to be a comprehensive record of theitems they record, regardless of the currentlocation of any particular item listed. In otherwords, bibliographies, although based upon thephysical description of objects, are independentof any particular object or repository of objects.

Further reading

Adams, T.R. and Barker, N. (1993) ‘A new model forthe study of the book’, in N. Barker (ed.) A Potencieof Life. Books in Society, London: The BritishLibrary.

Besterman, T. (1935) The Beginnings of SystematicBibliography, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Krummell, D.W. (1984) Bibliographies. Their Aims andMethods, Mansell Publishing.

Stokes, R. (1982) The Function of Bibliography, 2ndedn, Gower.

SEE ALSO: Bowers, Fredson Thayer; organiza-tion of knowledge

JOHN FEATHER

BIBLIOMANIA

A mania for collecting and possessing books. Theterm was popularized (and perhaps coined) byThomas Frognall Dibdin (1776–1845), an authorand bibliographer who made book-collecting afashionable aristocratic pursuit in early nine-teenth-century England. He used the word in thetitle of his Bibliomania (1809), one of his manybibliographic publications.

SEE ALSO: private libraries

BIBLIOMETRICS

The use of mathematical and statistical methodsto study documents and patterns of publication.It is a core methodology of informationscience, practised by pioneers such as S.C.bradford long before the term itself was coinedin the late 1960s. Bibliometrics can be dividedinto ‘descriptive’ and ‘evaluative’, both of whichcan, in turn, be further divided by ‘productivecount’ (geography, time and discipline) and‘literature count’ (reference and citation). Theterm replaced the older and narrower termstatistical bibliography. Bibliometrics is now un-derstood as part of the larger domain of infor-metrics.

SEE ALSO: citation analysis; scientometrics

38 BIBLIOMANIA

BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE DEFRANCE

The National Library of France. Questions con-cerning the site, organization, mission, status andreaders of the National Library have been askedthroughout its history. The history of the RoyalLibrary, which became the National Libraryduring the French Revolution, was marked byall of these questions and can be read in thatlight. The notions of acquisitions and stockdevelopment, of conservation and preserva-tion, of communication and of the transmissionof heritage have only emerged gradually.

A long story

If Charlemagne and his descendants showed anyinterest in manuscripts and collected a number ofthem, their holdings were usually scattered attheir deaths. Charles V, in the second half of thefourteenth century, installed his ‘librairie’ in theLouvre and enhanced it. From the reign of LouisXI onwards, the Royal Library was passed downfrom generation to generation. The processes oftransmission and improvement were unevenlyimplemented, and the Royal Library neverstopped being moved from one place to anotherfollowing the moves of the capital of the king-dom. During its first centuries of existence, theLibrary was located in Blois, in Fontainebleau, invarious areas of Paris and many other sites inroyal residences.The final foundation act was the work of

François I: the Montpelier Decree of 28 Decem-ber 1537 initiated legal deposit. The dualpurpose of this edict was well understood inFrance and abroad; it was a sign both ofreverence for books and of the fear of theirpower. The Royal Library was gradually enrichedby the operation of the Decree. Little by little,‘Library Science’ emerged, describing how toorganize the treasures they acquired. The Advispour dresser une bibliothèque, by Gabriel Naudé,published in 1627, was the first evidence of thisphenomenon.Colbert settled the Royal Library in the

Vivienne district of Paris, where it stayed untilrecently. He had great ambitions for the Library:‘we need to choose a site to build a large andsuperb Library without any equivalent in thewhole world’, he wrote. In the eighteenth centurythe French Royal Library was one of the wealth-

iest and most important in the world. AbbéBignon was one of the major forces behind thisincomparable expansion. By 1741 the collectionsof the Library had multiplied twofold, with135,000 printed books and 30,000 manuscripts.The French Revolution, and the disruptions it

brought about, affected the Royal Library. Thenew ‘National’ Library was created, with morethan 250,000 books thanks to the confiscation ofthe collections of the clergy and the aristocracy.The nineteenth century was the century of all

types of expansion: collections, readers, build-ings. The architect Henri Labrouste built the newhall for printed materials, and the major catalo-gues were initiated. In the twentieth century theLibrary was prey to inflation, to the need forprotecting all publications and to the growingnumbers of readers; it realized that it did nothave the means to fulfil its mission.

A new library

A new institution was born in January 1994: theBibliothèque Nationale de France, a merger ofthe Bibliothèque Nationale and of the projectedBibliothèque de France, announced in 1988 bythe President of the Republic, who wished to seeFrance graced with a ‘great library, perhaps thegreatest in the world’ at the disposal of all andopen to the newest technologies.Gradually, after much thought and sometimes

tumultuous discussions between politicians, ad-ministrators, professionals and users, the projectwas modified, clarified and stabilized. The build-ing was designed by Dominique Perrault in arectangular shape. The aisles surround a hugegarden and are punctuated with four towers(‘four books open on the city’). The space opento the public is organized on two floors.At the garden level the Library is dedicated to

researchers and specialists who need to useheritage holdings, amounting to some 10 millionvolumes. They have 400,000 volumes on openaccess at their disposal. The upper gardenlibrary is a research library (see researchlibraries) more widely open to the public. Itoffers standard collections on open access thatamount to 350,000 volumes. The two librariesare divided into four subject departments: philo-sophy, history and social sciences; politicalscience, law and economics; literature and arts;science and technology; and each of them in-cludes an audiovisual department. The 10 million

BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE DE FRANCE 39

volumes are kept in the stacks surrounding thereading rooms, and a quarter of them are kept inthe towers.

Professional issues

The building and opening of the BibliothèqueNationale de France marks the beginning ofmany important projects in librarianship. After acentury of shortage of funds, new resourcesallow significant increases in acquisitions. Besidesdocuments received through legal deposit, pur-chases are expected to amount to 80,000 vo-lumes a year compared with the previous 15,000.These funds are dedicated to supplying foreign

materials, and to enhancing the scientific andtechnical collections. Audiovisual holdings havesignificantly increased and diversified: 6,000hours of sound recordings, 1,000 hours of mov-ing images and 100,000 digital images areexpected to be acquired annually.The bibliographic database of the Library, BN-

opale, now has 2 million records and is to becompleted by a retrospective conversion of thewhole collection (5 million records are beingprocessed). The French Union Catalogue is beingimplemented and will provide access to the maincollections of academic, research and publiclibraries; there will be 13 million records by theopening day.Reading conditions have been improved by

human and technological services: work stationsallow readers to find reference material, toreserve a seat or to consult and order a docu-ment. Computerized reading stations allow ac-cess to a corpus of digital texts (100,000 at thetime of opening) and provide the facility tomodify these texts freely.The preservation and storage conditions of

documents are enhanced thanks to a policy ofrestoration, reproduction and protection sup-ported by additional resources. A new technicalcentre located in the suburbs of Paris, at Marne-la-Vallée, has been added to the processing work-shops. It is devoted to storage and to theprocessing of documents. Finally, the old libraryin Rue Richelieu is now a specialized departmentfor Manuscripts, Maps and Plans, and Engrav-ings, and the site of a project for a NationalLibrary of Arts.After building one of the biggest libraries of

the end of the twentieth century, and after havingreasserted in various ways its interest in the

development of all types of libraries, France hasto make sure in the long term that its newNational Library actually fulfils the mission ofenhancement and renewal that has been assignedto it. For the current position, see the Library’swebsite at www.bnf.fr.

Further reading

Balayé, J. (1988) La Bibliothèque Nationale des origi-nes à 1800, Droz.

Bibliothèque de France, bibliothèque ouverte (1989)IMEC [describes the main concepts of the Bibliothè-que de France].

‘Bibliothèque Nationale, Bibliothèque de France: où ensont les grands chantiers?’ (1993) Bulletin desbibliothèques de France 38(3) [the state of the arton some important issues].

Blasselle, B. and Melet-Sanson, J. (1990) La Bibliothè-que Nationale: Mémoire de l’avenir, Gallimard.

Cahart, P. and Melot, M. (1989) Propositions pour unegrande bibliothèque, La Documentation française[the first report on the ‘grande bibliothèque’ project].

Gattégno, J. (1992) La Bibliothèque de France àmiparcours: de la TGB à la BN bis, Le Cercle de laLibrairie [analyses the initial project and the subse-quent changes].

Histoire des bibliothèques françaises (1988–92), sous ladirection d’André Vernet, Claude Jolly, DominiqueVarry, Martine Poulain. Promodis-Le Cercle de laLibrairie, 4 vols [the most recent and the mostdetailed history of French libraries; includes severalpapers on the Bibliothèque Nationale].

Programme général de la Bibliothèque de France (1993)(March).

SEE ALSO: national libraries

MARTINE POULAIN

BIBLIOTHERAPY

Therapy using reading materials in order to helpa client solve emotional, mental and socialproblems. It is used by librarians, counsellors,psychologists, social workers and teachers, withor without a support group. The process ofbibliotherapy is sometimes described as includingthree phases: identification of the reader with thecharacter in the book, catharsis and insight. Oneexample is the Reading and You Scheme (RAYS)in Kirklees, UK, in which the public libraryservice, in partnership with local primary health-care groups, accepts referrals from doctors, com-munity psychiatric nurses and social workers.The service’s bibliotherapists work with indivi-dual clients and discussion groups, seeking to

40 BIBLIOTHERAPY

introduce a complement to the medical andpsychiatric therapy that they are receiving.

BODLEY, SIR THOMAS (1545–1613)

Founder of the Bodleian Library, Oxford Uni-versity, England.

Educated at Oxford and later a Fellow ofMerton College, he lectured in Greek and naturalphilosophy but left in 1576 to learn foreignlanguages by travelling across Europe. From1585 to 1596 he was in the diplomatic service,but after retiring he directed his attention to thecollecting of books and the developing of a greatacademic library (see academic libraries) atOxford University.

This library, which had existed since the four-teenth century, and had been augmented andrehoused by Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, inthe fifteenth century, had been despoiled duringthe Reformation. Bodley proposed to restore thelibrary room and assemble new collections in it.His offer was accepted in 1598, and ThomasJames was appointed as the first Librarian. Thelibrary opened in 1602. His great success inacquiring books for the library led to a need forexpansion. The year 1610 marked the opening ofthe Arts End extension, which Bodley supervisedand financed. On his death in 1613 Bodley lefthis fortune to the library, in part to build thestorage extensions he had proposed and whichnow form the Old Schools Quadrangle, which isstill the heart of the library.

Bodley was not merely a library benefactor; healso had strong views on library organization. Heimposed a cataloguing and classification sys-tem on James and kept a careful eye on acquisi-tions. He was, however, very open-minded. Hislibrary was not just for Oxford, but also for ‘thewhole common-wealth of learning’, and (con-trary to popular belief) was never narrowlytheological (and certainly not solely Protestant)in its holdings. He identified the elements thatmade his work for the library possible as: hisknowledge of literature, the ability to finance theproject, friends to call on for assistance and theleisure in which to work.

Further reading

Philip, I. (1983) The Bodleian Library in the Seven-

teenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Oxford: ClarendonPress, pp. 1–22.

SEE ALSO: academic libraries

BOOK

An object that is container for written, printed orgraphic information. Whilst there have beenother forms of book, notably the scroll, for thelast two millennia in the West the term has beenused to refer to the codex, consisting of sheets ofvellum, parchment, paper or other material sewnor stapled and enclosed within protective covers.By extension, the word also refers to the materialcontained within this object. A definition de-signed to distinguish the book from other writtenforms, such as pamphlets, for library purposeswas attempted by a unesco conference in 1964.This described a book as a non-periodical printedpublication of at least forty-nine pages, exclusiveof cover pages.The book has come to have an iconic status,

having become a symbol for religious traditions(the ‘people of the book’) and even for civiliza-tion itself. In the late twentieth century, the wordwas used is such contexts as ‘talking book’(sound recordings to provide services for thevisually impaired) and electronic books. Thesemultimedia formats are fundamentally differentobjects from the book, but the use of the word inthis context reinforces its perceived culturalsignificance.

SEE ALSO: book trade

BOOK CLUB

1 A method of publishing by issuing books tomembers of a society, at a lower price thanthe ‘trade’ editions. The books have usuallybeen published before and are reprinted forthis purpose. Distribution is by mail and theroyalties from book club sales are seen asproviding extra profits to both publisher andauthor.

2 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuriesthe term was used to describe a club whosemembers bought books for their joint use,often meeting regularly to discuss the con-tents.


BOOK CLUB 41

BOOK DESIGN

The process of planning the typography, illustra-tion and external features (jacket and binding) ofa book. It is both aesthetic and utilitarian. Awell-designed book is both easy to read andagreeable to look at.

Further reading

Williamson, H. (1983) Methods of Book Design, NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press.

SEE ALSO: publishing

BOOK FAIR

An exhibition of books and of book-making,sometimes including talks by authors, illustra-tors, booksellers and publishers. Although somebook fairs are intended for the general public(especially those mounted by antiquarian andsecond-hand booksellers), most are aimed at thebook trade itself.The Frankfurt Book Fair, which can trace its

origins to the fifteenth century, is the mostimportant international means of selling booksand intellectual property rights, and ofpromoting international sales and the translationof books into other languages. Fairs are held inmany cities, including, for example, Moscow,London and Harare.


BOOK JOBBER

In US usage, a wholesale bookseller who stocksmany copies of books issued by different publish-ers and supplies them to retailers and libraries.There are two types of jobber: (1) those whostock mainly current textbooks, trade and tech-nical books, and (2) those who stock onlyremainders. The equivalent UK booksellers arecalled library suppliers.


BOOK PRODUCTION

The art and craft of making books, includingbook design, choice and use of materials,illustration, printing and binding.

SEE ALSO: book trade; publishing

BOOK SELECTION

The process of choosing books for inclusion in alibrary with a view to providing a balancedincrease to the stock. Book selection is a keyprofessional skill for librarians, but they workclosely with users to ensure that the collection isdeveloped in a relevant and appropriate way.This is especially the case in academic librariesand special libraries, where book selection isoften virtually a joint process.

SEE ALSO: acquisitions; collection management

BOOK TRADE

The commercial activities involved in the produc-tion, distribution and sale of books and otherprinted products.The three principal components of the book

trade are publishing, printing and bookselling.They are normally undertaken as separate activ-ities by different companies, although in somecountries, especially in the developing world, twoor more of the functions may be combined in asingle organization.Publishing is the main operational element in

the trade. A publishing company (which may bea large multinational corporation or a singleindividual) obtains the copyright in books fromtheir authors and then makes arrangements fortheir production and sale. This process involvesnegotiations with authors leading to an agree-ment embodied in a legal contract; the editing ofthe submitted work, including, if appropriate,requiring the author to make alterations sug-gested by authoritative independent readers em-ployed by the publisher; the design of the printedbook; the management of the production pro-cesses; and the marketing, promotion and sale ofthe book. The capital for all of these activities isprovided by the publisher. Some of the work maybe undertaken by agents rather than employeesof the publishing house, especially design, copy-editing and proof-reading; all the productionprocesses are normally undertaken by othercompanies on behalf of the publisher.The production process is in three stages:

typesetting, printing and binding. The word‘typesetting’ is now an anachronism in theproduction of almost all books. Metal type is nolonger used, since authors are required to submittheir work in word-processed form, and the

42 BOOK DESIGN

digital files can be used to drive the computersthat produce the photographic output which isused to print the book. Nevertheless, the word isoften used to describe the process of copygeneration that is the first stage of the physicalproduction of a book. If the text is keyboardedby the publisher rather than the author, this isnormally undertaken by a specialist company; inany case, such a company will be involved inconverting the author’s files into an appropriateform for printing, and in generating displaypages (such as the title page) and other technicalaspects of copy generation. The output, afterproof-reading and correction, is transferredphotographically onto metal plates that are thensent to the printer. The printer produces thenumber of copies required by the publisher.These copies are then bound. Printing and bind-ing may be undertaken by the same company, butsome publishers will prefer to seek separateestimates for the two operations and commissionthe work accordingly. The finished product issent to the warehouse, either of the publisher orof a distribution company chosen by the pub-lisher.While the editorial and production work has

been in progress, the publisher’s marketing andsales team have been at work. Books are typicallylisted in catalogues and advertised in the tradepress up to six months before publication date,with a view to maximizing the sales at the timeof publication. Publishers sell their books toretail and wholesale booksellers, not to theindividual consumer. In addition, there are spe-cialized markets such as book clubs and li-brary suppliers. In the United Kingdom theconsumer book market is dominated by a smallnumber of bookselling companies with a wide-spread network of branches throughout thecountry, all carrying similar, but not identical,stocks. There is no wholesaling system for hard-backs; the publishers deal directly with the book-shops. Paperbacks are sold through wholesalers,and are typically found in a far wider range ofretail outlets, the majority of which (such asnewsagents and stationers) are not primarilybookshops. In some other countries, most nota-bly the USA, there is a more highly developedsystem of wholesaling (‘jobbing’ in the USA) forboth hardbacks and paperbacks. Book clubs buyeither copies of the book or the rights to it, forsale to their own members at a price normallysignificantly lower than the usual retail price of

the publisher’s edition. The advantage to thepublisher is either the sale of large numbers ofcopies of the book or the income generated bythe sale of the book club rights. Library suppliersare in the business of selling books to libraries, towhom they often offer additional services such asinserting marks of ownership or security devices,putting the books in special bindings (for paper-backs, for example) or even, in some cases,cataloguing and classification services. Through-out the world, bookshops now face a seriouschallenge from online bookshops. The first andnow the largest of these was Amazon, whichopened for business in 1995 (www.amazon.com).There was already some online bookselling, butit was the success of Amazon (in terms of thevolume of business that it transacted) that reallydrew attention to this new technique in the booktrade. As e-commerce expanded in the late1990s, many traditional booksellers includingBarnes and Noble in the USA (www.barnesand-noble.com) and Blackwell in the UK(www.blackwell.co.uk) also developed significantonline operations.In addition to these core areas of the book

trade, there are many peripheral and relatedactivities, some undertaken by persons and orga-nizations involved in the book trade itself. Somelibrary suppliers also act as agents for thepublishers of learned journals (serials agents).Many shops that sell books also sell magazinesand other printed products, and, increasingly,computer software and audiovisual media. Afew companies specialize in export sales, espe-cially in the major English-language publishingcountries, which command a global market fortheir products.The book trade is international in every

respect. Booksellers are to be found in allcountries, and publishers in most. In practice,however, publishing is dominated by a smallnumber of global corporations, and by works inthe English language. There is a vast imbalanceof trade between the industrialized countries andthe developing world for books and other printedmatter, as there is in many manufactured goods.This has significant educational, cultural andpolitical dimensions like other aspects of theuneven development of the information so-ciety.In some countries the activities of the trade are

carefully monitored by the state for purposes ofsocial or political control, or to protect or

BOOK TRADE 43

encourage indigenous cultures and languages. Inthe democracies, however, such regulation of thetrade is considered to be unacceptable, althougha number of aspects of information lawimpinge on how the trade works. There are somerestrictions on the international flow of booksthrough the trade, although these have substan-tially diminished since 1989.

Further reading

Altbach, P.G. (1987) The Knowledge Context: Com-parative Perspectives on the Distribution of Knowl-edge, State University of New York Press.

Coser, L.A., Kadushin, C. and Powell, W.W. (1985)Books. The Culture and Commerce of Publishing,University of Chicago Press.

Dessauer, J.P. (1994) Book Publishing. The BasicIntroduction, revised edn, Continuum.

Feather, J (forthcoming) Publishing: CommunicatingKnowledge in the Twenty-first Century, K.G. Saur.

SEE ALSO: author; fiction; knowledge industries

JOHN FEATHER

BOOLEAN LOGIC

A branch of mathematical logic devised in 1847by the mathematician George Boole and whichhas been applied to probability theory and to thealgebraic manipulation of sets (collections ofitems that share some common characteristic).Amongst other disciplines it is used in electro-nics, as a basis for digital circuit design, and inlibrary and information science as the mostcommon method of searching electronic data-bases such as cd-roms, online databases andlibrary catalogues (OPACs).

Boolean logic and information retrieval

Most information retrieval systems work onthe principle of text matching, whereby a searchterm (a word or a two- or three-word phrase thatthe user wishes to look up) is input and theretrieval system returns a set of records from thedatabase (these might be documents or referencesto documents) that contain the term in question.

In practice, however, few search topics can beadequately expressed by a single word or shortphrase, and Boolean logic is used as a means ofcombining brief search terms (which are all thatcan be matched successfully against stored text)

in order to put a more complex or detailedsearch expression to the database.

Most information retrieval systems offer threeBoolean connectors (Boolean operators) to linksearch terms: AND, OR and NOT. These areusually explained using Venn diagrams.

Venn diagrams

Suppose in a database a certain number of items(such as documents) contain the term ‘X’ and adifferent number contain the term ‘Y’. In a Venndiagram these two sets of documents are repre-sented by two circles that overlap when somedocuments contain both terms.

Figure 1 Venn diagram

In the next three sections, the search expres-sions shown on the left (called search statements)retrieve those documents which lie in the shadedarea of the corresponding Venn diagram.

The AND connector

Potato AND blight AND narrows the retrieval

Figure 2 The AND connector

Documents that contain BOTH terms – ‘potato’AND ‘blight’.

AND is used to link separate concepts to buildup a compound search topic, e.g. the ‘design’ of

44 BOOLEAN LOGIC

‘kitchen appliances’ for the ‘physically handi-capped’ (three concepts).

The Boolean AND connection is sometimesreferred to as: intersection (\) or conjunction(L). This terminology and the correspondingnotation come from two branches of mathe-matics that have close links with Boolean logic:set theory and propositional logic, respectively.

The OR connector

Woman OR female OR broadens the retrieval

Figure 3 The OR connector

Documents that contain EITHER the term ‘wo-man’ OR the term ‘female’ OR both

OR is used to link together synonyms, lexicaland morphological variants, and terms that areclose in meaning in the context of a particularsearch.

The OR connector is often overlooked bynovice users of electronic information retrievalsystems (Sewell and Teitelbaum 1986), yet it canbe essential for successful retrieval because thewords and phrases used to describe the samesubject in different documents can vary enor-mously. Thus the searcher should anticipatecommon variants to each search term and jointhem with the OR connector BEFORE using theAND connector, as illustrated by the followingBoolean search formulation for information onall aspects of BSE (mad cow disease) in relationto the European Union:

Mad cow disease OR bovine spongiform ence-phalopathy OR BSE

European Union OR EU OR EC OR EEC OREuropean Community

1 AND 2

Alternative terms and notation for OR are: union(|); disjunction (V).

The NOT connector

promotion NOT narrows the

NOT advertising retrieval

Figure 4 The NOT connector

Documents that contain the term ‘promotion’but NOT the term ‘advertising’

The obvious use of the NOT connector is toavoid retrieving irrelevant documents. For exam-ple ‘promotion NOT advertising’ might be usedto exclude items concerning the promotion ofgoods and services from a search on job promo-tion. There is, however, some danger in doingthis because useful items can be eliminated too.More helpfully, NOT can be used to removefrom a subsequent set those items that havealready been retrieved, to avoid the nuisanceand possibly the cost of viewing them a secondtime.Alternative terms and notation for NOT are:

complement (–); negation (~).

Complex Boolean search statements

Brackets can normally be used to prioritize theprocessing of a Boolean search statement:

(pollution OR contamination) AND (ocean ORsea)

If a search statement contains two or moredifferent Boolean connectors it almost certainlyneeds brackets to ensure that the logic is unam-biguous.

Problems with Boolean retrieval andsome solutions

To satisfy a query, search terms simply have to bepresent anywhere in the matching databaserecords according to the specified Boolean rela-tionship. Thus, in a bibliographic database, a

BOOLEAN LOGIC 45

record containing the word ‘school’ in the titleand ‘libraries’ in the abstract will be retrieved bythe search expression

school AND libraries

regardless of whether or not it is really aboutschool libraries (which is presumably what thesearcher had intended). To combat this problem,many information retrieval systems provide posi-tional as well as Boolean connectors, to allowsearches for phrases and for words in closeproximity to each other.Despite the fact that they are extremely widely

used, Boolean-based retrieval systems are criti-cized on other grounds, notably that:

. Boolean logic is not intuitive and easy for mostpeople to use correctly (possibly because it canconflict with conventional English locution, asillustrated by the query ‘find the names of theOxford AND Cambridge colleges’ and itsequivalent Boolean search expression, ‘OxfordOR Cambridge’).

. Boolean logic is unable accurately to representsome queries, leading to imprecise retrieval (toillustrate simply, the Boolean expression‘teaching AND French AND schools’ canretrieve items concerning ‘teaching French inschools’ as well as ‘teaching in Frenchschools’, and more).

. Boolean relationships are too rigid: itemsbelong to a set or they do not, hence itemsare retrieved or they are not retrieved,whereas, in reality, documents have differentdegrees of relevance and usefulness to eachquery and searcher.

More philosophically, many queries to infor-mation retrieval systems are vague and ill definedbecause the searcher is engaged in problemsolving, seeking new information on a topic thatthey may only partially comprehend (Belkin et al.1982). Arguably, it is unhelpful to apply a formalsystem of logic in this situation (Belnap and Steel1976).To combat searchers’ unfamiliarity with Boo-

lean logic, some CD-ROMs use ‘form filling’ orother techniques for query input, which disguisethe underlying Boolean-based retrieval. Informa-tion retrieval researchers have developed alter-natives to the Boolean retrieval model, notablydocument clustering (where a cluster of measur-ably similar documents is assessed for similarity

with a query); term weighting (where indexingterms are ‘weighted’ according, usually, to theirfrequency of occurrence in a database and ‘fuzzy’or partial matching between indexing and searchterms is possible); and probabilistic retrieval(which ranks documents in decreasing order ofprobable relevance to a query). Despite theirpromising performance in the research environ-ment, few alternative retrieval models have beenimplemented in operational systems because ofthe cost, effort and computer-processing over-heads involved in applying them to very largedatabases.

References

Belkin, N.J., Oddy, R.N. and Brooks, H.M. (1982)‘ASK for information retrieval: Part I. Backgroundand theory’, Journal of Documentation 38(2): 61–71.

Belnap, N.D. and Steel, T.D. (1976) The Logic ofQuestions and Answers, New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, p. 11.

Sewell, W. and Teitelbaum, S. (1986) ‘Observations ofend-user online searching behavior over elevenyears’, Journal of the American Society for Informa-tion Science 37(4): 234–45.

Further reading

Pao, M.L. (1989) Concepts of Information Retrieval,Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, pp. 176–89.

SEE ALSO: information retrieval; organization ofknowledge; relational database

GWYNETH TSENG

BOWERS, FREDSON THAYER(1905–91)

Bibliographer and literary scholar, best knownfor his editorial work, and for his theoreticalwork on historical and descriptive bibliographyand textual criticism.He edited the annual Studies in Bibliography

from 1948 until his death, and under his editor-ship it became one of the most prestigiousbibliographical journals in the world. His ThePrinciples of Bibliographical Description estab-lished itself as indispensable to all who wereconcerned with the exact description of printedbooks, as soon as it was published in 1949.Bowers offered a complete analysis of the de-scriptive principles that guide a bibliographer.From these principles he developed the methods

46 BOWERS, FREDSON THAYER

by which each part of a book can be describedaccording to a standard system that can begenerally understood. He also edited a largenumber of literary works, including ThomasDekker, Stephen Crane and Christopher Mar-lowe.If some of his theories are now questioned and

his methods of textual analysis seem rather out-moded, he nevertheless remains a towering pre-sence in bibliographical studies. His intellectualrigour and his relentless pursuit of truth andaccuracy set a standard to which many of hissuccessors have aspired.

Further reading

Tanselle, G.T. (1993) ‘The life and work of FredsonBowers’, Studies in Bibliography 46: 1–154.


BOX LIBRARIES

Boxes containing standard sets of books cateringfor different tastes and supplied in developingcountries by community development organiza-tions to community centres in rural areas, forcirculation from village to village. The idea goesback at least to the itinerating libraries of SamuelBrown (1779–1839) in nineteenth-century Scot-land. Book Box service, as provided by Nationalor Public Library services, is a more ‘official’version of this concept. Also sometimes referredto by other terms, such as Suitcase Libraries orHome Libraries.

SEE ALSO: barefoot librarian; lending libraries;rural library services

BRADFORD, SAMUEL CLEMENT(1878–1948)

Born and educated in London, he spent hiswhole professional life in the Science Library atSouth Kensington. Bradford had no professionalqualifications in librarianship, but founded theBritish Society for International Bibliographyand his eminence in information science wasrecognized by his election as President of fid in1945.Bradford was an avid proponent of the uni-

versal decimal classification (UDC) and ofthe utility of abstracts of scientific literature. Hefound that no more than half the scientific

articles published were listed by the abstractingand subject-indexing periodicals, as the editorsconcentrated upon the periodicals devoted totheir special subjects, ignoring material in otherjournals and non-periodical material such asbooks, pamphlets or patents. His work on thescattering of useful articles on a given subjectthroughout the mass of current published mate-rial is now known as Bradford’s Law of Scatter.To address this problem he advocated compre-hensive subject indexing of books and non-bookmaterials by scientific libraries, using UDC.He is regarded as one of the founding fathers

of the formal study of information flows.

Further reading

Bradford, S.C. (1948) Documentation, London: CrosbyLockwood.

Gosset, M. and Urquhart, D.J. (1977) ‘S.C. Bradford,Keeper of the Science Museum Library 1925–1937’,Journal of Documentation 33: 173–9.

SEE ALSO: abstracting and indexing services;bibliometrics; information science

BRAY, THOMAS (1656–1730)

Promoter of libraries.Born in Shropshire, and a graduate of Oxford,

he entered the ministry of the Church of Eng-land. When asked to serve in Maryland, heaccepted the position on the understanding thatthe bishop would provide for the establishmentof parochial libraries for ministers going to thecolony. He later developed plans for providingparochial libraries throughout England andWales, with funds provided by the clergymanand the congregation. The congregation wouldhave the right to borrow books from theselibraries because of their financial contribution.This plan was soon further developed by theSociety for the Promotion of Christian Knowl-edge, which he founded in 1698.During his time in the USA (1700–6) he

founded thirty-nine libraries, and he was alsoresponsible for the foundation of eighty librariesin England and Wales. His ideas on librarydevelopment were set out in An Essay towardsPromoting All Necessary and Useful Knowledgeboth Divine and Human in All Parts of HisMajesty’s Dominions (1697), and he also wroteextensively on religious topics. The librariesfounded under his direction, and after his death

BRAY, THOMAS 47

by the Associates of Dr Bray, were small (usuallyunder 1,000 volumes) and tended not to havefunds attached for their care and development,but were, nevertheless, the fruits of a comprehen-sive view of the value of libraries in the commu-nity. In 1708 he persuaded the British parliamentto pass an Act for the Better Preservation ofParochial Libraries in that Part of Great BritainCalled England, which, although ineffective, wasan early example of library legislation.

Further reading

Gray, S. and Baggs, C. (2000) ‘The English parishlibrary: A celebration of diversity’, Libraries andCulture 35: 414–33.

SEE ALSO: library legislation

BRITISH LIBRARY

The national library (see national libraries) ofthe United Kingdom.

History

The British Library was formed in 1973 by theBritish Library Act of 1972. It brought togethervarious bodies at its foundation and was supple-mented, in later years, by the addition of theBritish National Bibliography, the India OfficeLibrary and Records, and the National SoundArchive. Until 1997 it continued to exist in thevarious buildings across London that had housedits constituent parts. From the opening of thenew British Library building at St Pancras, theLondon collections and services (with the excep-tion of the Newspaper Library) have been largelybrought together on a single site. The researchand development function has been devolved toRe:source, the Council for Museums, Archivesand Libraries.While the London services are offered from

the St Pancras building, two external, Londonrepositories have been retained for overflowstock. A new conservation studio is being builton the site and will replace the bindery thatremained at the British Museum. The NewspaperLibrary remains at Colindale. Half of the Li-brary’s staff of about 2,300, and a significantpart of its collection, is based at Boston Spa,Yorkshire, where not only document supply butthe cataloguing of most of the intake of acquisi-tions and many of the IT operations take place.

Structure

The Library’s structure has evolved over the yearssince its foundation in 1973 as it has increasinglysought to create a single corporate whole from itsconstituent parts. The latest structure demon-strates, in addition, the determination to play acentral role in the provision and archiving ofelectronic texts. Scholarship and Collections isresponsible for collection development and ex-ploitation of all collections and collection man-agement (preservation and cataloguing);Operations and Services is responsible for allservices, bringing together services to remoteusers and reading rooms, and for services toscience technology and industry; a directorate ofE-Strategy and Programmes leads the develop-ment of services and collections on the Web.Directorates of Marketing and of Finance andCorporate Resources (Human Resources, Estatesand IS) support these others.

Collection

Although of relatively recent foundation theLibrary traces its roots back to the foundationof the British Museum Library in 1753 and thecollection reflects this. The Library’s collectioncovers all known languages and every age ofwritten civilization. The breadth and historicaldepth, in particular, make it of worldwide sig-nificance. The Library is the beneficiary of legaldeposit legislation which ensures that UK pub-lications are deposited. However, about £14million is also committed each year for theaddition of overseas material and other formatssuch as manuscripts and electronic material thatare not received by legal deposit. In the year2000–1, 526,903 items were received by deposit,70,133 items were donated, and 243,412 items,as well as 1.7 million patents, were purchased forthe collection. Since 1 January 2000, a scheme ofvoluntary deposit of electronic material hasoperated with UK publishers. Legal deposit ofsuch material awaits legislation.

Services

Since the Collection Development Initiative of1995–6, the collection has been viewed as asingle resource. Services designed for remoteusers and those for the reading rooms are beingdevised as a unity. The requirement to orderitems to be delivered either remotely or to the

48 BRITISH LIBRARY

reading rooms (depending on the nature of thematerial) represents a single need for ordering onthe Web. The Library delivers 8.3 million items ayear (4.9 million of them in reading rooms and3.4 million to remote users). The Library pro-duces the national bibliography of all itemspublished in the UK. Services to the generalpublic are provided through the exhibitionsprogramme, and the lectures and publications ofthe Library. The education section also providesincreasing access for schools as well as contentgeared to the national curriculum.Electronic media allow the Library to widen

both the scope of services and the audiences towhom they are delivered. On the scholarly sidethis has led to projects such as the digitizationof the Beowulf manuscript, with the University ofKentucky, and the digitization of the GutenbergBible (Mainz c. 1455) in association with KeioUniversity, Japan, funded by NTT Japan. TheLibrary’s Turning the Pages software has beenused on several key treasures to provide theexperience of turning the pages of illuminatedmanuscripts and other texts so as to allowvisitors to the galleries to see more than a singleopening of the books. The large digitizationprojects, funded by the New Opportunities Fundof the national lottery, will further extend therange of material available in electronic form.

Funding

While the Library earns a greater proportion ofits spend than any other national library, govern-ment remains the single most important source offunding. In the financial year 2000–1 total spendwas £111 million (Grant in Aid £82.3 million).

Further reading

The British Library Annual Report and Accounts2000–01 (2001) British Library.

Day, A.E. (1998) Inside the British Library, LibraryAssociation.

Harris, P.R. (1998) A History of the British MuseumLibrary 1753–1973, British Library.

M.J. CRUMP

BROADBAND

The term used to describe wide bandwidthnetwork connections using various advancedtechnology systems such as ISDN and satellite-based systems. The minimum speed for broad-

band is 512 Kbps, but some providers are alreadyoffering up to 2 Mbps. The installation ofbroadband capacity is a high priority, both forproviders and for many businesses and govern-ments, to increase the facilities for e-commerceand other applications demanding reliable high-speed connections to the internet.

BROADCASTING

A method of transmitting sound or pictures,using electromagnetic waves, to large, heteroge-neous audiences. Broadcasting is normally takento mean radio (originally called ‘wireless’ todistinguish it from wired telegraphy and tele-phony) and television. It may be distinguishedfrom the less common term ‘narrowcasting’,which denotes the sending of messages by similartechnologies to identified and discrete groups ofreceivers, as in citizens’ band (CB) radio orclosed-circuit television (CCTV).There has been much dispute about the ‘in-

ventor’ of radio and television, and undoubtedlythe emergence of these dominant mass media ofthe twentieth century owes its birth to the workof many individuals and organizations. Crucial,however, was the theoretical and laboratorywork of the physicists James Maxwell in Scot-land and Heinrich Hertz in Germany. Nonethe-less it was the arrival of the Italian GuglielmoMarconi in Britain, in 1896, which marks thetake-off point in the story. Initially taken up withenthusiasm only by amateurs (closely licensed bythe Post Office) and the navy, Marconi’s trans-missions attracted considerable attention frompotential investors, including electrical receivingapparatus manufacturers. In 1922 six of thesecombined to form the British Broadcasting Com-pany (BBC) with John (later Lord) Reith as itsGeneral Manager. In the USA rapid growth inradio led to dispute over its appropriate use. LeeDe Forest, inventor of the Audion vacuum tube,became a leading advocate of widespread publicaccess to the new medium, and is credited withconcocting the word broadcasting to encompassthis vision. He later proclaimed himself ‘dis-gusted and ashamed’ of the direction his ‘petchild’ had taken (McChesney 1993: 88).Essentially two models of broadcasting

emerged from this early period. In the USA thebasis was commercial, with blocks of air timesold to advertisers and the formation of major

BROADCASTING 49

corporate organizations – the National Broad-casting Company (NBC) in 1926 and ColumbiaBroadcasting System (CBS) in 1928 – as pro-gramme and transmission sources. The FederalRadio Commission (later Federal Communica-tions Commission) created by the Radio Act of1927 provided a regulatory underpinning, butthe essential driving force and organizing princi-ple was commercial entertainment as a mediumfor advertising. This model also became the basisfor broadcasting in most of Latin America, andin some areas of the Far East. By contrast, inBritain in 1926 the BBC became a Corporationwith its legal basis in a Royal Charter and withan independent Board of Governors, its missionto provide information, entertainment and edu-cation to a high standard as a public service. Thisformulation, ‘a masterpiece of calculated impre-cision’ (Burns 1977: 15), creating a body at arm’slength from the state but nevertheless protectedfrom commercial determination, was repeatedvariably throughout Europe, and in many otherparts of the world. Funding was derived eitherdirectly from government or, as in Britain, froman unusual form of hypothecated poll tax, thelicence fee. A variant on this structure, withbroadcasting firmly in the public sector, andindeed under direct government control, wasdeveloped most obviously in communist EasternEurope, and in many Third World countries afternational independence.Television had a faltering history in the first

half of the century. Laboratory experiments byPaul Nipkow in Germany and, later, by VladimirZworykin, in Russia, had demonstrated thepossibilities. (Zworykin later went to the USAand became a key figure in the development ofthe Radio Corporation of America, the companythat bought out American Marconi and gavebirth to NBC.) In Britain the Scot, John LogieBaird, took television from the laboratory, andagainst much scepticism persuaded the BBC toexperiment with transmissions from 1929. Realdevelopment required the arrival of the cathode-ray tube, and transmissions soon petered out forlack of interest, while the Second World Warhalted further progress.In the post-war period television soon became

the dominant medium. In Britain the BBC hadgrown rapidly during the war, with under 5,000staff in 1938 and over 11,000 in 1945. Audienceexposure to US style programmes during the war,together with a concerted lobby from manufac-

turers, advertisers and others, built up momen-tum for commercial broadcasting, and it was thecreation of the advertising-based commercialtelevision network in 1954 that led to a veryrapid expansion in television ownership, from 10per cent of homes in 1950 to 90 per cent ofhomes in 1963. Radio-only licences disappearedin 1971. In the USA television mushroomed fromabout a million households in 1948 to 90 percent of the population in 1954, with 377 stationsin operation. The recognition by the Hollywoodmoguls, that television was not a threat but anopportunity, saw the creation of the mass-manu-factured serials and recycling of film stocks thatwere to become the staple diet of the worldtelevision market. Between them radio and tele-vision have come to occupy prime place inpeople’s leisure time. In the UK in the 1990sadults watched television on average betweentwenty-five and thirty hours a week, and spentabout twenty hours a week listening to radio.With the growing use of recorded videotapes,watching television no longer only means watch-ing broadcast programmes, while radio listeninghas been sustained, and even increased, as a formof media consumption with the growth of ‘in carentertainment’.Internationally, radio and television have

spread very unequally. The introduction of thetransistor in 1948 held out hopes that radiowould become a cheap, mobile and crucial con-tributor to social and economic development. Yetafter the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s the broad-casting map was very uneven. UNESCO figurespublished at the end of the century showed that in1997 the developed world had nearly eight timesas many radios per capita as the developingworld, and over twenty times as many televisionsets. Africa, with just sixty televisions per 1,000inhabitants in 1997 and just 216 radios, illus-trates how far some regions have been left behind.In North America the equivalent figures showedan increase greater than total ownership in Africa.Many smaller and poorer countries import themajority of their programming, especially fortelevision, leading to complaints of ‘cultural im-perialism’, and the call, much promoted byunesco, for a ‘New World Information andCommunication Order’ (UNESCO 1980).Major new technological initiatives, such as

High Definition Television (HDTV), DirectBroadcasting by Satellite (DBS), cable distribu-tion and digital transmission, may change the

50 BROADCASTING

face of broadcasting, though as yet the changeshave been slower than many have predicted.Broadcast programmes are now distributed notjust terrestrially, but also increasingly via cabletelevision and satellite, and even the Internet.However, these are new means for distributingbroadcasting rather than alternative mass media.The major debates within broadcasting are likelyto be about the implications of such changes forthe social role and public regulation of technol-ogies increasingly integrated with computing andtelecommunications, and which have come todominate people’s lives to a degree totally un-precedented.

References

Burns, T. (1977) The BBC: Public Institution andPrivate World, London: Macmillan

McChesney, R.W. (1993) Telecommunications, MassMedia and Democracy, New York: Oxford Univer-sity Press

UNESCO (1980) Many Voices, One World: Report ofthe MacBride Commission, London: Kogan Page forUNESCO

Further reading

Barnouw, E. (1966) A Tower in Babel, New York:Oxford University Press. [This and later volumes,The Golden Web (1968) and The Image Empire(1970), may be considered the US equivalents ofBriggs. His summary volume, Tube of Plenty: Evolu-tion of American Television (1992), New York:Oxford University Press, is also valuable.]

Briggs, A (1985) The BBC: The First Fifty Years,Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Briggs’s author-ized history may be read in much greater detail in thefive volumes so far published by OUP of his Historyof Broadcasting in the United Kingdom.]

Dunnett, P.J.S. (1990) The World Television Industry:An Economic Analysis, London: Routledge.

Hendy, D. (2000) Radio in the Global Age, London:Polity Press. [A comprehensive and informed descrip-tive and analytical account of a medium that refusesto give way to the dominance of television.]

Thussu, D.K. (2000) International Communication:Continuity and Change, London: Arnold. [Criticaland informed account, mainly of broadcasting, tele-communications and related sectors, with relevanttheoretical and empirical material.]

SEE ALSO: cable television; communicationtechnology; cultural industries; film; informationand communication technology; knowledgeindustries; mass media; PTT; telecommunications

PETER GOLDING

BROWSING

The traditional use of the term is to describecasual investigation of the contents of a collec-tion of books or documents, possibly with somesubject in mind, but equally possibly for ‘inter-esting’ material. This normally takes the form oflooking along the shelves of a library, the meansby which large numbers of library users selectbooks to borrow. Similar serendipity can, how-ever, be exercised in browsing through a period-ical or a reference book.Since the mid-1990s, the term has come to be

associated with the world wide web, and inparticular with the use of software called a webbrowser. The user can then scan (or ‘surf’ (seesurfing)) the Web in a manner that is analogousto browsing through a collection of documents orother objects. Ideally, a digital library isstructured in a way that facilitates browsing.

SEE ALSO: communication; reading research

BULLETIN BOARD

Originally a place on which public notices weredisplayed. It is now, however, used as the genericdescriptor of a computer-based information ser-vice. Information is sent to an editor, who posts iton the electronic bulletin board. Access is usuallyby the Internet, using either a specific address orthrough a uniform resource locator on theworld wide web. In the UK, for example, theBulletin Board for Libraries, BUBL (www.bubl.a-c.uk), has become an invaluable informationsource.Some general-purpose bulletin boards are op-

erated by commercial service companies, such asCompuServe and Delphi in the USA, but manyare operated by common interest groups, such aspeople using a particular type of personal com-puter or sharing an interest in a particular hobbyor political issue. The major internet serviceproviders typically provide facilities for groupsto set up their own bulletin boards and othermeans of sharing information and communicat-ing with each other.

SEE ALSO: communication

BUSH, VANNEVAR (1890–1974)

Electrical engineer and inventor who workedon the development of mechanical, electro-

BUSH, VANNEVAR 51

mechanical and, latterly, electronic calculatingmachines or analogue computers, which led di-rectly to the development of the digital computer.Amongst many other projects, he also worked onthe development of the typewriter and themicrofilm scanner.Born in Everett, Massachusetts, and a gradu-

ate of Tufts College, he worked first for theGeneral Electric Company, then in the Inspec-tion Department of the US Navy. He tookdoctoral degrees from both Harvard and MITin 1916, and taught at Tufts and then MIT(1919–38). From 1940 he directed the war-related research projects undertaken by the USgovernment, including the Manhattan Project,as Director of the Office of Scientific Researchand Development. Afterwards he remained ac-tive as an adviser to many governmental agen-cies and boards on matters of scientificmanpower, organization and policy. His best-known contribution to information sciencewas the 1945 paper ‘As we may think’. In thisenormously influential paper he achieved what isstill regarded by many as the most convincingforecasts of the impact of information tech-nology.

References

Bush, V. (1945) ‘As we may think’, Atlantic Monthly176: 101–8.

BUSINESS INFORMATION SERVICE

This term is used in several different contexts,and can cover services that provide informationabout business and others providing informationfor business (though there is a broad overlapbetween these two types of service).Business information may be defined either as

any information that a business needs in orderto operate (including, for example, technicalinformation) or as information relating specifi-cally to companies, markets, products andmanagement topics. The term ‘company infor-mation’ refers to company profile data (e.g.address, financial data, personnel), although itmay be taken to mean other information suchas news stories or stockbroker reports. ‘Marketinformation’ either refers to stock market data orinformation about a specific market sector (e.g.the market for mineral water). A ‘market’, in

the latter context, can be defined as potentialcustomers who are interested in obtaining aparticular product or service, have the meansand authority to obtain it, and who can beaddressed as a group when developing market-ing strategy.The type of business information offered by a

business information service will be influenced byfactors such as: the mission of the informationsupplier, the needs of the target market, competi-tion, the information to which the supplier hasready access and the expertise of its staff.Services may include compilation and dissemina-tion of databases, document delivery services,publications, consultancy and advice, provi-sion of training, current awareness servicesand compilation of specialist reports. The med-ium in which the information is supplied willincreasingly be electronic (e.g. via a publicwebsite or a newsfeed into the intranet). TheInternet is changing businesspeople’s informationhabits, and has changed the market for someproducts (such as news), but people and organi-zations are still important information channelsfor business, and print also still has a place.A wide range of organizations provides busi-

ness information services. There are commercialinformation providers, pricing, delivering andpackaging their products in many different waysto meet the needs of particular market segments.For example, company information publishersDun and Bradstreet (D&B) sell individual creditreports to businesses, produce printed directoriesand CD-ROMs, mount databases on hosts likedialog and on the Web, and form partnershipsthat will help them embed their informationproducts in business processes. Mergers have ledto some strong business information providerssuch as the North American Thomson Corpora-tion (DIALOG, Gale Group, WestLaw, etc.) andthe Swedish Bonnier Affärsinformation (ICC,Hoppenstedt, etc.). Whilst there is much excel-lent business information free on the Internet,publishers are still experimenting with pricingmodels and in 2001–2 some valued free sources(such as the Financial Times) imposed charges orwithdrew services.There are some private-sector information

brokers, or information consultants, specializingin business information. These range from theFrench SVP (‘Il y a toujours quelqu’un qui sait!’)

52 BUSINESS INFORMATION SERVICE

and the Financial Times’s Ask FT service to one-or two-person brokerages that will normallyfocus on the specialist skills of the people whohave set up the business. Some services focus oncompetitive intelligence (collection and analysisof information about competitors and their busi-ness strategy). Competitive intelligence profes-sionals are expected to be more skilful atextracting information from people, organiza-tions and published sources, and to add value byanalysing the information rather than just pre-senting it.Information professionals, including specialists

in competitive intelligence, patents and so forth,may be employed in in-house information centresor units. The service they supply is likely to havea growing emphasis on negotiation with informa-tion suppliers for provision of networked infor-mation, design of effective delivery ofinformation to the desktop and on developingstrategies that enable end-users to make the bestuse of enterprise information portals (see por-tals and gateways), intranets or knowledgemanagement systems. Thus the company’s busi-ness information centre may deliver support,training and advice in the use of networkedproducts (including free sources on the Internet),but staff will still have to be adept in using awider range of business information servicesthemselves.In the public sector, business information

services may be supplied by the library andinformation sector, and by those with a missionto support business. There are some informationbrokers or consultants based in public li-braries, although in the UK there has been adecline in the number of priced services after apeak of interest in the late 1980s–early 1990s.Nevertheless, access to the Internet has meantthat public librarians can use their informationskills to help businesses access free or inexpensiveinformation. The provision of business informa-tion services from public sector libraries is morecommon in the UK and USA than it is in somecontinental European countries such as Franceand Germany. One of the causes of this is thegreater strength and importance of local cham-bers of commerce in the latter countries, whichhas led chambers (rather than local libraries) totake the lead in information provision. Businessesare also likely to turn to trade associations,

business associations (such as the UK’s Federa-tion of Small Businesses or the US’s NationalBusiness Association) and advisers such as ac-countants and banks.There have been a number of initiatives to

help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).The European Commission has funded severaltypes of European Information Service, some ofwhich are aimed specifically at business (e.g. theEuro Info Centres) and some of which includebusiness in their remit (e.g. the Rural Informa-tion Carrefours). In the UK, there has been asuccession of initiatives aimed to help, in parti-cular, small business and exporters, with frequentrebranding and restructuring of the services.These include the Small Business Service, Busi-ness Links (providing a range of advice andinformation to small businesses in England),Invest Northern Ireland and the Business Infor-mation Source network in the Highlands andIslands of Scotland. Some, but not all, of theseunits have qualified library and informationprofessionals on their staff.

Further reading

Blakeman, K. (2002) Business Information on theInternet [online], RBA Information Services.www.rba.co.uk/sources/index.htm.

Burke, M. and Hall, H. (1998) Navigating BusinessInformation Sources, Library Association Publishing.

Business Information Source network: www.bis.uk.-com/.

Business Links: www.businesslink.org/.http://europa.eu.int/comm/relays/index_en.htm.European Commission (2002) Relays: Europe at yourfingertips. Luxembourg: The Commission.

Federation of Small Businesses: www.fsb.org.uk/.Invest Northern Ireland: www.investni.com/.Lavin, M.R. (2002) Business Information: How to FindIt, How to Use It, 3rd edn, Oryx Press.

Lowe, M. (1999) Business Information at Work,ASLIB/IMI.

Marchand, D. (2000) Competing with Information,John Wiley.

National Business Association: www.nationalbusiness.org/.

Sabroski, S. (2002) Super Searchers Make It on TheirOwn, CyberAge Books. [The Super Searchers seriesincludes titles focusing on various types of businessinformation professional, including tips and sourcelists.]

Small Business Service: www.sbs.gov.uk/.Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals:www.scip.org/.

Special Libraries Association Business and FinanceDivision: www.slabf.org/.

BUSINESS INFORMATION SERVICE 53

KEY JOURNALS

Business Information Review; Business InformationTestdrive; Business Information Alert; Business In-formation Searcher. [There are also a good numberof relevant, practical articles in Free Pint (www.free-pint.com), Searcher, Econtent and Online.]

SEE ALSO: European Union information policies;fee-based services; information professions;market research; trade literature

SHEILA WEBBER

BYTE

The space occupied in a computer memory byone character or by one space; it consists of eightbinary digits. The memory of many computersystems, and particularly of personal computers,is organized and addressed in terms of bytes.

SEE ALSO: information and communicationtechnology; kilobyte; megabyte

54 BYTE

C

CABLE TELEVISION

Television that is broadcast through fixed cablesrather than by wireless transmission. The systemhas been in use in the USA since the 1940s toprovide good-quality reception to places thatcould not be served adequately by domesticantennas. Developments in Europe were slower,partly because of strict government controls overbroadcasting licences, and partly because of thehigher quality of typical broadcast signals. As themarkets were deregulated in the 1980s, cabletelevision did grow in Europe, however, and anumber of channels began to be broadcast inseveral countries. The UK market was particu-larly stagnant, as the UHF transmitter networkimproved reception via antennas, and govern-ment regulations prevented the introduction ofnew channels. In 1980 a small number of pilotservices were licensed as the ITAP Report onWideband Cable Systems (1981) suggested thatIT-based services could be financed by the privatesector. This led to the setting up of the HuntCommittee, whose report proposed a liberalframework of regulations to encourage privateinvestment. Programmes are transmitted viacoaxial cable or by fibre-optic links. The latestgeneration of broadband fibre-optic cables willallow multipurpose interactive use. It is throughthis mechanism, where television is merely onepart of the content carried by the cable net-work, that cable is getting a share of thedomestic market.

Further reading

Winston, B. (1998) Media, Technology and Society. AHistory from the Telegraph to the Internet, London:Routledge, pp. 305–20.

SEE ALSO: broadcasting; knowledge industries

CARIBBEAN

Although the term Caribbean in its geographicalcontext can be said to describe all the landswashed by the Caribbean Sea, traditionally it hascome to be applied to the Antillean island chainthat stretches from latitude 23.508 to 108 northand between longitude 858 and 598 west. TheseCaribbean islands include many territories withhistorical, political, linguistic and cultural affilia-tions that are as varied as their past, which hasbeen greatly influenced by the relationships ofthe pre- and post-colonial era. English, French,Dutch and Spanish are the main languages butlocal languages such as Papiamento (in the DutchIslands) and Creole (in the French Islands) arealso spoken.

However, the English-speaking Caribbean, acohesive subregion, is the area of concern, andhere the term Caribbean refers to those islandterritories comprising Anguilla, Antigua/Barbuda,Barbados, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands,Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, St Kitts/Nevis, StLucia, Montserrat, St Vincent and the Grena-dines, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Turks andCaicos Islands, as well as the mainland territoriesof Belize and Guyana. These former colonies ofBritain have now become independent states orhave some form of limited self-government asAssociated States of Britain. The independentterritories have formed themselves into an eco-nomic grouping known as the Caribbean Com-munity (CARICOM) but the shared historicalexperience has resulted in many cultural andeconomic similarities, and their people share a

common bond and participate in many co-opera-tive activities at both governmental and non-governmental levels.Generally speaking, the libraries of the Car-

ibbean promote the use of international stan-dards by subscribing to the principles ofUniversal Bibliographic Control (UBC), and theuse of anglo-american cataloguing rules(AACR2) and International Standard Biblio-graphic Description (ISBD) for different cate-gories of information materials is the norm inlibraries that are staffed by trained professionals.

Public libraries

public libraries, introduced by the British fromas early as the mid-nineteenth century, exhibitvarying stages of development. These range fromcomprehensive island coverage incorporating mo-bile and static units that offer service in bothurban and rural areas, in Jamaica, to a single unitin the island of Anguilla. These government-supported libraries provide free services andmany are housed in well-designed buildings,offering reference and lending services to thepopulation at large as well as special services tosome institutionalized groups in their commu-nities. Many serve as centres for legal depositwhere such legislation is in force and these alsomaintain collections of the national imprints,although the arrangements are far from perfectand there are some serious problems (Peltier-Davies 1997).

National libraries

Although the term national library (see nationallibraries) is incorporated in the names of manyCaribbean library systems, the traditional na-tional library as defined by Humphreys (1966)exists only in Jamaica. There the NationalLibrary of Jamaica, established in 1979 andbased on the collections and staff of the formerWest India Reference Library, houses an impress-ive collection of Caribbean material and serves asthe national bibliographic centre, while perform-ing most of the functions associated with tradi-tional national libraries (Ferguson 1996).

Special libraries

Early special libraries date back to the turn ofthe century, which saw the growth particularly ofmedical, agricultural and legal libraries. Gener-

ally speaking, however, development of othertypes of special libraries in the Caribbean reallybegan in the 1960s and can be attributed to theemphasis placed on the diversification of theeconomies from primary products to service andmanufacturing industries with the advent ofpolitical independence in that decade. Theselibraries, although commonly associated withgovernment ministries and departments, are alsoto be found in many semi-government entities,such as statutory bodies and public sector cor-porations, as well as in private-sector organiza-tions involved in business, manufacturing, miningand service industries. Special libraries led theway in library automation in the region(Renwick 1996).

Academic libraries

academic libraries exist at the UniversityCollege of Belize, at the University of Guyanaand on the three campus territories of theregional University of the West Indies (UWI).The UWI libraries use OCLC for cataloguingsupport and are located at Mona in Jamaica,Cava Hill in Barbados and St Augustine inTrinidad and Tobago. Academic libraries are alsoto be found in professional schools such as thoseassociated with law in Jamaica and in Trinidadand Tobago or in theological seminaries. A fewUS offshore university installations also operateacademic libraries in some islands such as Anti-gua and St Vincent. Depending on the curriculain each institution, these libraries carry signifi-cant holdings either in the arts and humanities,the social sciences or the natural sciences. TheMedical Branch of the University of the WestIndies Library on the Mona Campus is the centrefor a Caribbean Medical Literature IndexingProject (MEDCARIB), while the law library onthe Cave Hill Campus, which is well known forits collection of Caribbean and other Englishmaterials, is the centre for the West Indian CaseLaws Indexing Project (WICLIP). All these aca-demic libraries support resource-sharing bothnationally and regionally.

College libraries

These serve other tertiary institutions such asteachers’ colleges and special institutions such asthe College of the Bahamas, the Sir Arthur LewisCollege in St Lucia and the College of Arts,Science and Technology in Jamaica. Their devel-

56 CARIBBEAN

opment is uneven, ranging from well-staffedlibraries in functional buildings with comprehen-sive collections designed to meet the needs offaculty and students, to small collections housedin makeshift accommodation and operated byparaprofessionals. Recently, however, the degree-granting and university-associated statusachieved or desired by some colleges has stimu-lated the development of the better libraries,some of which now approximate to internationalacademic standards.

School libraries

school libraries are unevenly developed andvaried in their administration. In some territoriesa basic service is provided by the Ministry ofEducation, either independently or through thepublic library. In others, however, the schoollibrary service can only be described as rudimen-tary, based on the initiatives of the school withsupport from community groups such as parent–teacher associations. The tendency is for anational service at the primary-school level withthe secondary schools developing their librariesindividually.

Library associations

Active library associations have existed forseveral decades, uniting people with an interest inlibrary work and serving the library and informa-tion profession in the larger territories of Barba-dos, Jamaica, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago,but their fortunes have waxed and waned in thesmaller territories. Worthy of note, however, isthe regional Association of Caribbean University,Research and Institutional Libraries (ACURIL),which was established in 1969 and in whichmost of the territories are actively involved. Thisassociation links not only all the English-speak-ing territories of the Caribbean but also theDutch-, French- and Spanish-speaking territoriesas well. ACURIL has held an annual conferenceeach year since its inception and plays animportant role in continuing education and co-operative activities for library and informationprofessionals of the region.

Education and training

Prior to 1971 librarians gained professionalqualifications either by sitting external examina-tions of the library association in Britain or

by attending library schools in that country or inNorth America. The education and training oflibrarians (see library education) is nowcarried out by the regional school, which is theDepartment of Library Studies of the Universityof the West Indies and is located at the MonaCampus in Jamaica. This school, which wasestablished in 1971, offers, at the undergraduatelevel, a three-year programme leading to theBachelor of Arts Degree (Library Studies major).From 1973 to 1989 it offered a twelve-monthPostgraduate Diploma programme. Since then,however, the postgraduate programme has beenupgraded to a fifteen-month programme thatincorporates ten semester courses and a researchpaper leading to the Master of Library Studies(MLS). Three months of compulsory fieldworkis an integral part of all three programmes. AnMA in Library and Information Studies forthose holding a BA in the subject was intro-duced in 1998. An MPhil, obtained by researchand thesis, has existed since 1996. The depart-ment sees itself as having a regional as well as anational role. Special short continuing-educationcourses for information professionals in thefield, as well as basic training for support staff,have also been organized as part of the school’soutreach programme. A few people still continueto qualify or to upgrade their professionalknowledge overseas. Expertise in the Caribbeanhas been developed on a broad basis as a resultof this influence and also through involvementin international activities. For details of theschool, see http://dlis_pde.uwimona.edu.jm/.

Information networks

A relatively recent development in the region hasbeen the growth of specialized information net-works that serve a variety of sectoral interests.Examples of these include the Caribbean EnergyInformation System (CEIS), with its focal pointin Jamaica, the Caribbean Information Systemfor Planners (CARISPLAN), with its focal pointat the subregional Secretariat of the EconomicCommission for Latin America and the Carib-bean (ECLAC), which is based in Trinidad andTobago. These information networks are charac-terized by co-operatively built automated data-bases with the emphasis on documents and otherinformation material produced in the region.Online access is possible to some regional data-bases such as the CARISPLAN database, and

CARIBBEAN 57

also to international databases such as dialog,from the larger territories. The introduction ofthe internet on the Mona Campus of the UWIand the emergence of network servers such asAMBIONET, in Trinidad, and CARIBBEANONLINE, in Barbados, initiated networking inthe region in the early 1990s. Services developedsignificantly in the second half of the decade, andthere are examples of regionally based InternetService Bureaux and other infrastructural support(Miles and Bromberg 2000).

Information technology

Computer application is gradually being intro-duced in the region’s libraries, where the CDS/ISIS software developed by unesco for micro-computers is emerging as the standard, mainlybecause it is available free of charge to develop-ing countries. It is used primarily by the nationaldocumentation centres and special libraries thatserve public sector institutions and organizations.Other software for integrated library applicationshas been introduced in some libraries, largely inthe special library sector.

International links and relationships

International links are maintained by librariansand information professionals in the regionthrough membership and active participation ininternational professional associations such asifla, fid and the Commonwealth Library Asso-ciation (COMLA), which, except for a briefperiod, has had its headquarters in Jamaica sinceit was established in 1972.

References

Ferguson, S. (1996) ‘Defining a role of a new nationallibrary in a developing country: The National Li-brary of Jamaica 1980–1990’, Alexandria 8: 65–74.

Humphreys, K.W. (1996) ‘National library functions’,UNESCO Bulletin for Libraries 20(4): 158–69.

Miles, K. and Bromberg, S. (2000) ‘Filling an informa-tion gap for the Caribbean’, Business InformationAlert 12: 1–3.

Peltier-Davies, C. (1997) ‘Public libraries as nationallibraries – the Caribbean experience’, Alexandria 9:213–38.

Renwick, S. (1996) ‘Access to information in theEnglish-speaking Caribbean’, Third World Libraries6: 20–8.

Further reading

Amenu-Kpodo, N. (1993) ‘Commonwealth Library

Association’, World Encyclopedia of Library &Information Services, 3rd edn, ALA, pp. 220–21.

Blackman, J. (1993) ‘Barbados’, World Encyclopedia ofLibrary & Information Services, 3rd edn, ALA, pp.103–4.

Blake, D. (1997) ‘The Commonwealth Caribbean’, inInformation Sources in Official Publications, Bow-ker Saur, pp. 77–91.

Douglas, D. (1981) ‘British Caribbean’, in M. Jackson(ed.) International Handbook of Contemporary De-velopments, New York: Greenwood Press, pp. 567–94.

Ferguson, S. (1993) ‘Jamaica’, World Encyclopedia ofLibrary & Information Services, 3rd edn, pp. 405–6.

Johnson, I.M. and Medina, A.F. (2000) ‘Library andinformation studies in Latin America and the Car-ibbean’, Focus 31: 61–70.

Jordan, A. and Commisiong, B. (1993) ‘Trinidad &Tobago’,World Encyclopedia of Library & Informa-tion Services, 3rd edn, ALA, pp. 818–19.

Vernon, L.S. (1993) ‘Belize’, World Encyclopedia ofLibrary & Information Services, 3rd edn, pp. ALA,108–9.

STEPHNEY FERGUSON, REVISED BY THE EDITORS

CARNEGIE, ANDREW (1835–1919)

Industrialist and philanthropist who made newlibrary buildings available to hundreds ofcommunities all over the world. His enormousfinancial donations paid for 2,509 library build-ings throughout the English-speaking world, in-cluding 1,679 public library buildings in 1,412communities, and 108 academic library buildingsin the USA. He also donated an even larger totalsum to other philanthropic ventures, includingmore than 7,000 church organs to the CarnegieEndowments for International Peace.He was born in Dunfermline, Scotland, to a

poor family and, despite receiving little formaleducation, he prospered in the USA and built upthe Carnegie Steel Company. He sold this at theage of sixty-six and devoted his retirement tosystematic philanthropy. For library services, hisdonations came at an important time. Both in theUSA and Britain the need for library buildingswas desperate, as towns and cities that foundedservices would seldom commit sufficient funds tohouse collections appropriately. His initiativestimulated other library benefactions and encour-aged communities to fund their libraries to betterlevels. In 1956 financial assistance from theCarnegie Corporation helped the american li-brary association to formulate Public LibraryStandards, which confirmed much of the im-

58 CARNEGIE, ANDREW

provement that his donations had encouraged inthe first place.

Further reading

Bobinski, G.S. (1969) Carnegie Libraries: Their Historyand Impact on American Public Library Develop-ment, Chicago: American Library Association.

SEE ALSO: donations to libraries; public libraries

CATALOGUES

Generically, a catalogue is any list, register orenumeration. Bibliographically, a catalogue is alist, whose entries identify, describe and relateinformation resources, hereafter referred to asdocuments.

Objectives

The objectives of modern catalogues have devel-oped over time. The earliest Western catalogueslisted manuscripts that were owned by an indivi-dual, usually royal or noble, or an institutionsuch as a monastery or college, and served aninventory function. Gradually systematic orderwas introduced into the lists to permit locatingdocuments by author, and catalogues assumed afinding function, using formal systems of alpha-betization (see alphabetization rules); then,when the need for comprehensive and retro-spective information arose, catalogues adopted acollocation function: to bring together all theeditions of a work, all the works of an authorand all the works on a given subject; they thusassumed the character of a bibliographic tool(Pettee 1936). The objectives of a bibliographic-tool catalogue were stated implicitly, in themiddle of the nineteenth century, by Sir Anthonypanizzi in his call for a full and accuratecatalogue that would collocate like items anddifferentiate among similar ones. Charles Ammicutter in 1876 made the first explicit statementof the objectives of catalogue; Seymour Lubetzkymodified these in 1960 to underscore the conceptof work, and in this form they were adopted in1961 by the International Conference on Catalo-ging Principles. In 1998 the objectives were onceagain modified by IFLA in Functional Require-ments for Bibliographic Records to explicate thefinding, identifying, selecting and obtaining func-tions of catalogues.

Objects of bibliographic records

Up until the twentieth century, the documentsdescribed in catalogue entries consisted primarilyof books and manuscripts. Gradually differentnon-book materials came to be regarded asentities embodying information and, thus, subjectto bibliographical description: first serials, thenmusical scores, maps, films and videos, soundrecordings, two- and three-dimensional represen-tations, computer files and, now, documents indigital form.

Domains of catalogues

For the most part, the domain of documentsreferenced by a given catalogue has been, andcontinues to be, a single institution, such as alibrary. Catalogues describing the holdings ofmore than one library, called union catalo-gues, were envisioned as early as the thirteenthcentury (Strout 1957: 10), but not until sevencenturies later did they begin to be implementedat local and national levels. Today libraries arebeginning to develop interfaces to their in-housecatalogues to provide access to information fromthe Internet, including indexes to periodicals,catalogues of other libraries and full-text docu-ments.

Physical forms

The mechanics of catalogue construction are afunction of technology. One of the first catalo-gues, a Sumerian tablet found at Nippur, datingaround 2000 bc, was carved in stone (Strout1957: 5). For most of their long history catalo-gues have consisted of handwritten entries in list,sheaf or book form, inscribed on the prevailingmedium for writing: after stone, there waspapyrus, parchment and paper. ‘Printed’ entriesbegan to appear with the invention of the type-writer in the first part of the nineteenth century,although the writing out of entries in ‘libraryhand’ continued well into the twentieth century.The use of cards as carriers for catalogue entriesdates from 1791 (Strout 1957: 17), but did notbecome widespread until the end of the nine-teenth century. The mass printing by typesettingmachines and distribution of catalogue cardsfrom a central source dates from 1901, whenthe library of congress began its card distri-bution programme. In the middle of the twenti-eth century there was a flurry of interest in

CATALOGUES 59

catalogues in the form of microfiche and micro-film, but these have become all but eclipsed bythe advent of catalogues in electronic form. Forthe most part these are online public accesscatalogues (opacs), but they may also be carriedby a magnetic or silicon storage medium, such asCD-ROM, magnetic tape or disk. Increasinglycatalogue entries in machine-readable form(marc) are being created co-operatively anddistributed from a centralized source.

Arrangement of entries

In traditional (non-electronic) catalogues, howentries are arranged determines the type ofaccess available to the user. Normally entriesare arranged by author, title, alphabetic subjectand classified subject. Several types of catalo-gues are definable in terms of these arrange-ments: dictionary catalogues, which interfileauthor, title and alphabetic subject entries in onesequence; divided catalogues, which separateauthor and title entries into one sequence andalphabetic subject entries into another; andclassified catalogues with subject entriesarranged by the notation of a classificationsystem. Entries in online catalogue displays needto be arranged methodically if catalogue objec-tives are to be met, with the added constraintthat the arrangement must be consonant withcomputer filing. For the most part, the sort keysused are the traditional ones, but some onlinecatalogues sort by non-conventional data ele-ments such as date of publication and type ofmedia.

Cataloguing rules

Separate codes of rules are used: (1) to describethe physical and publication attributes of docu-ments and provide author and title access tothem; and (2) to provide subject access todocuments. The most extensively used code ofrules for descriptive cataloguing is the anglo-american cataloguing rules (AACR), 2nd

edn (1988) Deriving from the ninety-one rulesdeveloped by Panizzi, AACR are becoming in-creasingly reflective of co-operation and standar-dization efforts carried out at an internationallevel. Translated into many languages, the pre-sent code is becoming something of a de factostandard. There has been less acceptance of astandard to provide subject access to informa-tion. In the Anglo-American community the

library of congress subject headings andaccompanying Subject Cataloging Manual areused for alphabetic-subject access. The deweydecimal classification is a widely used stan-dard for classified subject access to bibliographicinformation.

The future of catalogues

Future catalogues might be expected to developalong present economic, political and technologi-cal trends: widening of catalogue domains be-yond library walls; incremental advancementtoward universal bibliographical control, as thisis realizable by international standardization andthe sharing of bibliographic records; adaptationof codes designed for card catalogues to theonline environment; development of formalismsfor describing and accessing digital documents;automation of the creation of catalogue entries,to the extent this is possible.

References

Pettee, J. (1936) ‘The development of authorship entryand the formation of authorship rules as found in theAnglo-American code’, Library Quarterly 6: 270–90.

Strout, R.F. (1957) ‘The development of the catalog andcataloging codes’, in R.F. Strout (ed.) Toward aBetter Cataloging Code, Chicago: University ofChicago Press, pp. 4–25.

Further reading

Svenonius, E. (2000) The Intellectual Foundation ofInformation Organization, Cambridge, MA: MITPress.

SEE ALSO: bibliographic control; bibliographicdescription; MARC; organization of knowledge

ELAINE SVENONIUS

CATEGORIZATION

The practice of organizing library collectionsin broad categories, as opposed to detailedclassification. The term particularly refersto this practice for fiction, but can apply toother materials, for instance in school li-braries.

CATEGORIZATION OF FICTION

The physical arrangement of fiction into divi-sions or reader interest categories, often known

60 CATEGORIZATION

as genres. The rationale behind categorization isthat it is a user-oriented approach to libraryorganization and improves access to popularmaterial. In the USA the term classificationtends to be used to mean categorization. How-ever, in the UK, fiction classification schemes areidentified with a more theoretical approach, forexample analysing and representing the contentof fiction books in a classified catalogue whilstthe novels themselves remain in an alphabeticalorder on the shelves.

Categorization versus alphabeticalarrangement

The arrangement of fiction in a single sequence,alphabetically by author, was long held to bethe only possible method of shelf presentation inpublic libraries. There are certain organiza-tional advantages for the library in that theorder is easy to follow, there is only one placefor the books to be reshelved and, if the authoris known, it is easy to find a book. Such apresentation, however, makes the assumptionthat readers select books by referring to thenames of the authors. reading research sug-gests otherwise. The majority of readers whouse public libraries are not looking for a specificauthor or title. For example, 69 per cent ofreaders at libraries said they searched for fictionby type or kind (Spiller 1980). Even those whodo look for specific authors are often unable tofind those known authors on the shelves. Insuch cases the alphabetic sequence is of little usein enabling readers to discover new authors orin guiding them to similar books.

McClellan (1981) was one of the first to notethat the habit of arranging fiction in alphabeticalorder presents the majority of readers with adaunting choice and that this serious mismatchbetween the level of service and the needs of thereader was damaging to the library’s effective-ness. This led to experimentation with alternativearrangements such as categorization by subjectmatter, which was shown to satisfy hidden andunstated preferences of readers for previouslyunseen types of books. Some of the first Britishpublic library authorities to use this approach,applied to both fiction and non-fiction, wereCambridgeshire, Hertfordshire and Surrey, andtheir experiences have been described by Ainleyand Totterdell (1982).

Choosing categories

In practice, shelf categorization breaks down theA–Z sequence by grouping books with similarcontents together under one heading. Any librarywishing to adopt categorization as a means ofarranging its fiction stock needs to decide whatcategories to use and how many categories ofsubdivisions are helpful. There are no definiteanswers to these questions and too many cate-gories can be as unhelpful for the reader as onealphabetic sequence. Research in the USA (Har-rell 1985) surveyed forty-seven libraries andfound twenty-six different fiction categories inuse. However, all libraries used three categories:science fiction, westerns and mysteries. In the UKthe categories used to establish public lendingright payments for adult fiction are romance,mystery and crime, historical, westerns, war,science fiction, fantasy and horror, and shortstories (Sumsion 1991).When choosing categories, library staff need to

take into account their readers’ interests andtrends in publishing, which may identify newcategories such as feminist fiction. A practicalguide as to whether a new category is viable iswhether there is sufficient material to support thesection. Categorization is also a useful techniqueto use on a short-term basis to promote areas ofstock. For example, Kent County Library Servicetook an innovative approach to combining thetheory of fiction categorization with good displaytechniques to set up a number of browsing areasin which stock was arranged under a number ofthemes, such as ‘books made into films’ or ‘best-sellers – past and present’, to help readers choosetheir fiction.

Criticisms of categorization

The major practical problem of categorization isthat it does not allow more than one placing. Ithas also been criticized (Dixon 1986) as beingrelevant only to some types of fiction, most ofwhich are recognizable from the cover or pub-lisher (such as Mills and Boon for romance,Collins for crime), and for being carried outinconsistently and not being maintained, as wellas for discouraging readers from using the wholefiction collection and for encouraging a lazyapproach by staff to the fiction service. A USstudy (Baker 1988) found that users at largerlibraries were very much in favour of fictioncategorization, saying it made their selection

CATEGORIZATION OF FICTION 61

easier and quicker, and enabled them to becomefamiliar with other novelists in a particulargenre.

References

Ainley, P. and Totterdell, B. (eds) (1982) AlternativeArrangement: New Approaches to Public LibraryStock, London: Association of Assistant Librarians.

Baker, S.L. (1988) ‘Will fiction classification schemesincrease use?’, Reference Quarterly 27: 366–76.

Dixon, J. (ed.) (1986) Fiction in Libraries, LibraryAssociation, pp. 162–6.

Harrell, G. (1985) ‘The classification and organisationof adult fiction in large American public libraries’,Public Libraries 24(1): 13–14.

McClellan, A.W. (1981) ‘The reading dimension ineffectiveness and service’, Library Review 30: 77–86.

Sear, L. and Jennings, B. (1989) ‘Novel ideas: Abrowsing area for fiction’, Public Library Journal4(3): 41–4.

Spiller, D. (1980) ‘The provision of fiction for publiclibraries’, Journal of Librarianship 12(4): 238–64.

Sumsion, J. (1991) PLR in Practice, Registrar of PublicLending Right, p. 137.

Further reading

Goodall, D. (1992) Browsing in Public Libraries,Library and Information Statistics Unit, Loughbor-ough University [describes eight studies of Englishpublic library use, focusing on fiction selection fromthe point of view of the reader].

Kinnell, M. (1991) Managing Fiction in Libraries,Library Association [Chapter 7, by L. Sear and B.Jennings, on organizing fiction for use, is excellent].


DEBORAH L. GOODALL

CD-ROM

A computer-based information storage and re-trieval medium based on laser-technology and astrong, highly resistant 4.75 in.-diameter opticaldisk. CD-ROM (Compact Disc – Read OnlyMemory) is one of the most popular and familiarof computer-based media. It can hold the equiva-lent of about 250,000 typewritten pages, or500,000 catalogue cards or 500 high-densityfloppy diskettes. Its capacity ranges between 500and 680 million characters (Mb) depending onthe type of CD used. It uses the same technologyas the audio CD for recording and reading data,and can have full multimedia functionality. CD-ROM players have become standard microcom-puter peripherals, and CD writers with which

users can record (or ‘burn’) their own CDs arebecoming increasingly common.

CENSORSHIP

Prohibition by political or religious authoritiesand their agencies of the production, distribution,circulation or sale of material in any medium orformat whose content or presentation is consid-ered to be politically, religiously or morallyobjectionable or otherwise harmful to individualsand society.

The concept of censorship

The concept of censorship tempts us to approachit with a moralistic black-and-white attitude. Acommon fallacy in censorship research has beenin concentrating on specific literary cases, forget-ting the general context. Censorship has in mostcountries been an essential part of political andcultural history, publishing, reading history andlibrary policy.

Classical, ‘hard censorship’ mostly appears asa concrete, visible drama (burning of books,purification of libraries) and can be described asdiscontinuation of the information or literarychain. Modern censorship (‘soft censorship’) ismore latent, and appears more intertwined withthe processes of publication and tends to formpermanent structures and systems (self-censor-ship). While the target of classical censorshipwas the book, modern censorship targets thereader.

We can also speak of official and unofficialcensorship, political and religious censorship,direct and indirect censorship. We can definemacrocensorship that refers to the governmentallevel (official orders, policy) and microcensorshipthat refers to the local decisions (local removalsfrom collections). We can also speculate onmarket censorship that appears as commercialselection of materials.

Censorship can take on preventive roles (pre-censorship) by monitoring beforehand the mate-rials to be published and read. It can also takethe form of guidance, giving instructions topublishers and readers, and thus securing theimplementation of the policy (post-censorship).Censorship has both concrete and symboliceffects, by demonizing instead of banning a bookor an author.

62 CD-ROM

History of modern library censorship

Libraries were heavily censored in Nazi Germany(1933–45) (Stieg 1992). Public libraries are in-stitutions whose purpose is to collect, maintainand distribute cultural material. When theircultural content is defined politically, the socialrole of libraries becomes emphasized and we caneven detect features of a political institution inthem. Public libraries in Nazi Germany wereharnessed to ideological work. Stieg’s study hasvaluable information on general book censorshipand the librarian’s mental adjustment to thechange. In the 1930s, the library system of NaziGermany was a microcosm of the whole state,where politics became the only standard, andwhere political values controlled the whole moralcode, beliefs, attitudes and social behaviour.Similar developments had taken place in the

Soviet Union after the 1917 revolution. V.I. Leninand Nadezha K. Krupskaja defined a strategy forSoviet libraries to fight against reactionary forces.Libraries should support the class struggle and actas a vehicle spreading the international commu-nistic movement. In the Soviet Union, strictlypolitical book selection led to the creation ofclosed collections called spetshrans (spetsialnoehranilistse). These hidden collections were useduntil the late 1980s in the Soviet Union itself andin most of the countries of central and east-ern europe. In 1985 the spetshran of the LeninLibrary alone had over a million items, with30,000–35,000 books added yearly.In the Soviet Union, politics and censorship

were never open but they were faceless and all-embracing: the term omnicensorship describesthe situation prevailing in the Soviet Union,where in addition to the author’s self-censorshipthe book had to pass through the publisher’scensorship and also tight library inspection.Censorship is not confined to totalitarian

states. There is a classic and much discussedresearch study into book selection and censorshipin Californian public and school libraries (Fiske1960), designed to discover whether some ex-ternal body imposed restrictions on librarians orwhether librarians themselves limit their activityso that a citizen’s right to versatile collectionsbecomes threatened. The conclusion was thatCalifornian librarians themselves act as the mostactive censors of their own library collections.There was not much external pressure to removeor include certain books in the library; instead,

when making acquisitions, librarians themselvesestimated what books would probably arouseindignation in clients and school authorities, andthese books were not acquired. According tolibrarians, the best way to avoid book removalsand censorship disputes was not to acquire con-troversial books for the library at all.The authoritarian role of librarians has been

the subject of further research (Busha 1972). Itwas determined that the best-educated librariansin the biggest libraries were the least authoritar-ian. But there is a contradiction: librarians cansupport non-censorship in principle but may stillparticipate in censorship as a part of a securityprocedure.In 1953 200 libraries supported by USIA

(United States Information Agency) were investi-gated and censored by Joseph McCarthy, RoyCohn and David Schine. They reported that inEuropean USIA libraries there were 30,000books of allegedly communistically biased wri-ters. Works of forty writers were removed fromthe libraries, including books by Sinclair Lewisand Dashiell Hammett. In the 1980s the censor-ship by supporters of Christian fundamentalismin the USA received much publicity. Salinger’sCatcher in the Rye, Judy Bloom’s books and evenVonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 were banned inmany school libraries.Usually the unofficial ‘soft’ forms are awarded

the label of censorship. For instance US librarycensorship in the 1980s typically followed thispattern:

1 Inquiry.2 Expression of concern.3 Formal complaint.4 Attack.5 Censorship (official removal of the material

by governmental order).

The newest and most difficult form of censorshiptakes place on the Internet. The so-called digitalor network censorship mostly happens by block-ing, filtering and pre-censoring materials on theInternet. Though the persons usually targeted arethe children, network censorship can prevent anyuser from accessing certain materials. Filtering bysearches for particular terms or words can havehilarious results, such as blocking pages contain-ing words like Dick Van Dyke, describing AlGore and Bill Clinton as a couple or givingrecipes containing chicken breast.

CENSORSHIP 63

References

Busha, C.H. (1972) Freedom versus Suppression andCensorship. With a Study of the Attitudes of Mid-western Public Libraries and a Bibliography ofCensorship, Littleton.

Fiske, M. (1960) Book Selection and Censorship,Berkeley: University of California Press.

Stieg, M.F. (1992) Public Libraries in Nazi Germany,Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press

Further reading

Blanshard, P. (1956) The Right to Read. The BattleAgainst Censorship, 2nd edn, Boston.

‘Censorship’, in Encyclopaedia Britannica (www.bri-tannica.com).

Ekholm, K. (2000) Kielletyt kirjat 1944–46 [Bannedbooks in 1944–1946], Jyväskylä.

Kasinec, E. (1998) ‘Reminiscences of a Soviet ResearchLibrary’, in Books, Libraries, Reading and Publish-ing in the Cold War. Livre, edition, bibliothèques,lecture durant la guerre Froide. La Table RondeHistoire des Bibliothèques d’IFLA. 11 et 12 Juin1998, Paris.

Sturges, P. (1998) Freedom of Expression and theCommunication Networks, Strasbourg: Council ofEurope.

SEE ALSO: freedom of information; informationlaw; information policy; Russia and the formerSoviet Union

KAI EKHOLM

CENTRAL AMERICA

Central America consists of Guatemala, El Salva-dor, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Ricaand Panama; the total population is more than136 million, of whom some 101 million are inMexico. These seven countries constitute a com-plex and multicultural society. Costa Rica has thelowest illiteracy levels, and Guatemala the high-est. Countries of various sizes have faced contin-uous economic, political and social crises thathave caused different and unfair developmentlevels. This uneven situation is also evident inthe information services sector. Some of themhandle many documentary resources, and use themost advanced technology for their library ser-vices, while others are lacking them. However,significant changes have been experienced sincethe late 1990s, due to greater support from thegovernments, as well as to a greater awareness ofthe need to use information, and a change ofattitude towards co-operation in sharing re-sources especially within Central America.

Academic libraries

The academic libraries are those that havereached the highest levels of development, inresponse to the demand for higher educationacross the region. A great number of theselibraries, in both public and private institutions,have been able to automate their services, to holdimportant collections recorded according to in-ternational standards such as the anglo-amer-ican cataloguing rules (AACR) and marc, tooffer online public-access catalogues (opacs), toaccess the most advanced information systems,have websites and, in some cases, publish elec-tronic documents. The Universidad de Colima,Mexico, has produced a great number of CD-ROMs for regional libraries. Some libraries havestarted with the digitization process of theirholdings, such as the COLMEX (El Colegio deMéxico) and the UNAM (Universidad NacionalAutónoma de México) libraries.The increase in the co-operative work to

ensure access to information resources has beenoutstanding; such is the case of the librariesof CSUCA (Consejo de Universidades Centro-americanas), which has led to the establishmentof online co-operative catalogues and services, aswith the one for the Instituto Interamericano deAdministración de Empresas (www.incae.ac.cr)serving Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and theefforts of the Comite de Cooperacion de Biblio-tecas Universitarias de Guatemala. The onlinecatalogue of the UNAM library system, LIBRU-NAM, integrated by 140 libraries, has had greatinfluence on the academic libraries of Mexicoand other countries (www.dgbiblio.unam.mx). InMexico, the Amigos group, whose head is theCOLMEX library (www.colmex.mx), has beenworking with US libraries in order to improveinterlibrary lending.


In all the countries there are one or morelibrary associations, whose aim is the im-provement and development of information ser-vices, the training of library staff and to achievegreater recognition for the profession. Accordingto the Directorio de Asociaciones de Bibliotecar-ios y Profesiones Afines de America Latina y elCaribe, published by IFLA in 1998, the sixCentral American countries (other than Mexico)have only one association or college, whileMexico has eleven associations and one college.

64 CENTRAL AMERICA

The AMBAC (Asociación Mexicana de Bibliote-carios, AC, www.ambac.org), the one with thehighest membership in the region, has beenresponsible in the last forty-five years for theorganization of the Jornadas, the most impor-tant national discussion forum, and their Mem-orias constitute an important source ofinformation on the development of the libraryprofession. Mexico also has the Colegio deBibliotecarios, representing librarians with uni-versity degrees. The outstanding Colegio deBibliotecarios de Costa Rica has attained a highdegree of recognition from government andacademic authorities, and has established thatprofessional librarians should be in charge ofpublicly financed libraries. Also in this countryAIBDA (Asociación Interamericana de Bibliote-carios y Documentalistas Agrı́colas) has wideinfluence on special libraries in Latin America(www.iicanet.org/aibda/). The Asociación Pana-meña de Bibliotecarios has also earned therecognition of academic and governmentalauthorities.These associations have worked out a code of

professional ethics, and published the proceed-ings of their congresses, serials and bulletins,although sometimes at irregular intervals.The II Seminario Latinoamericano de asocia-

ciones de Bibliotecarios was held in Mexico Cityin 1999, sponsored by IFLA, UNAM and AM-BAC, in which sixteen countries participated andanalysed the professional problems, the presentstatus of the associations and the future actionsthat were needed to address international issues.

Library education

All Central American countries, with the excep-tion of Honduras, have one or more libraryschools, generally as a part of a university, whereprofessional librarians are educated at technician,bachelor and master levels. Although a signifi-cant number of professional librarians have beeneducated in these institutions, this is not enoughconsidering the potential demand of existinglibraries and information centres in the region.Also, there is a low recognition of the libraryprofession, evidenced by the poor wages offeredto these professionals.Costa Rica has three schools: one of them

linked to the Universidad Nacional, another as apart of the Universidad de Costa Rica and thethird established in the Universidad Estatal a

Distancia in which they offer distance libraryeducation. In Guatemala, the library school ofthe Universidad de San Carlos was established in1948. Panama also offers library science studiesin three university schools. El Salvador andNicaragua have one school each. The CABCE(Centro de Actualización Bibliotecologica deCentro America), located in Costa Rica, orga-nizes a diversity of continuous education pro-grammes, and is sponsored by the MellonFoundation.In Mexico there are six schools offering under-

graduate studies in librarianship. In Mexico Citythere is the Colegio de Bibliotecologı́a of UNAMand the ENBA (Escuela Nacional de Biblioteco-nomia y Archivonomia), and both have four-yearprogrammes, although their curricula are differ-ent; ENBA also has a distance education pro-gramme for librarians. Postgraduate studies areonly provided by UNAM; there has been aMaster’s degree since 1970. UNAM’s doctoratein Library Science and Information Studies,which began in 2000, is the first in the Spanish-speaking Latin American countries.It is worth mentioning that library science

studies have been strongly influenced by theUSA.

Library research and publications

In the UNAM, the CUIB (Centro Universitario deInvestigaciones Bibliotecologicas) was establishedin 1981, as a forward-looking institution toencourage library science research. It has had awide influence in Latin America. Its twenty-sixresearch members are working in areas related totheoretical and practical problems faced by theorganization and transmission of informationand the provision of library services, in thecountry as well as in the Latin American region.Thus, a number of seminars, courses and pub-lications on reading promotion, training oflibrarians, collection development, libraryservices to the indigenous communities, universalbibliographic control, bibliographic and docu-mentary heritage, information policy, pro-blems of the information society and othershave been organized. CUIB has an outstandingrole in the academic advancement of librariansdue to its courses, seminars and diplomas, inwhich national and foreign specialists take part.CUIB has the most important professional pub-lishing programme in the region. Its periodical,

CENTRAL AMERICA 65

Investigación bibliotecológica. Archivos, biblio-tecas, documentación, is published in printed andelectronic formats.

The library schools, academic libraries and theassociations also publish important documents,but still the scarcity of professional literature inSpanish to support library education is a seriousproblem.

National libraries

The Central American national libraries aresupported by the cultural or the educationgovernmental authorities of each country, exceptin the case of the National Library of Mexico,which since 1929 has been a part of theUNAM.

In the 1990s these libraries, together withthose of all Latin America, Spain and Portugal,joined together to form the ABINIA (Asociaciónde Estados Iberoamericanos para el Desarrollo delas Bibliotecas Nacionales de los Paı́ses de Ibero-américa), which has promoted a better knowl-edge of the development achieved by theselibraries. It has also carried out joint researchinto their common problems, including co-opera-tive projects related to preservation, digitallibraries (see digital library) and union cata-logues. The Central American national librarieshave joined together to obtain foreign financialsupport to encourage the improvement of theirservices. Nicaragua and Guatemala have receivedspecial support from Sweden to enhance theircollections, to conclude their national bibliogra-phies and to microfilm historic documents, andfrom Spain to improve their services forvisually impaired people.

The national libraries of Costa Rica andPanama are in a better situation. The latter hasthe support of the Fundación Biblioteca Nacionalde Panamá as a provider of financial resourcesfor its institution (www.binal.ac.pa).

All national libraries benefit from legal de-posit to develop their collections, and to ensurethe preservation and diffusion of their biblio-graphic and documentary heritage. The Biblio-teca Nacional de México has an outstandingposition, holding the more important biblio-graphic and documentary heritage in the region,being the American country in which the firstprinting house was established in the sixteenthcentury (http://biblional.bibliog.unam.mx).

Mexican and Nicaraguan representatives arepart of the regional committee for the Memoryof the World programme of unesco.

Public and school libraries

In Central America in general, public librariesalso act as school libraries, because most ofthe educational institutions have not developedeffective library services; this is true even inMexico. Public libraries in Guatemala and Nicar-agua have received special support from Sweden,Spain and the USA for the improvement of theirservices, especially for children. El Salvador’slibraries have had a rather peculiar developmentbecause of the continuous earthquakes sufferedin this country.

In some countries, public libraries have hadsignificant improvements to their services, insome cases supported by the national libraries.This is the case in Panama with its sixty-ninepublic libraries, and in Costa Rica, with sixtylibraries.

In Mexico, the Dirección General de Bibliote-cas (Públicas) has achieved a significant increasein library services all over the country, in which6,000 public libraries of various sizes have beenestablished, although most of them have holdingsand are intended to support basic school stu-dents. Some libraries have begun to offer servicesthrough the Internet. Mexican and Central Amer-ican public libraries face the serious problem ofunqualified personnel and extremely low wages.

In spite of the fact that the greatest part ofCentral American countries and the central andsouthern regions of Mexico have a high percen-tage of indigenous population, they have notdeveloped special collection policies or libraryservices for these communities.

Special libraries

Among the special libraries in the region, theagricultural and medical libraries and informationcentres have had the most notable development.The Instituto Interamericano de Cooperaciónpara la Agricultura has its headquarters in CostaRica; its library has a great influence all over theregion (www.iicanet.org). In the same field, theInternational Maize and Wheat ImprovementCentre library, established in Mexico, is famedfor its information services all over the world(www.cimmyt.mx).

66 CENTRAL AMERICA

The libraries of hospitals and health centreshave established a valuable information system inMexico, whose head is Centro Nacional deInformación y Documentación sobre Salud(http://cenids.insp.mx/cenids/).In these countries, especially in Mexico, there

are also important special libraries and informa-tion centres on art, literature, history and energyresources using all electronic resources and inter-national databanks to give support to their users.The private Biblioteca Gallardo, with a collectionof ancient and valuable books, the most impor-tant in El Salvador, was practically destroyedduring the January 2001 earthquake.Central American countries were represented

at the Primer Encuentro Iberoamericano deBibliotecas Parlamentarias, which took place inMexico City in 1994, supported by IFLA, wherethey learned about the information servicesrequired by the parliamentary bodies.

Further reading

Fernandez de Zamora, R.M. and Budnik, C. (2001)‘Bibliographic Heritage of Latin America’, Alexan-dria 13: 27–34.

Memoria (2001) Encuentro Latinoamericano sobreAtención Bibliotecaria a Comunidades Indı́genas,México: UNAM.

Memoria (2001) II Seminario Latinoamericano deAsociaciones de Bibliotecarios y ProfesionalesAfines, México: IFLA, UNAM.

Polo Sifontes, F. (2001) The Development of NationalLibraries in Central America, Boston: IFLA-CDNL.

ROSA MARIA FERNANDEZ DE ZAMORA

CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE

The Central and Eastern European (CEE) coun-tries considered in this entry include Albania,Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland,Romania, Slovakia and the former Yugoslavia.

Economic and political transition

The collapse of communism and the dissolutionof the Soviet Union resulted in major economicand political changes in Central and EasternEurope in the early 1990s. One of the mostimportant changes was the creation of new statessuch as the Slovak and Czech Republics, and thecountries that emerged from the former Yugosla-via, namely Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Mace-donia, Slovenia and Yugoslavia (i.e. Serbia andMontenegro). While the Czechs and Slovaks

divided their country peacefully, the SoutheasternEuropean countries of the former Yugoslaviawent through a decade of civil wars.Yugoslav civil wars did not spare libraries. In

1992 Serbian forces set fire to Bosnia’s Nationaland University Library in Sarajevo. An estimated90 per cent of the Library’s collection (including155,000 rare books and 478 manuscript codices)was destroyed (Riedlmayer 2001). One of thefew Bosnian libraries that escaped destructionduring the 1992–5 war was the Gazi Husrev-beyLibrary in Sarajevo. Library staff saved thecollection by relocating it eight times during thewar (Peic 1999).In addition to political changes, the CEE

countries have been undergoing economic re-forms that in some cases have resulted in morecompetitive and free-market economies. There isalready a growing gap between the Czech Re-public, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia, countriesthat have reformed their economies extensively,and Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and most of theformer Yugoslav republics, countries that havefailed to attract foreign direct investment and arefalling behind in economic reforms (Smith 2000:xii).The current economic situation and possible

future enlargement of the European Union willhave a major influence on the development oflibrary and information services in the region.Once the more prosperous countries reintegratetheir economies into the Western European mar-ket they will be able to spend more on theircultural and educational institutions. There is adanger that the poorer countries, especially in theBalkans, will end up on the outside of a newlyintegrated Europe.

Library and information services andsystems

Since the early 1990s the CEE countries havestruggled to provide sufficient funds for socialprogrammes, including cultural and educationalones. After the collapse of communism most ofthe CEE countries cut subsidies for libraries andstate-run publishing companies. Consequently,many libraries, especially public libraries, wereclosed or consolidated as ‘they were at thebottom of the list of governmental priorities’(Krastev 1996: 62).Since the mid-1990s the economic situation

has improved, at least in some CEE countries.

CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE 67

For example, the Czech Republic, Hungary,Poland and Slovenia can now afford to spendmore on cultural and educational institutions.There has also been external support providedby Western Europe through PHARE and TEM-PUS (European Union programmes designedto help CEE countries with their economicand social restructuring) and by US foundationssuch as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation andthe Soros Foundation. A large part of thissupport has been used for library automationand the development of online public-accesscatalogues.

NATIONAL UNION CATALOGUES

Libraries, in conjunction with universities andresearch institutes, are Internet pioneers in Cen-tral and Eastern Europe. The development of theWorld Wide Web and the implementation ofintegrated library systems provide the user withaccess to the CEE library catalogues as well asinformation about their collections and services.The creation of national union catalogues isone of the best examples of the latest technologi-cal developments in some CEE libraries.As of mid-2001 the Czech Republic, Slovenia

and Poland have already developed or havebegun the implementation of national unioncatalogues.The CASLIN Union Catalogue of the Czech

Republic was created on the basis of the CASLIN(Czech and Slovak Library Information Net-work) Project in the late 1990s. There are overthirty Czech and Moravian libraries that partici-pate in the CASLIN Union Catalogue by con-tributing new cataloguing records or using theexisting ones for cataloguing purposes. In 2000there were almost 600,000 monograph recordsand approximately 60,000 foreign serials recordsin the CASLIN Union Catalogue. The participat-ing libraries must observe established standardsfor record processing (e.g. unimarc, ISBD,AACR2, universal decimal classification(UDC)). It should be mentioned here that somerecords produced by the Czech National Library(one of the major CASLIN participants) are nowoccasionally being loaded into the oclc data-base. In the near future the CASLIN UnionCatalogue will also include records of Czechperiodicals that will be merged with the existingcatalogue of foreign serials.COBISS (Co-operative Online Bibliographic

System and Services) is Slovenia’s national union

catalogue and its major gateway to informationresources. It provides the participating 244libraries (including the National Library of Slo-venia) with ‘conditions, necessary for sharedcataloguing at a national level, including biblio-graphies and the automation of local functions’(Seljak 2000: 12). As of May 2000 the COBISSNational Union Catalogue contained over 1.7million monographic and serials records of printand non-print materials. Some records originallycreated by the Slovenian National Library in theCOBISS system can now also be found in theOCLC database. While the COBISS system andcatalogue is mainly used by the Slovenian li-braries, some Bosnian and Croatian librarieshave joined (or rejoined) it recently. This is avery positive development, as the countries of theformer Yugoslavia work to re-establish cultural,economic and political relations.The COBISS system also functions as the main

gateway for Slovenian libraries and their users toaccess information resources. Patrons can getaccess to foreign bibliographic databases such asOCLC WorldCat, ERIC, the Library of Congressname authority file and many others.By mid-1997 eleven Polish libraries already

had catalogues available through the Internet.The implementation of VTLS by some majorPolish libraries had ‘a considerable effect uponthe creation of bibliographic and catalogingstandards fitted for the online environment’(Sroka 1997: 191). One of the most importantstandards first adopted by the VTLS Consortiumof Polish libraries and later by the NationalLibrary was the usmarc format for the transferof bibliographic data.The main authority file (abbreviated in Polish

as ckhw) has become a basis for the creation ofthe National Union Catalogue (referred to asNUKat). The catalogue should be operationalby the end of 2001. The participants of theNUKat project include twenty-one VTLS li-braries, fifty-four Horizon libraries and theNational Library. As of June 2001 the mainauthority file consisted of 460,333 records (in-cluding 340,799 personal and corporate namesand 50,803 subject headings). The NUKat Na-tional Union Catalogue will make those records(as well as bibliographic records) available toparticipating libraries and thus will greatlyenhance bibliographic and cataloguing standardsin Polish libraries.

68 CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE

National libraries’ websites

Since the Internet made its way to the regionmany CEE national libraries have been usingWeb technology to advertise their collections andprovide access to their online catalogues. Well-designed websites can attract a whole newcategory of virtual users interested in CEElibraries.By mid-2001 eight CEE national libraries had

websites. Most of them had a correspondingEnglish version, but the English-language sitewas usually lacking some information from theoriginal version. Only the Hungarian NationalLibrary could be accessed in another language(German) in addition to English. Most of thesites had links to either Web-based OPACs ortelnet OPACs. Only the Polish National Libraryand the Hungarian National Library providedaccess to their national bibliographies.The accessibility and performance of some

CEE national library websites are hindered bythe lack of an accurate English version, poorlyorganized staff directories and the lack of a sitesearch engine. By improving their websites theCEE national libraries may attract even moreforeign virtual users. These websites can betraced through the Gabriel gateway (Gabriel2001)

Library education

Many CEE library schools have been undergoingorganizational and curricular changes. Theirbiggest challenge is the development of a newmodel of library studies that would combinemore traditional book-based and bibliographicstudies with modern information technology.For example, the University of Warsaw Insti-

tute of Information Science and BibliologicalStudies tries to reconcile two orientations,namely bibliological studies and informationscience. On the other hand, the InternationalCentre for Information Management Systems andServices in Toruń (created in 1997 as a self-supporting school of librarianship and informa-tion management for Central and Eastern Eur-opean students) challenges the traditional modelof library education in Poland. The schoolfocuses exclusively on the latest developments ininformation technology and library management.The Institute of Information Studies and Li-

brarianship at Charles University in Prague offersa variety of courses ranging from retrospective

bibliography to information science and informa-tion management.The curriculum of the Department of Library

and Information Science of the Eotvos LorandUniversity in Budapest includes courses in boththe history of bibliography and informationscience.The CEE library schools are now teaching

more topics such as computer technology, librarymanagement, library automation, etc. There is adecreasing demand for traditional subjects suchas history of libraries, history of the book, etc.The trend towards modern library education willcontinue as the CEE library schools revise andupdate their curricula in line with developmentsin US and Western European library studies.Many of the schools have websites that can befound through the website of the Royal School ofLibrary and Information Science in Denmark(www.db.dk/dbi/internet/schools.htm).

Future trends

More than ten years after the fall of communism,Central and Eastern Europe is a greatly diversi-fied region. The Czech Republic, Hungary, Po-land and Slovenia are more advanced in theireconomic reforms than other CEE countries. Asthey can afford to spend more on education,their libraries and library schools are in theforefront of library automation and educationalreforms. The greatest challenge facing the coun-tries of the former Yugoslavia (Slovenia being anexception) as well as Albania, Bulgaria andRomania is bridging the economic gap betweenSoutheastern Europe and Central Europe. Achronic political crisis and a lack of economicreforms experienced by many Balkan countrieswill have a negative impact on the developmentof libraries and information services in thatregion.That is why it is crucial for the future devel-

opment of Southeastern European librariesto maintain co-operation with the West andformer Communist countries (especially Slove-nia). An interesting example of the co-operationbetween Bosnian libraries and Western Europeanand US libraries is ‘CUPRIJA’ (a bridge) – agroup of librarians who are helping to recon-struct the National and University Library inSarajevo and reconstitute its holdings, especiallythe collections of Bosniaca (www.soros.org.ba/cuprija/index.html).

CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE 69

As the co-operation between CEE libraries andWestern Europe and the USA increases, the needfor stricter standards for the transfer of biblio-graphic data will become even more important.Some CEE libraries are already using USMARCor UNIMARC in their bibliographic databases.The Czech National Library and the SlovenianNational Library are contributing records toOCLC. The CEE cataloguing standards need tobe revised and updated so that more CEEcataloguing records can be used by global biblio-graphic utilities (e.g. OCLC WorldCat etc.).

References

Gabriel (2001) [For URLs and information aboutCentral and Eastern European national libraries seethe homepage of ‘Gabriel – Gateway to Europe’sNational Libraries’ (http://portico.bl.uk/gabriel/en/welcome.html).]

Krastev, D. (1996) ‘Libraries in transition’, in M.Kocójowa (ed.) Libraries in Europe’s Post Commu-nist Countries, Krakow: Polskie Towarzystvo Biblio-logiczne, Oddzial w Krakowie, pp. 61–4.

Peic, S. (1999) ‘Sarajevo: Coping with disaster’, in P.Sturges (ed.) Disaster and After, Taylor Graham, pp.151–60.

Riedlmayer, A. (2001) ‘Convivencia under fire’, in J.Rose (ed.) The Holocaust and the Book, Amherst:University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 266–91.

Seljak, M. (2000) ‘COBISS: National Union Catalo-gue’, New Library World 101(1,153): 12–20.

Smith, A. (2000) The Return to Europe, New York: StMartin’s Press.

Sroka, M. (1997) ‘Creating bibliographic and catalo-ging standards and developing cooperation in Polishacademic libraries after the implementation ofVTLS’, Information Technology and Libraries 16(4):182–92.

SEE ALSO: European Union information policies;Nordic countries; Russia and the former SovietUnion

MAREK SROKA

CHAIN INDEXING

An alphabetical subject index system, originallydevised by S.R. ranganathan. A list of terms istaken from the terms used in a classificationscheme. For each item (which might be a mono-graph, a paper in a journal or some other entity),either the most precise term, or the broadestterm, is assigned. The chain is then created bygoing from this term to the broadest term thatdescribes the item. The chain might thus runfarming:agriculture:technology. Any of the terms

can be used as the heading in the index, and theother headings then follow in order. The entrymight thus take one of these three forms:

farming:agriculture:technologyagriculture:technologytechnology

This can also be presented in the reverse order,beginning with the broadest term, but no link inthe chain can be omitted between the first termchosen and the end of the sequence.


CHAOS THEORY

The study of phenomena that appear random, butwhich in fact have an element of regularity thatcan be described mathematically. First identifiedby the meteorologist Edward Lorenz in 1960,chaotic behaviour has been found to exist in awide range of applications, such as the incidenceof medical conditions or weather patterns. Katsir-ikou and Skiadis (2001) argue that the volume ofresources, variety of technologies, number ofdifferent providers and interfaces available inlibraries constitute an instance of chaotic beha-viour. Chaos theory can therefore provide usefulapproaches to the management of information.

References

Katsirikou, A. and Skiadis, C.H. (2001) ‘Chaos in thelibrary environment’, Library Management 22: 278–87.

Further reading

Alligood, K. et al. (eds) (1996) Chaos: An Introductionto Dynamical Systems, New York: Springer.

Haywood, T. and Preston, J. (1999) ‘Chaos theory,economics and information: The implications forstrategic decision making’, Journal of InformationScience 25: 173–82.

CHILDREN’S LIBRARIES

Services to children and young people aged frombirth to adolescence provided by public library(see public libraries) authorities in most coun-tries. Ages of formal transfer to adult servicesvary between 11 and 18 years, with 14–16 theusual period of transition. Ease of access totargeted lending and reference materials in avariety of formats, study space, specialist staff

70 CHAIN INDEXING

and promotional programmes are common ele-ments in well-founded services.

Service origins

EARLY LIBRARIES

Prior to 1850 in the UK, few library serviceswere available to children, other than thoseprovided in day and Sunday schools. A similarsituation existed in other developed countries.Books were mostly provided through class teach-ing and rudimentary school libraries. Theearliest public library service to youths was atManchester in 1862, when a separate readingdepartment for boys, with its own stock ofliterature, was opened. There were around fortylibraries throughout England and Wales by 1891that had special collections for children. Similarmoves were taking place in the USA, where thefirst children’s library opened in Brookline, Mas-sachusetts, in 1890. So rapid were developmentsthat, in 1901, the Children’s Library Association(CLA) became a section of the american li-brary association (ALA).In the UK, services were rudimentary at first:

opening hours took little account of children’sneeds and poorly educated individuals wereoften appointed as librarians. Few children wereeven allowed direct access to the books, until1906, when a children’s reading room wasopened at the new Islington Central Library.Schemes of public and school library co-opera-tion were common in this period; these evolvedinto the schools library services, largely pro-vided by public libraries in England and Wales.These acted as agents for local education autho-rities to support school libraries and ensurechildren’s libraries were not used by childrenand teachers simply as textbook repositories.Links between public and school libraries havenot developed in the same way in other coun-tries.

TRANSATLANTIC COMPARISONS

Some of the best early public library services forchildren, with spacious buildings, customizedequipment, furniture and well-qualified staff,were found in the USA. Specialist training wasinstituted there in 1898. However, in the 1920sadvances in library work with teenagers werebeing developed in the UK. A pioneer intermedi-ate library opened at Walthamstow in 1924 withover 4,000 volumes, and the Carnegie United

Kingdom Trust provided book grants to youthclubs in 1926. As the quality and quantity ofchildren’s literature increased in the 1930sand 1940s, book stocks were enhanced by newauthors, although there were still concerns aboutthe range of titles being provided. In 1936 thefirst modern reviewing journal, Junior Bookshelf,modelled on the US Horn Book Magazine, waspublished, and surveys of children’s readingbegan to be considered important. A moreprofessional approach to service delivery wasalso evident in the library association’s greaterinterest in children’s work; the Association ofChildren’s Librarians was established as theirYouth Libraries Section (later Group) in 1945.In commitment to young adult services, however,they lagged behind the USA somewhat; there, asearly as 1929, the Young People’s ReadingRound Table had been founded as part of theCLA.

Professional approaches to children’sservices

Since 1945 there has been increasing professionalcommitment to children’s and youth services,with the ifla complementing the work of na-tional associations by defining standards of basicprovision and establishing a philosophy forchildren’s services. In 1963 IFLA issued a Mem-orandum on Library Work with Children, drawnup by the Sub-Committee of the Public LibrariesSection (IFLA 1965). This remains a definitivestatement of purpose, although a revised editionis currently being prepared (www.ifla.org/VII/s10/scl.htm#3). The ALA produced its Standardsfor Children’s Services in Public Libraries in1964 (Chicago ALA), and emphasized the needfor non-book materials, then an uncommonfeature of provision in most other countries. TheLibrary Association guidelines, which were notproduced until 1991, have reflected the increas-ing focus on the child as user and the importanceof targeting services more carefully to ensureindividual needs are met. Intellectual, language,social and educational development are the focusfor provision, with emphasis on the need foradequate materials, including books, periodicals,audiovisual media and computer equipment andsoftware. Specialist staff and effective training forall public library staff in serving children andyoung people are regarded as essential, althoughthere is concern at the reduction in the number of

CHILDREN’S LIBRARIES 71

specialist posts and the loss of children’s workfrom library school curricula (Shepherd 1986).

Standards of service

Much of the work on delivering effective servicesis now directed to measuring the quality ofservices and identifying the relevant performanceindicators. Basic provision has not been estab-lished in most countries and the emphasis there-fore remains on maximizing scarce resources andensuring children’s needs are accurately identifiedso that they may be more effectively met.

References

International Federation of Library Associations, Com-mittee on Library Work with children (1965) LibraryService to Children, 2nd edn, Stockholm: Biblioteks-janst Lund.

Shepherd, J. (1986) ‘A crisis of confidence: The futureof children’s work’, International Review of Chil-dren’s Literature and Librarianship 1: 22–32.

Further reading

Barker, K. (1997) Children’s Libraries: A Reading List,Library Association (available at www.la-hq.org.uk/directory/prof_issues.html).

Ellis, A. (1971) Library Services for Young People inEngland and Wales 1830–1970, Pergamon Press.

Library Association (1991) Children and Young People:Library Association Guidelines for Public LibraryServices, Library Association Publishing.

Walter, V.A. (1992) Output Measures for Public Li-brary Service to Children: A Manual of StandardisedProcedures, American Library Association.

SEE ALSO: public libraries

MARGARET KINNELL

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

Books and other materials in an increasinglydiverse range of formats, including audio cas-settes and CD-ROM, which contain narrativetexts written for children and young adults. Thebreadth of scope implied by this has caused muchcritical controversy about what constitutes achildren’s book, given that concepts of childhoodand adolescence have shifted over the centuries.

Development

THE EARLY PERIOD

Children’s books written for entertainment didnot emerge as a commercially viable specialismuntil the 1740s. Before then, children and young

adults read widely in adult popular literature, inthe school books published from Caxton’s timeand in books of courtesy like The Babee’s Book.Children learnt to read from crudely producedABCs and hornbooks. From these emerged thebattledore, a folded piece of cardboard popularuntil the mid-nineteenth century. Illustrated al-phabets were rare before the eighteenth century,but Comenius’s Orbis sensualium pictus, firstpublished in English in 1659 and the earliestillustrated encyclopaedia for children, wasknown throughout Europe. This exceptional textserved to highlight the lack of suitable materialfor child readers.

ORIGINS OF THE CHILDREN’S BOOK TRADE

When John Locke wrote his Thoughts Concern-ing Education in 1693 he therefore reiteratedothers’ concerns that children should have ‘someeasy, pleasant book’, as well as school texts andthe flimsy chapbooks that contained old talesfrom the oral tradition (see oral traditions).Thomas Boreman and Mary Cooper wereamong the earliest publishers to supply suchmaterial – The Gigantick Histories (1740–3)and Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, Voll 2[sic] (1744) just pre-dated John Newbery’s moresuccessful and sustained publishing and book-selling venture. His most famous books are ALittle Pretty Pocket-Book (1744) and The His-tory of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765); he isacknowledged as the first publisher to make abusiness of importance from the children’s trade.The mid-eighteenth century was a turning pointin children’s book production. Changed atti-tudes to childhood, wider literacy and bettereducational opportunities created the conditionsfor publishers to specialize in children’s books(Plumb 1975). By the end of the nineteenthcentury production techniques were improving,coloured illustrations were becoming widelyavailable and a great range of titles was beingissued. Cross-cultural influences were also im-portant. Fairy tales, Robinson Crusoe and themoral tales inspired by the educational philoso-pher Jean-Jacques Rousseau appeared in most ofthe European languages; they also crossed theAtlantic.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY EXPANSION

Morality and instruction were the main themesof much of children’s literature through to thenineteenth century and beyond – Isaac Watts’s

72 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

Divine Songs (1717), for example, was a stapleof Victorian nurseries. More lighthearted andamusing tales also became increasingly available.The Grimms and Hans Andersen were early ontranslated into English and joined the numerousversions of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales that werefirst famous in England as Histories, or Tales ofPast Times. Told by Mother Goose. Illustratedbooks proliferated as mechanical productiontechniques were introduced and pictures oftenassumed greater significance than text. From themid-century, serious artists, who included Ran-dolph Caldecott, Walter Crane and Kate Green-away, turned to children’s literature as a creativeoutlet and made the modern picture book. (TheLibrary Association Greenaway Medal was in-stituted in 1955.) Authorship was also beingpursued more intensely. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’sAdventures in Wonderland (1865) changed thewhole cast of children’s literature with its ex-tended fantasy narrative (Darton 1982) andadventure and school stories were becomingmore significant. Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’sSchool Days (1857) and Frederic Farrar’s Eric, orLittle by Little (1858), for example, developedcharacterization and storyline, and presaged themodern novel, and by the turn of the century E.Nesbit was achieving genuine warmth and hu-mour in her extension of the range of domesticstories. Periodical literature, too, offered greatervariety and amusement, with plentiful illustra-tions and vivid stories. Little Folks (1871–1933)was a magazine for children which includedW.G.H. Kingston and Mrs Ewing among its earlycontributors and retained a lively naturalnessuntil its demise. A less patronizing tone wasincreasingly evident in writing for children.

Modern children’s books

From the beginning of the twentieth century upto the 1940s children’s books grew in importanceas the number of juvenile titles increased byaround 70 per cent and the paperback becamesuccessful. The Library Association establishedits Carnegie Medal in 1936, with Arthur Ran-some’s Pigeon Post the first winner. This was alsothe period when many ‘classics’ and enduringcharacters first appeared, including The Wind inthe Willows, Rupert Bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, theHobbit, Biggles, Just William and Mary Poppins.Media involvement began with radio broadcastsof serial readings. After 1945 internationalism

was heightened as the quality and quantity ofbooks improved in the UK, the USA and acrossEurope. The International Board on Books forYoung People (IBBY) and its Hans ChristianAndersen Medal have been catalysts for transla-tion and exchange. Major writers, among themWilliam Mayne, Lucy Boston, Philippa Pearceand Peter Dickinson, are now widely knownoverseas, although fewer international authorshave been translated into English. Successfulexceptions include Paul Berna, Dick Bruna andAstrid Lindgren. The impact of Canadian, Aus-tralian and New Zealand writers has beeninfluential in challenging the dominance of anEnglish perspective in children’s books, as hasmultinational publishing. Films, television andcomputer media now complement as well ascompete with more traditional formats, althoughbooks are retaining their appeal.

References

Darton, F.J.H. (1982) Children’s Books in England:Five Centuries of Social Life, Cambridge, UK: Cam-bridge University Press.

Plumb, J.H. (1975) ‘The new world of children ineighteenth century England’, Past and Present 67:64–95.

Further reading

Hunt, P. (ed.) (1995) An Illustrated History of Chil-dren’s Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Whalley, J.I. and Chester, T.R. (1988) A History ofChildren’s Book Illustration, London: John Murray.

SEE ALSO: book trade; publishing

MARGARET KINNELL

CILIP

Since April 2002, the Chartered Institute ofLibrary and Information Professionals (CILIP)has been the successor to the library associa-tion and the institute of information scien-tists, and the chief association for theinformation professions in the UK. Similarbodies recognizing the convergence betweenlibrarians and information scientists have beencreated elsewhere, notably the Australian Libraryand Information Association (ALIA) and theLibrary and Information Association of SouthAfrica (LIASA), but none have included such alarge and venerable association as the LibraryAssociation. A new association, also intended to

CILIP 73

include ASLIB, had been proposed by Saunders(1989), but on that occasion the obstacles hadproved too great to be overcome. A Charter andBylaws for the new association were agreed in2001, but the period April 2002 to March 2005is intended as a transitional period in whichmatters like new local branch arrangements, anew framework of qualifications and a newcode of professional conduct will be devel-oped.

References

Saunders, W.L. (1989) Towards a Unified ProfessionalOrganization for Library and Information Scienceand Services: A Personal View, Library AssociationPublishing.

Further reading

Library and Information Update (April 2002–).CILIP website (www.cilip.org.uk).

CINEMA

The general term for motion pictures, the indus-try that produces and distributes them, the artform that they embody and (in the UK) the placein which they are exhibited to the general public.The US term for the last is movie theater.

SEE ALSO: film; mass media

CIRCULATING LIBRARY

Although this can mean any library that lendsbooks for use outside the building, in commonusage it is reserved for a commercial librarywhere payment has to be made for the use ofbooks. Borrowers, unlike the users of subscrip-tion libraries, do not have joint ownership ofthe books and other materials. Such librarieswere first established in England in the lateseventeenth century, but reached their apogee inthe nineteenth century in the rival companies ofMudie and W.H. Smith. They were also commonin the USA in the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies, and in some other parts of the thenBritish Empire. A few commercial circulatinglibraries survive (including one in India), but forthe most part their role has now been inheritedby public libraries. The principle, however,underlies the commercial video lending librariesthat became ubiquitous towards the end of thetwentieth century.

Further reading

Griest, G.L. (1970) Mudie’s Circulating Library and theVictorian Novel, David & Charles.

Skelton-Foord, C. (1998) ‘To buy or to borrow?Circulating libraries and novel reading Britain,1778–1828’, Library Review 47: 348–54.

SEE ALSO: history of libraries

CIRCULATION SYSTEM

A method, either manual or electronic, of record-ing loans of documents and other media from acollection by linking unique borrower and biblio-graphic data. A system will normally provide themeans to identify overdue loans and to recallloans required before the due date. Circulationsystems are central to the wider concept of‘access services’, a term now sometimes used toinclude other areas of library operation such asreshelving, interlibrary loan (see interlibrarylending) and current periodicals.

Non-electronic systems

The earliest method of recording loans was towrite borrower and item details in a ledger.Cancelling a loan, let alone checking the where-abouts of a particular item, becomes difficultwith even a small number of loans. The Brownissue system, widely used in libraries beforeautomation was common, physically links a cardtaken from the book with a ticket surrendered bythe borrower. The cards, inserted in the ticketpocket, are filed in order, allowing checks onbooks; the number of tickets allocated to eachborrower limits their total loans. No statistics,other than a gross loan count, are possible as theborrower–book link is destroyed when the bookis returned and its card replaced. Multipart slips(two- or three-part carboned slips), on whichbook and borrower information is recorded,offer a wider range of query facilities as the slipscan be separated and filed in book, borrower ordate order, but more filing is involved for bothissues and returns. Slips may be saved for manualanalysis. Photocharging offers a quick method ofcollecting loan data, by photographing booklabel and borrower ID together, but the proces-sing of the data is the same as for any othermanual system.Manual methods become both staff- and

space-intensive as issues increase. They are sus-ceptible to human filing error, and checking for

74 CINEMA

overdue items can be difficult unless loan periodsare fixed (for example at the end of an academicterm). The provision of any sort of statisticaldata, other than a raw count of transactions, isstrictly limited. However, manual systems canstill be effective in collections where circulation islow or where automation is too expensive.

Electronic systems

Advances in computer technology since the early1970s have led to the introduction of automatedcirculation systems in many libraries. Increasedaccuracy of circulation records has improvedaccess to collection material and electronic datacapture has made the service quicker and easierfor borrowers. Data capture, from both docu-ment and borrower, is by means of electroniccoding, using optical character recognition, mag-netic coding or, most frequently, bar-coding. Eachborrower number is unique, as is each documentnumber, although the latter may be based oninternational standard book number orlibrary accession number. Different bar-codingsystems exist, often leading to incompatibilitybetween commercial systems.The linked borrower and document numbers

are stored electronically in a database and maybe sorted to provide either printed lists ofborrower loans, items borrowed, overdue loans,etc., or an online interrogation facility on aterminal linked to the database. Early systemswere offline – that is, not connected directly tothe database. In an offline system data is col-lected and stored, usually on magnetic tape, andthis is used to update the database at regularintervals, for example overnight (‘batch-proces-sing’). Bibliographic information may be addedat this stage. Printouts of the previous day’stransactions will be produced and copies of theentire loan database, sorted by document numberand borrower number, will be printed less fre-quently, perhaps weekly. This type of system canusually provide printed letters for overdue orrecalled items and fairly detailed circulationstatistics.The next stage in development was online

access to the database, doing away with largeprintouts, although updating was still batched,usually overnight, so the current day’s transac-tions could not be viewed. Interrogation of thedatabase is through a query function, removingthe need to page through lists. The most recent

systems operate in real time, with the databaseupdated immediately a loan transaction occurs.Many are linked to an online public accesscatalogue, which provides the circulation systemwith bibliographic data and the catalogue withcurrent access information. These are known asintegrated library systems.

Functions

Various types of collection will have differentcirculation requirements. For example, aca-demic libraries will usually want to include ashort-loan collection (one-day loan or less) forundergraduate course material and require anefficient recall process for reserved material.public libraries need to cope with itemsincurring hire charges, such as music and videos,and to record loans from mobile libraries (seemobile library) and to housebound readers.special collections of rare material on closedaccess may require a circulation system to recordin-house use. There are, however, core featuresthat are now expected from an automatedcirculation system. An integrated system shouldoffer the variety, choice and ease of operationneeded to implement a collection’s policies andregulations. These will include variable borrowercategories (reflecting different privileges), vari-able document categories (reflecting differentloan policies), variable loan periods and variablefines. Reliability is essential, with some form ofstandby provision should the main system godown. Because of data protection legislation,security of data is important: any public accessquery facility must only be available to theauthorized borrower, and security is achieved byusing personal identification numbers (PINs) inconjunction with borrower ID or by electroni-cally scanning the borrower card.Statistics have become increasingly important

for collection management. If loan data isarchived, sophisticated systems should be able toprovide virtually unlimited analysis. This isparticularly valuable when linked to biblio-graphic data, giving detailed profiles of a collec-tion’s use. In practice, such analysis oftenrequires specialist expertise and can be extrava-gant with processing time, sometimes interferingwith the more essential operations of the circula-tion system or online public-access catalogue(OPAC). Accuracy and consistency of loan dataare important in the recording of sample loans

CIRCULATION SYSTEM 75

for the public lending right scheme, andaccounts information, particularly of hirecharges, may be required for auditing purposes.

Future developments

Self-service is a major current development inintegrated systems. Reservations are possible onOPACs and self-service issue points have beeninstalled in some collections. The concept ofvirtual access has already reached libraries. Mu-sic and video can be accessed on the Internet andsome universities are already offering tuitiononline. Following the trend from holdings toaccess, the future will bring a greater use ofonline access to documents and less borrowing oforiginal material, thus diminishing the impor-tance of circulation systems.

Further reading

Paietta, A.C. (1991) Access Services: A Handbook,McFarland & Company (Chapter 1).

Preece, B.G., and Kilpatrick, T.L. (1998). ‘Cutting outthe middleman: Patron initiated inter library loans’,Library Trends 47: 144–57.

Sapp, G. (ed.) (1992) Access Services in Libraries: NewSolutions for Collection Management, HaworthPress.

PENNY CRAVEN

CITATION ANALYSIS

Citations and reasons for citing

Citations are notes placed in the main text of anacademic publication that give a bibliographicreference to published work which has been usedor quoted by the author. The principle underlyingthe indexing of citations is as follows: if onedocument cites another document, they bear aconceptual relationship. The references given in apublication link that publication to previousknowledge. This is the basic idea that led to thedevelopment of citation indexes, published by thePhiladelphia-based Institute for Scientific Infor-mation (ISI) (www.isinet.com). In addition, jour-nal-to-journal citation data are compiled by theISI and published in the Journal of CitationReports (JCR). Citation analysis is the study ofcitations to and from documents, of the author-ship of such documents and of the journals inwhich the documents are published.

The issue of why authors cite other authorshas been widely discussed among scholars. Thedifferent functions of citations are:

1 Giving credit (i.e. identifying antecedentsand original publications in which a fact,idea, concept or principle was first pub-lished).

2 Previous work (i.e. identifying general docu-ments related to the topic; presenting pre-vious results or announcing future work;commenting, correcting or criticizing pre-vious work; identifying methodology, equip-ment, etc.).

3 Authority (i.e. substantiating claims andpersuading readers; authenticating data andother results, or identifying the results byothers supporting the author’s work).

4 Social factors (i.e. citing prestigious re-searchers; citing work by the author’s grad-uate students, fellows and co-workers toincrease their visibility; ‘perfunctory’ cita-tions).

Citation data obtained from ISI databases revealthat citation distributions are very skewed: themajority of papers cite relatively few journalsand authors.

Evaluation of research performance

Citation analysis has been used for the evaluationof research performance. Among other outcomes,this has led to the study of rankings of journals,university departments, research institutions andindividual scholars and scientists. The startingpoint of this approach is that citations, evennegative ones that refute or correct the workcited, are a measure of influence in science: themore often an article is cited the more it isknown to the scientific community. The wholeacademic community acts as a big set of peers torecognize, by means of citations, the value of agiven contribution and the decisions of this jurycan be studied using citation indexes.Citation analysis can be used to identify the

most frequently cited journals relevant to a givenfield. As has been noted in many studies, in agiven area or discipline, a few core journalsreceive many citations and the rest receive farfewer citations. This pattern has been alsoidentified with individual authors and throughother approaches to analysis.When used to study research performance, all

76 CITATION ANALYSIS

publications or a sample, covering a given timeperiod, are selected. Typically, research paperspublished in primary sources (academic journals)are used as units of analysis. Next, citations tothese documents are collected from citationindexes to be analysed to discover the most citedauthors or articles and the antecedents or coredocuments in a given field or discipline.

The work that has been done demonstratesthat there is a correlation between most-citedauthors and the judgement of peers on theiracademic excellence, eminence and visibility.However, raw citation counts should be usedwith care for evaluating the quality of scientificwork done by individual scientists. For example,is a scientist who has received 200 citations halfas qualified as one receiving 400 citations?Citation analysis cannot replace experts that readand evaluate the work done by others within thesame field; it essentially complements otherevidence.

Structure of science

Dynamic mapping of science using citation in-dexes has been pursued for more than thirtyyears. The starting point is that citations frompaper to paper or from journal to journal provideindicators of intellectual linkages between subjectareas, organizations or individuals. Researchapproaches used in this field study co-citations(one document is cited by two other documents)and bibliographic coupling (two documents arecited in another document).

The clustering of citation matrices has beenpursued for the purpose of obtaining comprehen-sive and dynamic maps of science from which thenatural structural units of science can be shown.

Different analytical units and methodologieshave been used. Thus, there are networks ofauthors, references, citations, institutions andjournals. Studies at different levels (i.e. word,article, journal and so on) and using differentmethodologies (cluster analysis, factorial analy-sis, graph analysis, neural networks, multi-dimensional scaling) are found in the readings atthe end of this entry. And there are even authorswho have integrated multiple sources of informa-tion in literature-based maps of science to visua-lize semantic spaces and networks. Among thevarious units of analysis listed above, journalsmerit special attention from researchers.

The results of studies carried out with theabove methodologies have been used to identifyscience and discipline maps, research fronts, net-works of scientific journals, epistemological andconceptual networks, invisible colleges orauthor networks.

Some problems and caveats

Potential limitations for citation analysis are:

1 Not all significant journals are covered bythe ISI in the citation indexes.

2 Some informal influences are not cited.Alternatively, repetition of errors of detailreveals secondary or tertiary citing, i.e.documents that have been cited withouthaving been read.

3 There are different kinds of citations (posi-tive citations, self-citations, negative cita-tions).

4 Citation indexes include only printed jour-nals, and, in some research fields, a signifi-cant part of publication is done inelectronic journals.

5 Important and influential discoveries areoften incorporated by ‘obliteration’ in thecommon knowledge of a given discipline,and the original paper reporting is not oftencited.

6 Errors can be misleading (e.g. errors mayoccur in the year, volume and/or pagenumbers of a citation; names can be mis-spelled; there can be inconsistent use ofinitials by authors; homonyms can be con-fused; and so on).

Further reading

Case, D.O. and Higgins, G.M. (2000) ‘How can weinvestigate citation behavior? A study of reasons forciting literature in communication’, Journal of theAmerican Society for Information Science 51: 635–45.

Cronin, B. (1984) The Citation Process, London:Taylor Graham

Seglen, P.O. (1992) ‘The skewness of science’, Journalof the American Society for Information Science 43:628–38.

White, H.D. and McCain, K.W. (1998) ‘Visualizing adiscipline: An author co-citation analysis of informa-tion science, 1972–1995’, Journal of the AmericanSociety for Information Science 49: 327–55.

[See also many articles at the Web page of EugeneGarfield (http://garfield.library.upenn.edu).]

SEE ALSO: Garfield, Eugene; invisible college;

CITATION ANALYSIS 77

research in library and information science;scholarly communication

JUAN MIGUEL CAMPANARIO

CLASSIFICATION

The systematic organization of books, serials andother documents in all media by their subjectmatter. The subject divisions identified are gen-erally assigned a coded notation to represent thesubject content. Classification schemes in li-braries, or bibliographic classification, areused both as the basis of the subject catalogueand a subject index, and for the arrangement ofthe items on the shelves.


CLASSIFIED CATALOGUES

A library catalogue (see catalogues) in whichthe entries are arranged in the order of theclassification scheme used by the library. Suchcatalogues are now being replaced by automatedcatalogues with a wide range of search facilities,but they still exist in many older academiclibraries.

CLOSED ACCESS

A part of the library where books and otheritems are stored to which only staff have directaccess. Once common in all libraries, closedaccess is now typically used only for rare books,special collections, manuscripts, archivesand other material of exceptional financial orartefactual value. In libraries in russia and theformer soviet union, and in central andeastern europe, closed access was commonuntil the late 1980s as a means of censorship,since it allowed control of access to materials.Closed access necessitates the provision of acatalogue or library indicator that informs thereader which books are available and also directsthe librarian to the fixed shelf position at whichthe book is to be found.In archive administration, archives that are not

available to the general public due to the ex-istence of a confidentiality restriction are ‘closed’.They are said to be ‘open’ when the period ofrestriction has expired.

CODE OF PROFESSIONALCONDUCT

A set of standards of ethical behaviour expectedof individual members of a professional associa-tion. Codes are issued by professional bodies toestablish and encourage the highest possiblestandards of conduct by their members in theirperformance of professional duties. A code willusually outline grounds and procedures for com-plaints. In the library and information worldprofessional codes normally indicate those ac-tions that may be regarded as contrary to theaims, objectives and interests of professionalassociations and/or the professions of librarian-ship and information science.

History

It is argued that until 1800 ethics had nothing todo with formal codes of conduct because a trueprofessional, being a gentleman, did not needformal instructions about how to behave (Baker1999). In the nineteenth century the establishedprofessions debated the issue, while during theearly part of the twentieth century a number ofnewer professional groups started to developcodes of conduct. The information profes-sions came rather late to the discussion. Theneed for librarians to maintain ethical standardswas first mentioned in 1903 by Mary W. Plum-mer, who observed ‘Doctors, lawyers and minis-ters, college professors, officers of the army andnavy, have a certain code which presupposes thatthey are gentlemen, and wish to remain so.. . .Li-brarians and educators in general have their codestill to make’ (Plummer 1903: 208).However, despite intermittent discussions the

american library association did not adopt aCode of Ethics until 1938. The years thatfollowed were dominated by war and later, inthe USA, by McCarthyism. This tended to con-centrate minds on intellectual freedom issues,and the ethical concerns of librarians of thatperiod are reflected in the American LibraryAssociation’s Library Bill of Rights and Freedomto Read Statement. In Britain the library profes-sion’s concern with these matters resulted in alibrary association statement on censorship,published in 1963. This document appeared ayear after Foskett’s often quoted but misunder-stood The Creed of the Librarian – No Politics,No Religion, No Morals (1962). The issue of

78 CLASSIFICATION

censorship is closely related to matters ofprofessional conduct, as is that of freedom ofinformation, and it was perhaps more than acoincidence that the Library Association set upworking parties to consider all three topics. As aresult the Library Association, after much discus-sion and consultation, adopted a Code of Profes-sional Conduct in 1983. Clearly, with theunification of the Library Association and IIS(Institute of Information Scientists), the twoorganizations will need to work together toproduce one Code for the Chartered Institute ofLibrary and Information Professionals (cilip).There was a revival of interest in the subject in

the 1980s as professions responded ‘to societalpressure stemming from the Watergate years andincreasing public skepticism. . .about professionalprivilege’ (Vosper 1985: 74) The literature of theperiod includes references to ethics from placesas far apart as France, South Africa, Scandinavia,Singapore, Poland and the USA (Usherwood1989). A code of ethics for information profes-sionals in Portugal was adopted in 1999.

Areas of concern

Codes of professional conduct set out rulesdesigned to safeguard the standard of serviceprovided to clients and to regulate relationshipswithin the library and information professions. Itis possible to identify several areas of concern:the competence of the librarian or informationworker, the question of discretion and respect fora client’s privacy, professional independence andintellectual freedom, the impartiality of the li-brary and information professions, financialethics and the integrity of members. Froehlich(1997) links ethical and legal concerns, andincludes copyright in his survey for ifla.The moral and ethical questions facing librar-

ians and information workers have been compli-cated by political, economic and technologicaldevelopments. The introduction of commercialideas, such as competitive tendering for publiclibraries and other council services, together withthe increased use of consultants and contracts hasresulted in codes of conduct for local governmentthat cover such subjects as professional stan-dards, confidentiality, relationships, hospitalityand sponsorship.Any consideration of professional ethics

causes one to explore a series of responsibilitiesand relationships. These include a professional’s

relationship to the client, to the employer and/orgoverning authority; the relationship with othermembers of staff and with other library andinformation services; the relationship to librarysuppliers, trade unions, publishers and com-mercial organizations; and the individual’s rela-tionship to her or his profession. There is alsothe need to consider areas of personal conflict,for example between religious and professionalvalue systems. There is, for instance, potentialfor conflict when a librarian or informationworker is asked to provide information dealingwith a topic about which she or he holds strongbeliefs.

Interpretation

Although such issues are common to manyprofessional codes of conduct, their interpreta-tion by individual associations is sometimessignificantly different. For instance, there is adifference of emphasis between the Library Asso-ciation (1999) and the Library Association ofSingapore (1992) on the issue of duty to theclient and employer. The Singapore code statesthat ‘The librarian must give complete loyaltyand fidelity to the policies set by the governingauthority’, while the Library Association’s codesays that, ‘In all professional considerations, theinterests of clients within their prescribed orlegitimate requirements take precedence over allother interests’. It goes on to say, in the guidancenotes that accompany the code, that ‘it wouldcertainly constitute unprofessional conduct for alibrarian to refuse to supply information orknowingly to supply erroneous or misleadinglyincomplete information to a legitimate client atthe behest of the librarian’s employer’. There arealso differences between the British and USpositions on the promotion of material thepurpose of which is to encourage discriminationon grounds of race, colour, creed, gender orsexual orientation. These differences reflect thetension in trying to accommodate two ethicalconcerns: intellectual freedom and social respon-sibility.There are differences, too, in the way that the

professional associations enforce codes. The Li-brary Association’s Code of Professional Conductgoes further than others in the profession byhaving a procedure whereby a member who failsto comply with the requirements of the code canbe expelled, suspended, admonished or ‘given

CODE OF PROFESSIONAL CONDUCT 79

appropriate guidance as to his or her futureconduct’. This can affect an individual’s abilityto practise in those organizations that requirechartered librarians – that is, professionallyqualified members of the Library Association.Professional codes of conduct are not, how-

ever, mainly about the disciplining of members;rather they are a formal recognition of theprofession’s responsibilities with regard to anumber of important issues. It may be arguedthat a code is only a statement of what is alreadybeing done. Even if this is so, good habits needreinforcing and this is an important function ofprofessional codes. Last but by no means least,they are a public proclamation of library andinformation workers’ individual and collectiveprofessional concern for service, standards andpractice.

References

Baker, R. (1999) ‘Codes of ethics: Some history’(www.iit.edu/departments/csep/perspective/persp_v19_fall99_2.html) [accessed 10 August 2001].

Foskett, D.J. (1962) The Creed of the Librarian – NoPolitics, No Religion, No Morals, LA Reference,Special and Information Section, North WesternGroup Occasional Papers no. 3.

Froehlich, T.J. (1997) Survey and Analysis of the MajorEthical and Legal Issues Facing Library and Infor-mation Services, München: K.G. Saur (IFLA Publica-tions 78).

Library Association (1999) The Library Association’sCode of Professional Conduct and Guidance Notes,3rd edn, London: Library Association.

Library Association of Singapore (1992) Constitution:Code of ethics (www.las.org.sg/constit.htm#ethics)[accessed 14 August 2001].

Plummer, M.W. (1903) ‘The pros and cons of trainingfor librarianship’, Public Libraries 8(5) (May: 208–20).

Usherwood, B. (1989) ‘Ethics of information’, in J.E.Rowley (ed.) Where the Book Stops. The LegalDimensions of Information. Proceedings of theInstitute of Information Scientists Annual Confer-ence 1989. ASLIB.

Vosper, R. (1985) ‘Commentary on the code’, in J.A.Lindsey and A.E. Prentice (eds) Professional Ethicsand Librarians, Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press.

Further reading

Alfino, M. and Pierce, L. (1997) Information Ethics forLibrarians, Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

SEE ALSO: information ethics

BOB USHERWOOD

CODEN

1 A code assigned to a document or otherlibrary item, which generally consists of fourcapital letters followed by two hyphenatedgroups of Arabic numerals, or of two Arabicnumerals followed by two capital letters, orof some similar combination.

2 More particularly, the American Society forTesting and Materials (ASTM) coden isintended to provide a unique and unambig-uous permanent identifier for a specificperiodical title. It uses five-letter codes as asubstitute for full or abbreviated titles ofperiodicals in processing and storing biblio-graphical data. These can be found in manycomputer-based information handling sys-tems. The first four letters of each codenhave some mnemonic relation to the title,and the fifth letter is arbitrary. The ASTMCoden system was transferred in 1975 toChemical Abstracts Service (CAS).

SEE ALSO: periodical

COGNITIVE SCIENCE

The discipline that studies the internal structuresand processes that are involved in the acquisitionand use of knowledge, including sensation, per-ception, attention, learning, memory, language,thinking and reasoning. Cognitive scientists areto be found among researchers in the areas ofcognitive psychology, philosophy, linguistics,computer science and cognitive neuroscience.They propose and test theories about the func-tional components of cognition based on obser-vations of an organism’s external behaviour inspecific situations. The findings of cognitivescience underlie much theoretical thinking ininformation science.

SEE ALSO: informatics; information theory;organization of knowledge; systems theory

COLLECTION

A planned accumulation of selected artefacts.The term is used in museums as well as inlibraries. In the latter it includes not only booksand other printed matter, but also all informationmaterials. A collection might consist of the whole

80 CODEN

contents of the institution, and is used in this sensein such phrases as collection management orcollection development. It can also, however,refer to a designated part of the whole, sometimesknown generically as special collections, or toa particular group of materials on a specificsubject or accumulated by or about a namedindividual. More broadly, it can also be taken toinclude all the information resources to which alibrary has access, including those availablethrough physical and virtual networks.

COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT

The process of planning a library’s programmefor acquisitions and disposals, focusing on thebuilding of collections in the context of theinstitution’s collection management policy.

SEE ALSO: information management

COLLECTION MANAGEMENT

‘Collection management’ is a broad term that hasreplaced the narrower ‘collection building’ and‘collection development’ of former decades.In its present manifestation collection manage-ment includes:

. Planning and funding.

. Collection development.

. book selection.

. acquisitions.

. Provision of access.

. Use.

. Maintenance.

. Evaluation.

. preservation.

. Weeding.

It thus encompasses the activities traditionallyassociated with collection development – theselection and acquisition of library material –but is also far more comprehensive: it alsoincludes the systematic maintenance of a library’scollection, covering resource allocation, technicalprocessing, preservation and storage, weedingand discarding of stock, and the monitoring andencouragement of collection use.

Collection development

A term sometimes used synonymously withcollection management, collection development

is in fact a specific subset of the broader activityof collection management. Collection develop-ment focuses on the building of library collec-tions, ideally following guidelines alreadyestablished and articulated in the library’s writ-ten collection development policy. It involves theformulation of a systematic general plan for thecreation of a library collection that will meetthe needs of that library’s clients and incorpo-rates a number of activities related to thedevelopment of the library’s collection, includingthe determination and co-ordination of relevantpolicies, assessment of user needs, studies ofcollection use, collection evaluation, identifica-tion of collection needs, selection of materials(the identification of information resources ap-propriate to a particular field, and the choice ofwhat to acquire or provide access to fromwithin it), planning for resource sharing, collec-tion maintenance and weeding.

COLLECTION POLICIES

A library collection is an assemblage of physicalinformation sources combined with virtual accessto selected and organized information sources.Such collections are often managed according totwo types of policies. A collection managementpolicy can be viewed as a statement guiding thesystematic management of the planning, compo-sition, funding, evaluation and use of librarycollections. It is thus a global statement about alibrary’s collections, of which the collectiondevelopment aspect is but a single component. A‘collection development policy’ is a statement ofgeneral collection-building principles that deline-ates the purpose and content of a collection interms relevant to both external audiences (suchas readers and funders) and internal audiences(or staff). Collection development policies areformal, written statements that provide clearand specific guidelines for the selection, acquisi-tion, storage, preservation, relegation and discardof stock. The guidelines should be formulated inrelation to the mission of the individual library,and the current and future needs of its users. Thepolicy statement should cover all subject fieldsand all formats of information.Collection development policies assist in en-

suring the adoption of a consistent, balancedapproach to selection, evaluation and relegation,and help to minimize personal bias in theseactivities. They can be invaluable in helping todifferentiate between those collecting priorities

COLLECTION MANAGEMENT 81

that must be supported at all costs and those thatare to be developed only as funding permits.They can also lead to improved communicationbetween the library and its users, and to anincreased understanding of the library’s objec-tives by the administrators whose decisions influ-ence resource allocation. If collectiondevelopment policies are to be effective, it isimportant that they allow for a degree offlexibility in the collection-building process andthat they are reviewed on a regular basis.

Collection evaluation

Collection evaluation is defined as the process ofmeasuring the degree to which a library acquiresthe materials it intends to acquire in accordancewith stated parameters (usually in a collectiondevelopment policy). It is concerned with how‘good’ a collection is in terms of the kinds ofmaterials in it and the value of each item inrelation to the community being served. It is alsothe process of getting to know the strengths andweaknesses of a collection using techniqueswhich are likely to yield valid and reliableresults.Collection evaluation consists principally of

two types of approaches. The first is use- anduser-centred, meaning that concentration is onthe individual user as the unit of analysis, with‘user’ being defined as the person using thematerials in the collection. The second is collec-tion-centred, meaning that the evaluation techni-ques focus on examination of the collection interms of its size, scope, depth and significance.Measures of use seem to be the most broadlyuseful means of evaluating a collection, andwidely accepted indicators of use include thefollowing:

. Number of loans per capita.

. Items on loan per capita.

. Loans per item per annum.

. Percentage of items borrowed/not borrowed.

. Proportion of interlibrary loans to total loans.

. Ratio of interlibrary loans received to inter-library loans lent.

. A ‘needs-fill’ measure of whether users findwhat they seek.

. User satisfaction with stock.

By definition collection-centred evaluation in-volves the evaluation of a collection. Collection-

centred measures include size, rate of growth, thequality of the collection when compared withagreed external standards, and citation analysis.In the digital age libraries no longer have ‘a’collection. Instead they consist of a hybridcollection: a physical collection of print, multi-media and digital objects complemented byaccess to the emerging worldwide virtual li-brary. Clients should not need to know whetheran item is held locally or merely available ondemand: if they want a particular piece ofinformation, their library can access it for them.The result of this is that use- and user-centredevaluation methods are increasingly the assess-ment methods of choice. Accordingly, evaluationnow tends to focus on techniques of user orclient evaluation: usage studies, client surveys,document delivery studies and availabilitystudies.In the recent past a most popular collection-

centred approach to evaluation was the con-spectus method. This was devised in the USA bythe Research Libraries Group and was success-fully adopted or modified for use in manycountries. The method is based on a set ofcodified descriptions that record existing collec-tion strengths and current collecting intensity.However, many have been deterred from usingthe full Conspectus methodology because of thelevel of detail it requires, and it seems to havegone into decline as a popular approach todescribing collections, at least outside the USA.A properly conducted collection evaluation

exercise is a demanding and time-consumingprocess, and it will usually be undertaken with aview to understanding the strengths and weak-nesses of the collection, with the aim of produ-cing something better by retaining and enhancingthe strengths, and reducing or eliminating theweaknesses. In other words evaluation of acollection should lead to a more objective under-standing of the scope and depth of the collection,and provide a guide for collection planning,budgeting and decision making.

Resource allocation

The ways in which libraries allocate their re-sources vary widely. Some divide them accordingto material type; others use a discipline-basedapproach. With the advent of electronic publish-ing libraries have begun to include within the

82 COLLECTION MANAGEMENT

collection management budget not only the costsof material they add to their own stock, but alsothe costs of providing access to informationstored elsewhere. Library managers in pursuit ofobjectivity will sometimes calculate their budgetson a formula basis, but it is questionable whethera formulaic approach is really any more objectivea method of allocating resources, since subjectiveopinion will almost certainly influence theweighting factors used.

Technical processing

For the library’s collections to be made accessibleto library users it is important that the technicalprocessing activities of the library are carried outefficiently and effectively. Acquisitions, biblio-graphic control, classification, storage,preservation and disaster preparedness plan-ning all come into play and contribute to theoverall management of the library’s collections.Decisions taken by a technical processing depart-ment can have a major impact on whether theclientele find the library easy to use, so it isimportant that staff working in these depart-ments keep user needs in mind when devisingprocedures for processing the collections.

Weeding, relegation and disposal

Weeding is the process of removing materialfrom open access and reassessing its value. It isa generic term, which includes both relegationand discarding. Once an item has been removedit can be relegated or transferred to storage inanother area under the control of the library,designed for less regular use, perhaps one oper-ated jointly with partner institutions. Othermaterial may be sold, or discarded – permanentlyremoved from the stock of the library.Positive reasons for weeding include a belief

that there is an optimum size beyond which thecollection should not be allowed to grow and aconviction that with the passage of time some ofthe items in any library lose some or all ofwhatever value they originally had, and becomea distraction to users rather than an asset. Theclassic rule is that the criteria for weeding shouldbe essentially those used in the first place forselection – in fact, weeding has often beenreferred to as deselection.Criteria for weeding, relegation and disposal

vary according to the type of library, but will

include publication date, acquisition date, physi-cal condition, circulation history and continuedrelevance (this last often based on professionaljudgement exercised in conjunction with thelibrary’s collection development policy). Formany libraries lack of space is a principal factormotivating relegation and disposal. Develop-ments in optical disk technology may makedigitization an increasingly attractive optionfor those whose problems are primarily space-related. Computerized library housekeeping sys-tems can provide management information relat-ing to stock management. Such information willmake it easier to apply mechanistic criteria to theweeding and relegation process, although profes-sional judgement will still sometimes need to beexercised if over-simplistic application of therules is to be avoided.

Further reading

Clayton, P. and Gorman, G.E. (2001) Managing In-formation Resources in Libraries: Collection Man-agement in Theory and Practice, London: LibraryAssociation Publishing.

Collection Building (1981–) Emerald/MCB (quarterly).Gorman, G.E. (ed.) (2000) International Yearbook ofLibrary and Information Management, 2000–2001:Collection Management, London: Library Associa-tion Publishing.

Gorman, G.E. and Miller, R.H. (eds) Collection Man-agement for the 21st Century: A Handbook forLibrarians, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Jenkins, C. and Morley, M. (eds) (1999) CollectionManagement in Academic Libraries, 2nd edn, Alder-shot: Gower Publishing.

Library Collections, Acquisitions and Technical Ser-vices (1977–) Elsevier (quarterly).

Spiller, D. (2000) Providing Materials for LibraryUsers, London: Library Association Publishing.

SEE ALSO: digital library; hybrid libraries;libraries; organizational information policies;user studies

G.E. GORMAN

COLON CLASSIFICATION

Designed by S.R. ranganathan, this is based onthe classification of any subject by its uses andrelations, which are indicated by numbers di-vided by a colon ‘:’. It was the first example of ananalyticosynthetic classification, in which thesubject field is first analysed into facets, and classnumbers are then constructed by synthesis.

COLON CLASSIFICATION 83

Ready-made class numbers are not provided formost topics but are constructed by combining theclasses of the various unit schedules of which thescheme consists. It has proved particularly popu-lar in India and has inspired classificationresearchers in many parts of the world.

SEE ALSO: faceted classification; organization ofknowledge

COMMUNICATION

‘Communication’ is a word with many meanings:the Concise Oxford Dictionary, for example, listssix. When examined more closely, however, thesevarious definitions can be reduced to two basicentities: the process of communication and themessage communicated. The study of communi-cation typically involves both elements.Communication is obviously fundamental to

any kind of social activity. It therefore forms atopic for study by a very wide range of dis-ciplines – from science, medicine and technologythrough law and the social sciences to thehumanities. Nor, of course, is communicationlimited to human beings. In this wider context,what we mean by communication has to belooked at more closely. The only way of tellingthat one animal has certainly communicated withanother is by showing that the interaction hassomehow changed the behaviour of the latter.(Even for human beings, this can be an enlighten-ing way of examining communication.) Animalcommunication also draws attention to the limitsimposed on communication by the senses. Someanimals can hear sounds that we cannot; somecan see colours invisible to us. In fact, humansrely primarily on two senses – sight and hearing.Touch, smell and taste not only convey lessinformation than these, but are also not easilycommunicable in a quantitative form (though thepreceding definition of communication includeseverything from quantitative information to emo-tion). Even in conveying emotions, however, sightand hearing play a fundamental part. The mostimportant reason for this is the distinctive humanreliance on language.Although speech and writing are by far the

most important means of human communication,they face a major obstacle – incompatible lan-guages. Coping with different dialects in thesame language can be a stumbling block, but the

serious problems obviously arise with differentlanguages. Only a minority of most populationsstudy foreign-language material in any depth.Speakers of major languages can find so muchmaterial in their own language that, specialistsapart, they rarely need to look elsewhere. Trans-lated works help to bridge the language barrier,but the effort of moving from one language toanother still represents a brake on the process ofcommunication. It can also involve considerablecost: thus a large part of the budget of theEuropean Union is expended on providing thesame information in the different official lan-guages. One much-debated solution is to choosea particular language to be used for internationalcommunication. Such a proposal faces a numberof difficulties, not least national pride in one’sown language. A less contentious way forward isto invoke the power of the computer. machinetranslation, though far from perfect, has madegreat strides in recent years, as have speechrecognition and synthesis.

The communication process

Imagine a simple form of human communication:two people talking to each other over thetelephone. First, the speaker has to work outwhat to say, and say it clearly. Then the speechmust be converted to electricity, which is trans-mitted and reconverted at the other end. Finally,the listener must hear and understand what hasbeen said. This apparently simple process in-volves elements of importance to a wide rangeof disciplines: psychology, linguistics, sociology,engineering and so on.The question of people talking over the tele-

phone was first examined in detail from amathematical viewpoint half a century ago. Theresultant publication by shannon and Weaver in1949 has become a classic, and has influencedthinking about communication across most of thedisciplines involved. Their discussion, as Figure 5indicates, contained one additional element – thebox marked ‘noise’. This represents any type ofinterference that affects reception of the signal. Inthe original work on telephones, the word ‘noise’could be taken literally. The type example wascrackling in the earpiece, which drowned outsome of the conversation. As the model has cometo be used more widely, so ‘noise’ has beenreinterpreted as anything that hinders reception

84 COMMUNICATION

of a message. For example, something may bemissed because the attention of the listener hasbeen diverted. It is also possible to talk about‘semantic noise’, meaning by that any way inwhich the meaning of a message becomes dis-torted during the process of communication. Forexample, the speaker may use words with whichthe listener is not acquainted.The Shannon–Weaver model represents com-

munication as a linear flow process. This isobviously only a partial reflection of howcommunication works. It does not, for example,include feedback. In a telephone conversation,the speaker becomes the listener and thelistener the speaker, in turn. Conveying meaningoften depends on this interaction to reducemisunderstandings. Again, messages may befiltered through more than one informationsource. Thus, the recipient of a telephonemessage may pass some of its contents on to acolleague.

The message communicated

Messages are made up of signs, entities thatrefer to something other than themselves. (Theword ‘symbol’ is sometimes used in muchthe same sense.) A road sign showing a speedlimit is an example of communication via signsin two senses: its shape and layout are signsindicating that it is an instruction to drivers,whilst the number emblazoned on it is a furthersign representing the maximum permissiblespeed. In order to convey meaning, signs mustbe organized into a system – called a ‘code’ –which relates the signs to each other in away that can be interpreted by the receiver ofthe message. Take road signs again as anexample. A speed limit sign has a specificphysical format that relates it to the wholegroup of road signs that must be obeyed by adriver (as distinct from signs that provideinformation or give a warning). The number onit involves another code, whose interpretationdepends on our understanding of the numericalsystem in current use. Designing a speed limitthus requires encoding two sets of signs. Thedriver has the task of decoding these signs in

order to comprehend their significance. Errorscan easily occur in this process, depending onthe background of the recipient. For example,someone accustomed to seeing road signs denot-ing speeds in kilometres per hour may misunder-stand signs in another country that uses milesper hour.The study of signs and codes is called

‘semiotics’. There are, correspondingly, semioticmodels and theories that can be used for lookingat message transfer. One simple model, forexample, is based on a triangular interaction(see Figure 6). It reflects the fact that a personreceiving a message is likely to have directknowledge of the object that is being signified,as well as of the sign that represents it. Inter-pretation for an individual will then depend onthe interaction between these two types ofknowledge. For example, the word ‘stream’ islikely to invoke a different picture for peopleliving in a flat country as compared with thoseliving in mountains. Models help in the discus-sion of communication by concentrating atten-tion on the aspects that are most important andby providing a framework for analysis. Inevita-bly, any one model is limited in its scope. For thisreason, many communications models exist: theimportant thing is to choose an appropriate onefor the particular needs at hand. A problem isthat, with so many theories in circulation, anyindividual theory is used but rarely, which canmake intercomparisons difficult. One survey ofbasic textbooks on communication found thatthere was little overlap between the theoriesdescribed in each. Over three-quarters of thetheories were mentioned in only one of thebooks.

Figure 6 Triangular interaction

Figure 5 The Shannon–Weaver model

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Technology and communicationchannels

For many years past, one of the distinctivefeatures of human communication has been thegrowth in the number and diversity of thecommunication channels available. Recent devel-opments have related almost entirely to digitalchannels (i.e. ones that operate in terms of bits).Obvious examples of this are the appearance ofdigital television and digital mobile telephones.Digital channels have a number of virtues (suchas a better ability to handle noise), but theirparticular interest is their computer-related cap-abilities. A digital television can be used forteleshopping, while a mobile phone can sendand receive text as well as oral messages. Twotypes of channel can be used for transmission –either some kind of cable, or the atmosphere.Traditionally, these were deployed for differenttypes of message. The atmosphere was used fortransmitting messages aimed at a wide audience,as with radio and television. Cable was used forpersonal messages, as with telephone calls.Nowadays, digital messages of all kinds can govia either route. For example, telephone callsmay go either via cable or through the atmo-sphere, and the same is true of television pro-grammes. The sorts of message transmitted bythe various channels are likewise changing. Forexample, a computer network can be employedto look for particular categories of news. Theitems retrieved can then be used to construct anindividually personalized newspaper. As all thisreflects, a key characteristic of digital channels isthat they support interactive communication,whether with computers or other human beings.In some ways, there are parallels between

human and computer handling of information.Each has sensors to accept incoming information,methods for internally handling and storing theinformation, and devices for outputting informa-tion to the external world. Correspondingly, it isnecessary to see how the computer system canbest be adapted to the human system (usuallyreferred to as human–computer interaction).To give one example, humans often react differ-ently to the provision of information on-screenand on the printed page. So it seems generally tobe easier to read long pieces of text on paperthan on-screen; the requirements for easily legibletext may be different between screen and paper;colour, too, must be used in a different way.

For communication, however, it is not theindividual computer that is important, but thetotality of networked computers. The combina-tion of computers and networks is usuallycalled information technology. The significanceof the growing role of information technologyis not simply its ability to handle large quanti-ties of information very quickly, but also itspower to reorganize the way we look atinformation. For example, in terms of effortby the sender it makes little difference whethera message is sent to an individual colleaguelocally or to large numbers of contacts world-wide. Information technology is here blurringthe dividing line between personal communica-tion and mass communication. Electronic dis-cussion groups demonstrate a different aspectof this blurring process. In such discussions, anyparticipant can put up a query, and any othercan reply. Here, large numbers of people areinvolved in the communication process, but itis still possible to have individualized interac-tion. As this suggests, electronic communicationmay draw the boundaries between informationactivities in different places from written com-munication. Indeed, it has been suggested thatelectronic communication has a number ofcharacteristics in common with oral communi-cation. For example, text and graphics canbe ontinually manipulated by a computer, sothat it may never be possible to point to adefinitive version, as one can for printed text orgraphics. In some ways, this is analogous tostorytelling, where the theme may stay the samebut the details may change at each retelling.Thus, the use of information technology repre-sents not simply a new communication channel,but a new set of possibilities for handlinginformation.

Communication options

Just because information is provided via a com-munication channel, this does not mean that itwill necessarily be absorbed by recipients. Manychannels, especially nowadays the internet,transmit so much information that it is impossi-ble for any individual to sift through it all. Thisinformation overload acts as another source ofnoise in the system. Although relevant items mayexist, they can often be hidden in the flood ofirrelevant items. The difficulty lies not only in theflood of information currently appearing, but

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also in the stores of past information that canincreasingly be accessed.Though the Internet provides an obvious

example of these problems, they also afflict otherchannels. Thus keeping up with the flood offiction available is a major concern for publiclibraries, while maintaining access to all theresearch journals available is equally a matter ofconcern for university libraries. One conse-quence is that all libraries have had to becomemore efficient in their handling of material.Developments down the years have ranged fromthe growth of interlibrary loan schemes to theautomation of library catalogues. The rapidexpansion of global information and communi-cation obviously depends in part on the growthof world population. It has, however, been aidedand abetted by the growth of mechanical meth-ods for collecting, storing and disseminatinginformation. For example, a single remote-sen-sing satellite examining the earth produces agreater quantity of data than all the ground-based surveys of the earth throughout history puttogether. Clearly, with such a vast informationstore, communication in the future will relyincreasingly on electronic assistance.The use of particular information sources

depends not only on the likelihood of retrievingrelevant information from them, but also on therelative convenience of the communication chan-nels through which they can be accessed. Giventhe choice, many information users prefer aconvenient channel providing lower-quality in-formation to a less convenient channel providinghigher-quality information. The question, ofcourse, is what makes a communication channel‘convenient’. Physical proximity is certainly onefactor. Not surprisingly, more distant channelsare less likely to be tapped than nearby ones. But‘distant’ here can mean something very limitedindeed. On a university campus, for example, alibrary that is twenty minutes’ walk away fromthe office will be used less frequently on averagethan a library that is two minutes’ walk away.Even smaller obstacles can impede informalcommunication. For example, communicationbetween people working on different floors of abuilding is typically worse than communicationbetween people working on the same floor. Inrecent years, the obvious example of this rule –that distances to the communication channelmust be small – has been the use of computersfor communication. The level of usage of electro-

nic mail drops unless the computer terminal isactually on the desk of the sender/recipient.Although the impact of distance on use is most

evident for communication channels, it is oftenpossible to discern a distance-related factor in thechoice of the information sources themselves. Forexample, local telephone calls typically predomi-nate over calls to people further afield. Here, thecause is not necessarily convenience: cost and thelocation of colleagues are likely to be moreimportant. In looking at communication in theseterms, however, it is often necessary to look atquestions of time as well as distance. Peopleusually consider the speed of interaction whenchoosing communication channels. Somethingthat needs an immediate response may be an-swered by fax or electronic mail, whereas amessage that is less urgent may be replied to byordinary mail. Hence, distance is only one of thefactors involved when individuals select commu-nication channels: speed, cost, etc. also influencetheir choice.One consequence of these selection factors is

that communication channels are as likely tocomplement each other as to be in competition.Effectively, different channels create niches forthemselves that exploit their distinctive charac-teristics. The idea of a ‘niche’ comes fromevolution. Darwinian evolution is often thoughtof as depending on vigorous competition, leadingto survival of the fittest species. In practice, whathappens is that organisms tend to find specificniches in the environment: the better they fit intothese, the more limited the competition that theyface. Something similar happens in communica-tion. Take newspapers as an example. Mostcountries publish a range of different newspa-pers. An examination of these makes it clear thatthey are not all competing with each other forreaders. Some may limit themselves geographi-cally. A Los Angeles newspaper is not in directcompetition with one published in New York.Most limit themselves by aiming at a particularaudience. There are, for example, upmarketbroadsheets and downmarket tabloids. Somenewspapers appear on Sunday only, and so on.The main point about niche creation is that itworks reasonably well so long as the environ-ment remains stable. For organisms, rapid envir-onmental change can have a catastrophic result ifthey fail to adapt quickly. In communication, theintroduction of information technology has beenthe equivalent of a rapid environmental change.

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The question is how traditional communicationchannels will reposition themselves (i.e. find newniches) in the new electronic environment. Thatsuch repositioning is occurring is illustrated, forexample, by the rapid growth of electronicpublishing.

Communication in groups

Communication is essentially a group activity,one-to-one communication simply being one endof the chain. For this reason, many studies ofcommunication examine how it works in parti-cular groups, communities or organizations. Thecommunication links between individual mem-bers form a ‘network’, the exact nature of whichaffects the way communication occurs within thegroup. Indeed, the differing networking patternsof different groups means that for some commu-nication purposes each group can be thought ofas having an identity of its own, separate fromthat of its constituent members.Consider, as an example, a commercial firm. It

has its own goals, which have a long-termvalidity regardless of changes in personnel, andits own organization, which typically imposes ahierarchical structure on the activities of thesepersonnel. Communication in such a firm istraditionally expected to be vertical, starting withthe managing director at the top and passingthrough various levels to manual labour at thebase of the organizational pyramid. Employeesobtain instructions from the level above, andpass on their own instructions to the level below.An efficient firm also arranges for information toflow back upwards again, so providing feedback.Otherwise, plans made at the top may befrustrated by unrecognized problems furtherdown the hierarchy.This picture of a hierarchical network usually

fits fairly well the way in which formal commu-nication (e.g. office memos) works within thefirm. However, to concentrate solely on formalcommunication is to omit the equally importantflow of informal communication. People operat-ing at the same or nearly related levels in thehierarchy often pass information horizontally viaconversation. Someone like the managing direc-tor’s secretary, who may appear to rank fairlylow in the formal communication hierarchy, canplay an important role in the flow of informalcommunication. Most organizations contain peo-ple who are recognized by their fellow employees

as important sources of information althoughtheir apparent position in the hierarchy may notseem important. Such people are often labelled‘gatekeepers’, because they help control anddirect the flow of information. This applies toexternal information coming into a firm as wellas to the information generated within it. Thegatekeeper function depends on the inclinationof the individuals concerned and their range ofcontacts: if they leave the firm, their replace-ments may well not act as gatekeepers. Reorga-nization of the firm can also affect the way thatgatekeepers operate. For example, moving from alow-level building to a high-rise building canreduce their contacts, and so their effectiveness.The network pattern within a group obviously

depends on the way in which the group isorganized. For example, there may be one leaderto whom all the information from other membersflows, or, alternatively, each member may passon information to all the other members simulta-neously. Each pattern has its own advantages anddisadvantages. Thus, information may be trans-mitted and recorded more accurately with thefirst type of network, but all the participants,apart from the leader, tend to find their commu-nication activities less satisfying. On the contrary,participants enjoy the second type of networkmore, but their information may be less carefullytransmitted and recorded.The nature of the interaction between partici-

pants can also depend on the communicationchannel employed. Nowadays, much informationwithin organizations is handled by computers,and circulates via an intranet. Introducingcomputers changes the nature of the communica-tion network. For example, a computer networkcan readily make all kinds of information avail-able to any member of an organization. This actsto flatten the traditional hierarchical flow, sinceinformation no longer needs to cascade downfrom the top to the bottom of the organization. Italso affects the role of gatekeepers, since itenhances everyone’s ability to access informationdirectly. The changes are most evident in firmsthat allow staff to work from home, keeping intouch via electronic networks (teleworking).Managers in such firms can find it difficult toredefine their communication roles, while thestaff at home miss informal exchanges of infor-mation over coffee. Computer-mediated commu-nication is also increasingly affecting education.It is seen, in particular, as an essential base for

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distance learning. However, online interactionbetween teachers, students and informationsources alters both teaching and learning pro-cesses in ways that are still being investigated.One important aspect of communication is

how it can be used to introduce new ideas.Within a group, such ideas may be introducedby gatekeepers and accepted by the more infor-mation-conscious members. If the ideas proveinteresting enough, most of the members in thegroup then take up the idea. The remainingmembers either absorb the idea more slowly ormay never accept it at all. These kinds of reactionhave been discerned, for example, in the accep-tance of a new drug by the medical profession orthe acceptance of a new type of communicationchannel by the public at large. However, the wayin which innovations are accepted can be greatlyinfluenced by the beliefs and preconceptions ofeach of the individuals concerned. It is a com-monplace of media studies that what people takefrom any branch of the media depends on whatthey bring to it. A political programme ontelevision may be watched by people from boththe left and the right of the political spectrum.Both are likely to find in it confirmation of theirbeliefs, and both may complain that it is biasedin favour of the opposing side.

Structuring communication

From their earliest days, human beings developexpectations about the way communicationworks and about the information environmentthat the communication channels reveal. Chil-dren acquire a reasonably extensive vocabularyquite early. A 3-year-old may know a thousandwords, which should be compared with the factthat most people can get through their everydaylife with a vocabulary of only 5,000 words. Butthe ability to apply this vocabulary and tounderstand the subtleties of communication takesmuch longer. For example, many children cannotuse abstract terms correctly and creatively untilthey are in their teens. For this sort of reason,children’s literature is often aimed at parti-cular age ranges, and written accordingly. Theability to use language, whether in terms of oralfluency or of literacy, obviously varies not onlywith age, but also from individual to individual.This is reflected in the provision of formalsources of information as well as in informalconversation. For example, the range of daily

newspapers available caters for varying degreesof literacy. Tabloid newspapers are aimed at lesssophisticated readers: they typically have simplersyntax and a greater emphasis on pictures thanthe upmarket broadsheet newspapers. In fact, thewhole layout of the newspaper, from the size ofthe headlines to the typeface used, can be relatedto the expected target audience. Equally, thereare differences not only in the way in which newsis presented, but also in what news is commu-nicated. Tabloid newspapers contain many fewermentions of science and finance, for example,than broadsheets. The interaction between themedium, the message and the target audienceextends across all types of information. It can beillustrated in some detail by looking at theappearance and function of an ordinary researchjournalScholarly articles tend to be structured in a

standard way, which derives from their role ascommunication channels for research. Firstcomes the title. This is formulated so as best tocatch the attention of its intended audience. Itshould, for example, contain all the key wordsthat might be expected by a potential reader, sothat it will be retrieved efficiently from anautomated list of articles. Next come the namesof the authors, together with their institutionalaffiliations. The ordering of names can be sig-nificant here, since it is often supposed that thefirst-named author will have contributed most tothe article. The expectation that the authors willhave an institutional rather than a personaladdress reflects the fact that research is now ahighly professionalized activity. The inclusion ofaddresses also allows readers who have queriesabout the article to get in touch directly with theauthor(s). Under the authors’ names may comean indication of when the article was receivedand/or accepted for publication. This date is partof the regulatory activity of the scholarly com-munity. Its inclusion gives the authors someprotection if they need to defend their priority inpublishing a new idea or result. After theseintroductory elements, there is an abstractsummarizing the contents of the article. Like thetitle, this abstract may appear in other printed orautomated listings that provide a guide to theoriginal research literature. It is customary torefer to such listings as secondary communica-tions, which draw attention to this primaryresearch literature.

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The body of each article is usually alsostructured in a standard way. It may, for exam-ple, have successive sections labelled introduc-tion, methodology, results, discussion and so on.Most scholarly articles also include – often at theend – a list of other publications that have beenused in the process of putting together the newcontribution. These citations form a networklinking the new publication to previous researchthat has been formally communicated to theresearch community. By tracing such networks,it is possible to form some idea of how researchis linked, in communication terms, not only withcurrent contributions, but also with past devel-opments.Not all the communication characteristics of

the research community can be derived purely byscanning individual articles. Some are reflected inother parts of the journal. For example, the end-pages of each issue often call attention to anotheraspect – quality control. Here are listed editor(s),and referees may be mentioned, too. It is parti-cularly important that research informationshould be reliable, since it is used as the basisfor further research. Assessment by experts,together with their advice on how to improvework, is seen as an essential way of implementingcontrol over the dissemination of research infor-mation. Indeed, a scholarly journal can be seenas a printed artefact reflecting what is regardedas acceptable practice by the research commu-nity.Although an article in a scholarly journal is a

particularly good example of a structured com-munication, readers always have prior expecta-tions regarding the way in which informationwill be presented to them via any formal source.For example, a reader will expect anythingdescribed as a ‘novel’ to be a book, divided intochapters and probably with few illustrations.Equally, someone interested in news about (say)microcomputers will usually look at computermagazines. They will expect such magazines tohave colourful covers, often featuring a picture ofcomputing equipment. The cover will also an-nounce the main features to be found inside. Onopening the magazine, these main articles will befound to be accompanied by various shortersnippets of news, but much of the space will beoccupied by advertising. These expectations help,in the first place, with the choice of readingmatter. A glance at the cover and a quick skim

through a computer magazine, for example, isusually sufficient to decide whether or not it isworth purchasing. Similarly, standard placementof items inside (e.g. the editorial) allows rapidretrieval of the category of information that mostinterests the individual reader.The point can be put in another way. The

presentation of information in a standard wayassists its rapid retrieval when browsing. Brows-ing is one of the most important ways in whichreaders seek information. It is essentially asampling process, in which salient features ofthe text and graphics are scanned until the readeris satisfied that the desired amount of informa-tion has been gathered. For example, readers ofscholarly journals often flip through the pages ofa newly received issue to see if anything catchestheir attention. They will typically glance at thetitle, authors and abstract first. If these seeminteresting, they may next look at the introduc-tion and conclusion, and at some of the diagramsor other graphics included. If these also proveinteresting, the greater part of the article maythen be read with attention. Such selective read-ing is the norm rather than the exception. Evenwith a novel, readers will skip paragraphs thatstrike them as boring.browsing might be labelled ‘undirected’ read-

ing. The reader is looking for any item ofinterest, but does not know ahead of time whatthe item will be. In ‘directed’ reading, in contrast,the reader knows what information is requiredand is actively seeking it. For example, a cookwho has it in mind to produce a particular dishmay search through a selection of cookery booksto find the appropriate recipe. Different types ofreading matter have differing probabilities ofbeing used for directed reading. A dictionary oran encyclopaedia is typically consulted when aparticular piece of information is required,whereas novels usually are not. This differenceaffects the way the information in the source isstructured. An encyclopaedia, for example, be-sides having its contents arranged alphabetically,may also have various indexes to allow readersto pin down quickly the precise piece of informa-tion they need. Even the physical shape and sizeof a publication can relate to its expected com-munication function. For example, a ‘coffeetable’ book, as the name implies, is not meant tobe read on a train.Oral communication has always ranked on a

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par with formal sources as a means of transmit-ting information. Surveys of researchers, forexample, show that discussion with colleagues isranked as of top importance for acquiring rele-vant information, alongside journals and books.The choice between oral and print sources ofinformation depends on a range of factors – thetype of feedback sought, the currency of theinformation and so on. But the nature of theinformation can also be important. Thus, craftknowledge – how to make something – is oftendifficult to transmit fully via text and pictures. Itmay be better picked up on the basis of on-the-job discussions. Equally, complex concepts – suchas mathematical equations – nearly always haveto be written down if they are to be properlyunderstood and manipulated. It follows thatformal and informal sources of information oftenprove complementary in their information provi-sion. Indeed, even for information dealing withthe same topic, people seem to require exposureto it via a variety of channels in order to perceiveits full significance. Impact can vary with contextas well as with channel. People watching atelevision programme by themselves may assessit differently from people who watch in a group,for the group discussion may modify their opi-nions.The nature of oral information transfer at a

group meeting depends critically on the size ofthe group. A few people together can have afairly unstructured, interactive discussion withoutmuch difficulty. They simply observe a fewconventions. For example, it is normally re-garded as bad manners to interrupt a speaker inthe middle of a sentence. As the size of the groupincreases, so the need for structure grows. Thus,talks at conferences are scheduled for a specificplace and time, audiovisual aids are laid on, etc.At the same time, the feedback element thatcharacterizes oral discourse decreases with groupsize. There is rarely time for more than a fewquestions at the end of a conference talk. Theubiquity of radio and television nowadays meansthat mass communication is concerned as muchwith the spoken as with the written word. Again,the different channels tend to be complementaryrather than competitive. Many people read dailynewspapers and listen to both radio and televi-sion. From the broadcast information they mayobtain the most up-to-date news, whilst from theprinted information they may obtain a moredetailed analysis.

Limitations on communication

The obvious restriction on use of communicationchannels relates to economic problems. People indeveloping countries often find it difficult to buybooks, both because they cost too much andbecause the distribution system is inefficient.Similarly, telephone networks in many suchcountries serve only a minority of the populationand do not necessarily do so very efficiently.Radio is a widely used channel in developingcountries: it is relatively cheap (for group pur-chase) and does not presume a literate audience.Unlike the telephone, however, it does not permittwo-way communication. A key question now iswhether the growing use of information technol-ogy will increase, or decrease, the communica-tion gap between the haves and the have-nots.

In developed countries, a different debate isunder way. This concerns copyright, and theeffect that electronic channels may have on it.The problem relates to the ‘copy’ part of theword ‘copyright’. Copying a printed book takestime, and is not necessarily cheap. Copying anelectronic document, on the contrary, is rapid,and the costs are trivial. Commercial providers ofelectronic information are therefore demandingstricter controls on copyright for networkedinformation. This is opposed by many users,who believe both that communication via theInternet (and any successor) should be as free aspossible of control and that, in any case, suchcontrol will prove to be very difficult to impose.The outcome from this debate will affect users inboth developed and developing countries.

Further reading

Communication Research (www.communicationresearch.org/).

Crystal, D. (1997) The Cambridge Encyclopaedia ofLanguage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Freeman, R.L. (1999) Fundamentals of Telecommuni-cations, Wiley-Interscience.

McQuail, D. and Windahl, S. (1993) CommunicationModels, Longman.

Pemberton, L. and Shurville, S. (eds) (2000) Words onthe Web: Computer Mediated Communication, In-tellect.

Rutter, D.R. (1987) Communicating by Telephone,Pergamon Press.

Schiffman, H.R. (2000) Sensation and Perception, JohnWiley.

Shannon, C. and Weaver, W. (1949) The MathematicalTheory of Communication, University of IllinoisPress.

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Tubbs, S.L. and Moss, S. (2000) Human Communica-tion, McGraw-Hill.

SEE ALSO: broadcasting; e-commerce; economicsof information; Geographic Information Systems;information and communication technology;mass media; oral traditions; PTT; scholarlycommunication; telecommunications;translations

JACK MEADOWS

COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY

The design and application of systems andequipment for sending or exchanging data byelectrical means between two or more distantstations.


COMMUNICATIONS AUDIT

The process whereby the communications withinan organization are analysed by an internal orexternal consultant, with a view to increasingorganizational efficiency or effectiveness. In con-temporary practice, this is often part of a broaderprocess of information audit. Communica-tions auditing is largely oriented towards humanbehaviour, as even technical specifications forcomputer-based systems need to respond to theneeds and motivations of employees using them.They therefore use techniques such as interviewsand questionnaires that elicit personal responsesto institutional structures. The practice has itsorigin in the early 1950s, but has been trans-formed by the application of information andcommunication technology.

Further reading

Booth, A. (1988) The Communications Audit: A Guidefor Managers, Gower [out of date in terms oftechnology, but still useful for concepts].


COMMUNITIES OF INTEREST

Communities of interest and communities ofpractice form naturally on the internetthrough the freedom to publish information thatit gives to individuals, and the searchability of

the world wide web. For example, academicscan communicate and share research withgreater ease across national boundaries andbetween institutions in ways that extend theconcept of the invisible college; groups fol-lowing a particular hobby can link up to sharetheir interests; and wider-based support groupsfor people who suffer from particular disabilitiesor other problems become possible. Such virtualcommunities become sources of specialized in-formation and advice, and as such form animportant part of networks of referral andinformation service.

COMMUNITY INFORMATION

Community information is the information thatpeople and their dependents need or want inorder to live their everyday lives. It can enableindividuals and groups to make informed deci-sions about themselves and the communities inwhich they live, and participate more effectivelyin the democratic process. In this sense it canhave a positive impact on preventing socialexclusion (see social exclusion and li-braries). Community information relates toareas such as housing, transport, benefits, healthand recreation, and includes such things as bustimetables, the locations of doctors’ surgeries anddetails of events and activities. Characteristically,community information is ephemeral and takesthe form of leaflets, posters, pamphlets or anelectronic form that can be updated more easilythan formally published material. Communityinformation can also be a term applied toinformation that records the feelings, activitiesand identity of a distinct community. Collectionsof stories from or about a particular community,memories of a geographical area or documenteddiscussions about issues pertinent to a particulargroup could also be considered to be ‘communityinformation’.The ‘communities’ that need and use this type

of information fall into two main categories:communities of interest and geographicalcommunities. This distinction is important whendetermining the information needs of a particularcommunity and effective methods of disseminat-ing and maintaining community information.The former refers to communities that share acommon interest or characteristic, for example, agroup with a particular medical condition or one

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that shares a common heritage. The boundariesof geographical communities may be determinedby agencies external to them, as in the case ofwards and districts, for example. In practice,communities tend to define their own bound-aries, which may or may not coincide withformal definitions. Examples of electronic com-munity information provided on a geographicalbasis might be www.healthprofile.org.uk,www.cheetham.info or www.seamless.org.uk.

Sources of community information

Community information may be informationabout an organization that can help people inparticular circumstances. For example, a publiclibrary (see public libraries) may signpost anindividual to an advice agency. Communityinformation is also useful factual informationgenerated by a number of agencies, organizationsand individuals across all sectors, public, volun-tary, community and private. Central govern-ment, for example, provides information aboutthe National Curriculum for primary and sec-ondary education, local authorities make avail-able information relating to more localizededucation provision and the voluntary sector inmany cases provides information about subjectssuch as bullying, youth issues and educationalopportunities outside the mainstream. This broadrange of sources enables users to find informa-tion through the means that is most appropriateand accessible to them. However, the variety ofsources can act as a barrier to access. There canbe significant degrees of overlap and contradic-tion between, leaving users with feelings of‘information overload’. Communities may find itdifficult to make sense of the information avail-able to them and to evaluate effectively thequality and accuracy of the information.

Electronic community information

Increasingly, community information is beingpresented electronically. This is advantageous toboth providers and users for a number ofreasons. Organizations can more easily shareinformation collections, therefore helping toeliminate duplication and anomalies. metadataschemes enable users to search for and findinformation more effectively and XML (extensi-ble mark-up languages) standards allow provi-ders to share electronic community informationeasily. The classification of electronic community

information is evolving in order to accommodatethe variety of metadata schemes but as yetconforms to no recognized protocols.As people’s access to information and com-

munication technology increases, so does thepotential for community information to take theform of online participation and debate. Thismay be through discussion forums, online adviceor chat, e-mail lists, etc. It may serve to equipusers with the means to make decisions at apersonal, local, national or international level.The provision of community information in an

electronic format means that, potentially, userscan access the information from their ownhomes. This removes barriers people may havewhen communicating with institutions. Users inremote and rural locations can access informa-tion without having to make prohibitive journeysto a physical venue. Specific skills are stillrequired in order to access information via apersonal computer, mobile telephone or Internettelevision, but increasingly the skills issue is beingaddressed by a range of training initiatives, forexample, the government’s UKOnline programme(www.ukonline.gov.uk). Language and literacyproblems can be minimized by developingaudio-based community content online. Peoplewho do not read English or other writtenlanguages can use the Internet to access informa-tion spoken in these languages. People who arehousebound may also benefit from accessingelectronic community information from theirown homes.A distinction can be drawn between organiza-

tions and individuals creating community infor-mation and those which fulfil an enabling role interms of promoting access to that information.‘gateways’ or intermediaries have traditionallybeen advice agencies and libraries, and bothcontinue to play an important role in the deliveryof community information. Increasingly and inaddition, community information is providedelectronically by a range of organizations using avariety of mechanisms including online databasesand portal sites, for example, www.mymanches-ter.net, a portal site facilitated by a communityinformation network in Manchester, UK.

The provision of community information

The provision of community information bysome agencies constitutes a ‘top-down’ approach,where the information flows vertically from the

COMMUNITY INFORMATION 93

provider down to the user. Judgements are madeabout the information needs of communities andthe most effective methods of meeting thoseneeds. Whilst this approach can maximize skillswithin an organization, ensure that information isco-ordinated effectively and draw upon econo-mies of scale (as in the creation of bus timetables,for example), it can also lead to the creation ofinformation that is irrelevant to particular com-munities, which is inaccurate or out of date by thetime it is disseminated. A ‘top-down’ approachcan result in the tendency to present communityinformation in a way that reflects the structure ofan organization rather than the needs of a usergroup, and it often ignores the importance ofcommunity information in the form of memories,documented discussions, stories etc.An alternative model for community informa-

tion is a ‘bottom-up’ approach, whereby a com-munity develops the capacity to create, maintainand disseminate information that it considersrelevant. This process enables information toflow much more fluidly between agencies andusers with potential users in many instancesbecoming providers themselves. An examplemight be in the creation of information aboutlocal events and activities. This approach ispotentially more sustainable as relevant skills aredeveloped and retained within the communitiesthat need the information. Similarly, as there isless distance between the information and theusers of it, the information is likely to retain itsaccuracy and currency.

The quality of community information

Issues associated with the quality of informationdiffer from other areas of information provision.Information from a self-help group for diabetessufferers, for example, could hold equal status asthat originating from the National HealthService.Community information enables individuals to

make informed decisions relating to themselves,their dependents and their communities, and canpromote participation, social inclusion and accessto the democratic process. A variety of mechan-isms have evolved to disseminate communityinformation effectively and in a timely and acces-sible way, with perhaps the most effective andsustainable being a community-centred, ‘bottom-up’ model.

Further reading

Leech, H. (1999) CIRCE: Better Communities throughBetter Information, Library and Information Com-mission.

Nicholas, D. (2000) Assessing Information Needs:Tools, Techniques and Concepts for the InternetAge, ASLIB.

Pantry, S. (ed.) (1999) Building Community Informa-tion Networks: Strategies and Experiences, LibraryAssociation Publishing.

Sokvitine, L. (2001) ‘Cataloguers may yet inherit theearth’, State Library of Tasmania, 22 May 2001(www.service.tas.gov.au/papers/catinherit4.htm).

SEE ALSO: advice service; communication;community librarianship; e-government;electronic public-information services;telecentres

CLAIRE RAVEN AND GARY COPITCH

COMMUNITY LIBRARIANSHIP

The provision of library and information servicesof special relevance to a particular community, atcommunity level. Provision focuses particularlyon social, domestic, health or educational facil-ities, details of local cultural activities, clubs andsocieties, and the range of local authority orgovernmental services. public libraries havelong accepted this as a major responsibility,providing community information and meet-ing facilities, but it may also be provided via aspecial unit set up by a local authority, avoluntary agency or an advice group. Commu-nity librarianship has come to have a higherprofile in recent years as a mechanism by whichlibraries can contribute to overcoming problemsof social exclusion (see social exclusion andlibraries).

Further reading

Black, A. (1997) Understanding Community Librarian-ship, Aldershot: Avebury.

SEE ALSO: community information; socialexclusion and libraries

COMPUTER

An electronic device that can accept, store,process and retrieve data following the instruc-tions contained in a pre-written program thathas been installed into its memory. Concep-

94 COMMUNITY LIBRARIANSHIP

tually, computers were envisioned in the nine-teenth century, but the first machines that werecapable of the full range of operations of pre-programmed data storage, processing andretrieval were not built until the 1940s (Winston1998: 166–88). Since then there has been rapidand continuous progress in their development, intheir capacity, in their functionality and in theirability to communicate with each other. Compu-ters are now ubiquitous, and are of particularimportance in all aspects of information manage-ment including librarianship. The digital electro-nic technology on which modern computers arebased is also used by many forms of communica-tions device, both for voice communications, andfor broadcasting.

References

Winston, B. (1998) Media, Technology and Society,London and New York: Routledge.

SEE ALSO: communication; informatics;information and communication technology;information management

COMPUTER-ASSISTED LEARNINGIN LIBRARY ANDINFORMATION SCIENCE

The rapid pace of change in the library andinformation science (LIS) curriculum is leading tothe more extensive use of information technology(IT) in all aspects of LIS education. Students onLIS courses must, on completion of their chosencourse of study, have a broader range of IT-basedskills. LIS curricula now require that students behighly IT literate, and will include such diverseareas as HTML programming, electronic pub-lishing and online searching. These are only afew of the topics in which LIS students areeducated.In the early 1980s computer-assisted learning

(CAL) packages were created by academics toaid them in the teaching of students. This wasespecially so in information retrieval, asboth telecommunications and host databasecharges were prohibitive, and prevented exces-sive use of online teaching methods. CALpackages were created to avoid these charges.These conditions have now changed. Throughthe introduction of cd-rom, and of access to

databases via janet in the UK and similaracademic networks in other countries, the costof searching has been significantly reduced.Furthermore the host providers, such as DIA-LOG, now provide online tutorials that enablestudents to familiarize themselves with thedatabase, and how to search it. So, althoughreal-time searching may, on occasion, still beexpensive, it is possible for students to practiseusing databases and refining searches beforegoing online, thereby minimizing any costsincurred.These reasons mitigate against the creation of

specialist CAL packages, especially in compara-tively small disciplines like LIS. The cost ofproducing them, in terms of staff time andmaterial costs, is disproportionate to the lifespanof the product before revisions to the softwareare necessary. A package is likely to need updat-ing within two years of its creation.The only noteworthy CAL package still being

used in LIS education is CATSKILL. Produced bythe UK library association this allows stu-dents to learn cataloguing skills. The product hasbeen in use since the mid-1990s and is based onthe marc format and the anglo-americancataloguing rules. It maintains its currencyby focusing on cataloguing skills and standards,not technology.The rate of change in IT and the rapid

redundancy of technology have led to the flood-ing of the market with software trainingpackages that can instruct students in general ITliteracy. Departments of LIS have generally cho-sen to use industry standard software and train-ing packages without the need to create CALpackages internally. Students can, therefore, pre-pare themselves using the very tools they will usein the work environment following the comple-tion of their studies. The growth in the numberof these packages available makes it impossiblefor any printed directory to remain current oncepublished.LIS departments are now able to purchase

products by established IT training providers touse as part of their teaching. Products includetraining on word processing, spreadsheets anddatabases. Particular emphasis is being given inhigher education to the European ComputerDriving Licence (ECDL) syllabus, which is main-tained and supported by the British ComputingSociety. This can give students a foundation in

COMPUTER-ASSISTED LEARNING IN LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE 95

IT, from word processing through to networks.This programme is supported by commercialsoftware recommended by ECDL. Products, suchas Electric Paper, are now available and enablestudents to learn independently.The development of the internet has in-

creased the possibilities for developments ineducation. By using free and available technol-ogy, including HTML and Internet browsers,resources can now be made available more read-ily for students. Academics can prepare resourcesfor students, which can be accessed via theInternet. These range from reading lists, throughto assignments being made available online.There have also been some developments in theuse of Computer-Assisted Assessment (CAA) andfurther growth can be predicted for the future.The familiarity of students with the Internet

has led to an explosion of information availablevia the medium. Service providers, includingpublishers and libraries, are now more confidentin making their materials available electronicallyover the Internet. This encompasses library cata-logues, electronic journals, online tutorials andother resources to support students.Librarians, themselves the products of LIS

education, are providing online training forstudents via the Internet. Examples of guides toplagiarism, citation and information skills, toname but a few, can be found on universitywebsites. These have been created by librariansto aid students in their learning across all subjectdisciplines.UK higher education has sought ways to widen

participation. To this end both part-time anddistance learners have been targeted. This has ledto the advent of managed learning environments(MLEs) in higher education institutions and isgiving a new dimension to CAL. Students arenow able to log on remotely to systems thatprovide support and materials for their chosencourse of study. The Department of InformationScience at City University has been adapting thistechnology to develop their courses. The use ofMLEs will gradually increase over the comingyears, and some aspects of learning and teachingwill be given over to more electronically basedsolutions. CAL packages, as developed in the1980s, have ceased to be used, but with theincrease in the use of Internet technology a newelectronically based environment for education isbeing created.

Further reading

JISC (2001) ‘Managed Learning’ Environments(www.jisc.ac.uk/mle/).

Stephens, D. and Curtis, A. (2001) ‘Use of ComputerAssisted Assessment by staff in the teaching ofinformation science and library studies subjects’ITALICS 1 (www.ics.ltsn.ac.uk/pub/italics/index.html).

SEE ALSO: information science education; libraryeducation

ALAN BRINE

COMPUTER CRIME

A term used to describe both crimes directed atcomputers and networks, and crimes committedthrough the agency of computers. Some defini-tions are even more inclusive than this. TheRoyal Canadian Mounted Police, for instance,describe it as ‘Any illegal act which involves acomputer system, whether the computer is anobject of a crime, an instrument used to commita crime or a repository of evidence related to acrime’. They associate it with telecommunicationcrime, which they describe as ‘the fraudulent useof any telephone, microwave, satellite or othertelecommunication system’ (Computer Crime1999).

Does computer crime exist?

In fact, there is a strong case for denying theexistence of computer crime as such and arguingthat media and popular excitement concerning itis an example of ‘moral panic’. This line ofargument would hold that all the so-calledcomputer crimes are examples of previouslyidentified types of offence and are capable ofbeing dealt with by existing laws. Much of thepublic concern relates to security of credit cards.The credit card companies deny that details ofcards are ever stolen from within their systems,arguing that the problem occurs when details arestolen in the real world. Successful prosecutionsof computer-related offences under existing lawhave, however, proved very difficult to obtain.An exception is the death sentences against theHao brothers in 1998 for hacking into thecomputer system of a state-owned Chinese bank,and transferring money to bank accounts undertheir control. However, computer-related crimesdo usually share sufficient characteristics, in

96 COMPUTER CRIME

addition to the fact that they are usually difficultto prosecute, to make it worthwhile to discussthem as a category of crime. Despite such doubts,it is commonly accepted official practice to treatcomputer crime as a distinct category, and issuestatistics and estimates of its volume. The UKAudit Commission, for instance, has regularlyissued such estimates, whilst admitting that manyoffences involving computers are never reported,usually because the victims fear consequent pub-lic loss of confidence in their systems.

Fraud

Much computer crime is, in fact, merely fraudthat takes advantage of the facilities offered bycomputers. The massive and complex corporatefraud in the Equity Funding affair has some-times been quoted as the first major example ofcomputer fraud (Seidler et al. 1977). However,although the firm, and therefore the fraudsters,employed computers, there was virtually noth-ing in the whole case that originated in, orrelied on, the computer. Three categories ofcomputer fraud are usually identified, but thefirst two, input and output fraud, are arguablynot computer crime as such. An input fraudinvolves creating false data to enter into acomputer system so as to obtain some sort ofprofit or advantage for the person concerned. Afairly typical offence consisted of an employeereactivating retired colleagues’ records so thattheir ‘salaries’ could be directed to bank ac-counts she controlled. Output fraud is much lesscommon, or significant, and involves manipulat-ing data at the point of output from a compu-ter. Thus, a case of (input) fraud by a bankmanager also included suppressing other incri-minating records that the computer would gen-erate. Only the third category, program fraud,actually involves the computer as an essentialtool of the fraud. A new program is introducedinto a system, or an existing program modified,so as to achieve some fraudulent aim. A retailaccounting system that could conceal a propor-tion of transactions so as to reduce tax liabilityis often cited as a classic example.

Other offences

There are various other types of offence that arecommonly committed in the computer environ-ment. Invasions of privacy, ranging from reading

someone else’s e-mail to examining confidentialfiles on the medical, financial or business affairsof others, are typical. They usually involvestealing passwords or bypassing password pro-tection. Eavesdropping, often to obtain businessintelligence, through the agency of bugging de-vices clandestinely attached to computer systemsor the use of equipment that can pick upelectromagnetic radiation at a distance, is alsosaid to be widely practised. Sabotage of compu-ters, usually through the introduction of virusesbut occasionally through direct damage to themachinery, seems mainly to be done as a demon-stration of programming and network expertise,or, in the latter type of case, as a means ofobtaining temporary relief from the drudgery ofroutine computer-based employment. Theft ofsoftware, although an enormously profitable andcommon infringement of copyright, for practi-tioners of piracy and major unlicensed usersalike, is also practised by advocates of thesharing of software as a common good ratherthan a proprietorial product.

Hacking

Indeed, a great deal of the type of activitydescribed above is attributable to the activitiesof enthusiasts who make unsanctioned use ofnetworks and the access they give to otherpeople’s computers. Their activities follow fromand overlap with those of the phone phreaks whohave delighted in cheating the telephone compa-nies by finding ingenious methods of making freecalls. A distinction is generally made betweenhackers, who test their technical abilities andingenuity against computer systems in this way,and crackers, whose intentions are malicious.However, the activities of either can result indisruption and expense to those whose systemsprove vulnerable. The imagination and persis-tence with which they pursue this type of activityon networks is well captured in Clifford Stoll’senthralling account of his encounters with hack-ers (Stoll 1990). When hackers have been appre-hended for alleged offences, they have onoccasion successfully argued that they actedwithout malice and in the grip of an obsessionor addiction. Kevin Mitnick, whose major coupsincluded hacking into the North American AirDefence Command’s main computer in 1982,successfully avoided imprisonment in 1989 on

COMPUTER CRIME 97

the grounds of ‘impulse disorder’, and could citethe lack of any personal profit from his activitiesin support.

Responses

The laws that have been used, or suggested foruse, to prosecute computer-related crime inBritain include: the Theft Act, 1968, for theft ofelectricity; the Criminal Damage Act, 1971, forintroduction of viruses; and the Forgery andCounterfeiting Act, 1981, for the presentation ofa false password. However, it was the failure ofthe prosecution of the hackers Gold and Schif-reen under the forgery laws in 1988 that waslargely responsible for the introduction of the UKComputer Misuse Act of 1990. This introducedinto British law the three offences of unauthor-ized access to computers, unauthorized accesswith intent to commit a crime and unauthorizedmodification of the contents of a computer. Veryfew prosecutions have, however, been broughtunder the Act, and if it has had an effect at all ithas been merely as a deterrent. In 2001 theCouncil of Europe, a Europe-wide policy forumnot to be confused with the European Union,approved a Convention on Cyber Crime designedto harmonize laws on Internet crime. (Conven-tion 2001) Although the convention will onlycome into force if and when countries formallysign up to it, its inclusion of a very wide range ofoffences (copyright infringement, child pornogra-phy, malicious hacking, etc.) has aroused fearsamongst civil liberties groups.

References

Computer Crime (1999) ‘Can it affect you?’(www3.sk.sympatico.ca/rcmpccs/cpu-crim.html) [ac-cessed 2 April 1999].

Convention on Cyber Crime (2001). http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/EN/projets/FinalCybercrime.htm [ac-cessed 23 November 2001].

Seidler, L.J., Andrews, F. and Epstein, M.J. (1977) TheEquity Funding Papers: The Anatomy of a Fraud,Wiley.

Stoll, C. (1990) The Cuckoo’s Egg, Bodley Head.

Further reading

Bowcott, O. and Hamilton, S. (1992) Beating theSystem: Hackers, Phreaks and Electronic Spies,Bloomsbury.

Chaney, M. and MacDougall, A.F. (1992) Security andCrime Prevention in Libraries, Ashgate.

Clark, F. and Diliberto, K. (1996) Investigating Com-

puter Crime, CRC Press.Clough, B. and Mungo, P. (1992) Approaching Zero:Data Crime and the Computer Underworld, Faber.

Tapper, C. (1989) Computer Law, Longman.Wasik, M. (1991) Crime and the Computer, Oxford.

SEE ALSO: computer security; crime in libraries;encryption; information law; security in libraries

PAUL STURGES

COMPUTER SCIENCE

All the activities concerned with the complete orpartial automation of problem-solving strategiesusing some form of automatic system (usuallyknown as a computer). Currently such systemsare invariably implemented using electronic sig-nal processing, but this need not always be so(for example, early computer-like implementa-tions such as Babbage’s Analytical Engine werebased upon mechanical properties, and futuresystems may be chemically or biologically based).The term computer is usually restricted to sys-tems that operate using a stored ‘program’ or setof instructions describing the computations to becarried out. The system that actually executes theproblem solving (or computation) is known asthe computer or ‘hardware’ and the storedprogram (or programs) is collectively known asthe ‘software’. Using the stored program ap-proach, the same hardware can be used to solvemany different problems by loading and execut-ing different programs. Activities may be theory-based (for example examining the power, limitsand costs of the process of computation), design-based (design of hardware, languages, applica-tions, interfaces) or efficiency-based (the effi-ciency of algorithms, representations or theefficient storage and retrieval of information).

Acceptance of the term ‘computerscience’

The term ‘computer science’, whilst used quitegenerally, is not completely accepted. Opinionsdiffer as to whether the subject is a science, orwhether it is closer to an engineering discipline.In reality, it is probably best described as a cross-discipline subject. Other terms in use includecomputer (or computing) engineering, computingand computer studies. On the continent ofEurope, and increasingly in the UK, the term‘informatics’ is often used.

98 COMPUTER SCIENCE

Broad aims and coverage

Computer science covers all activities associatedwith computation, from hardware design (that isthe design of the computational engine) to theevaluation of the effectiveness of computer appli-cations in the field. The current content of thediscipline can be broadly separated into tensubject areas. These are:

. Architectural methods.

. Operating systems.

. Numerical and symbolic computation.

. Programming languages.

. Algorithms and data structures.

. Software methodology and engineering.

. Databases, knowledge management and infor-mation retrieval.

. artificial intelligence and robotics.

. Human–Computer Interaction (HCI).

. Graphics and visualization.

Three extensions to these subject areas – high-performance scientific computing, bio-informaticsand quantum computing – are currently of in-creasing interest in the community.Each of these subject areas can be understood

from three viewpoints – theory, abstraction anddesign (ACM 1991). Theory is concerned withaxioms and theorem proving (for example, com-putability and proving program correctness).Abstraction is concerned with data collectionand modelling, and the interpretation of results.Design involves the engineering aspects of com-puter science including requirements analysis,design rationale and implementation, methodol-ogies, testing and analysis.

Subject areas in more detail

ARCHITECTURAL METHODS

This area focuses on the overall design of theessential components of computing systems –processors (serial or parallel), memory organiza-tions, communications software and hardware,systems distribution and software/hardware inter-faces. Key objectives include the design of sys-tems that are predictable, reliable, safe andefficient. Architectural research has increasinglyfocused on distributed systems and their inter-connection, and the transmission of complexmedia between systems. High-performance scien-tific computing, for example, involves the inter-connection of powerful remote computers using

high-speed communication lines.

OPERATING SYSTEMS

This area covers the development of controlmechanisms (usually in software) that allow forthe efficient use of multiple computing resourcessuch as processor time, disk space, communica-tions facilities and memory, by concurrentlyexecuting programs. In recent times such controlsystems have been extended to cover distributedor ‘grid’ systems (that is, processors and memorydistributed geographically, connected by high-speed communication lines).

NUMERICAL AND SYMBOLIC COMPUTATION

A highly mathematical area concerned with theefficient solution of equations using either sym-bolic (i.e. algebraic) or numeric (i.e. approxima-tion) techniques. Work in this area has resulted inhighly reliable and efficient packages of mathe-matical routines for science and engineeringresearch workers.

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES

Programming languages are notations for in-structing virtual machines on how to executealgorithms. Many different types of program-ming language exist that are appropriate forsolving particular problems. The four mainclasses of language are procedural (such asFORTRAN, PASCAL or BASIC), functional(such as LISP, ML and HASKELL), object-oriented (examples include SMALLTALK, EIF-FEL, JAVA and Cþþ) and logic programming(PROLOG).

ALGORITHMS AND DATA STRUCTURES

This area is concerned with the development ofefficient methods for solving specific problems(algorithms) and how data is organized (andaccessed) in computer memory or in secondarystorage.

SOFTWARE METHODOLOGY AND ENGINEERING

This area is concerned with the specification,design and development of large software sys-tems. Techniques and approaches include re-quirements and systems analysis, goodprogramming practice (step-wise refinement,structured programming), verification and valida-tion techniques for showing that programsactually do what they have been designed to do,

COMPUTER SCIENCE 99

and testing techniques. Safety, security, reliabilityand dependability are key goals.

Databases, knowledge management andinformation retrieval

This area is primarily concerned with theorganization of, and access to, data on second-ary storage (disks, tapes, floppy disks or CDdrives). Database techniques attack the problemsof storing and accessing large amounts of highlystructured data in an efficient and flexiblemanner. Such large collections of data willusually be accessed by many terminals at localand remote locations, so that security, integrityand privacy are major issues. More recently, thestorage and retrieval of multimedia data hasbecome important. This involves not only newstorage techniques but also new retrieval me-chanisms in which elements of the media them-selves are used as search strings. Thedevelopment of the world wide web has alsohad a major impact in database and informa-tion retrieval research.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND ROBOTICS

Artificial intelligence has two main goals – thesimulation of human intelligent behaviour incomputer systems, and the testing of possiblemodels of human behaviour. Key aspects includeknowledge representation, inference, deductionand pattern recognition. Early successes involvedthe creation of expert systems (systems storingrepresentations of expert knowledge). Othertechniques include neural networks and geneticalgorithms. With the introduction of object-oriented programming and the internet, thedevelopment of software agents has become animportant research area.

HUMAN–COMPUTER INTERACTION

The field of HCI is mainly concerned with theefficient transfer of information between personsand computers. It is the study of how humanbeings and computers interact. It involves theconception, design, implementation, and evalua-tion of the effects of user interfaces and tools onthose who use them. A key design principle isuser-centred design, where the needs, capabilitiesand limitations of the intended users are properlytaken into account during the design process.More recently, the implications of group working

and the effects of the organizational environmenthave also become a focus for research.

Recent developments

There used to be a clear distinction betweenhardware and software (that is, the machinerythat carried out the computation and the set ofinstructions for that computation). Recently suchdistinctions have become blurred. First, there wasthe development of microprogramming that pro-vided a bridge between hardware and software,allowing computers to emulate other computersbased on different hardware. Second, the devel-opment of programming in Silicon has resulted ina form of hardware programming (or ‘firm-ware’).

The object-oriented paradigm has been enthu-siastically adopted in many application areas andthe language JAVA is now widely used, partlybecause it is platform independent, meaning thatJAVA programs can be passed and executedacross dissimilar computers. This makes it idealfor Web-based applications.

Another important development has been theadoption of software-agent technology. Suchagents are autonomous, proactive and have somelimited social awareness. Some problems cannow be solved efficiently using collections of co-operating agents that, if built using languagessuch as JAVA, may be spread across dissimilarand remote computers.

Quantum computing (or quantum informationprocessing) exploits quantum mechanical effectsfor computation and information transfer.Although in its early stages, this research hasalready yielded cryptographical methods for un-conditionally secure information transfer.

References

ACM (1991) Computing Curricula, Report of theACM/IEEE–CS Joint Task Force.

Further reading

Bacon, J. (1998) Concurrent Systems: Operating Sys-tems, Database and Distributed Systems, an Inte-grated Approach, 2nd edn, Addison-Wesley.

Date, C.J. (1999) Introduction to Database Systems, 7th

edn, Addison-Wesley.Russell, S.J. and Norvig, P. (1994) Artificial Intelli-gence, a Modern Approach, 1st edn, Prentice-Hall.

Schneider, F.B. and Rodd, M. (2001) InternationalReview of UK Research in Computer Science, IEE.

100 COMPUTER SCIENCE

Silberschatz, A., Galvin, P.B. and Gagne, G. (2001)Operating Systems, 6th edn, John Wiley & Sons.

Sommerville, I. (2000) Software Engineering, 6th edn,Addison-Wesley.


J.L. ALTY

COMPUTER SECURITY

The term includes the policies, practices andtechnology necessary to preserve computers,networks, software, data and communicationsfrom accidental or malicious damage. The ex-treme vulnerability of digital information itselfhas been further compounded by the increasinglynetworked computer environment. Theft, intru-sion, espionage and malicious damage can becarried out from distant sites, and the conse-quences of data errors, fire and natural disasterscan have far-reaching effects. The majority ofcompanies will admit that security breachesoccur every year, and that many of these can beregarded as serious. The consequences of seriousfailures in security are capable of crippling ordestroying the computerized organization. Sur-veys suggest that public confidence in the secur-ity of systems for banking, commerce and othertransactions is low. At the same time, there aremany computer security products on the market,and the services of security consultants can beused in the creation of comprehensive protectionfor the organization’s facilities. Despite this,computer security is widely neglected. Thisshows itself both in organizational informationpolicy-making (see organizational informa-tion policies) and the observation of existingsets of security rules.

Types of security

The physical security of computer systems needsto be protected first of all through protection ofthe areas in which they are located. Environmen-tal protection of computer facilities begins withrestricted human access to relevant areas, or thewhole, of computerized premises. Identity cards,passwords, door codes, restricted access to keysand alarm systems are amongst the methods bywhich this can be achieved. Video surveillance isincreasingly used to deter those who might offera threat to computer and other property andfacilities, and as a means of identifying those

who might have attempted or succeeded in someform of physical intrusion. Physical security alsoincludes protection of power supply, heating,ventilation and lighting systems. Power failures,excessive heat and humidity, water damage, fireand excessive quantities of dust and dirt (whetherairborne or introduced by people) can all causeirretrievable damage.The security of computer hardware itself then

follows. Theft of computers or computer chips iscommon and increasingly easy as systems be-come more and more compact and portable.Malicious damage to hardware is also a potentialproblem. Both of these are initially combated byprotecting the areas in which hardware is lo-cated, but also security cables can be used toattach computers to walls and immovable ob-jects. Drive locks can also be employed toprevent unauthorized use of hardware. Smart-card technology also controls access by holdingencrypted passwords, IDs and, if required, bio-metric means of identification, based on voice-prints, fingerprints, iris recognition and otherunique data about authorized users.Software security is needed to protect against

both indiscriminate damage of the kind causedby viruses, and the more specific abuses that canbe inflicted by people either within or outside theorganization. Virtually all organizations experi-ence virus attacks, and protect against these byattempting to prevent employees introducingdata and software from unauthorized sources,and running virus protection software and fire-wall systems. Firewalls enforce access controlbetween networks, or individual sectors of asystem, by controlling connections, authenticat-ing users, filtering data and creating security logsfor audit purposes. encryption is also widelyused as a software solution for the protection ofdata security. Information, which might be e-mailmessages or other files that are to be commu-nicated, is scrambled in a manner that only theintended receiver can decrypt.Finally, however, a system is only as secure as

the people who have access to it. An organizationthat is strongly concerned with security will needto screen potential employees for dishonestclaims in their applications and curriculum vitae,and evidence of personal history that mightsuggest unreliability. It is quite common toconduct extensive security checks where sensitiveposts are concerned, making use of credit ratingagencies, legal records and even the services of

COMPUTER SECURITY 101

private investigation agencies. The sensitivity ofparticular posts needs to be thoroughly assessedand the duties that are allocated to employeesmay need to be segregated so that the duties ofone employee will provide a cross-check on thework of another. Important though such precau-tions may be, it is arguably much more impor-tant that there is good training of all employeeswith computer access in good security practice.This will include, as a priority, protection of theirpasswords and other access facilities, and theregular backing up and secure storage of data.

Security policy

Computer security is essentially a matter oforganizational policy, and like all such areas itcalls for a thorough process of policy making,including appropriate research and consultation.Identification of the resources to be protectedand an assessment of risks and threats areessential starting points. The organization’s pol-icy should set out the conclusions drawn fromthis broad analysis, but then the policy must bebacked up by guidelines on procedures and thestandards to be applied. Lines of responsibilitywithin the organization are particularly vital andat the apex of the system there should be asecurity administrator or team to take responsi-bility for the area. Large companies and govern-ment agencies frequently employ computersecurity consultants, sometimes referred to as‘ethical hackers’ to test their systems and proce-dures so as to identify problems. Finally, such isthe speed of change in the field and the scale ofthe problems that occur that even a thoroughlyprotected organization will need a contingencyplan so as to respond to some unanticipateddisaster

Further reading

Gollmann, D. (1999) Computer Security, Wiley.Information Management and Computer Security(1992–) ISSN 0968–5227.

Shim, J.K, Qureshi, A.A. and Siegel, J.G. (2000) TheInternational Handbook of Computer Security, Glen-lake Publishing.

White, G.W. et al. (1996) Computer Systems andNetwork Security, CRC Press.

SEE ALSO: computer crime; data protection;disaster preparedness planning; security inlibraries

PAUL STURGES

CONCORDANCE

An alphabetical index of words in a document orset of documents, each word present in the textbeing an index entry.

CONSERVATION

The preservation of materials by the physicaland chemical treatment of them and throughpreventive care. The purpose of conservation isto stabilize materials, to retard their furtherdeterioration and to maintain them in a condi-tion as close as possible to their original form. Ingeneral no attempt is made to restore materialsto look as they did originally. Although pre-viously the term ‘conservation’ implied primarilytreatment, it now often is defined more widelyand includes preventive care practices. Conserva-tion treatment is carried out by professionallytrained conservators or conservation technicianswho work under the supervision of a conservator.These conservators are also familiar with pre-ventive care practices and how to implementthem.Physical treatments that are invasive destroy

much of the physical evidence in an object,evidence that can tell how, and frequently where,the object was produced. Such evidence in booksand manuscripts is essential for bibliographers,and scholars of the history, technology andproduction of the book. Conservators are trainedto avoid invasive treatments and, when they arenecessary, to save all physical evidence foundwithin a book, such as sewing thread andmaterial from the covers.A number of outstanding book and paper

conservators and educators have been trained inapprenticeship programmes in the UK and incontinental Europe. Only slowly, over the pastforty years, as conservation evolved from a craftto a profession, did training programmes developwithin academic institutions. Today book andpaper conservators are trained in rigorous pro-grammes that combine theory with practice intreatment. Programmes offer undergraduate and/or postgraduate certificates or degrees. To enrolin a conservation training programme a studentmust have specific credentials in art history orthe humanities and in science, especially chemis-try, and demonstrate superior manual skills. Inaddition to their academic training, conservatorsspend one or more years in internships in their

102 CONCORDANCE

specialties before reaching full professional sta-tus. At that point a conservator may elect to gointo private practice or join a conservationdepartment within a library, archive or museum.Many senior conservators are Fellows of the

International Institute for the Conservation ofArt and Historic Artefacts (IIC) and/or theirnational professional organizations, such as theInternational Institute for Conservation – Cana-dian Group (IIC–CG), the Australian Institute forthe Conservation of Cultural Materials(AICCM), or the American Institute for theConservation of Art and Historic Artefacts(AIC). Many book and paper conservators arealso members of the Institute of Paper Conserva-tion (IPC), which recently developed an accred-itation programme.Today’s conservators are generous with their

time and knowledge, sharing the results ofresearch and solutions to conservation problemswith their colleagues. The IIC journal, Studies inConservation, and the Australian and Americanjournals deal with conservation in all fields andoften have excellent articles on book, paper andphotograph conservation, as well as on researchinto environmental concerns such as light da-mage. Restaurator, published in Munich, is aninternational journal for the preservation oflibrary and archival material. IPC publishes anannual journal, The Paper Conservator, withrefereed papers, and the AIC Book and PaperGroup issues an unrefereed Annual. Both publishcurrent research and treatment reports of con-siderable interest, not only to conservators butalso to librarians and archivists. The AbbeyNewsletter, published in Austin, Texas, USA, alsoprovides current information about conservationresearch. Art and Archaeology Technical Ab-stracts (AATA), published by the Getty Conserva-tion Institute (GCI) in association with IIC,provides printed and online abstracts of theconservation literature. The latest tool for com-munication among conservators is the Internet,which carries debates about theory and treat-ments on various ‘listservs’ with active partici-pants from around the world.Libraries, archives and museums contract for

conservation treatment with conservators in pri-vate practice in lieu of, or in addition to,treatments undertaken in-house. In addition totreatments, conservators frequently undertakesurveys to determine the physical condition oflibrary and archival collections, and of the

environment in which the collections are stored.These surveys help librarians, archivists andcurators create environments that will preservecollections, for it is useless to treat a damagedbook or document if it is returned to conditionsthat contribute to its deterioration. A profes-sional conservator knows a great deal about thephysical nature of the materials and how toremedy harmful environmental conditions, oftenat little cost. More and more, conservators areasked to assist in establishing an environmentalmonitoring programme in an institution or toimplement other preventive care measures.A professional conservator will explain treat-

ment options to librarians and archivists but willnot appraise materials, which is against theprofession’s ethical code of practice. A conserva-tor will assess the damage to a book or documentand will prepare an estimate for treatment,explaining what treatment will be undertaken.Conservators keep detailed treatment records,with photographic documentation before, duringand following treatment for valuable items. Fortreatment of entire collections, such as a largecollection of documents, less detailed treatmentrecords are kept to minimize cost.This represents a recent shift from single item

to collections conservation. Technological andeconomic developments have caused conserva-tors to view their work in new ways and tochange their approach to preservation. Theystrive to make the most effective use of newtechnologies to preserve not just single items,but entire collections. Today book and paperconservators frequently treat groups of docu-ments, photographs or books to stabilize them,and a subspeciality of collections conservation isemerging. In the USA a recently formed LibraryCollections Conservation Discussion Group(LCCDG) meets at the annual meeting of theAmerican Institute for Conservation, and anumber of articles on collections care haveappeared in the literature.Conservation as a profession has evolved from

the craft of restoration. Today its focus is aslikely to be on the preservation of entire collec-tions as on the treatment of single items, andactivities are as likely to include preventive carepractices as complex treatment procedures. Thegoal, however, remains the same – to extend theuseful life of library and archival materials forfuture generations.

CONSERVATION 103

Further reading

Merrill-Oldham, J. and Schrock, N.C. (2000) ‘Theconservation of general collections’, in P.N. Banksand R. Pilette (eds), Preservation Issues and Plan-ning, Chicago and London: American Library Asso-ciation, pp. 225–47.

Stewart, E. (2000) ‘Special collections conservation’, inP.N. Banks and R. Pilette (eds), Preservation Issuesand Planning, Chicago and London: American Li-brary Association, pp. 285–307.

SEE ALSO: bibliography; paper; preservation;special collections

SUSAN G. SWARTZBURG, REVISED AND UPDATED

BY SHERELYN OGDEN

CONSOLIDATION OFINFORMATION

The restructuring of existing public knowledgeinto the form of a text or other form of message,so as to make it available to those whosecircumstances would otherwise effectively denythem access to this knowledge.Whilst this is essentially a process that is

already used in all kinds of circumstances(broadcasting, journalism, etc.), it has beendiscussed amongst information scientists becauseof its potential for information services in lessdeveloped countries. Weak local publishing in-dustries, poor availability of imported books andjournals, and unsatisfactory access to onlineinformation all lead to a call for alternatives.Repackaging, or, more correctly, provision ofconsolidated information, is often offered as suchan alternative. The consolidation process, asdescribed by Saracevic and Wood (1981), beginswith the study of potential users, selection ofprimary information sources and the evaluationof their information content. Analysis of contentto permit restructuring (condensation, rewriting,etc.) and packaging or repackaging of the re-structured information can then follow. Thediffusion or dissemination of the packages shouldbe accompanied by feedback from users toenable evaluation and adjustment of the processto take place.This process is in the first place, of course,

totally dependent on the availability of informa-tion content to repackage. This content can bederived from published material, from raw datacollected by research institutes and governmentstatistical services, from grey literature, from

information acquired electronically via onlineservices and networks, and indeed from thepeople’s own corpus of indigenous knowledge.Given the existence of suitable materials toconsolidate, for an effective process to followthere are three main requirements: first, thatinformation materials such as books and jour-nals, or grey literature, should be collected oraccessed and their content organized efficiently;second, that there should be the capacity toresearch the content and create new informationpackages from it; and, third, that these newproducts should be disseminated effectively.National and public library services, national

and local archives, and national institutes ofresearch are all capable of contributing to theacquisition of source materials. However, thepoint is made very strongly by Saracevic andWood that the information consolidation unitproper needs a host organization that containssubject experts. The work needs to be done bypeople who have a full understanding of both themessage they must repackage and the audiencefor which it is intended. Specialized researchinstitutions in particular subject areas providethe necessary technical expertise in interpretingthe source materials, rewriting and re-presentingthe information for different media of commu-nication, whilst a broad-based service, such as alibrary or archive, does not. Sturges (1994) citesthe Botswana Technology Centre as an exampleof a subject specialist institution performing thisfunction effectively. To complete the chain, in-stitutions are required that are able to mediatethe delivery of information, in the context ofplaces and situations accepted by the public.Extension and adult education services, broad-casting corporations, libraries and other informalinformation services whose personnel understandtheir public are amongst the various suitableinstitutions.The ultimate product of the consolidation

process may be a printed leaflet, such as theTechnical Bulletins on Better Care for Your CarBattery, An Easier Way to Make Tomato Cratesor Protecting Your Home against Lightning fromthe Botswana Technology Centre. It can be averbal message passed on by the central manage-ment of an Agricultural Extension Service to theextension workers at their regular training ses-sions, so that they can disseminate it to farmerswho they will visit in their homes or meet ingroups for practical demonstrations of farming

104 CONSOLIDATION OF INFORMATION

improvements. It can be the content of a radiobroadcast, whether as a simple announcement,part of a documentary programme or embeddedin a fictional serial directed at the rural commu-nity, such as Kenya’s Ndinga Nacio. It can be thehealth education songs and playlets performed invillages by the Malawi Ministry of Health’sKatemera Band. It can be a cd-rom product, afile available via the internet or whateverproduct the community at which it is aimed willbest absorb, but essentially it will embody theoriginal knowledge, from whatever source, trans-formed by expert hands into something moreappropriate to prevailing circumstances.

References

Saracevic, T. and Wood, J.B. (1981) Consolidation ofInformation: A Handbook on Evaluation, Restruc-turing and Repackaging of Scientific and TechnicalInformation, UNESCO.

Sturges, P. (1994) ‘Using grey literature in informalinformation services in Africa’, Journal of Documen-tation 50: 273–90.

SEE ALSO: dissemination of information; socialexclusion and libraries

PAUL STURGES

CONSPECTUS

A tool to enable libraries to describe theirexisting collection strengths and current collect-ing interests. It was conceived in 1979 in thecontext of library co-operation and the moreeffective sharing of resources, originally withinNorth America. Codes are allocated to a collec-tion to indicate collection strength, linguistic andgeographical coverage and intellectual level. Thedata was made available through RLIN. In 1983Research Libraries Group and the Association ofResearch Libraries in the USA joined forces towork on the North American Collection Inven-tory Project (NCIP), to provide data online aboutthe collections of a large number of libraries.NCIP has been growing steadily.Interest in Conspectus has grown outside

North America. In Australia the National Li-brary has accepted Conspectus methodology andthere has also been much interest from theuniversity and the state libraries. The NationalLibrary of Scotland and the british libraryhave also been active. After the first meeting ofthe Conference of European National Librarians

in 1987, the National Libraries ConspectusGroup was established, with representatives fromthe National Libraries of France, Germany, Hol-land, Portugal and the United Kingdom.

SEE ALSO: collection management; libraryco-operation; research libraries

CONSULTANCY

Consultants are widely used as a means toaddress some particular need experienced by theorganization without increasing the salaried staffestablishment. The practice has been a growthindustry since the 1980s, and has grown evenmore rapidly as companies in the 1990s soughtto divest themselves of all but their core function.The information sector of the economy usesconsultants for a wide range of services, whichcan include planning, research, informationaudit and system and database design. Thedistinction between the consultant and the in-formation broker is seldom a clear one, sincepeople describing themselves as consultants arefrequently engaged to find information, conductonline searches or provide document delivery.However, used strictly the term consultant shouldrefer to someone whose services go much beyondinformation provision. Consultants are expectedto be able to offer a detached and objective viewof the organization’s needs and problems, and,for their fee, to recommend and, on occasion,implement fresh solutions.

Further reading

Vickers, P. (1992) ‘Information consultancy in the UK’,Journal of Information Science 18: 259–67.

SEE ALSO: fee-based services; informationprofessions; research in library and informationscience

CONTENT

The term describes the information that in-formation systems and mass media carry, andthus makes an important distinction, which isnot always made clear, between the medium andthe message. The cultural industries andknowledge industries produce a flow of data,text, images, moving images and multimediacombinations of these, and there is an enormousheritage of artistic, scholarly, popular, technical

CONTENT 105

and scientific material in established forms, someof which is undergoing or likely to undergodigitization. This is content, and its exploita-tion is the reason why information and com-munication technology has gone so fartowards creating an information society.In terms of information systems, content is

regarded both as information structured in someway, as a database or (comparatively) unstruc-tured text. Content objects are discrete bodies ofinformation and thus the building blocks of anyprovision of content to users. They are describedas having certain levels of granularity. Thus thefinest grained objects are individual documents,graphics, audio clips and similar individual itemsin other formats. Coarser granularity is repre-sented by collections, such as sites, applicationsand databases, consisting of fine-grained objects.The business of acquiring content for mediadistribution is highly profitable and has resultedin the emergence of enormous content-basedcompanies such as AOL Time Warner. Theyacquire marketable content from many sources,and vigorously defend intellectual propertyrights.

Further reading

Sturges, P. (1999) ‘The pursuit of content’, Educationfor Information 17: 175–85.

CONTINUING PROFESSIONALDEVELOPMENT

Continuing professional development (CPD) isthe acquisitions of professional skills and knowl-edge beyond those required for initial qualifica-tion and learned in formal programmes ofeducation. It is an activity strongly promotedby library and information associations, whichtypically make provision for it by providingseminars and workshops, and perhaps throughtheir publications. It involves a systematic ap-proach to staff development and continuingeducation, usually consisting of a programme oflearning opportunities made available over aperiod of time. The intention is to ensure thatinformation workers continue to acquire andadapt their skills and knowledge to a swiftlychanging professional environment. Increasingly,professionals are expected to take responsibilityfor their own CPD as they plan the enhance-

ment of their skills and the development of theircareers.

Further reading

Dawson, A. (1998) ‘Skills of the archive labour pool’,Journal of the Society of Archivists 19: 177–87.

Evans, J. (1996) ‘Continuing professional develop-ment’, Education for Information Services: Australia13: 37–42.

Prytherch, R. (2002) The Literature Review: State ofthe Sector Project, London: Library and InformationCommission (report no. 166).

SEE ALSO: information professions; informationscience education; library associations; libraryeducation

CONTRACTS FOR INFORMATIONPROVISION

Contracts determine the ground rules of therelationship between the provider and the clientin imaginative and useful ways. An understand-ing of the role of contract is essential to every-one, at whatever level or in whatever type oforganization, concerned with the provision ofinformation. The importance lies not only in theability of the contract to set out the basic ‘workfor money’ agreement, but also in the way itenables disputes to be avoided or, if that is notpossible, at least contained. They need not beregarded as mechanisms for keeping clients atarm’s length, though they can do this. Moreproperly they should be regarded as a marketingtool that allows the needs of the client to beidentified, structured relative to fees and targetedto fit need so that the client gets no less thanrequired but no more. Nowhere is this moreimportant than in relation to intellectualproperty rights.Contracts for information provision need no

special format, which means that they can beentered into verbally or in writing. The majorproblem with oral contracts is that there is noproof as to their content or existence. If, forexample, A had carried out work for B as theresult of a telephone call, then there is a verbalcontract between A and B. If, however, B subse-quently reneges, there is little that A can do. Evenif A can convince a court that work was carriedout in expectation of a fee, the court is likely toimpose what it believes to be a reasonable fee.

106 CONTINUING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

This is hardly satisfactory; in effect the parties(or more exactly the party who carried out thework) have abdicated the right to negotiate aprofessional fee for services rendered.Written contracts, on the other hand, prove

the existence of a relationship but present differ-ent problems, namely, what terms to include andhow to interpret them. The latter questioncannot be answered here but some indication isgiven below of the types of term that will beuseful. Even a precisely drawn contract cannotcover every eventuality, but at the worst it canact as the foundation for a court action and atbest it can stimulate realistic formal negotiationthat allows parties to be aware of whether theyare asking favours or enforcing rights so ashopefully to allow the parties to continue anongoing business relationship. The contract hasmany other advantages too, which the followingreview will highlight.

Entry

One must avoid verbal contracts, for the reasonsstated above, yet it would be unrealistic to expectevery commission for a client to have a formalwritten contract associated with it. However, ifthe provider adopts a standard business contract,which has been designed to cover a range ofpossible circumstances, stratifying the types ofservice to be provided through different levels ofuser licence, each with variations on the restric-tions imposed in keeping with appropriate feestructures, in much the same way as an insurancepolicy has different schedules attached, then thiscan be used as a reference document for alltransactions. All that is then required, whetherthe client approaches in writing, fax or simpletelephone call, is an indication, at the time of thecontact, that the provider is dealing on theirstandard terms of business followed immediatelyby the completion of a standard confirmatoryletter referring to and incorporating the appro-priate provisions of the reference document. Acontract has been made and the detailed termsevidenced in writing; it is still better if a copy ofthe standard terms is sent simultaneously, and itcan even be printed on the back. The letter canalso detail the name of the client, informationrequirements, purposes for which information isrequired and the appropriate sections of thereference contract.

Defining the relationship

Liability for either party under the contractresults from a failure to meet the terms; conse-quently, the way in which the terms are draftedwill to a large degree determine the existence ofliability. The contract must clearly stipulatewhat is being provided in return for the fee,but equally must delineate what has not beenprovided. This latter element is important notonly as a marketing device to establish a path-way to greater value-added fees, relative to theclient’s needs, but also in recording the use forwhich the information was provided so as to setlimits on the professional standard that theprovider must achieve in the event of anysubsequent action for negligence. Provided thatthis standard is established, a provider who uses‘best practice’ is unlikely to fall foul of a claimfor negligence. Such a clear definition of pur-pose is also useful, particularly where theprovider is an intermediary using copyright orother information gained from another, to estab-lish what rights of further use and distributionthe client may have. If the provider is anintermediary (for example, is acting as a host)such definition must match the provider’s con-tract with the source of information so that it isclearly within the remit allowed for the use ofthat information, e.g. is the provider’s furtherdissemination of that information a breach ofcopyright or confidence?

Exclusion of liability

The first point to make is that a carefully draftedcontract will substantially diminish the probabil-ity of liability in the first place. It will defineclearly and precisely what the parties must do tofulfil their obligations, so that disputes of the‘who should do what’ variety should not happen.But, even when things do go wrong, the contractcan cater for minor failures or incursions byincluding a graduated scale of agreed damagespayable by the parties on the occurrence ofspecified events, such as lateness, all the way tothe rights of the parties on termination of theagreement. It is also useful, in order to avoidpotentially costly court appearances, to includean arbitration clause. When it does becomenecessary to consider exclusion it is wise to beara number of key points in mind:

CONTRACTS FOR INFORMATION PROVISION 107

1 It is usually acceptable to exclude all liabilityfor the acts of another.

2 It is not usually acceptable to attempt a totalexclusion of one’s own liability; the courtswill usually view an attempt to do so asunfair. Much more acceptable is a limitationof liability. This can include quite strictlimitations if one is dealing with anotherbusiness party of equal bargaining power.The position taken by the court is that suchparties will, like the provider, have lawyersadvising and so must be assumed to knowwhat they are doing.

3 Where the other party with whom one iscontracting can be viewed as a consumer,then any attempt to exclude liability will betotally disallowed or highly constrainedeither by the Unfair Contract Terms Act1977 or, more recently, the Unfair Terms inConsumer Contracts Regulations 1994,which put into effect the EU Directive onUnfair Terms in Consumer Contracts 1993and came into effect on 1 July 1995. Theregulations go so far as to allow pre-emptivestrikes against unfair terms.

The end of the contract

The contract ends when each of the parties hasfulfilled its obligations. This will end the relation-ship between the parties, unless some term isincluded for renewal. Where a party has brokenan obligation under the contract, where there hasbeen a breach of warranty or minor term, thecontract will not necessarily end but damagesmay be payable. These may either have beenpreviously agreed by the parties, as suggestedabove, or be imposed by the court. Where therehas been a breach of a major term, a condition,the contract will end, unless the innocent partywaives his rights and treats it as a breach ofwarranty. The contract can make this rightexplicit. Damages may be payable here too.When the court assesses damages it does so ontwo bases. First, do the damages claimed ‘arisenaturally from the breach’ or are they too remote(for example has the client lost contracts as aresult of the provider’s failure)? Second, the courtwill assess the amount payable, which must becommensurate with loss but may be more thanjust the contract price. The party claiming has aduty to mitigate loss.

Further reading

Downes, T.A. (1991) Textbook on Contract, Black-stone Press.

Major, W.T. (1990) Casebook on Contract Law, Pit-man.

Slee, D. (1991) ‘Legal aspects of information provi-sion’, in The Information Business, Issues for the1990s, Hertis Information and Research.

SEE ALSO: liability for information provision

DAVID SLEE

CONVERGENCE

1 The coming together of technologies andmedia, both technically and industrially;thus fibre-optic cables can deliver television,voice communications, interactive comput-ing or viewdata systems. Group media own-ership (e.g. of newspapers, motion pictureproducts, complete broadcasting systems) isbecoming common as a consequence of thetechnological developments.

2 The coming together of library and comput-ing services in universities, both manage-rially and operationally. There is a livelyprofessional debate on the benefits andpotential pitfalls of the convergence of li-braries and computing services, within thecontext of a rapidly changing technologicaland learning environment, not least in rela-tion to the wider developments in virtuallearning environments.

3 The integration of access methods to localinformation and remote-site information,where the remote-site information typicallyrefers to remote online bibliographic infor-mation.

Further reading

Sidgreaves, Ivan et al. (1995) ‘Library and computingservices: Converge, merge or diverge?’, The Journalof the University College and Research Group 42: 3–9.

SEE ALSO: information professions; knowledgeindustries

COOKIES

A cookie is a very small text file that is placed ona user’s hard drive by a Web page server, whenthe user visits a particular site. It functions as a

108 CONVERGENCE

means of identification and can be read by theserver that placed it so as to record the user’scomings and goings, usually without their knowl-edge or consent. The companies that use themdescribe them as a helpful means of personalizingthe service that they provide to users when theyreturn to a site. Their contention is that this is inthe interests of both the company and the user,but cookies are widely regarded as a tool ofexcessive covert surveillance by the commer-cial sector.

COPYRIGHT

A legal concept that concerns rights to copy.Copyright protects the labour, skill and judge-ment that someone – author, artist or someother creator – expends in the creation of anoriginal piece of work, whether it is a so-called‘literary work’, a piece of music, a painting, aphotograph, a TV programme or any othercreated work.

Acquiring copyright

Copyright is an automatic right in the UK; thereis no need to register with any authority, andputting # is not essential, although the case isdifferent in many other legal systems. Remarks atthe start of books along the lines of ‘All rightsreserved. No part of this publication may bephotocopied, recorded or otherwise reproduced,stored in any retrieval system, etc.’ are notnecessary to gain copyright protection, and in-deed have no validity in British law. The Copy-right, Designs and Patents Act (1988) and itsrelated Statutory Instruments determine whatmay or may not be reproduced or photocopied.

Who can own copyright?

The owner of copyright can be an individual oran organization; in the latter case, an employeewho creates something as part of the course ofhis/her normal duties passes ownership of thecopyright to his/her employer. UK law uses theword ‘author’ in its broadest sense, to apply to,say, not only a novelist but also a playwright,composer, photographer, artist and so on. Anyworks originated by a corporate body that showno personal author are protected as ‘anonymousworks’. Copyright can change hands by assign-ment. A novelist or an author of a learned article

typically assigns to a publisher the right toreproduce copies of his/her work.The law gives rights of protection not only to

originators but also to those who create particu-lar physical formats for general distribution orsale, such as publishers of printed books, produ-cers of audiovisual media and providers ofbroadcasting services. Certain rights are alsogiven to performers of plays and other works.It is important to note that copyright is a

negative right. It does not give someone the rightto copy items; it gives the owner the right toprevent others copying items. No one is obligedto give such permission if they do not want to doso. An author (and his/her heirs) is granted amonopoly for a finite period. After the period,copyright ends and the materials are said to ‘fallinto the public domain’; they are then usablewithout restriction by third parties.Copyright can only occur provided a work is

‘fixed’ or recorded in some form. Thus, forexample, a speech or a telephone conversation isnot copyright unless it is in some fixed format,such as a tape recording or a transcript. Careshould be taken not to confuse copyright withlegal deposit, which is also known as copy-right deposit.

Originality

A work must be original to be regarded ascopyrightable. Under current UK law its degreeof originality need not be large. ‘Original’ implies‘not copied’. Works can overlap by coincidence.Thus, if two people take a photograph of theHouses of Parliament from the same spot, bothown the copyright in their respective photo-graphs even though the images might be identi-cal.There is no copyright in a fact, such as the

closing share price for a company, the tempera-ture in London today, the capital of a country orbibliographical citations, even if the fact isoriginal.

Restricted acts

The copyright owner has the right to preventothers from selling, hiring out, copying, perform-ing in public, broadcasting on radio or TV, oramending (‘adapting’) the copyright work. Theseacts are the so-called restricted acts. Just becausesomeone owns the copyright, this does notnecessarily mean he/she can produce copies at

COPYRIGHT 109

will – for example if the work breaks nationalsecurity law, or if it infringes someone else’scopyright. It is possible for a work to be originalcopyright and yet infringe someone else’s copy-right. This sort of situation is not uncommon inintellectual property law. Infringement ofcopyright occurs if someone does one of therestricted acts without the copyright owner’spermission. He/she can be sued for this. Exceptin extreme cases, the penalty for this is paymentof financial damages to the aggrieved party.

International treaties

Copyright law is governed by international trea-ties, the most important of which are the berneconvention and the Universal Copyright Con-vention. These allow for basic minimum laws inall countries that are parties to the particulartreaty, and allow for reciprocal protection fornationals from other signatory countries. If thereis a question about a copyright, it is the local lawthat applies. The origins of the work are im-material. The crucial question is the country inwhich the act is perpetrated.

Acts of parliament, statutoryinstruments and European Uniondirectives

Copyright is regulated by law (statute law,interpreted in particular cases as appropriate)and by contracts. The major UK statute is theCopyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. ThisAct should never be consulted in isolation, butconsidered in relation to the many StatutoryInstruments of relevance. The Act is not the onlypiece of primary legislation that affects Britishcopyright law. European Union Directives in thefield have been issued, and will continue toappear. A Directive, once passed by the Councilof Ministers, becomes law in the member statestwo years after approval.

The different types of copyright

Literary works, dramatic works (plays), pieces ofmusic, artistic works (paintings and sculptures),sound recordings, films, TV broadcasts and radiobroadcasts are the most important materialsprotected by copyright.The term Related Rights is used to cover rights

that, while they are not concerned with copying

and other copyright restrictions, apply to copy-right materials and are linked to the duration ofcopyright. These rights include public rental orhire, public lending, so-called moral rights andso-called neighbouring rights. This last termincludes rights such as performing and broad-casting rights, recording rights and film distribu-tion rights.Any item may take several material forms.

Each of them will enjoy a separate copyright. Forexample, in the case of a book there will first bean unpublished manuscript (regarded as ‘written’whether produced in handwriting, typed or wordprocessed) and a published volume. There maybe a radio broadcast of the works as well, orother adaptations or forms, such as a cinema,film or magazine serialization.

Literary works

The library and information community ismainly concerned with text and numbers, so-called literary works. These include handwrittendocuments, books, pamphlets, magazines, thelyrics of songs, poetry, learned journals andtabular material such as statistical tables orrailway timetables, as well as computer pro-grammes and data in machine-readable form.There is no implication that this is qualityliterature.There is a special type of literary work called a

compilation. This is a collection of works, eachof which may or may not be subject to individualcopyright. The compilation enjoys its own copy-right because skill and effort were expendedselecting and organizing the collection. A compi-lation therefore includes a directory, encyclopae-dia, anthology or database, whether in written,printed or in electronic form.The owner’s ability to prevent others from

doing certain acts is limited in various ways. Forexample, copyright in a literary work lasts forseventy years beyond the author’s death. The1988 Act states that third parties are permittedto copy small portions of a literary work withoutprior approval under a provision known as fairdealing. There are also special provisions forlibraries to make copies on behalf of patrons, aslong as the patrons sign appropriate copyrightdeclaration forms.Copyright is a complex area of law, and one

which abounds with misunderstanding. In several

110 COPYRIGHT

areas of relevance to librarians, experts disagreeabout their interpretation of the Act. Non-specialists should read one of the standard textson the subject and/or consult a copyright lawyerif they are in any doubt about what they are orare not permitted to copy.

Further reading

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (1988),London: HMSO [Chapter 48 – a typically unread-able piece of legislation – is reproduced in full inOppenheim, Phillips and Wall 1994].

Cornish, G. (1990) Copyright: Interpreting the Law forLibraries and Archives, London: Library Association[although now slightly dated, a very user-friendlyand reliable overview of typical questions that arisein libraries].

Oppenheim, C., Phillips, J. and Wall, R. (1994) TheASLIB Guide to Copyright, London: ASLIB [com-prehensive looseleaf account of copyright law, withan emphasis on user needs and requirements; repro-duces relevant pieces of legislation].

Wall, R.A. (1993) Copyright Made Easier, London:ASLIB [despite its title, not a particularly easy bookto read; should be read with caution, as the authormakes statements from time to time that are notsupported by the legal profession].

SEE ALSO: book trade; broadcasting;communication technology; information policy;intellectual property; trade marks

CHARLES OPPENHEIM

CRIME IN LIBRARIES

Ranges from theft of books, other library materi-als and personal belongings of staff and users, todamage to books, library buildings, fittings andequipment, and violent attacks on staff andusers, and other anti-social behaviour on librarypremises.Descriptions of Persians looting papyri from

Egyptian libraries and images of fifteenth-centurychained libraries indicate that crime in libraries isnot new and that its most obvious manifestationhas been the theft of library stock. Accounts ofnotorious biblioklepts from centuries past arewell documented (Thompson 1968; Stuart1988). However, many other forms of criminalactivity now prevail in libraries, mirroringchanges in the wider society of which librariesare a part. All types of library are affected; noneare immune.Comprehensive, accurate statistics on library

crime are not readily available, since published

crime statistics are not normally recorded to thislevel of detail. However, several studies (Lincoln1984; Burrows and Cooper 1992) have begun toaddress this and supplement anecdotal accountsand estimates. Serious interest in and approachesto crime in libraries gathered momentum in theUSA in the 1960s, with libraries in the UKbeginning to address crime in the 1970s as,coincidentally, electronic security systems becamemore widely available. It would seem that muchtheft in libraries is opportunistic, although sev-eral notorious thieves (librarians among theirnumber) have systematically stolen books andremoved maps and illustrative plates. Reasons fortheft range from bibliomania, building collec-tions at home, to selling stolen property forfinancial gain – sometimes, especially with rarebooks, to order.Traditionally, librarians have recourse to li-

brary rules and regulations, together with thecivil and criminal law of the land (and, perhaps,local codes) under which to prosecute offenders.However, prosecutions appear limited as it canbe difficult to prove in law, for instance, thatsomeone who has not returned a borrowed bookintended to remove it permanently from thelibrary. Similarly, some librarians may not wishto publicize instances of theft for fear of drawingattention to weaknesses in security and their ownlackadaisical behaviour. Others have felt thatrelatively small fines meted out by courts havenot justified lengthy administrative procedures,and that this time and effort might be betterspent on prevention if library theft is apparentlynot treated as seriously as, say, theft from super-markets. Those cases that have been taken tocourt would seem to be where major large-scaletheft has been uncovered. In the UK one notor-ious case was that of Norma Hague, who stolefashion plates from various major libraries, caus-ing damage estimated at £50,000; in the USA thecase of Stephen Blumberg, who stole 25,000volumes from libraries, has been widely reported(Jackson 1991). Without going to law, publiclibraries have traditionally barred persistentoffenders from library entry or access to services.academic libraries additionally can recom-mend non-promulgation of degree awards orother institutional penalties, at least so far asstudents are concerned.To the outside world, libraries are quiet,

orderly institutions. However, since the 1970s orso this has increasingly not been the case, with

CRIME IN LIBRARIES 111

libraries facing a growing range of criminalactivity – including theft of personal belongingsfrom individuals (staff and users) and theft ofequipment (televisions, video recorders, compu-ters, etc.); attacks on buildings, including vand-alism, arson, graffiti and terrorism; and violence,aggression, general nuisance, physical abuse andharassment of staff and users. Commonly identi-fied problem patrons include unruly gangs ofyoung people, drunks, eccentrics and those in-volved in activities such as importuning and drugabuse in areas of the library such as toiletfacilities.Each library is recommended to adopt security

measures relevant to its own circumstances.Security marking of equipment and propertymarks in books are commonplace. Strong rooms,electronic security pads and magic eyes andbeams are for those with expensive, rare bookcollections, but many busy lending libraries nowat least have security systems with books trig-gered to deter theft, and building security sys-tems; and some have panic buttons for staff tosummon rapid assistance. Where fines for de-layed return of books are not a sufficient deter-rent, some libraries have occasional finesamnesties in an attempt to encourage the returnof overdue books; others have employed BookRecovery Officers to call at readers’ homeaddresses to recover long-overdue books and thiskind of service has been found to more than payfor itself.Professional bodies and advisers place great

emphasis on devising and deploying preventativemeasures against crime. A library policy andstrategy on dealing with crime is strongly recom-mended, as is adequate training of staff in itsimplementation. Thought must be given to thelocation of the library (those in inner-city areasand rural sites are both prone to crime) and itsinternal design and layout. Surveillance can beundertaken through security patrols and by videocameras but this can be costly. Advice should besought from Police Crime Prevention Officersand Health and Safety Officers. Some crime canbe designed out through planned layout oflibrary furniture, avoiding hidden corners andincreasing lighting and staff visibility, but there issometimes a conflict between security measuresand access and use of stock. There are costs butthese should be set against potential savings andthe damaging effects of crime on service andmorale.

References

Burrows, J. and Cooper, D. (1992) Theft and Loss fromUK Libraries: A National Survey, Police ResearchGroup, Crime Prevention Unit Series Paper no. 37,Home Office Police Department.

Jackson, M. (1991) ‘Library security: Facts and figures’,Library Association Record 93(6): 380, 382, 384.

Lincoln, A.J. (1984) Crime in the Library: A Study ofPatterns, Impact and Security, R.R. Bowker.

Stuart, M. (1988) ‘The crime of Dr Pichler: A scholar-biblioklept in Imperial Russia and his Europeanpredecessors’, Libraries and Culture 28(4): 401–26.

Thompson, L.S. (1968) Bibliokleptomania, PeacockPress.

Further reading

Chadley, O.A. (1996) ‘Campus crime and personalsafety in libraries’, College and Research Libraries57: 385–90.

Chadwick, W.E. (1998) ‘Special collections librarysecurity: An internal audit perspective’, Journal ofLibrary Administration 25: 15–31.

Chaney, M. and MacDougall, A.F. (eds) (1992) Securityand Crime Prevention in Libraries, Ashgate.

Lincoln, A.J. and Lincoln, C.Z. (1987) Library Crimeand Security: An International Perspective, HaworthPress.

Nicewarmer, M. and Heaton, S. (1995) ‘Providingsecurity in an urban academic library’, Library andArchival Security 13: 9–19

SEE ALSO: computer crime; copyright; dataprotection; espionage; forgery; health and safety;intellectual property; liability for informationprovision; official secrecy; preservation; securityin libraries

GRAHAM MATTHEWS

CULTURAL INDUSTRIES

A term used to describe the commercial activ-ities that promote or facilitate the use of culturein the broadest sense. It thus includes publish-ing, cinema and almost all broadcasting.It also includes many other activities suchas entertainment, sport and many aspects ofcultural heritage in general, including access tomuch of the built and natural environment suchas historic houses and national parks. There areseveral parallel concepts such as entertainmentindustries, knowledge industries, creative in-dustries and content industries. The concept ofcontent industries became particularly commonin the European Union in the 1990s.

112 CULTURAL INDUSTRIES

History of cultural industries

The concept of cultural industries was created bymembers of the Frankfurt School of socialsciences working in Los Angeles, and was embo-died in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, by Theo-dor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, originallypublished in 1944 (Horkheimer and Adorno1972). Walter Benjamin believed that multipliedand industrially produced cultural industriescould function as a source of enlightenment tothe masses. Unlike him, Adorno and Horkheimercriticized the phenomenon of cultural industriesas a passive mass culture. Adorno himself de-scribed mass culture as ‘the bad social conscienceof high culture’. According to them, the culturalindustries can be traced back to the Europeancultural monopolies at the beginning of thetwentieth century. The history of the culturalindustries during the twentieth century reflectsthe continuing debate between these two ways ofapproaching the issue: the positive attitude tocultural industries as a democratic force, and thenegative attitude that identifies an increasingcultural passivity among the masses.The proportion of immaterial exchange in the

economy is continuously on the increase and it isevolving into a central growth factor for nationaleconomies in the future. At a global level, thisdevelopment is already visible. Competitivenessis increasingly dependent on the level of controland knowledge of the international market ofcultural significances. Successful products arecharged with symbolic value, be they intangiblegoods or traditional commodities. Culture is theinnovation reserve for this immaterial produc-tion. Cultural industries provide new economicopportunities for creativity in a world whereimmaterial exchange, and in particular the ex-change of cultural significances, is a rapidlygrowing area, and of important potential for theinnovation of economy both at national andinternational levels.As a form of exchange of symbols and social

meanings cultural industry is by no means new;on the contrary, it is an ancient action concept ofhuman communities. In the long run, however,the focus is shifting more and more from com-modity production to production of symbols.The future will see a shift of focus from the

information society towards the society ofmeaning, which emphasizes production of signif-ication, or meaning industries. Cultural industries

may also be considered from an ecological pointof view as an alternative form of sustainabledevelopment to support living and materialculture, as a key element of social and economicdevelopment that results in social inclusion,environmental protection and the reduction ofpoverty.

Definitions

The concept of cultural industries is problematic,because it combines two separate spheres, tradi-tionally far apart from each other: artistic crea-tivity and economic production. Thiscombination forces us to evaluate the points ofconvergence and the section surfaces of these twospheres in a new light; therefore, the concept ofcultural industry may function as a producer ofnew questions and solutions. In addition, theconcept is well adapted for describing the in-crease of immaterial exchange in the globalaction environment. Symbolic exchange is atypical growth area of the supranational econ-omy in post-industrial production.The concept of cultural industry can be de-

fined on several levels. Existing definitions can beclassified into four groups as follows.According to the most general definition,

cultural industry is production based on themeaning of contents. This general definitioncovers traditional commodity production mar-keted by cultural meaning, for instance design,clothing or any kind of brand product. Accordingto this general definition, cultural industry is aperspective on several sectors of industry, be-cause, in addition to the different core areas like,for instance, the entertainment industry, it en-compasses sports, the clothing industry and al-most every form of trade in the world, for themeanings connected to commodity productiondictate demand, supply and consumption. Thedefinition is interesting, but it easily leads to theconclusion that ‘everything is cultural industry’and makes it, therefore, difficult to grasp inspecific terms. On the other hand, the generaldefinition enables us to visualize and compre-hend ongoing social processes and developmentof perceptions in society. It enables us to deter-mine the new infrastructure of a society ofcultural industry, and the educational needs ofthe citizens in this environment.On another level, cultural industry could be

defined as an industry covering both the fields

CULTURAL INDUSTRIES 113

of traditional and modern art and culture, fromartistic creation to distribution: the creativework of an artist, its further development andcommercialization to a piece of work, thepresentation of the work and its distributionand reception. According to this definitioncultural industry covers literature, the plasticarts, music, architecture, theatre, dance, photo-graphy, cinema, industrial design, media art andother fields of creative and performing arts. Italso includes the production and distributionsystems of art and culture, such as publishing(books, newspapers and magazines, music inrecorded and printed form), programme produc-tion, galleries, the art trade, libraries, museums,radio, television and Web-art. This definitionprovides an opportunity to present action pro-posals for new guidelines for traditional art andcultural institutions in the context of a societyof cultural industry.The third group of definitions is based on the

criteria of replication and multiplication, whichemphasize the role of electronic production. Inthis definition, the criteria for determining theextent of the cultural industry are mainlyrelated to commercial success, mass audiencesand the reproducibility of works of art. In thiscase cultural industry comprises cinema, televi-sion, radio, publishing activity, music industryand production of cultural content. Culturalcontent production can be linked with a parti-cular field of activity. Cultural content produc-tion means producing cultural material, andthen distributing and presenting it throughvarious media in such a manner that it gener-ates business activity. The ‘culturality’ of thismaterial is determined according to the commu-nity’s prevalent views of culture; it is, therefore,a variable definition.The fourth, and the narrowest, definition of

cultural industry is from the perspective ofcultural entrepreneurship. In this case, the pro-duction of art and culture is seen as entrepreneur-ship: cultural contents are the commodities, andthe value and distinction of the exchangedproducts are based on significances, whether theproducts and services are material or immaterial.The concept of cultural industry is more a

general perspective on producing and distributingcreativity than an exactly definable, strictlylimited operational starting point. It might bebetter to talk about ‘producing creativity’ or‘creative production’ than about cultural indus-

tries. On the other hand, a concept that links thearts and culture sector to the economy as a wholeand to the concept of production is useful in thesense that it questions traditional modes ofthought and can, at its best, create new kinds ofbridges between these areas that now are seen asseparate. Creativity always involves new kinds ofcombinations of the existing definitions andclassifications.The concept of cultural industry is still fluid

and, therefore, controversial. The concept mustbe redefined for each context. For example, thereis a need for definitions that permit the collectionof better statistics about the sector, which can inturn underpin the future planning process.Cultural industries is an umbrella concept

that combines the phenomena of creative pro-duction, such as opportunities for employmentin cultural professions, differentiation of audi-ences and fulfilment of their diverse needs, withcurrent cultural policy, recognizing the possibi-lities of creative human capital in the develop-ment of national and international innovationsystems.

Value chain of the cultural industries

Cultural activity can be analysed by dividing itinto different phases of action with the help ofthe concept of the ‘value chain’, used ineconomic theory. The value chain consists ofcontent creation, content development, contentpackaging, marketing and distribution to finalaudience, or consumers. As regards culturalindustries it is important to emphasize theimportance of feedback and reformulate thevalue chain into the form of a circle (see Figures7–9).The value circle covers all the phases of

cultural production, from the artist’s idea to theaudience or customers and the effect on them.The value circle includes content creation, devel-opment and packaging for different channels ofdistribution, and marketing and distribution toconsumers. Actors in the various phases of thevalue circle include artists, producers, marketingprofessionals and the audience itself. The cul-tural industries value circle has a positivepotential in society: if a society has highcapacity for cultural signification it producesmore and more cultural signification. Thus,cultural signification is in principle a resourcewith no limits.


Figure 8 Value circle of cultural productionCopyright Hannele Koivunen, www.hanneleinen.com

Figure 7 Value circle of the cultural information societyCopyright Hannele Koivunen, www.hanneleinen.com

Libraries and information services ascultural industries

In the value chain of cultural industries, librariesbelong most evidently to the phase of distribu-tion, but, if we consider the issue more closely,the role of libraries is more complicated, andactually libraries penetrate the whole circle.Creativity always depends on knowing the sig-nification of the community. Library collectionsare a crucial resource of cultural heritage for theinformation society, from which all kinds ofcreativity get raw material. Innovations aredeveloped as continuity from the past or inreaction to it. Libraries form an essential infra-structure for a networking information commu-nity, and for realizing the right to knowledge forcitizens in the information society. Libraries alsodevelop information and signification productsfor information retrieval, and have a pivotalrole in the distribution of information. Throughlibraries new cultural products go intothe value circle as feedback, and strengthenthe capacity of society for new cultural produc-tion.

Library products

The core of library know-how comes fromdesigning and creating products in the field ofmetadata. Metadata can be defined as creatingthe knowledge of both form and content thatdescribes various meanings of documents. Tradi-tionally this means cataloguing, classificationand indexing bibliographic data and the infor-mation content of cultural products. The use ofinformation and communication technol-ogy has, however, added new elements to thisprocess, and we can define three dimensions ofmetadata: technical surroundings, the traditionalfield of metadata and the added-value develop-ment of products.

The traditional field of metadata consists ofcataloguing, classifying, indexing and all kindsof description for the content of documents. Thedimension of technical surroundings consists ofall kinds of technical solutions like standardsand formats (such as the anglo-americancataloguing rules (AACR) or dublin core),which are essential for distributing information,for example, on the Web. Technical solutions

Figure 9 Electronic applications of cultural productionCopyright Hannele Koivunen, www.hanneleinen.com


form the basis for such distribution, but veryoften they simultaneously intermingle withchoosing content opportunities, and creatingfunctioning metadata products. In the culturalindustries, as in other sectors, post-industrialproduction is characterized by networking, flex-ible action models and the use of new technol-ogy, where technical solutions, products andservices are blurred.The field of library products development will

in the future be creating more and more focusedon-demand added-value metadata products. Li-braries may develop metadata products creatingquality portals (see portals and gateways) onthe Web, and, while fulfilling classical informa-tion roles with abstracts, summaries, criticismand packaged information on different themesfor special audiences and customers. Librarieshave traditionally networked both locally andglobally with each other, but the development oflibrary products will increasingly be mixed withcreating new kind of network solutions. Wemight even say that library networks form theinterface and infrastructure for distributingmetadata.

Further reading

Adorno, T.W. (1990) Culture Industry. Selected Essayson Mass Culture, London: Routledge.

Bermingham, A. and Brewer, J. (eds) (1995) TheConsumption of Culture 1600–1800. Image, Object,Text, London: Routledge.

Bourdieu, P. (1993) The Field of Cultural Production.Essays on Art and Literature, Cambridge: PolityPress.

Castells, Manuel (1996) The Information Age: Econ-omy, Society, and Culture, vol. 1: The Rise ofNetwork Society, Oxford: Blackwell.

Lash, S. and Urry, J. (1994) Economies of Sign andSpace, London: Sage.

References

Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T.W. (1972) Dialectic ofEnlightenment, New York: Herder & Herder.

SEE ALSO: catalogues; copyright; digital library;economics of information; European Unioninformation policies; knowledge industries; massmedia

HANNELE KOIVUNEN

Figure 10 Libraries in the cultural production circleCopyright Hannele Koivunen, www.hanneleinen.com

CULTURAL INDUSTRIES 117

CURRENT AWARENESS

A service for notifying current documents tousers of libraries and information services. It cantake the form of selective dissemination ofinformation (SDI), information bulletins, index-ing services or reviews of current literature. Suchservices are now typically provided using theInternet from such sources as Denver UnCover(www.uncweb.carl.org) and the Bath Informationand Data Service (BIDS) (www.bids.ac.uk).

Further reading

Martin, P. and Metcalfe, M. (2001) ‘Informing theknowledge workers’, Reference Services Review 29:267–75.

SEE ALSO: dissemination of information;document delivery

CURRENT CONTENTS LIST

A publication that reproduces the contents listsof periodicals in a particular subject field. Cur-rent Contents is a registered trade mark (seetrade marks) of the institute for scientificinformation (ISI), and is used for their familyof publications that reproduce the contents pagesof periodicals (www.isinet.com/isi/products/cc),and is accessible through ISI’s Web of Knowledgeportal (see portals and gateways). Genericallythe phrase is used to mean any such list, includ-ing those produced non-commercially by librariesand other information agencies for their ownclients.

Further reading

Jezzard, H. (2001) ‘ISI launches new portal’, Informa-tion World Review 175: 6.

CUTTER, CHARLES AMMI (1837–1903)

Librarian and developer of the most successfulformat for dictionary catalogues. His Rulesfor a Printed Dictionary Catalogue and hisactivity in american library association(ALA) committees on cataloguing were extremelyinfluential, but he also did significant theoreticalwork on subject access. Cutter numbers bear hisname and are still much used in library catalo-gues.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, he was aHarvard graduate who first became interested inlibrarianship as student librarian at the HarvardDivinity School. He joined the Harvard librarystaff in 1860, moving to the Boston AthenaeumLibrary in 1869 and remaining for twenty-fouryears. In 1876 he was associated with Melvildewey in the establishment of ALA. He was anenthusiastic supporter of Dewey’s projects for co-operation and standardization in librarianship.Influenced by Dewey’s book classificationsystem, he developed his shelf classificationsystem for the Athenaeum. The ‘Author Tables’for this became the Cutter numbers, which areused for arranging books alphabetically byauthor. His eminence in librarianship was recog-nized by his appointment to the editorship of theLibrary Journal in succession to Dewey, a postthat he held until 1893.

Further reading

Miksa, F. (ed.) (1977) Charles Ammi Cutter: LibrarySystematizer, Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited.

SEE ALSO: bibliographic classification

CYBERCAFÉ

A café that not only serves food and drinks, butalso provides personal computers connected tothe internet for use by customers; it is thussometimes referred to as an Internet café. Whilstsome cybercafés do not charge customers to usethe computers it is more normal for them tocharge by the hour or part of the hour. It wasestimated that by 2001 their numbers would be intens of thousands rather than thousands, and theyare to be found even in small and remote commu-nities worldwide. They provide an extremelyimportant local facility where public Internetaccess facilities are rare, fewer homes have com-puters or computers with fast network lines, up-to-date hardware and the latest browsersare uncommon. However, they are found mostcommonly in the industrialized countries andthose parts of the world frequented by touristsand migrants who require contact with home.

CYBERNETICS

The science of the communication and control ofinformation in machines and animals. In this

118 CURRENT AWARENESS

sense, and for this purpose, it was developed byNorbert wiener.

Further reading

Web Dictionary of Cybernetics and Systems (2002)(www.pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/indexASC.html).

SEE ALSO: information theory; systems theory

CYBERSPACE

A term generally credited to the novelist WilliamGibson in 1984 in the novel Neuromancer. Itrefers to the way that users of computers andnetworks, particularly the internet, can per-

ceive themselves as existing in a world ofvirtual reality paralleling the real world. Thedisplay of data in an artificial three-dimensionalspace, real-time communication and the playingof elaborate simulation and fantasy games allcontribute to the illusion that people are con-nected in a way that transcends physical spaceand time. Perhaps the strongest and most persua-sive expression of the idea comes from JohnPerry Barlow (1996).

References

Barlow, J.P. (1996) ‘A declaration of the independenceof cyberspace’ (www.eff.org/barlow/declaration-fi-nal.html).

CYBERSPACE 119

D

DATA

A general term for quantitative or numericallyencoded information, particularly used for infor-mation stored in a database. The word is,however, frequently used in a casual way with asense not especially different from ‘information’,as, for instance, in a phrase like ‘biographicaldata’.

SEE ALSO: information; information andcommunication technology; informationmanagement

DATA ARCHIVES

Research facilities acting as central processorsand disseminators of electronic research data tousers, taking electronic data resulting from re-search projects and administrative processes inthe form in which data generators find it con-venient to provide it, and then processing,documenting and disseminating it (through avariety of media) in a form convenient to users.Data archives offer a variety of additional ser-vices ranging from dissemination of informa-tion about data, through the provision ofinformation retrieval resources and systems,instruction and training in data analysis techni-ques and methodologies, to the creation ofspecial-purpose datasets and packages.

Development

The roots of centralized social data archives lie inthe late 1950s, when millions of computer cardscontaining data from market research surveyinterviews were preserved and made availablethrough the first data archives, or survey archives

as they were originally titled. Because the datawere on cards, and could therefore be used,reused and copied long after they were collected,researchers saw the advantages of recycling theinformation collected and created central distri-buting repositories, or archives, of machine-readable social data, to encourage this ecologicalapproach to research data. The largest of these inthe USA is the Inter-University Consortium forPolitical and Social Research (ICPSR) at theUniversity of Michigan (www.icpsr.umich.edu/ORG/). In 1960, the first European data archivewas established in West Germany, the Zentral-archiv in Cologne (www.gesis.org/ZA/). Thereare now central data service centres in mostmajor European countries, and throughout Ca-nada, the USA and elsewhere. Data archives areusually of two types: data dissemination servicesoffered as part of the more traditional library,with little or no processing of the data; or dataand research services offered by a separate entityor an adjunct to a social science teaching andresearch department, in which data are processed(cleaned), documented and manipulated to in-crease ease of access. Data handled by thesearchives generally cover all of the social sciences,although some tend to concentrate on particulardisciplines or substantive areas.The UK Data Archive at the University of

Essex (www.data-archive.ac.uk/) is among thelargest in Europe. Established in 1967 by theEconomic and Social Research Council, the DataArchive now holds some 4,000 datasets fromboth national and international academic, com-mercial and government sources, and provides awide variety of services. Data holdings cover thesocial sciences in general. In common with itsinternational counterparts, the Data Archive is

developing a number of specialist services for theresearch community, for example special units onhistorical and qualitative data, and is wideningits remit to include data-based resources through-out the world.

Advantages and services

Data archives are effective in both maximizingthe benefits of developments in technology and inminimizing its risks and disadvantages. As thereis no single standard for storing and analysingelectronic data, data archives have developed avariety of techniques for the conversion of datainto an archival standard format and for disse-minating them in a form required by the user. Ina time of rising costs of data collection, thesecondary use of data collected for other pur-poses – academic or administrative – becomesincreasingly attractive. Data archives facilitatethis process by cleaning and documenting datafor more general use, and by devising anddeveloping techniques to ease data access andretrieval. Acting as data brokers or gatekeepers,archives regularly acquire data from governmen-tal agencies and provide, on a centralized basis,the monitoring and control required for its safeand responsible use.Archives also provide co-ordination centres for

the creation, implementation and maintenance ofstandards of data collection, documentation anddescription. As computer technology develops,large numbers of data files are being created, andarchives have responded by concentrating ondevelopment of techniques to assist users inlocating relevant and useful data: this has in-cluded techniques for bibliographic controlof electronic data files and the development ofstandardized data description formats. A workinggroup co-ordinated by the UK Data Archivedeveloped standards for the inclusion of refer-ences to computer files within the common marcformat for library catalogues in 1989, andinvestigated the feasibility of a union catalogue(see union catalogues) of computer files in aBritish Library project. Almost all European dataarchives now implement the European StandardStudy Description Scheme, which allows ex-change of information and catalogues betweenthe archives. Most data archives also providesophisticated finding aids for their own collec-tions, involving detailed and comprehensive in-dexing and advanced information-retrieval

systems. The UK Data Archive offers, throughits BIRON catalogue, an index to all of itsholdings, based on a specially constructed socialscience thesaurus, and an easy-to-use retrievalsystem, available on the electronic networks forinstant interrogation by British and internationalresearch users.As electronic data without comprehensive

documentation are of little use to researchersinterested in their secondary analysis, data doc-umentation has been a long-standing concern fordata archives, who have developed guidelines forgood practice and documentation standardsfor collectors and users of data. A more recentdevelopment, the Data Documentation Initiative(DDI), is attempting to establish an internationalstandard and methodology for the content, pre-sentation, transport and preservation of meta-data about datasets in the social andbehavioural sciences. This will allow codebooksto be created in a uniform, highly structuredformat that is easily searchable on the Web, andthat fosters simultaneous use of multiple datasets.Within the DDI, a Document Type Definition(DTD) for mark-up of social science codebooksis being developed, employing the eXtensibleMark-up Language (XML), which is a dialect ofthe more general mark-up language, SGML (seemark-up languages).Dissemination of data has traditionally been

offered on a variety of portable media, includingmagnetic tape and CD-ROM. Most archives nowoffer data via electronic transfer or online access.Completion of necessary undertakings and li-cences can also now frequently be done online.As archive services are increasingly becoming

more world wide web-based, and in responseto data users’ requirements for linking datasetsfrom disparate sources, a consortium of archiveshas collaborated in the development of NES-STAR (www.nesstar.org/server/), an infrastruc-ture for data dissemination via the Internet thatallows users to locate multiple data sourcesacross national boundaries. This researcher’s‘dream machine’ provides an end-user interfacefor searching, analysing and downloading dataand documentation. The service is based onutilization of the DDI data and metadata struc-ture, and is being implemented in a large numberof data archives and libraries throughout theworld.Charges for data archive services vary consid-

erably between countries; charges are usually not

DATA ARCHIVES 121

made for the data themselves, although indivi-dual data depositors may require that surchargesare added to defray their own data collectioncosts.

International co-operation

The Standing Committee on Social Science DataArchives of the International Social ScienceCouncil of unesco laid the groundwork forinternational co-operation between the worlddata archives in 1966. Two organizations, inwhich the majority of the world data archiveshold institutional memberships, organize andfacilitate this international effort: the Committeeof European Social Science Data Archives(CESSDA) (www.nsd.uib.no/Cessda/) overseesand fosters non-raiding agreements and colla-borative ventures; and the International Federa-tion of Data Organizations (IFDO) (http://www.ifdo.org/), which includes members notonly in Europe but also in Australasia, the USA,Canada, Japan and India, sets policies for colla-boration and co-operation, and supports a num-ber of common projects. The InternationalAssociation for Social Science Information Ser-vice and Technology (IASSIST) (http://datalib.library.ualberta.ca/iassist/), an association of in-dividuals working in data organizations, holdsjoint annual conferences with IFDO, alternatingbetween venues in the USA and Europe.

Further reading

ICPSR (2000) Guide to Social Science Data Preparationand Archiving, http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ACCESS/dpm.html.

Mochmann, E. and de Guchteneire, P. (1998) TheSocial Science Data Archive Step by Step, http://www.ifdo.org/archiving_distribution/archive_sbs_bfr.htm.

Ryssevik, J and Musgrave, S. (1999) The Social ScienceDream Machine: Resource Discovery, Analysis andDelivery on the Web, http://www.nesstar.org/papers.

Scheuch, E.K. (1990) ‘From a data archive to aninfrastructure for the social sciences’, InternationalSocial Science Journal 42: 93–111.

Silver, H.J. (2000) ‘Data needs in the social sciences’, inConference on Information and Democratic Society:‘Representing and Conveying Quantitative Data’,Columbia University, 31 March 2000 (www.cos-sa.org/dataneeds.html).

Taylor, M. (1990) ‘Data for research: Issues in dissemi-nation’, in M. Feeney, and K. Merry (eds) Informa-tion Technology and the Research Process, Bowker-Saur.

Taylor, M.F. and Tanenbaum, E.T. (1991) ‘Developing

social science data archives’, International SocialScience Journal 43: 225–34.

SEE ALSO: archival description; archives;catalogues

MARCIA FREED TAYLOR

DATA BANK

Usually synonymous with database but some-times used to specify collections of non-biblio-graphic data or numeric data.

DATA COMPRESSION

Techniques used for the reduction of the storagespace needed in a computer by the encoding ofdata and the reduction of redundant information.A trade-off is made between the savings instorage capacity and the increase in computationneeded to achieve the compression itself and torestore the original when it is retrieved. Theenormous popular success of MP3 compressionfor the exchange of music files is at the heart ofthe whole peer-to-peer (P2P) movement.

Further reading

Cannane, A., and Williams, H.E. (2001) ‘Generalpurpose compression for efficient retrieval’, Journalof the American Society for Information Science 52:430–7.


DATA MINING

Data mining is the exploration and analysis ofvery large volumes of data stored in a company’sexisting databases, or in repositories, such asdata archives and data warehouses, to dis-cover meaningful new correlations, patterns andtrends. The development of new algorithms tocope with very large datasets has made it possibleto exploit information that was stored, but to allintents and purposes unusable. The process usesstatistical techniques and pattern recognitiontechnologies. It is essentially a mechanism foridentifying data, on the basis of specified termsand associated terms and concepts, from a widerange of sources, so as to address complexproblems.

122 DATA BANK

DATA PROTECTION

According to the Standard: BS-ISO 2382 oninformation processing systems, data protectionis defined as: ‘The implementation of appropriateadministrative, technical or physical means toguard against the unauthorized interrogation anduse of procedures and data.’

In the context in which the term is customarilyused, however, there needs to be a greateremphasis on protecting personal information.The definition of privacy protection in the sameStandard appears more appropriate.

The implementation of appropriate adminis-trative, technical, and physical safeguards toensure the security and confidentiality of datarecords and to protect both security andconfidentiality against any threat or hazardthat could result in substantial harm, embar-rassment, inconvenience, or unfairness to anyindividual about whom such information ismaintained.

Data protection extends far beyond the me-chanics of data security and preserving perso-nal privacy. In addition to ensuring the securityand confidentiality of information, it also incor-porates the need for reliability, completeness andaccuracy of any information, together with itsfair use, in terms of the motives and behaviour ofdata users. This takes on particular meaning withpublic domain information that is clearly notprivate but still needs to be safeguarded againstmisuse. A recent investigation into UK publicregister information is relevant here.

Until relatively recently considerations of dataprotection were, to a large extent, centred onelectronic data processing with its considerablepotential for performing a range of operationswith personal information. Early internationalinitiatives, government policies and legislationtended to reflect this attitude. The currentapproach recognizes the need to safeguard perso-nal information regardless of the medium onwhich it is kept or the mode of its processing. Itencompasses paper-based or ‘manual’ records aswell as a range of other manifestations ofpersonal data including electronic images andsound. Thus data protection applies equally tothe contents of a piece of paper, the use of a

mobile telephone or information gathered on aCCTV surveillance system.In 1981 the Council of Europe established a

Convention for the Protection of Individualswith Regard to Automatic Processing of Perso-nal Data, which became the catalyst for, andformed the model for, many nations to enactlegislation. The OECD issued, also in 1981, itsGuidelines on the Protection of Privacy andTransborder Flows of Personal Data, which alsoacted as a landmark for the development ofpolicy and legislation. Though there had longbeen European Union interest in the issue,serious attempts to codify and regulate activitydid not gather momentum until the appearanceof a draft Directive on data protection in 1990.This encountered strong opposition from a rangeof interests, and a much revised version waspresented in 1992 and achieved formal transla-tion into European legislation in 1995. Theobjectives of the Directive, as encapsulated inArticle 1, are two-fold. It seeks to protectfundamental rights to privacy as well as facilitatethe legitimate flow of information within mem-ber states.

Article 1 Object of the Directive:

1. In accordance with this Directive, MemberStates shall protect the fundamental rightsand freedoms of natural persons, and inparticular their right to privacy with respectto the processing of personal data.

2. Member States shall neither restrict norprohibit the free flow of personal databetween Member States for reasons con-nected with the protection afforded underparagraph 1.

The first body to enact data protection legisla-tion was the Lander of Hesse, in Germany, whichachieved this in 1970. Sweden can claim thedistinction of passing the first national dataprotection law in 1973. A number of countriesnow have legislation designed to achieve dataprotection in some measure. The UK InformationCommissioner’s website includes a page (http://www.dataprotection.gov.uk/dpr/dpdoc.nsf) thatprovides details of data protection and privacyauthorities for the following countries (seeDavies et al. 2000):

DATA PROTECTION 123

UK Territories:Guernsey, Isle of Man, Jersey.

European Union and EEA Authorities:Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France,Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Luxem-bourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal,Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom.

Other Data Protection/Privacy Authorities:Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Hawaii,Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Japan, Monaco,New Zealand, Poland, Slovak Republic, Swit-zerland, Thailand, Uruguay.

In the UK, the proper foundations of dataprotection legislation may be regarded as havingbeen laid by the Younger Committee on Privacy,established in 1970. The Committee’s Reportappeared in 1972. Later, the Lindop Committeeon Data Protection, established in 1976, under-took the most extensive review of the issue andits Report, published in 1978, is of considerablevalue as a detailed commentary on the subject.The international initiatives from the Council ofEurope and the OECD, noted earlier, providedadded impetus and the first Data Protection Actin the UK was passed in 1984. The legislationcurrently in force is the Data Protection Act1998, which derives from the European UnionDirective and covers personal data in whateverform, including paper records. The full textis available on the Web at: www.legislation.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts1998/19980029.htm.Its purpose is described in its preamble as: ‘An

Act to make new provision for the regulation ofthe processing of information relating to indivi-duals, including the obtaining, holding, use ordisclosure of such information.’The Act has, as its basis, eight guiding princi-

ples. They require that personal data be:

. Processed fairly and lawfully [detailed condi-tions are specified].

. Obtained and processed only for specified andlawful purposes.

. Adequate, relevant and not excessive.

. Accurate and, where necessary, kept up todate.

. Not be kept for longer than is necessary.

. Processed in accordance with the rights ofindividuals about whom data are held [definedas data subjects].

. Processed under appropriate technical andorganizational security measures.

. Not transferred to a country or territory out-side the European Economic Area unless thatcountry or territory ensures an adequate levelof data protection.

The role of implementing the legislation isplaced upon the Office of the InformationCommissioner. The Commissioner maintains aRegister of personal data-processing activitycompiled from notifications submitted by datausers [defined as: data controllers]. Operatingwithout notifying the Commissioner is prohibitedand a punishable offence unless the circum-stances are covered by an exemption. The Com-missioner also has powers to investigate,monitor, approve, regulate and direct the activ-ities of data users and has responsibility forpromoting good practice and disseminating in-formation about data protection. A Data Protec-tion Tribunal acts as an appeal mechanism fordata controllers regarding decisions taken by theCommissioner.The interests of the individual are safeguarded

in the Act by several means. In many cases aperson’s informed consent has to be sought fordata gathering and use, and a person may objectto data processing in certain circumstances. Aperson’s rights of scrutiny of data and provisionfor redress in the event of its inaccuracy or if it isbeing misused are also included. The Act alsoidentifies a category of sensitive personal data forwhich additional safeguards are specified. Suchdata comprises information on a person’s race, orpolitical, religious or trade union activity as wellas a person’s health, sexual life or any alleged oractual criminal offences.There is a lengthy list of exemptions to the

Act’s provisions, and these are generally specifiedin relation to the purposes to which informationis put. Many are rather specialized and thedegree and nature of exemption varies. Amongthe exemptions are information applied to:

. Protecting national security.

. The prevention of crime and offences relatingto taxation.

. Health, education and social work where thereare conditions on data subject access.

. Regulatory activity such as that undertaken byagencies concerned with the protection ofmembers of the public [for example, Ombuds-men and similar ‘watchdogs’].

. Journalism, literature and art as they represent

124 DATA PROTECTION

‘special purposes’ that warrant a degree ofprotection of expression.

. Research, history and statistics [an importantprovision for academic activity].

. Information available to the public by, orunder, any enactment [it will be in the publicdomain already].

. Disclosures required by law or made in con-nection with legal proceedings.

. Domestic household purposes [lists of homepersonal contacts and addresses].

The global relevance of data protection isclearly apparent especially with the potentialfor transborder data flow offered by informa-tion technology. The need to assure adequatedata protection across national boundaries be-comes imperative. Legislation originating inEuropean Union countries makes adequate pro-tection beyond the European Economic Area arequirement. This has caused particular diffi-culty for the USA with its fundamentally differ-ent approach based on voluntary self-regulation.The situation has been resolved through thecreation of a ‘Safe Harbour’ arrangement.Through this means organizations may affirmtheir compliance with prescribed controls thatthen enable them to operate globally. This ‘self-certification’ is overseen by the US Departmentof Commerce, which publishes a list on itswebsite of organizations participating (www.ex-ports.gov/safeharbor/).There is particular relevance in data protection

for knowledge managers and those directinginformation and library services because theyhave customarily played a role in ensuring theefficient handling of data. Examples where per-sonal data feature in information and libraryservices are numerous. They include user regis-tration records, loan transaction files, records ofinformation services provided, logs of databasesearches, Internet transactions, library cataloguescontaining personal authors’ details, indexes ofexpertise and databases, sales, accounts andfinancial records, staff files, payroll and pensionrecords, and survey and research data. Themanagement of operations necessitates appropri-ate systems, procedures, training and supervisionto ensure adequate data protection and that it isan ongoing commitment.Reference to specific legislation has been made

above. It needs to be emphasized that, in the

discussion, detail has of necessity been abbre-viated. There is no substitute for consulting thefull text of the legislation before undertaking anyrelated action.

References

BS-ISO 2382/8:1986.Committee on Data Protection (1978) Report of theCommittee on Data Protection (Chairman: Sir Nor-man Lindop), London: HMSO (Command Paper no.Cmnd 7341).

Committee on Privacy (1972) Report of the Committeeon Privacy (Chairman: Rt Hon. Kenneth Younger),London: HMSO (Command Paper no. Cmnd 5012).

Council of Europe (1981) Convention for the Protec-tion of Individuals with Regard to Automatic Pro-cessing of Personal Data, Strasbourg: Council ofEurope (European Treaty Series no. 108).

Data Protection Act (1984) London: HMSO (PublicGeneral Acts 1984 – Chapter 35).

—— (1998), London: SO (Public General Acts 1998 –Chapter 29).

Davies, J.E., Oppenheim, C. and Boguscz, B. (2000)Study of the Availability and Use of PersonalInformation in Public Registers: Final Report to theOffice of the Data Protection Registrar, Wilmslow,Office of the Data Protection Commissioner [pub-lished on the Information Commissioner’s website at:http://www.dataprotection.gov.uk/dpr/dpdoc.nsf].

European Communities Commission (1995) Directive95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of theCouncil of 24 October 1995 on the Protection ofIndividuals with Regard to the Processing of Perso-nal Data and on the Free Movement of Such Data,Brussels: EC Commission (Official Journal of theEuropean Communities, 23 November 1995, no. L281, p. 31).

Information processing systems – Vocabulary – Part 08.Control, integrity and security. Section 08.06.03

Information processing systems – Vocabulary – Part 08.Control, integrity and security. Section 08.06.04

Organization for Economic Co-operation and Develop-ment (1981) Guidelines on the Protection of Privacyand Transborder Flows of Personal Data, Paris:OECD.

Further reading

Carey, P. (2000) Data Protection in the UK, London:Blackstone.

Jay, R. and Hamilton, A. (1999) Data Protection: Lawand Practice, London, Sweet & Maxwell.

Lloyd, I. (1998) A Guide to the Data Protection Act1998, London: Butterworths.

Oppenheim, C. and Davies, J.E. (1999) Guide to thePractical Implementation of the Data Protection Act1998, London: British Standards Institution (BSI-DISC PD0012).

Ticher, P. (2001) Data Protection for Library andInformation Services, London: ASLIB [ASLIB know-how guides].

DATA PROTECTION 125

SEE ALSO: information management;information policy

J.E. DAVIES

DATA SECURITY

The sensitivity of much computer-held informa-tion (personal files, strategic business informa-tion, etc.) requires password protection andpossibly encryption to ensure that it is notcapable of being accessed or interfered with byunauthorized persons. The evidence is that datasecurity is habitually neglected by the organiza-tions and individuals that hold data, making theactivities of those who might wish to access thedata – hackers, for example – that much easier.Part of the purpose of data protection laws isto promote positive attitudes towards data secur-ity. The issue is becoming even more importantas e-commerce continues to expand, bringingwith it increased use of personal and corporatecredit cards in online transactions.

SEE ALSO: computer security; informationmanagement

DATA WAREHOUSE

A system designed to enable improved decisionmaking through the swift provision of appropri-ate information. It utilizes a collection of tech-nologies to integrate heterogeneous informationsources for online analytic processing. Organiza-tions have invested considerable sums in creatingdata warehouses to counter the inefficiencyresulting from the different transaction character-istics of systems already in place. In particularthe problem of legacy data from outdated sys-tems is addressed by bringing it into a commonconceptual and technical framework, so as toretain it for current and future use. Within thewarehouse, information can be customized andcached for particular user groups, thus increasingthe speed and efficiency of access.

Further reading

Jarke, M. et al. (2000) Fundamentals of Data Ware-houses, Berlin: Springer.

SEE ALSO: data mining; Geographic InformationSystems

DATABASE

The term is normally applied to digital datastored in a computer or on an optical disk. It isa systematically ordered collection of informa-tion, which might be, for example, bibliographicdata such as a bibliography or catalogue (seecatalogues), numerical or statistical material,or textual material of the kind found in a textarchive, a data archive (see data archives) oran abstracting and indexing service. It mightbe assembled for personal or corporate use, butcan also be assembled to be marketed commer-cially. Data is generally structured so that it canbe sought and retrieved automatically. Access tocommercially available databases is usually on-line on the Internet.

SEE ALSO: database management systems;economics of information; informatics;knowledge industries; organization of knowledge

DATABASE MANAGEMENTSYSTEMS

A database management system (DBMS) is aprogram that can input, edit and retrieve infor-mation from a database. A database is a collec-tion of information organized into records andfields, and stored as files on a computer. Some-times the term database is used to include theDBMS as well.Relational, object-oriented, network, flat and

hierarchical are all types of DBMS. They differin how they organize information for storage.Retrieval from a DBMS requires a query lan-guage, a structured way for expressing searchrequests. Relational DBMS alone have a stan-dard query language called SQL (structuredquery language).

Further reading

Ramakrishnan, R. (1998) Database Management Sys-tems, WCB/McGraw Hill.

SEE ALSO: informatics; information retrieval;object-oriented technology

ALAN POULTER

DATABASES

Information collections, sharing a common char-acteristic such as subject discipline or type, which

126 DATA SECURITY

are published electronically by public- or private-sector database producers (usually on a commer-cial basis) and made available to a large publicfor interactive searching and information retrie-val. Online databases are accessed via telecom-munications or wide-area network links toremote online host services that normally offermany different databases. CD-ROMs are opti-cal disks that are mounted locally on a PC,workstation or local-area network. In terms oftheir content, online and CD-ROM databasesshare many common features. Indeed, manydatabases are published in both formats. Otherless commonly used formats for database distri-bution include diskette, magnetic tape and hand-held products.

Background

The first databases to go online in the 1970swere bibliographic, containing references to and(usually) abstracts of articles in the academic andprofessional literature (examples include Chemi-cal Abstracts and Medline, which aim to coverthe worldwide literature of chemistry and medi-cine, respectively). Since then there has been atremendous growth in the number and scope ofonline databases, as well as the introduction ofthe CD-ROM format in the early 1980s. World-wide, there are no accurate statistics for the totalnumber of databases in existence. As long ago as1997 it was possible to identify over 10,000databases (including those on CD-ROM) (Walkerand Janes 1999). The USA is by far the largestproducer of internationally available databases,followed by the UK, Canada and Germany.

Coverage and updating

Online or CD-ROM databases can be found inalmost all fields of human endeavour, though themajority are still geared to the academic orprofessional user. The largest number of data-bases exists in the business sector, followed byscience, technology and engineering, law, healthand life sciences. Although fewer databases coverthe arts, humanities and social sciences, thisbelies the enormous wealth of electronic informa-tion that is also available in these fields. Informa-tion in online and CD-ROM databases tends tobe archival in nature, though online can berapidly updated compared to printed and CD-ROM equivalents. Some online databases thatcontain time-sensitive data such as stock market

prices are updated in real time, though these arealmost invariably very expensive to use.

Types

Online and CD-ROM databases now cover ahuge range of different types of information, butthe vast majority fall into one or more of thecategories below.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATABASES

Bibliographic databases contain references topublished literature, including journal and news-paper articles, conference proceedings and pa-pers, reports, government and legal publications,patents, books, etc. In contrast to library catalo-gue entries, a large proportion of the biblio-graphic records in online and CD-ROMdatabases describe analytics (articles, conferencepapers, etc.) rather than complete monographs,and they generally contain very rich subjectdescriptions in the form of subject-indexing termsand abstracts.

FULL-TEXT DATABASES

These contain, in addition to a bibliographicdescription, the entire text of documents. Forexample, the majority of articles from all the UKquality newspapers are available in online for-mat, and many are also published on CD-ROM.As the full text is normally searchable, abstractsand indexing terms may not be present.

DIRECTORY DATABASES

Directory databases contain descriptive informa-tion for entities. Different directories may listorganizations, individuals, electronic or printedpublications, materials, chemical substances,computer software, audiovisual materials, etc.

NUMERIC DATABASES

These contain predominantly numeric data. Ex-amples include company accounts and financialperformance indicators, commodity and stockmarket data, statistical data of all types, includ-ing time series, and chemical or physical proper-ties of substances.

MULTIMEDIA DATABASES

multimedia databases contain a mix of differentmedia such as text, audio, video and still gra-phics (photographs, diagrams and illustrations,graphs, charts, maps and even representations of

DATABASES 127

works of art). Because of the limitations ofcurrent telecommunications networks in trans-mitting large graphics files, multimedia databasesare more usually in CD-ROM format than on-line, though the implementation of high-speednetworks will radically alter this situation in theforeseeable future.

TRANSACTIONAL DATABASES

These contain information on goods and servicesthat the user can order electronically; they arenormally online.

OTHER

Other types include dictionary databases (worddefinitions, glossaries, thesauri), encyclopaedias(often in multimedia format), chemical structuredatabases, patent and trade marks, and computersoftware.

Structure and searching

Database structures and search techniques stillhave their roots in the 1970s systems, thoughwith considerable refinement and enhancementsince then.Each database comprises a vast number of

records (typically several hundred thousand, butthe largest contain several million records). Re-cords in the same database normally (but notalways) have the same structure. Records aresubdivided into separately identifiable andsearchable fields, as illustrated by the following(fictitious and abbreviated) company record.

Table 1 Fields in a database record

Searching is in accordance with the principlesof text retrieval. Although many online hostshave introduced easy-to-use (usually menu-driven) search interfaces, CD-ROMs are generallyregarded as easier to use because of their moreintuitive and guided screen displays. Some CD-ROMs provide additional software for the manip-ulation of subset data, particularly numeric.

Publication formats

Many online and CD-ROM databases have anequivalent printed publication, two advantages ofthe electronic formats being the speed of search-ing and convenient storage. An increasing num-ber, however, are only published electronically.

Charging mechanisms

Online databases are normally charged on a pay-as-you-use basis, with charges being levied forthe amount of time the user is connected to thedatabase and the amount of information viewed,printed or downloaded. Connect-time and view-ing charges vary considerably from database todatabase, from as little as nothing to over £100per hour or per record for high-value informationsuch as the full text of stockbroker and marketresearch reports. Relatively few online databasesare available on a subscription basis, whereasthis is the main method of pricing for CD-ROMs. CD-ROM subscriptions are also highlyvariable, from a few pounds to several thousandpounds per annum, with additional charges fornetworked workstations.

References

Walker, G and Janes, J. (1999) Online Retrieval: ADialogue of Theory and Practice, 2nd edn, LibrariesUnlimited.

Further reading

Henderson, A. (1998) Electronic Databases and Pub-lishing, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

SEE ALSO: electronic information resources;information retrieval; online services;organization of knowledge; relational database

GWYNETH TSENG, REVISED BY THE EDITORS

DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS

Decision support systems (DSS) have been

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128 DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS

defined as ‘interactive computer-based systemsthat help decision-makers to utilize data andmodels to solve relatively unstructured problems’(Turban 1988). Sprague and Watson (1986)suggest that other defining characteristics ofdecision support systems are that they typicallyfocus on the underspecified problems that seniormanagers face, they promote features that makethem easy to use by non-specialists and theyemphasize flexibility and adaptability so thatthey can respond to the user’s requirements.Decision support systems have found a widevariety of applications including planning, fore-casting, simulation and investment appraisal.

The role of decision support systems

There are many different types of computer-based systems operating in the library environ-ment whose aim is directly to support thedecision-making process. These systems are gen-erally given the generic title of managementsupport systems (MSS). Decision support sys-tems, management information systems (MIS)and managerial expert systems are the threemost common types of management supportsystem. Decision support systsems are both flex-ible and responsive to the user, and consequentlythey play an active role in the decision-makingprocess. The user of a decision support systemwill be able to interrogate the system, experimentwith and evaluate different strategies, and gen-erally get a better understanding of the problem.The decision, however, will ultimately be madeby combining the insights provided by the deci-sion support system with the skills, judgementand experience of the decision-maker. This is adistinctly different role from that of both theMIS, which simply acts as a passive source ofinformation for the decision-maker, and theexpert system, where the decision is typicallymade on behalf of the decision-maker.

It should be noted that while the majority ofdecision support systems are designed to be usedby a single manager, many newer systems havebeen developed explicitly to support the decision-making processes of a group of managers. Suchsystems, known as group decision support sys-tems (GDSS), may either be used by a group ofdecision-makers in a single location or facilitatedecision-making across a number of diverselocations by using a communications network.

Components of a decision supportsystem

Turban (1988) suggests that such systems aretypically composed of three components: the userinterface, the model management system and thedatabase management system, each of which isbriefly described below.

USER INTERFACE

The user interface is the part of the system that isresponsible for controlling all the communicationbetween the system and the user. As decisionsupport systems are invariably used by functionalmanagers rather than by systems specialists, it isessential that the interface is clear, concise andreadily understandable, often incorporating so-phisticated graphics facilities. Graphics, in theform of graphs, charts and diagrams, are particu-larly important in decision support systems, as theyhelp managers visualize data and relationships.

MODEL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

A model is a representation of reality upon whichexperiments can be conducted in order to sup-port more fully reasoned decisions. The decisionsupport system may have either a single model ora model-base containing a range of differentbusiness models. The modelling tools and techni-ques embedded within the decision supportsystem can range from the general purpose, suchas a spreadsheet package, to the highly specific,such as a piece of forecasting, linear program-ming, simulation or statistical analysis software.

DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

The database management facility will incorpo-rate data that has been generated internallywithin the organization and data that is retrievedfrom external sources. There are a large numberof commercial information services to which anorganization may subscribe. These provide ac-cess to external databases, which may containfinancial, economic, statistical, geo-demographic,market-oriented or commercial information thatcan be utilized in a decision support systemapplication.

Applications of decision support systems

Decision support systems have found a widevariety of applications in all the functional areasof organizations. Decision support systems can,for example, be found in the areas of financial

DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS 129

planning, sales forecasting, cash-flow analysis,corporate strategy evaluation, production plan-ning, factory and warehouse location selectionand manpower planning. Whilst the majority ofapplications of decision support systems arefound in the commercial sector, many applica-tions have been implemented in public-sectororganizations, including libraries.

APPLICATIONS OF DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS WITHINTHE LIBRARY

Most of the writing on the utilization of decisionsupport systems in libraries has concentrated onperformance assessment applications (Adams etal. 1993; Bommer and Chorba 1982). Typically,such systems focus on identifying and analysingthe current utilization of resources so that moreinformed decisions can be made on how re-sources should be allocated in the future. Inaddition to these performance assessment appli-cations, however, there are a wide range of otherpotential applications in which decision supportsystems could be used in a library context. Suchsystems could, for example, be used to simulatethe ways in which queues are serviced in alibrary, to determine what the optimum numberof counter staff is at various times of the day.Alternatively, simulation models could be used toidentify the optimal ways of laying out facilitiesand resources within the library so as best toservice the needs of the users.The appropriate use of decision support sys-

tems provides the potential greatly to facilitatethe decision-making process, by providing acomparative analysis of the alternative coursesof action facing a manager. It must, however, berecognized that decision support systems will beeffective only if the systems are designed tobe compatible with a manager’s decision-makingstyle and managers are educated and trained withregard to their use.

References

Adams, R., Bloor, I., Collier, M., Meldrum, M. andWard, S. (1993) Decision Support Systems andPerformance Assessment in Libraries, Bowker Saur.

Bommer, M. and Chorba, R. (1982) Decision Makingfor Library Management, Knowledge Industry Pub-lications.

Sprague, R. and Watson, H. (1986) Decision SupportSystems: Putting Theory into Practice, Prentice-HallInternational.

Turban, E. (1988) Decision Support and Expert Sys-tems: Managerial Perspectives, Macmillan.

Further reading

Finlay, P. (1994) Introducing Decision Support Systems,NCC Blackwell [this is an informative book thatthoroughly explores the major applications of DSSand reviews methods for their development, valida-tion and implementation].

SEE ALSO: economics of information;information management

NEIL F. DOHERTY

DEFAMATION

Defamation is the making of a statement thattends to reflect adversely on a person in theestimation of members of society. The word‘publication’ is used to describe this process, butin the legal sense that it is communicated tosomeone else, not that it takes the form of apublished document. Defamation can take theform either of libel, which is written, or ofslander, which is oral. It is possible to take legalaction for a libel on the grounds that it wouldcause damage, whereas slander is actionable onlyon proof of actual damage. This distinction,critical to the common law tradition, does notexist in Roman law. Whilst it has always been aconcern in libraries and information services, therelaxed communication environment of the in-ternet has made potentially defamatory com-ment more accessible. Issues relating to liabilityfor defamatory comment are a concern besttreated as matters of information ethics. Thedevelopment of netiquette can be seen as, atleast in part, a response to defamatory statementsin electronic communication forums.

DESKTOP COMPUTER

The generic name for the typical computer nowin universal use. It consists of a keyboard, aprocessing unit containing the hard disk and diskdrives, and a visual display unit. The term isactually used principally to distinguish this devicefrom the increasingly common laptop and palm-top computers.

SEE ALSO: personal computer

DESKTOP PUBLISHING

Desktop publishing (DTP) is the use of personalcomputers for interactive document composition

130 DEFAMATION

(Tuck 1989). Satisfactory definitions are elusive ifonly because DTP stands at the confluence ofoffice work, printing and computing. The term isa misnomer as it is not really to do with publish-ing but with improving the quality and loweringthe costs of text preparation. As it was originallydeveloped in the 1980s, it was a combination ofpage make-up software running on a desktopcomputer with a laser printer for the productionof copy that was then reproduced for conven-tional printing. The growth in the functionalityof personal computers, however, means thatmuch of what could only be done by DTPsystems can now be performed by commonword-processing packages, and high-quality out-put can be derived from colour laser printers.DTP can be easily distinguished from electronicpublishing, because DTP is designed to generatea printed product, but it is increasingly difficultto distinguish it from the highest quality of word-processed material.

Applications

DTP was devised to be used for the preparation ofdocuments such as reports, newsletters, leaflets,posters, manuals, brochures and invoices thatcontain text and often graphics of various sortsand where presentation is important. For librariesand information services this facilitates better-quality documents or reduces the costs of produ-cing high-quality materials, perhaps enablingthem to produce publications where traditionalcosts would have been prohibitive. One of themain advantages of DTP is that it makes itrelatively easy to incorporate pictures, logos,diagrams and graphs into documents. Again,much of this can now be done by word-processingpackages.

Software and hardware

DTP packages arrived in the mid-1980s and weremore sophisticated than word-processingpackages at that time, but simpler than thoseused for photo-typesetting. DTP packages havefacilities and characteristics suitable for differentuser groups, such as office/computing users (e.g.PageMaker and Ventura Publisher), designers/typesetters (e.g. QuarkXPress) and technicalauthorship (e.g. Interleaf). Thus there is softwareto enable the non-specialist to make up docu-ment pages and also software to assist designers

in the graphic design process. The needs of bothgroups are rather different.The hardware required includes a computer

(often an Apple Macintosh or PC is used) withhard disk, graphics capability, a high-resolutionscreen and a laser printer. A document scanner,graphics tablet and optical character recognitionsoftware may be desirable.Generally documents are created and edited in

a word-processing package and then importedinto the DTP package, where the pages aredesigned. Graphics, created with a drawingpackage, can also be imported into pre-definedframes within the page, as can images from adocument scanner. Various ‘style sheets’ (e.g. fora newsletter or report) can be designed andstored. These specify such attributes as page size,margin sizes, columns, font styles, font sizes,headings, subheadings, etc. A key characteristicof most packages is ‘WYSIWYG’ (What You SeeIs What You Get), in which the user can see onthe (high-resolution) screen the page as it willfinally appear. As screen resolution is lower thanprinter resolution, this is not precise. The finaloutput from the laser printer is camera-readycopy ready for reproduction.

Design

One of the main dangers with DTP for theinexperienced is design; it becomes very easy foranyone with a package to ‘play around’ with allthe features and facilities newly at their finger-tips, and the results can be disastrously evident.Published documents have a purpose, a messageto communicate. Design plays a large part inachieving that purpose, and attention to thedesign of the documents is crucial. LIS profes-sionals specialize in the presentation and com-munication of information, and DTP hasprovided them with a powerful tool to enhancethe design of their documents, improve thepresentation of the information and thus increasethe communication value of them. But for thosewithout any graphic design skills, caution shouldbe exercised.

Developments

As DTP became more sophisticated, other issuesarose and were addressed. One of the moreobvious was the problems created by foreignlanguages, from extra characters and symbols tocompletely different character sets. This

DESKTOP PUBLISHING 131

exemplifies the advances of the late 1990s, sincenot only are the diacritical marks used in manyLatin alphabet languages available in word-processing packages, but so also are fonts forother scripts such as Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic andHebrew.The retention of the document structure and

layout is often important, and in these respectsDTP is related to mark-up languages such asSGML, document structure standards suchas ODA and publishing standards such as AdobeAcrobat. As processes have become more inte-grated, so the software packages at each stagehave been linked in with those in other stages.Another area of development, and potentialconfusion, is ‘desktop CD-ROM publishing’whereby ordinary users can produce (and pub-lish) material on cd-rom on their desktop.A problem created for the LIS profession, but

of a different nature, is that DTP and similartechnologies make it easier for many people toproduce and publish, often on a small scale,documents that would not previously have seenthe light of day – that is, it has resulted in agrowth in grey literature. This in turn willcreate accessing, cataloguing and handling pro-blems.

References

Tuck, B. (1989) ‘Desktop publishing: What it is andwhat it can do for you’, ASLIB Proceedings 41: 29–37.

Further reading

Carson, J. (1988) Desktop Publishing and Libraries,Taylor Graham [discusses the role of DTP, andincludes a survey of DTP use in UK public libraries].

Hall, J. (1999) Desk Top Publishing, Liberty Hall.Tuck, B., McKnight, C., Hayet, M. and Archer, C.(1990) Project Quartet, British Library Board (Li-brary and Information Research Report 76) [Chapter7 gives a general outline of DTP and relates it todocument architecture and mark-up].

Yates-Mercer, P.A. and Crook. A. (1989) The PotentialApplications of Desktop Publishing in InformationServices, British Library Board (British Library Re-search Paper 62) [describes a survey of DTP users ininformation services and six case studies of potentialusers].

SEE ALSO: informatics; knowledge industries;publishing; reprography

PENELOPE YATES-MERCER,

REVISED BY THE EDITORS

DEVELOPMENT CO-OPERATION INSUPPORT OF INFORMATION ANDKNOWLEDGE ACTIVITIES

Agencies that offer aid and other assistanceto developing countries have been involvedin many activities designed to promote thedevelopment of libraries, information servicesand the knowledge industries in general.Such agencies include international bodies suchas the United Nations Development Programme(UNDP) and unesco, national agencies suchas the British Council, and non-governmentalorganizations including some charitable founda-tions.

Publishing

Initiatives to support publishing in developingcountries in the early 1990s were often sporadicand unco-ordinated. Some focused on trainingpotential writers, others on providing workshopsfor editors. Development agencies discoveredthat the provision of modern printing units bythemselves did not generate books, and the nextphase of project support concentrated on pre-paration of manuscripts. By the late 1990s thetrend changed to focus on bolstering indigenouspublishing initiatives to counteract the depen-dence on information being provided from the‘North’. Other funders sought to get the resultsof their support disseminated to a wider audi-ence. However, the flurry of new journal titlesthat appeared in the early 1990s did not lead tosustainable publications and the ‘Volume 1, Issue1’ syndrome continued to indicate a fragilepublishing environment.By the late 1990s the development community

began to appreciate that publishing only makessense if its objective is permanent supply to itstarget group, and information is only useful themoment it is in the hands of readers. Thepublication chain has to be complete. The rela-tionships between authorship, editorial work,publishing in the private and commercial sectors,marketing and distribution have to be consideredwithin an overall context. Development supportat the end of the decade therefore tried toconcentrate efforts on a ‘holistic’ approach.Agencies such as those in Sweden, Denmark andNorway have made a considerable effort to worktogether in supporting projects with commonaims and objectives. This approach has also

132 DEVELOPMENT CO-OPERATION IN SUPPORT OF INFORMATION AND KNOWLEDGE ACTIVITIES

given rise to the requirement for partners toelaborate short, medium and long-term strategicplans that can be funded collaboratively. Success-ful examples include the African Books Collec-tive (ABC) and the African Publishers’ Network(APNET).

Library development

Funding for large capital projects became unsus-tainable by the end of the 1980s and agenciesrevised their policies. With few exceptions, sup-port for access to information became oneelement of individual project support. As aprinciple, this might have worked if the economicand ‘political’ environment had been able tosustain the foundations provided in the 1960sand 1970s. In reality, funding for informationactivities became ad hoc, and national andcentral libraries began to collapse during the1980s and 1990s. As research for the UniversityLibraries in Africa: A Review of their CurrentState and Future Potential showed (see Rosen-berg 1997) – although few agencies were able toput a figure on the scale of their support toAfrican university libraries, since aid was beingchannelled through a number of parallel ways –many libraries became highly, if not totally,dependent on external assistance. Between1989–94 the level of external support was nolonger a supplement to an institution’s budget,but rather replaced it. Only the universities ofBotswana and Zimbabwe, and the private uni-versities in Kenya and Zimbabwe, used cash ormaterial donations to supplement their ownbudget; and the University of Botswana was theonly institution that could afford to turn downdevelopment support.

Support for information and knowledgeactivities in the twenty-first century

Virtually all new initiatives in the field of accessto information and ‘knowledge’, particularly inAfrica – whether the acquisition of computers,staff training, development of services like CD-ROM searching, e-mail, Internet access, estab-lishment of networks and ‘telecentres’ – arethe result of outside assistance. Although a greatdeal of emphasis from 1995–2000 was placed on‘affordability’ and ‘sustainability’, there is nodoubt that many of these programmes weretotally dependent on external funding for start-up investment. Furthermore, many institutions

found that they were unable to bear the recurrentcosts of updating software or telephone linerental and call costs, and some of the heavilyresource-dependent projects have now fallen intodecay.Funding for the production of information,

especially at research level, has continued to besporadic. There is considerable pressure tocreate viable publishing industries within devel-oping countries, but it is difficult to support thissector without running into the problems of thehigh cost of production and the lack of purchas-ing power of libraries and individuals. Small-scale academic publishing, especially of journals,is a precarious business all over the world, butthose operating from a developing-country baseare particularly vulnerable. The opportunitiesafforded by the electronic medium providepossibilities for exposure and dissemination,which were hitherto not available. There are afew particularly well-targeted and practical pro-grammes in this area – SciELO (ScientificElectronic Library OnLine) providing a fullyelectronic environment for selected biomedicaljournals in Latin America, and AJOL (AfricanJournals OnLine) providing the tables of con-tents and abstracts of articles from scientificjournals published in Africa.Following the trend of development co-opera-

tion in the late 1990s, many agencies have givenclear articulations of what types of projectsmight receive positive consideration for funding.In the field of information the most obvious‘good candidate’ has been that which involvesthe use of new technology. However, the impor-tance of training is often ignored, and the need toposition electronic information as a componentof a total solution, in which the print formatcontinues to have a place, is frequently over-looked.Another trend that has been accelerating is the

willingness, indeed keenness, for funding bodiesto see themselves as supporting pilot projects to‘test’ or ‘trial’ new initiatives or approaches,again preferably at the cutting edge in the use ofnew information and communication tech-nology. In theory this is a positive developmentas small amounts of money can often facilitate auseful pilot in a specific area. The down-side isthat, in many instances, the funding available forpilots is very short term in nature, and where itcan take between twelve to eighteen months toget a pilot underway the completion date is often

DEVELOPMENT CO-OPERATION IN SUPPORT OF INFORMATION AND KNOWLEDGE ACTIVITIES 133

on the horizon before activity has matured toprovide positive results. In fact, by the time theproject really begins to take off there has oftenbeen little funding available within the hostinstitution, the ‘intermediary’ or the fundingbody to continue those that are evaluated to be‘successful’. The host is left with a ‘showcase’experiment, the ‘intermediary’ feels that it isletting the involved partners down and thefunder has moved on to the next ‘pilot’ in anewer, more ‘trendy’ field somewhere else.There is no doubt that the new technologies

can offer tremendous potential in providing acomplementary medium for provision and ex-change of information, and there are severalinitiatives that have received external funding,and some that are low-cost indigenous initia-tives, which bear possibilities for replicationelsewhere. The fashion for funding high-costtechnical components is running its course. Asmore stable communication infrastructures arein place, more development agencies are open togive consideration to the content aspects ofinformation and knowledge sharing and provi-sion, and, as a result, a number of information‘access’ programmes have been developed in2000–1. Some have a single aim – to provide‘free’ or differentially priced access to onlinejournals, the most significant of which at thetime of writing include eIFL (the ElectronicInformation for Libraries Direct) of the OpenSociety Institute and HINARI (Health InterNet-work Access to Research Initiative) of the WorldHealth Organization. Others have developedprogrammes in close collaboration with theirpartners and used a more holistic approach –the Programme for the Enhancement of ResearchInformation (PERI) being described as the mostdevelopmentally mature of the activities available(Silver 2002).

Conclusion

Work in the information/global knowledge arenais going through an exciting and rapidly chan-ging period, but the ability to be in a position torespond to the challenges seems less certain.Taking into account the above trends, develop-ment organizations see their role, quite rightly,no longer as central to identification of projects,nor ‘ownership’ of implementation, nor even toprovision of long-term technical assistance. Theirability to disburse or attract funding for such

aspects is long past. However, the supportive roleof ‘intermediaries’ in providing advice, sharinginformation and in advocacy, seems to be in evengreater demand. Non-governmental organiza-tions (NGOs), with long-term practical relation-ships with colleagues, have fulfilled a special rolein drawing the attention of the major fundingand development bodies to the continued andcentral importance of information. The voice andexperience of colleagues in developing and tran-sitional countries must be heard so that the fulladvantages of the potential in the ‘new informa-tion’ era can be explored and implemented.

References

Silver, K. (2002) Pressing the Send Key – PreferentialJournal Access in Developing Countries, LearnedPublishing, April 2002.

Further reading

African Books Collective (ABC) (http://www.africanbookscollective.com/).

African Journals OnLine (AJOL) (http://www.inasp.info/ajol/).

African Publishers’ Network (APNET) (http://www.apnet.org/).

eIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries Direct) ofthe Open Society Institute (http://eifl.net).

HINARI (Health InterNetwork Access to ResearchInitiative) (http://www.who.int/inf-pr-2001/en/pr2001–32.html) (press release only available atDecember 2001).

Programme for the Enhancement of Research Informa-tion (PERI) (http://www.inasp.info/peri/).

Rosenberg, D. (1997) University Libraries in Africa: AReview of their Current State and Future Potential,International African Institute.

SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library OnLine) (http://www.scielo.br/).

SEE ALSO: Africa; book trade; Central America;knowledge industries; South America

CAROL PRIESTLEY

DEWEY, MELVIL (1857–1931)

Although most famous for the dewey decimalclassification, Dewey, more than any otherindividual, was responsible for the developmentof modern library science.Born in New York and educated at Amherst

College, his career in librarianship began with astudy of the techniques used in the best-knownlibraries in the northeastern US states. Recogniz-ing the limitations of the fixed-location method

134 DEWEY, MELVIL

of arranging library collections, Dewey devisedthe idea of relative location – using decimalnumbers to indicate the subjects of books ratherthan numbering the books themselves. The De-wey Decimal Classification, the outcome of thiswork, was published in 1876. In the sameremarkable year, the american library asso-ciation was founded, as was the Library Jour-nal, under Dewey’s own editorship. Dewey alsoestablished the Library Bureau, a company thatdeveloped standardized supplies, equipment andlibrary methods under his direction.He became Librarian at Columbia College,

New York, in 1883 and developed the world’sfirst library school there. He later becameDirector of the New York State Library andhelped found the New York Library Associa-tion, the first of the state associations and themodel for those to come, in 1890. In additionto his contributions to the techniques of librar-ianship and to library education, he took astrong interest in library services for the dis-advantaged and in travelling libraries or book-mobiles for isolated communities. He also sawthe value of acquisitions of non-book media inlibraries. His contribution was recognized byaward of the Presidency of the Association ofState Librarians (1889–92) and of ALA (1890and 1892–3).

Further reading

Wiegand, W.A. (1996) Irrepressible Reformer: A Bio-graphy of Melvil Dewey, American Library Associa-tion.

SEE ALSO: bibliographic classification; libraryeducation

DEWEY DECIMAL CLASSIFICATION

A bibliographic classification scheme de-vised by Melvil dewey and first publishedanonymously in 1876. It has now reached itstwenty-first revised edition (Dewey 1996).Knowledge is divided into ten main classes,each designated by a numeral from 0 to 9,which can then be subdivided by the additionof two numerals before a decimal point andfurther numerals after it. These indicate sub-divisions of the broad class. It has a relativeindex that shows the relation of each subjectthat is indexed to a larger subject (or class ordivision). For shelving purposes the first three

letters of the author’s name or of the title of thework are often added after the classificationnumber. The published schedules have beenextended and modified in successive editions.DDC as it is commonly known is widely usedin public and academic libraries throughout theworld.

References

Dewey (1996) Decimal Classification and RelativeIndex, 21st edn, revised by J.S. Mitchell et al., ForestPress.


DIALOG

A major US host offering access to in excess of12 terabytes of content. Founded in 1972,DIALOG was one of the pioneers of commercialprovision of online information services. It isnow part of the Thomson Corporation. Furtherinformation can be found at www.dialog.com.

SEE ALSO: electronic information resources

DICTIONARY

A list and explanation of the words of a languageor the vocabulary of a particular subject. Thewords are arranged in the order determined bythe appropriate alphabetization rules. A lan-guage dictionary typically gives the orthography,pronunciation and meaning of each word, andsometimes its etymology and examples of usage.A dictionary of the words in a restricted field ofknowledge usually only gives the meaning,although it may be more elaborate. In informa-tion retrieval, it can be used as synonymous withthesaurus.

DICTIONARY CATALOGUES

A library catalogue (see catalogues) in whichentries for authors, titles and subjects are inter-filed in a single alphabetical sequence. Suchcatalogues were once normal in the USA,although less usual elsewhere. The NationalUnion Catalog published by the library ofcongress is the largest and probably best-knownexample of a dictionary catalogue.

DICTIONARY CATALOGUES 135

DIGITAL LIBRARY

What is a digital library?

The literature abounds with definitions of digitallibraries. However, the definition formulated bythe Digital Library Foundation and cited byWaters (1998) is particularly broad-ranging:

Digital libraries are organizations that providethe resources, including the specialized staff, toselect, structure, offer intellectual access to,interpret, distribute, preserve the integrity of,and ensure the persistence over time of collec-tions of digital works so that they are readilyand economically available for use by adefined community or set of communities.

It is interesting to note that removal of the twoinstances of the word ‘digital’ results in a gooddefinition of a library. Deconstructing this defini-tion yields an overview of many of the inter-related issues facing digital libraries today.

ORGANIZATION

Is there necessarily an ‘organization’ behind adigital library? Increasingly on the world wideweb, individuals are making available collectionsof material. Arms (2000: 80) points to thePerseus project as ‘one of the most importantdigital libraries in the humanities’ but which wasstarted by Gregory Crane, a member of thefaculty at Harvard University.

RESOURCES

Libraries have always required resources anddigital libraries are no different. One of themyths of digital libraries (Kuny and Cleveland1998) is that they will be cheaper than printlibraries. However, there is no evidence for this.Shelves may be replaced by servers, therebypossibly saving some space, but the serversrepresent significant hardware costs and requireskilled maintenance. Additionally, there are costsassociated with providing and maintaining anetwork infrastructure.

STAFF

There has been an interesting discussion in theliterature over whether the digital library needslibrarians (e.g. Matson and Bonski 1997).Although some have suggested that librarians areno longer needed (so-called ‘disintermediation’),the more prevalent view is that their role is

changing, with terms like ‘cybrarian’ appearingin the literature as a reflection of this change. Asthe role changes, so training needs will change toinclude management of the technical infrastruc-ture as well as ‘the collection’. It is also likely thatthere will be an increased need for user trainingand engagement in the concomitant discussionabout what services the digital library shouldprovide.

SELECTION

This can be construed in two different senses:selecting digital material to include in the ‘collec-tion’; and selecting what is to be digitized. Part ofthe disintermediation argument is that withpowerful search engines there is little reason toselect – simply make everything available and relyon the search engine to find it. However, it iswidely accepted that it would be impossible (andnot necessarily desirable) to digitize all the exist-ing paper documents and so some selection isnecessary.

STRUCTURE

Similar arguments to those surrounding selectionrecur in relation to structure, particularly con-cerning the power of search engines. However,such arguments fail to recognize that searching isonly one mode of information discovery. brows-ing is another important mode and is difficult toachieve without some structure.

ACCESS

One of the much-vaunted advantages of thedigital library is that it is accessible twenty-fourhours a day, seven days a week, 365 days of theyear. This ideal view ignores the frailty of compu-ter networks and servers, and their need formaintenance. However, a digital library is moreaccessible for longer hours than the traditionallibrary. What is more, there is some evidence thatsignificant use is made of digital collections out of‘normal’ office hours. This increased access toinformation is fine for those with the necessarytechnology, but half the world’s population havenever made a telephone call. The digital librarycould actually work towiden the gap between theinformation rich and the information poor.

PRESERVE THE INTEGRITY

In the digital library, preserving the integrity ofthe information can be seen as a technicalfunction, making sure the files are not corrupted.

136 DIGITAL LIBRARY

However, there are still organizational and man-agement functions that are necessary to ensurethat the process is carried out in the short term.In the long term, other issues arise.

PERSISTENCE OVER TIME

Paradoxically, it is possible to walk into TrinityCollege, Dublin, and read the Book of Kells,which was written in about ad 800, yet there arefloppy disks that are only ten years old but forwhich we no longer have machines that can readthem. Such technological obsolescence is indanger of rendering vast amounts of informationinaccessible. Digital media are also subject todeterioration. As Rothenberg said, ‘digital infor-mation lasts forever – or five years, whichevercomes first’ (Rothenberg 1995: 24). The preser-vation of digital information is still an activeresearch area and one that must be a concern forthe digital library.

COLLECTIONS OF DIGITAL WORKS

Although there now exist many digital ‘collec-tions’, one possibility for the digital library isthat it goes beyond a single collection andprovides access to resources not held by the hostlibrary. Zemon (2001) discusses the role of thelibrarian in such portal development (see por-tals and gateways). Additionally, we are nowseeing the emergence of digital content providers– organizations like Questia, netLibrary andebrary – offering libraries and users instantaccess to large collections.

THE ECONOMIC DIMENSION

The move to digital media has created a differenteconomic climate, one in which the journalsubscription or book price has been replacedwith the software licence. The implications ofthis change are still being worked out and neweconomic models are being explored (see, forexample, Halliday and Oppenheim 2000).

COMMUNITY

As Borgman says, ‘Digital libraries are con-structed – collected and organized – by [and for]a community of users, and their functionalcapabilities support the information needs anduses of that community’ (Borgman 2000: 42).With library budgets shrinking, collections needto be user driven, serving an identifiable needrather than being collected ‘just in case’.

Some remaining issues

Comprehensive though the definition is, there areother issues involved in digital libraries. Thefollowing are examples.

STANDARDS

As the old saying goes, ‘The good thing aboutstandards is that there are so many to choosefrom!’ However, if digital libraries are to achievea reasonable level of interoperability, then avariety of standards are needed for different partsof the process of making information available.Such standards are emerging, for example theadoption of the Z39.50 search and retrieveprotocol, the discussion surrounding the dublincore metadata proposals and so forth.

INTERFACE

The de facto interface to the digital library seemsto be Web-based. However, this by no meansguarantees usability and there is a need to designfor the user population and the tasks they wish toperform. Closely related to interface issues arethe issues regarding user acceptance of digitallibrary technology.

COPYRIGHT

The ease with which electronic documents can becopied has prompted a reconsideration of thecopyright legislation. On one hand, publishershave advocated strengthening the law in order toprotect their product (and therefore their incomestream). However, balanced against this is theview that copyright is a social construct thatserved a purpose but which may no longer do so(Samuelson 1995). Do we need it? Can wesustain it?

SCALABILITY

Most of the work done so far has been relativelysmall scale. It remains to be seen whether themethods and techniques will scale up to copewith large numbers of users and enormousvolumes of information.

MEDIA INTEGRATION

Although there are examples of ‘pure’ digitallibraries, traditional libraries are themselves mov-ing increasingly toward making digital contentavailable to their users. This has given rise to theconcept of the hybrid library (see hybrid li-braries) in which digital and paper-based

DIGITAL LIBRARY 137

content coexist. Effective integration of servicesis a management challenge for the modernlibrarian.

References

Arms, W.Y. (2000) Digital Libraries, Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.

Borgman, C.L. (2000) From Gutenberg to the GlobalInformation Infrastructure: Access to Information inthe Networked World, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Halliday, L.L. and Oppenheim, C. (2000) ‘Comparisonand evaluation of some economic models of digital-only journals’, Journal of Documentation 56(6):660–73.

Kuny, T. and Cleveland, G. (1998) ‘The digital library:Myths and challenges’, IFLA Journal 24(2), 107–13.

Matson, L.D. and Bonski, D.J. (1997) ‘Do digitallibraries need librarians? An experiential dialog’,Online, November. (http://www.onlineinc.com/onli-nemag/NovOL97/matson11.html) [accessed 31 July2001].

Rothenberg, J. (1995) ‘Ensuring the longevity of digitaldocuments’, Scientific American 272(1): 24–9.

Samuelson, P. (1995) ‘Copyright and digital libraries’,Communications of the ACM 38(4): 15–21 and 110.

Waters, D.J. (1998) ‘What are digital libraries?’, CLIRIssues 4 (July/August) (http://www.clir.org/pubs/is-sues/issues04.html) [accessed 31 July 2001].

Zemon, M. (2001) ‘The librarian’s role in portaldevelopment’, College and Research Libraries News62(7) (July/August) (http://www.ala.org/acrl/ze-mon.html) [accessed 31 July 2001].

SEE ALSO: information and communicationtechnology; information professions; informationsociety; libraries; licences; social exclusion andlibraries

CLIFF MCKNIGHT

DIGITAL PRESERVATION

The preservation of digital documents forfuture use. Digital media are dependent on theavailability of software and hardware throughwhich the content can be read, so long-termpreservation is now conceived in terms of con-tinuous refreshment of selected files so that theyare compatible with currently available equip-ment and systems. Despite early optimism, digi-tized versions are not considered sufficientlystable to be used as surrogates for the originals.

DIGITIZATION

The process of converting analogue information

to a digital format for storage and processing in acomputer, or in communication the process ofconverting analogue signals to digital signals fortransmission across digital networks such as theInternet. In library and information work, digiti-zation is normally understood as the process ofcreating digital versions of analogue documents.Depending on the input methods used, this mayproduce an electronic file that can be manipu-lated as if it had been created in digital form, orit may merely be capable of retrieval. Digitiza-tion has sometimes been argued to have potentialapplications in the field of preservation, but inpractice the preservation of digitized files them-selves is often more problematical (Hedstrom1998).

References

Hedstrom, M. (1998) ‘Digital preservation: A timebomb for digital libraries’, Computers and theHumanities 31: 189–202.

Further reading

Youngs, K. (2001) Managing the Digitisation of Li-brary, Archive and Museum Materials, NationalPreservation Office.

SEE ALSO: document image processing;informatics; information and communicationtechnology

DIPLOMATIC

The science of the critical study of officialdocuments, such as charters, acts, treaties, con-tracts, judicial records, rolls, cartularies, regis-ters, etc., as historical sources.

SEE ALSO: archives; palaeography

DIRECTORY

1 A book containing lists of the names andaddresses, sometimes with other informationadded, of people, organizations or businesses,in a particular area, or with some commoninterest such as membership of a particulartrade or profession.

2 In computing, a list of the contents of a disk orother filestore.

138 DIGITAL PRESERVATION

DISASTER PREPAREDNESSPLANNING

The process of organizing a system for copingwith emergencies, and for dealing with thedamage that may be caused to the library byfire, storm, flood and so on, and by man-madedisasters perhaps resulting from war or terror-ism. Although traditionally this has been con-cerned with books and other documents, it isequally important to have effective plans inplace for retrieving data that is lost if acomputer system is physically or electronicallydamaged.

Risk assessment and disaster prevention

A risk assessment may be conducted as apreliminary step towards developing a plan.This should identify what sort of problemsmight lead to loss or damage to the stock orbreakdown of service, and what the long-termconsequences might be. The principal concern ofmost library disaster plans is how to salvagematerials following fire or flood damage,though the question of disaster prevention andthe backing-up of computer systems may also beaddressed.If a library building (see library buildings)

survey is undertaken, the results should bring tolight which areas are most susceptible and relatethis to where the most valuable materials arekept. Periodic safety inspections may also help.Risk assessment may lead to improved buildingmaintenance and may help prevent disasters, andit is closely related to the need to ensure adequateinsurance cover is provided.

Disaster response

The first priority must be people’s safety. Noticesmay be posted round the building telling staffand readers what to do in case of fire or otheremergency. The provision of fire extinguishers orwater hoses, fire escapes and other matters maybe required by law. Consideration may also begiven to the installation of sprinklers or otherautomatic fire-control systems, and staff mayreceive training in the use of fire extinguishers.In some countries, staff may also be given guide-lines on the action to be taken in severe weatherconditions and in the event of floods or earth-quakes.

In larger buildings it is desirable to maintain arota so that there is always a designated DutyOfficer available to respond to emergencies andto oversee the evacuation of the building. A listmay also be needed of staff who could be calledupon to attend in the event of an emergencyoutside working hours.Stocks may be kept of such things as poly-

thene sheeting, paper products for absorbingwater or other materials for use in emergencies.Special equipment may be kept for pumpingout water and cleaning up, and basic traininggiven to familiarize staff with the use of anyspecial equipment. Procedures for contactingelectricians, plumbers and so on need to beas clear as possible. As it is not practicableto keep everything that may be required instock, it is recommended that lists be keptof local suppliers and other sources of assis-tance.In the event of a disaster, teams may need to

be organized to assist with the salvage of thestock, the whole operation being co-ordinatedby a senior member of staff. A number of bookshave been published giving salvage guidelines,and some national libraries provide an advisoryservice. Many libraries and record offices haveprepared their own staff manuals dealingin some detail with the salvage of water-damaged materials, usually based on a pub-lished model such as that produced by theNational Library of Scotland (Anderson andMcIntyre 1985).

Initial action plan

Initial action should concentrate on effortsto stabilize the condition of materials that needto be removed and prevent further damage, andon the task of rescuing as much of the damagedmaterial as possible so as to minimize theneed for future restoration or replacement. Ithas been found that when books are badlydamaged, the combined costs of salvage andrestoration are likely to be greater than thecost of replacement for books that are stillobtainable, but no hasty decisions should bemade in the initial stages of dealing with adisaster. Typically, guidelines will recommendthat:

. The degree and character of damage shouldbe assessed as soon as possible, and the

DISASTER PREPAREDNESS PLANNING 139

different types of media should be distin-guished (photographs, manuscripts, printedbooks, brittle and semi-brittle papers, coatedpaper), as different conservation treatmentmay be required.

. Priority should be given to the removal ofstanding water, reducing temperature andintroducing controlled ventilation, so as todelay the onset of mould or to slow itsgrowth.

. The amount of handling given to damagedmaterials should be minimized, and all con-servation work should be avoided during thesalvage operation or while working underpressure.

. No attempt should be made to lay out wetdocuments to dry, or to fan out wet booksto air the pages inside, until the situationhas been brought under control and conditionsare conducive to drying; the relative humidityin the area may need to be monitored.

It is generally acknowledged that mould growthis liable to begin within forty-eight hoursin warm humid conditions. Freezing is the bestway of preventing mould, and can be usedas a way of providing a ‘breathing space’,allowing time to make proper arrangementsfor drying, to analyse the relative costs ofthe different drying methods available, to pre-pare appropriate environmental conditions, torestore the buildings affected, to estimate fullrecovery costs or just to defer decisions until thevalue of damaged materials may be betterassessed.

Recovery plan

Decisions regarding the drying of materials thathave been frozen, the repair or replacement ofdamaged books and the restoration of damagedbuildings may be dealt with separately as part ofan agreed recovery plan. Points to be consideredmay include the following:

. The treatment of books on coated paper maynot be successful unless the materials arefrozen quickly while still wet.

. Freeze drying or vacuum drying may be theonly practical treatment for some types ofwater-damaged library materials: booksprinted on coated paper, masses of paper stucktogether, magnetic media, manuscripts with

fugitive inks, hand-coloured prints, maps, etc.. No water-damaged material should be re-turned to a high-humidity environment (suchas that often specified for the air-conditionedareas for archives and special collections)without having first been rehabilitated in acool dry area and monitored for mouldgrowth.

A reacclimatization period of at least sixmonths has been recommended by the Libraryof Congress (Waters 1975). If environmentalcontrols are available in the storage area, itis recommended that the relative humiditybe set as low as 35 or 45 per cent for the firstsix months and then increased gradually tomatch the desired conditions for long-termstorage.

References

Anderson, H. and McIntyre, J. (1985) Planning Manualfor Disaster Control in Scottish Libraries and RecordOffices, National Library of Scotland.

Waters, P. (1975) Procedures for Salvage of Water-damaged Library Materials, Library of Congress.

Further reading

Matthews, G. and Eden, P. (1996) Disaster Manage-ment in British Libraries: Project Report with Guide-lines for Library Managers, British Library.

Matthews, G. and Feather, J. (eds) (2002) DisasterManagement in Libraries and Archives, Ashgate.

Morris, J. (1986) The Library Disaster PreparednessHandbook, American Library Association [includesdiscussion of fire protection, safety and security, andthe salvage and restoration of water-damaged mate-rials].

Sturges, P. and Rosenberg, D, (1999) Disaster andAfter: Practicalities of Information Services in Timesof War and Other Catastrophes, Taylor Graham.

SEE ALSO: computer security; health and safety;preservation

JOHN ASHMAN, REVISED BY THE EDITORS

DISCOGRAPHY

1 The study of sound recording (see soundrecordings).

2 A list of sound recordings giving details ofcomposer, title, performer(s), maker andmaker’s catalogue number, analogous to abibliography of printed matter.

140 DISCOGRAPHY

DISSEMINATION OFINFORMATION

Definition

Active distribution and the spreading of infor-mation of all kinds is called dissemination ofinformation. It concerns metadata as well asprimary sources. This service is offered bylibraries and other information agencies todefined target groups or individuals whoseparticular information requirements must havebeen previously determined. In this case theterm selective dissemination of information(SDI) is frequently used. Its goal is to supplycustomers with all the latest information exclu-sively relevant for them. This information pro-cess has to take place at regular intervals. Theevaluation criteria have to be the satisfaction ofthe customers. As an instrument of qualitymanagement their relevance feedback gives theopportunity to control and improve the accuracyof the service. The interest profiles of individualsor target groups stored by the provider must bechecked and regularly updated. In addition,customers have the opportunity to access theirindividual profile data and to make changes atany time.

AIM

The value added for customers consists insaving of time and the avoidance of informationoverflow through a regular supply of currentinformation, for scientific research or profes-sional practice, for political, social and culturalpurposes or for the cultivation of hobbies. Evencustomers who never would be able or willingto keep themselves informed about the latestdevelopments can be supplied with currentinformation. Dissemination of information is aneffective means to improve the level of informa-tion and allows the making of decisions of allkinds on a well-informed basis. Charges forcorresponding services usually vary considerablydepending on different qualitative and quantita-tive levels.

Evolution

Traditionally, libraries as well as archives wererestricted to gathering, classifying and providinginformation. special libraries and documenta-

tion centres expanded their basic functions byadding the distribution and dissemination ofinformation.The transition from industrial society to in-

formation society will affect the traditionallibrary functions. Most library types will have tointegrate services like the dissemination of infor-mation as soon as possible. This can be achievedby supplying traditional pull services throughpush services that can be tailored to the indivi-dual or group information profiles.marketing of libraries allows the develop-

ment of appropriate services that are regularlyadapted to the customers’ requirements. In thepast, dissemination of information offered bylibraries or rather special libraries was restrictedto library-owned material. Now digital mediaand the Internet make it possible to accesssources that are located all over the world. Thisconcept means that the well-proven inter-library lending is broadened by co-operativedissemination of information. Institutions likesubject gateways, subject portals (see portalsand gateways) or information co-operatives ofscientific and public libraries are heading in thisdirection and show both a clear revaluation ofactive dissemination of information and a pre-ference for working collaboratively.

FORMS

Intensity and forms of dissemination of informa-tion vary. At a basic level current journals andreports or their tables of contents are circulatedto those customers whose information profilesthey affect (current contents). Externally gener-ated bulletins and current-awareness servicesthat are made and offered for default profiles canbe subscribed and are distributed by the library.In this particular case the library acts as amediator.A higher level of dissemination service is

achieved if the library or a related institutiongenerates the relevant information itself, com-piles it and forwards it to the clients. All relevantsources (printed material, bibliographic and fac-tual databases, hosts, Internet sources) arescanned and evaluated for this purpose regularlyby the library. The profile-corresponding selec-tion and compression of relevant information isalso done by the library. Methodically andtechnically these activities have been simplifiedconsiderably through intelligent agents. Default

DISSEMINATION OF INFORMATION 141

profiles or individual information profiles can bestored there and be rendered into the searchvocabulary of the respective sources. Intelligentagents, filters (see filtering) or push technol-ogy assistants facilitate a drastic improvement ofdissemination of information. However, they donot replace the work of highly qualified informa-tion specialists by any means. Conception, main-tenance and management of these instrumentsbelong to their tasks.An appropriate methodology of generation,

description, maintenance and adaptation of in-dividual profiles of interest is basic to effectivedissemination services. Internet portals for exam-ple provide checklists, thus enabling their custo-mers to describe their focal interests. With anextensive thesaurus, customers tend to selecttoo many descriptors. In order to avoid this, it ismore often offered to customers as a way todescribe their interest fields using common terms.Afterwards, information specialists convert thesenon-standardized descriptions into controlled vo-cabulary to produce exact information profiles.Avoiding uncertainties requires purposeful feed-back from the client and ideally a properreference interview. Interest profiles can bepersonalized or be tailored to a target audience.Where the interests of numerous customers coin-cide, a default profile is recommended that canbe distributed in the form of an informationbulletin. Heterogeneous profiles require persona-lized dissemination services. In large institutionsand information co-operatives a combination ofboth alternatives can be offered. Individual rele-vance feedback allows the successive personaliza-tion of what were initially default profiles.The content of dissemination of information

services can include metadata and primarysources, hypotheses and validated information,published and informal material. Metadatashould be detailed and include annotations,abstracts and so forth so that customers areenabled to judge whether, for example, theordering of digital or printed material withresulting costs is worthwhile.Dissemination of information in former times

occurred through newsletters, information bulle-tins or individual messages in printed form.Today such bulletins and newsletters are offeredonline in combination with personal notificationby e-mail.Whether printed or digital, the extent of the

information provided per issue must not be too

great so that the clarity is not impeded andcustomers can use the added value of this regularpush service immediately and without largeexpenditure. User-friendly structuring of all ma-terial is, of course, a basic condition for that.

State and perspectives

Dissemination of information in the academicsector is usually offered by libraries. The trend toproduce such services co-operatively is obvious.Commercial providers too are venturing into thismarket although their customers are for nowmainly enterprises. Lately dissemination of infor-mation has gained immensely in importance as aninstrument to increase the customer relationshipregarding e-commerce. Customers define theirindividual profile, e.g. within the context ofInternet portals, in order to be supplied withspecific information. Thus created personalizeddata can be used for effective one-to-one market-ing. In the economic sector personalized and role-based push services are used, to supply employeeswith exactly the information they need to do theirjobs. Personalization proves to be a basic consti-tuent of the information society. Libraries toointegrate this trend into new conceptions andservices, and they even establish new institutionsfor this purpose; dissemination of informationreceives a considerably increased value within theframework of subject gateways, library portalsand virtual libraries (see virtual library).

Further reading

Hamilton, F. (1995) Current Awareness, Current Tech-niques, Gower.

Murch, R. and Johnson, T. (1999) Intelligent SoftwareAgents, Prentice Hall PTR.

SEE ALSO: current awareness; current contentslist; information service; portals and gateways;virtual library

HERMANN RÖSCH

DISTANCE LEARNING

Distance learning (also known as ‘distance edu-cation’ and ‘open learning’) in library andinformation studies covers both the professionalqualification and further education of library andinformation sector (LIS) workers. Distance lear-ners are not required to attend the institutionoffering the course of study; they learn from a

142 DISTANCE LEARNING

location of their choice, often at the time of theirchoosing. The effects of barriers such as geogra-phical isolation and personal and work commit-ments are thus minimized. Distance learning inLIS using the postal system was proposed asearly as 1888 by Melvil dewey. It is now firmlyestablished in mainstream LIS education, increas-ingly complementing and replacing face-to-faceteaching and learning.

Delivery modes

Distance learning can be thought of as a con-tinuum, ranging from broadcast modes of deliv-ery of learning material, to full interactivitybetween learner and teacher.Traditional distance learning attempts to repli-

cate classroom teaching by sending teaching staffto students at remote locations and offering radioand television broadcasts and short-term residen-tial schools. These are usually supplemented byprint material, audio-cassette and video materialand home lab kits. There is little or no formalpeer-to-peer communication. Interactivity be-tween student and teaching staff is increasedthrough techniques such as telephone tutoringand interactive video (video-conferencing).Currently, the widespread adoption of infor-

mation and communication technologyand the Internet allows greater interactivity,transforming distance learning with peer-to-peercommunication in multiple modes. Asynchro-nous tools such as e-mail, online forums, news-groups and electronic submission ofassignments, and synchronous learning usingdesktop interactive video, online chat andMOO (Multi-user Object-Oriented domains)are used. The world wide web is used as adelivery mechanism for learning materials, sup-plementing or replacing print material, and as aninformation resource, providing resource-basedlearning opportunities.

Popularity of distance learning

Distance learning is becoming increasingly popu-lar with LIS workers and students. It offersgreater flexibility for students who may beisolated by distance, by family circumstance orby employment constraints (such as shift work-ers). The distance learning mode is also increas-ingly popular for continuing and furthereducation for similar reasons: it allows skills andknowledge to be updated in one’s own time, free

from workplace constraints such as lack of studyleave, and it can be planned and undertakenaround family and social responsibilities.

Constraints

Distance learning faces technological, resourceand pedagogical constraints. Technological con-straints include limited student access to informa-tion and communication technology (e.g. highcharges for Internet access) and lack of infra-structure and resources (e.g. poor technologysupport by the teaching institution). Resourceconstraints include limited library provision ofservices to distance learning students.The pedagogical issues are less significant as

more distance learning takes place, but some stillneed to be addressed. Chief among them is howto encourage regular peer-to-peer and faculty-to-student communication, an essential part ofeffective learning. To ensure that students main-tain high levels of self-discipline and commitmentit is essential to create and maintain an activecommunity of learners. To this end mechanismssuch as online forums and newsgroups are used.The pastoral care aspects of education assumegreater prominence in effective distance learning.Scepticism about whether distance learning is aseffective as face-to-face learning is dissipatingrapidly.

Large distances and sparse populations

Large distances and sparse populations have beenthe incentive in some countries to provide dis-tance learning in LIS. Australia’s large land massand widely dispersed population has resulted inmost of its thirteen LIS schools offering distancelearning. Charles Sturt University’s School ofInformation Studies (http://www.csu.edu.au) hasoffered courses solely in this mode for twodecades, moving from traditional print-basedmail packages to Web-based subjects supplemen-ted by CD-ROM. All courses are fully supportedby interactive Web mechanisms such as forumsand e-mail.South Africa provides another example of a

country where distance learning is offered as aneffective way to counter the constraints ofdistance. The University of South Africa (www.unisa.ac.za) has a long history of offering dis-tance learning in LIS. It is currently implementingInternet-based services and its students haveaccess to learning centres throughout the country.

DISTANCE LEARNING 143

Need to increase educationopportunities

Elsewhere, the incentive for distance learning hasbeen the need to rapidly increase the number ofcitizens participating in formal education at alllevels. In India, distance learning in LIS wasoffered in 1985 by the University of Madras,followed in 1989 by the Indira Gandhi NationalOpen University (IGNOU). One decade later, atleast twenty-five institutions offered distancelearning LIS programmes to about 4,000 stu-dents. IGNOU provides self-instructional printmaterial supplemented by video and audio pro-grammes (which are also regularly broadcast bythe National TV Network and All India Radio),counselling sessions at study centres throughoutIndia and satellite-based teleconferencing (http://www.ignou.edu).Thailand, like India, has rapidly moved to

providing education to populations who havetraditionally not had access to universities. Su-khotai Thammathirat Open University has of-fered distance learning LIS programmes since1989, using mailed material (textbooks andworkbooks) supplemented by audio-cassettes,radio and television programmes. Optional tutor-ials are offered and counselling support is avail-able. There is a compulsory residential period.

Offering greater study choices

Another principal driver of distance learning hasbeen the flexibility it offers to learners whosepersonal and work commitments prevent themfrom attending campus. European countries arestarting to offer distance learning opportunitiesin LIS, such as the programmes of the Universityof Wales Aberystwyth (http://www.dil.aber.ac.uk)and the Swedish School of Library and Informa-tion Studies at Göteborg University and Högsko-lan i Borås (http://www.hb.se/bhs/bhs-eng).Of the fifty-six American Library Association-

accredited masters programmes in LIS in August2001, thirty-six offered some form of distancelearning. Of these, twenty-three were primarilyinvolved in delivering courses at satellite sites andthirteen with delivery via the Internet. Thisrepresents a change over the last decade fromprimarily face-to-face delivery, to most schoolssupplementing face-to-face teaching with off-campus instruction. There is also an increasingmove towards full degrees being availablethrough distance learning.

Conclusion

Distance learning is now accepted as a main-stream delivery mode, although concerns stillexist about some pedagogical issues. It is one ofseveral avenues available for library and informa-tion studies education, both for gaining profes-sional qualifications and for continuingprofessional development activities. Its popular-ity suggests that it may eventually eclipse othermethods of delivering learning to the LIS profes-sion.

Further reading

Distance Education Clearinghouse Website (2001)(http://www.uwex.edu/disted/definition.html) [provi-des a wide range of definitions of distance learningand distance education].

Julien, H., Robbins, J., Logan, E. and Dalrymple, P.(2001) ‘Going the distance’, Journal of Education forLibrary and Information Science 42: 200–5.

SEE ALSO: computer-assisted learning in libraryand information science; information professions;information science education; library education;object-oriented technology

ROSS HARVEY

DOCUMENT

A record that contains information content. Incommon usage it still normally means a piece ofpaper with words or graphics on it. In libraryand information work, the term is however usedto mean any information-carrying medium, re-gardless of format. Thus books, manuscripts,videotapes and computer files and databases areall regarded as documents.

DOCUMENT CLUSTERING

Clustering involves grouping together descrip-tions of documents by their similarity to eachother. information retrieval systems haveused clustering of documents and queries toimprove both retrieval efficiency and retrievaleffectiveness. Document clustering is reflected inthe methodologies of some of the newer search-ing techniques, such as data mining, which arebeing developed to facilitate more efficient andfocused searching for documents on the worldwide web. Recent work has included the crea-tion of automated clustering systems (Roussinov

144 DOCUMENT

and Chen 2001), which seem likely to be the wayof the future.

References

Roussinov, D.G. and Chen, H. (2001) ‘Informationnavigation on the Web by clustering and summariz-ing query results’, Information Processing and Man-agement 37: 789–816.

DOCUMENT DELIVERY

Definitions for document delivery vary, but it hascome to mean the provision of material that maybe retained by users. This is in contrast tointerlibrary lending, which is the lending ofan item by one library to another. This distinc-tion has, in some instances, led to a physicaldivision of operations within single libraries.Occasionally, too, the term interlending is re-garded as encompassing both traditional inter-lending and document supply operations, withthe phrase document delivery (or, increasingly,docdel) being used to refer exclusively to electro-nic document delivery, often regarded as being afaster and more sophisticated method of satisfy-ing requests for material. The vast majority oftraditional and electronic document delivery isrun as a mediated service, with the library beinginvolved in the processing, ordering and (some-times) receipt and delivery of documents. Unme-diated document delivery, by way of contrast,allows the individual library user to order andreceive a document direct from the supplier. Thiscan be beneficial to library users and to librariesby reducing the amount of administration in-volved in the process, thus speeding up thesupply of material, though the process is not asunproblematic as this bald summary implies.Document delivery can be proactive or reac-

tive depending on the users and their require-ments. In the early 1990s Current AlertingServices – Individual Article Supply (CAS-IAS)was launched, which provided a mechanism foralerting end-users and librarians to the existenceof new article titles. In CAS-IAS services adatabase is constructed, culled from the tablesof contents from significant journals that are inactive use. Interrogating this database enablesindividuals to identify titles of particular rele-vance to their research, and to place an orderonline for the article itself. These CAS-IASservices differ from formal interlending anddocument delivery because a royalty payment is

made to the copyright holder (the publisher) inorder to comply with national copyright laws. Assuch, these integrated services tend to be moreexpensive than interlending or centralized docu-ment delivery services.As a reactive measure, document delivery

represents an alternative strategy that can beused by librarians according to budgetary re-quirements. It is a feature of collection develop-ment that the growth in materials budgets has ingeneral been insufficient to allow the continuedacquisition of the full range of journals thatlibrary users require, particularly given the con-tinued growth in information output. As journalsare cancelled, the prices of other journals areraised by a factor greater than overall inflation inorder to compensate publishers for loss of earn-ings, forcing librarians to cancel additional titles.Such economic pressures, combined with therapid increase of information available electro-nically, has led to a change in the role oflibraries, with the traditional model of owningas much material as possible being replaced by aglobal approach to providing access to thatmaterial via document delivery.A key factor in document delivery is its

susceptibility to economic and technical trends.It is therefore a less stable activity than interlend-ing, which relies heavily on librarians’ expertise,but it has the advantage of being able to adaptmore quickly to new developments. It is also anarea of library work that both concerns andattracts commercial suppliers, whether publishersor distributors.

The key players

The british library Document Supply Centre(BLDSC) dominates the UK scene for documentdelivery. It receives over 3.8 million requests eachyear, over a million of which are from outside theUK; 89 per cent of these are satisfied fromBLDSC’s own stock. Three-quarters of the re-quests received by BLDSC are made electroni-cally. Most of the orders are dispatched by mail,and delivery to UK clients usually takes betweentwenty-four and forty-eight hours.Similar services operate in France (INIST), in

Germany (Hanover, Cologne), in Canada (CISTI)and in other counties that have adopted theBLDSC model as their basis. The adoption of acentralized approach has been stimulated by theapparent efficiency of a dedicated source for

DOCUMENT DELIVERY 145

document delivery, though in many instances thisrequires some sort of (usually) governmentalsubsidy. Such subsidies are often regarded as partof the government’s support for education andthe national research effort.In the USA, oclc has taken a dominant role in

providing an interlibrary lending subsystem to itslibrary management system, thus facilitating thecreation, sending and tracking of documentdelivery and ILL requests for materials includedon World Cat (OCLC’s Online Union Catalo-gue), which provides access to the combinedresources of over 6,700 libraries, totalling over43 million records. Around 18,000 libraries arepart of the OCLC network, and the ability tofind articles or books required within this vastlibrary system is an attractive option, particularlyas there is no charge for such transactions inmany instances.The growth in demand for document delivery

has resulted in an increased number of optionsbeing available to libraries in terms of commer-cial document suppliers and the range of servicesthey provide. These include UnCover, ISI’s Cur-rent Contents Online database, Current CitationsOnline from Ebsco Subscription Services andSwetscan from Swets Blackwell. The BritishLibrary’s own contributions include Zetoc, anelectronic table of contents service that providesaccess to the British Library’s Electronic Tables ofContents (ETOC) database. OCLC has devel-oped its own Article First and Contents Firstdatabases while the Research Libraries Groupuses its CitaDel system in a similar way.

Technological developments

The rise in the 1990s of electronic journalsavailable via the World Wide Web posed achallenge to traditional docdel. Such journals arein some cases refereed, some are freely availableand some of them command a price. Mostimportantly, many do not have a printed equiva-lent from which a document request mightotherwise be satisfied. A further development inthe UK electronic journals environment has beenthe National Electronic Site Licence Initiative(NESLI), established by the Joint InformationSystems Committee (JISC). Intended as a servicedesigned to promote the widespread delivery anduse of electronic journals in the UK highereducation and research community, NESLI is aninitiative intended to address the many issues

that at present hinder the most effective use of,access to and purchase of electronic journals inthe academic library community. A model licenceis an idealized version of a licensing contract thatgives both libraries and vendors a basis forevaluating and negotiating contracts that will befair and profitable to all parties. Documentdelivery is a particularly contentious issue forvendors of electronic information and a cleardefinition of terms is one of the most valuablefunctions model licences can perform in support-ing the needs of the library’s ILL and documentdelivery functions.

The future

The nature of document supply will inevitablychange as an increasing amount of materialbecomes available only electronically. There area number of issues and challenges for libraries tocontend with: access remains a major issue facinglibraries and the debate over copyright law andits application is likely to continue as librariesand publishers attempt to deal with the implica-tions of new technologies, new formats forinformation and improved networks of commu-nication. The interoperability of equipment andsoftware, and the development of standards forthe delivery of information for both traditionallibrary-based interlending and commercial sup-pliers are further issues of concern. In addition tothese, other factors will need to be considered asdocument delivery continues to evolve: the can-cellation rate on printed journal subscriptionsthreatens to drive many specialized journals outof existence; and the increasing number ofcommercial suppliers affords users an ever-increasing choice of potential sources of supply.There is also the increasing possibility of achanging marketing model as publishers moveaway in the future from the page fidelityapproach of current scientific, technical andmedical (STM) journals to a truly electronicversion where content takes precedence overprinted appearance.Reviewing research in the area of document

delivery is useful and allows the identification offuture trends. In the UK, FIDDO (FocusedInvestigation of Document Delivery Options)was a major Electronic Libraries Programme(eLib) project aimed at providing informationabout other projects, document suppliers andtrends, and had, as one of its major objectives,

146 DOCUMENT DELIVERY

to supply relevant, up-to-date information tolibrary managers. Other such projects concernedwith the future of document delivery wereEDDIS (Electronic Document Delivery: the In-tegrated System), SEREN (Sharing of Educa-tional Resources in an Electronic Network),LAMDA (London and Manchester DocumentAccess), JEDDS (Joint Electronic DocumentDelivery Software) and Infobike. Similar projectshave been undertaken in other countries:Australia has been very active in exploring thepossibilities of new technologies for documentdelivery and the REDD (Regional DocumentDelivery Project), JEDDS and LIDDA (LocalInterlending and Document Delivery Adminis-tration) websites give useful information on thiswork. In the USA, NAILDD (North AmericanInterlibrary Loan Document Delivery Project)was initiated to promote developments thatwill improve the delivery of library materialsto users at costs that are sustainable forlibraries.Increasingly, libraries operate in a global

environment and document delivery has a keyrole to play within this. As libraries move from atraditional model where they are the resourcecentre and purchase items, to an access-basedmodel with items being purchased at time ofneed, this role becomes even more critical. It islikely that document delivery will become morestreamlined, more integrated and less reliant onlibrary staff mediation as suppliers move to-wards providing direct electronic access to theend-user. The need for a library-based documentdelivery department will remain but it is likelythat its role will change. Though much attentionis focused on document delivery as the salvationof librarians in meeting their responsibilities for‘just in time’ information for their clients, thedocument delivery process is by no means with-out its problems. The question of whether a fairbalance can be reached between those whoprovide the source articles and those who orderthem through a document delivery process is onethat must be solved if real progress is to bemade.

Further reading

Braid, A. (1994) ‘Electronic document delivery: Visionand reality’, Libri 44: 224–36.

Brown, D. (2001) ‘The document delivery disgrace’,Library Association Record 103(10): 610–11.

Davies, E. and Morris, A. (1998) ‘Weighing up the

options for document supply: A description anddiscussion of the FIDDO project’, Interlending andDocument Supply 26: 76–82.

Finnie, E. (1998) Document Delivery, ASLIB.Gould, S. (ed.) (1997) Charging for Document Supplyand Interlending, IFLA.

Interlending and Document Supply, MCB UniversityPress [a specialist journal in the field].

Morris, A. and Blagg, E. (1998) ‘Current practices anduse of document delivery services in UK academiclibraries’, Library Management 19: 271–80.

Morris, A., Jacobs, N. and Davies, E. (eds) (1999)Document Delivery Beyond 2000, Taylor Graham.

Orman, D. (ed.) (1997) Evolution or Revolution? TheChallenge of Resource Sharing in the ElectronicEnvironment, The British Library.

Vickers, P. and Martyn, J. (1994) The Impact ofElectronic Publishing on Library Services and Re-sources in the UK: Report of the British LibraryWorking Party on Electronic Publishing, The BritishLibrary Board (Library and Information ResearchReport 102).

SEE ALSO: collection management; currentawareness

PENELOPE STREET AND DAVID ORMAN

DOCUMENT IMAGE PROCESSING

The digitization by scanning of informationfrom paper or documents in other media (suchas microforms). The data can then be processedand stored in a computer.

DOCUMENTATION

The librarians’ lexicon in Anglophone countriestends to make less and less use of the term‘documentation’, as evidenced in the professionalliterature, and to give preference to the term‘information science’. While the word ‘doc-umentation’ is almost equivalent in semanticcontent, both in English and in French, there ishowever a noticeable discrepancy in the usage ofthis term: the English term covers a narrowerarea of concepts and practices than its Frenchcounterpart. As early as 1951, the Documenta-tion Committee of the Special Library Associa-tion (SLA) gave a rather qualified definition:‘Documentation is the art comprised of (a)document reproduction, (b) document distribu-tion, (c) document utilization’ (Kent and Lancour1972: 264). While debating the setting up of adocumentation section under the umbrella of theSLA, members indeed pointed out that ‘docu-

DOCUMENTATION 147

mentation is procedural in nature as opposed tosubstantive’ (Kent and Lancour 1972: 265).The French term ‘documentation’ is still a

popular word and very much used by the profes-sion. It encompasses several concepts and thustotally embraces the whole field of informationscience. It covers a full range of activities relatedto document acquisition (see acquistions) andselection, evaluation of materials, classifica-tion schemes, storage and document delivery,as well as the technical procedures linked to theseactivities. It also implies an activity such assearch strategy and designates a comprehensiveamount of documents related to one topic as wellas the tasks performed by the staff in charge.It is of paramount importance to stress that in

French-speaking countries the very characteristicsof documentation/resource centres on the onehand and of libraries on the other hand aretraditionally clearly marked. This distinction alsoapplies to the training the staff receive, as well asto the duties and responsibilities they are in-volved in. The mission of libraries, generallyspeaking, is to give access to primary resources,the bulk of the latter still being the printed book.Documentation/resource centres differ from li-braries because of the greater diversity of docu-ments they hold. Printed books account for alimited amount of their holdings, whereas peri-odicals and grey literature constitute theirstrength. This includes PhD theses, in-housereports, conference proceedings, patents, draw-ings, maps, plans, statistical records, photographsand audiovisual materials, among other things.One must stress other elements specific to thesecentres: the diversity of the public/clients theycater for (depending on their field of expertise),the complexity of the queries as well as theirreplaceable added value as complementary in-formation to primary resources. Informationscientists are facilitators and the essential inter-faces between users/patrons and their resources.While the centres are responsible for the manage-ment of their resources, they also provide in-formed advice on the contents of the materialsthey hold and provide services and productsspecifically designed and developed for the publicthey serve.However, the sharp demarcation between the

missions of libraries and of documentation/re-source centres has tended to become less and less

noticeable even in France. This trend is particu-larly true in the case of academic libraries,which tend to follow the pattern of English-speaking countries where there exists no clear-cut distinction between librarianship or libraryscience and information science. Such is the casebecause activities such as information storage,retrieval and search are based on the principlesestablished for librarianship.Interestingly enough, few international organi-

zations have kept the term ‘documentation’ in thewording of their names with the exception of fid(the now defunct International Federation forInformation and Documentation), thus reflectingits French-speaking Belgian origins. The variouschanges made through time to the name of thelatter organization reflect the change of concep-tualization in the field of what professionals meanby the term ‘documentation’ in French-speakingcountries. The name ‘Institut International deBibliographie’ was chosen at the time of itsinception in Brussels in 1895. In 1931 the namechanged to ‘Institut International de Documenta-tion’, becoming ‘Fédération internationale deDocumentation’ in 1937. It is only as late as1988 that it came to be known under its presentname. While the Universal Bibliographic Reper-tory and the universal decimal classificationremained for a long time the most visible aspect ofits activities, both Paul otlet and Henri LaFontaine, the two men who started this organiza-tion, had indeed privileged connections withBelgian political life and an internationalist per-spective of what documentation was all about.The Palais Mondial in Brussels was built to hostthe Institut International de Bibliographie, whichwas to be a national library, a museum and aninternational university. It marked the peak ofsuch a vision, a utopian plan marred by thedevastation of the First World War.The term ‘documentation’ is more and more

either qualified (if used) or replaced by the terminformation, as evidenced by the various changesthat have occurred in the course of time to thename FID. Thus the French professional organi-zation ADBS (Association des Documentalistes etBibliothécaires Specialisés) has kept its acronym,but makes itself known by the more up-to-dateexpression Association des Professionnels del’Information et de la Documentation (Profes-sional Association of Information and Documen-

148 DOCUMENTATION

tation). The change in usage of the term ‘doc-umentation’ is not only to be accounted for byAnglo-Saxon influence, but also by the develop-ment of new technologies. The latter have broa-dened information scientists’ field of expertise,thus allowing for the emergence of new needs bybusinesses and organizations, needs which can bemet thanks to new computer-based tools (strate-gic information services, database managementand information engineering). Therefore, thechallenge for librarians and information scientistsin this information age is to redefine their rolesand extend their boundaries of knowledge.

References

Kent, A. and Lancour, H. (eds) (1972) Encyclopaediaof Library and Information Science, vol. 7, MarcelDekker

Further reading

ADBS chart (http://www.adbs.fr/adbs/actu/html/charte.htm).

d’Olier, J.H. and Paillard, M.-F. (1997) ‘Documenta-tion’, in Encyclopaedia Universalis vol. 7, pp. 598–605.

Sutter, E. (1997) ‘Documentation’, in S. Cacaly (ed.)Dictionnaire encyclopédique de l’information et de ladocumentation, Nathan, pp. 187–91.

Rayward, W.B. (1994) ‘The International Federationfor Information and Documentation (FID)’, in W.A.Wiegand and D.G. Davis (eds) Encyclopaedia ofLibrary History, Garland Press, pp. 290–4.

SEE ALSO: information professions; informationtheory; special libraries

RAYMOND BERARD

DOMAIN NAME

Whilst in common parlance a domain is ageographical area controlled by a particular ruleror government, it also refers to a sphere ofactivity or knowledge. In relation to the inter-net, however, a domain refers to a set of siteswith network addresses distinguished by acommon suffix, such as .de (Germany, geogra-phical) or .com (commercial, category). A do-main name consists of the specific name of a sitefollowed by a category, followed in turn by acountry (except in the case of US sites) as withlboro.ac.uk (Loughborough University, an aca-demic site in the UK).

The selection and protection of domain namesis a major consideration in e-commerce, andinternational responsibility for this is taken bythe Internet Corporation for Assigned Namesand Numbers (ICANN). ICANN is a non-profitcorporation that handles the allocation andmanagement of the domain name system, afunction previously performed under US Govern-ment contract by various other bodies.

Further reading

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers(www.icann.org).

DONATIONS TO LIBRARIES

Gifts of books or other material to a library,normally intended to be added to its stock; alsoused for gifts of money, equipment or buildings.From the earliest times donations were one of theprincipal ways in which libraries added to theirstock. In many cases libraries were established bythe gift or bequest of a private collection ofbooks or manuscripts, for example to a collegeor church. Only rarely, however, were such giftssupported by provision for continuing funding,so that libraries of this kind often becamefossilized.One notable donation was the refounding of

the university library at Oxford by Sir Thomasbodley in 1598 by the gift of his own books andthe cost of a librarian; this led to many otherdonations, which set the Bodleian Library on itshighly successful path. The gift of the rich libraryof King George III to the nation by his sonGeorge IV in 1823 immeasurably strengthenedthe rare book collections of the British Museum(now part of the british library).Similar large donations to public or research

libraries have long been recognized as an impor-tant source of specialized material, and librariesoften contain special collections named afterdonors. Individual donations of more recentmaterial, for example an author’s own books, orspecial items felt to merit permanent preservationin a public collection, are regularly received bylibraries of all kinds. Librarians usually acceptsuch gifts of books with gratitude, and in manycases these gifts represent books that the librarywishes to acquire but lacks the resources topurchase. In the case of scholarly donors, the

DONATIONS TO LIBRARIES 149

material may well complement existing strengthsand include valuable out-of-print works. Gifts ofsubscriptions to periodicals can also usefullyextend a library’s range.Libraries often have a section within the

acquisitions department concerned with theacknowledgement and handling of donations,including assessment of their value to the libraryin relation to the cost of processing and storage.(Such a department will often also handle ex-changes (see exchange programmes), whichhave some similarities to donations but areessentially acquisitions paid for in kind; theyhave even more cost implications than dona-tions.)Donations can, however, cause problems be-

yond those associated with checking, cataloguingand housing a large volume of material. Theymay duplicate stock already held by the library,or may be in a field in which the library has nointerest. In the case of periodicals, the libraryneeds to be assured that parts will be receivedregularly. There may be problems of space toaccommodate a large collection, or the materialmay be in need of expensive conservation. Adonor may place stipulations on the gift, forexample requiring the collection to be kept as aunit or even requiring it to be kept in a specifiedlocation. Individual books or serials may bedistributed free to libraries by government agen-cies or bodies wishing to secure free publicity; insuch cases the librarian must guard against thedangers of unbalanced propaganda.Such considerations make it desirable for the

librarian to discuss the terms of a gift or bequestwith the donor wherever possible. Most donorsare happy for the library to dispose of materialthat it does not require, and are glad to see theirmaterial going to a more appropriate home. Theinvolvement of friends of the library can beuseful both in soliciting donations and in helpingdonors to understand the library’s real needs.In some cases benefactors have given money

rather than books, often to provide endowmentfunds either for purchasing or for specified posts.library buildings, too, have often been built atthe expense of a benefactor. An outstandingexample is Andrew carnegie, who began fund-ing library buildings in 1886 with the gift of $1million for a central library and seven branchesin Pittsburgh. Carnegie extended his benefactions

to Britain, and many library buildings funded byhim and his trustees still survive. His gifts,however, laid a responsibility on the local autho-rities to stock and maintain the library, whichmeant that not all his offers were accepted –another example of the hidden costs that canunderlie donations of all kinds.

Further reading

Chapman, L. (1989) Buying Books for Libraries,Bingley [stresses the problems caused by donations].

Magrill, R.M. and Corbin, J. (1989) AcquisitionsManagement and Collection Development in Li-braries, 2nd edn, American Library Association[Chapter 11 (pp. 216–33) deals with gifts andexchanges].

PETER HOARE

DUBLIN CORE

A metadata initiative intended to allow users ofthe world wide web to search for electronicinformation resources and information aboutresources in other formats in a way analogous tousing a library catalogue (see catalogues). Itoffers a resource discovery mechanism based onfifteen descriptive elements. These are:

. Title (the name given the resource).

. Creator (the author or institution responsiblefor creating the content).

. Subject (the topic of the resource).

. Description (text outlining or providing anabstract of the content).

. Publisher (those responsible for making theresource available).

. Contributors (those who supplied elements ofthe content).

. Date (when the resource was made available).

. Type (a categorization of the content).

. Format (digital or physical manifestation ofthe content).

. Identifier (an unambiguous reference to theresource, e.g. uniform resource locator orinternational standard book number).

. Source (an original resource from which thecontent is derived).

. Language.

. Relation (reference to any related resource).

. Coverage (extent or scope of the content).

. Rights (information on copyright status).

150 DUBLIN CORE

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative began in1995, after a workshop in Dublin, Ohio, andcontinues as an open forum working to promoteacceptance and use of metadata standards andpractices generally, and the Dublin Core elementsin particular. Its activities include working

groups, workshops, conferences, liaison on stan-dards and educational efforts.

Further reading

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (http://dublincore.org).

DUBLIN CORE 151

E

E-COMMERCE

At a basic level this refers to selling goods andservices via the internet, using Web pages. Inthis sense there is little basic difference betweene-commerce and catalogue sales or the use oftelevision shopping channels, in that awarenessof the product may be obtained at a distance, butdelivery is likely to be via postal services andother means of delivery to the purchaser’s actualaddress. E-commerce is, however, distinct in thatthe methods for ordering (by electronic mail)and paying (by electronic data interchange)are fully integrated with the means of advertis-ing. It can also involve the delivery of specificallyelectronic products. For instance, access to por-nographic images and text is the most tradedcategory of e-commerce.The concept of e-commerce is now subsumed

within a broader concept of e-business in whichthe Internet, intranets and extranets are usedto create and transform business relationships. E-business can not only increase the speed ofservice delivery, and reduce the cost of businessoperations, but also contribute to the improve-ment of the quality of goods and services throughthe effective transfer and sharing of informationwith customers, within organizations and be-tween organizations.

E-GOVERNMENT

In broad terms, electronic or e-government canrefer to the use of information and commu-nication technology (ICT) in politics at theglobal, state, party or civil societal level. Anarrower definition, dominant in most politicalsystems, refers to the impact of the Internet and

related network technologies on the values,processes and outcomes of central and localgovernment, and their administrative structures,with the objective of providing public access ‘toinformation about all the services offered by . . .Departments and their agencies; and enabling thepublic to conduct and conclude transactions forall those services’ (UK National Audit Office2002: 1). Although the term is sometimes con-sidered to be synonymous with ‘e-democracy’,this is misleading. An analytical distinctionshould be drawn between the two on the groundsthat, unlike e-democracy, the dominant model ofe-government to date has not often involved thedevelopment of direct forms of political delibera-tion and decision-making through electronic re-ferendums and similar devices.

E-government emerged as an agenda for gen-eral reform of the public sectors of liberaldemocratic political systems during the early1990s. The Clinton Presidency in the USA ledthe way with its ‘National Performance Review’of the Federal bureaucracy (US National Perfor-mance Review 1993). It was the explosion ofInternet use in the mid-1990s, however, whichgave impetus to the idea, and countries such asthe UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealandsoon followed suit with their own versions. Inthe UK, the Labour Party, elected in 1997, put‘electronic service delivery’ at the centre of itsprogramme for ‘Modernising Government’ (UKCabinet Office 1998), claiming that all publicservices would be online by 2005 – a targetgreeted with much scepticism by the IT industryand political commentators alike.

In common with other programmes of organi-zational reform, the claims made about e-govern-

ment differ quite substantially, but can be dividedinto two main schools.According to one, far-reaching, perspective,

the principal aim is to use ICTs, especially theInternet, to open up the state to citizen involve-ment. The ubiquity of network technologiesoffers the potential to increase political participa-tion and reshape the state into an open, inter-active, network form, as an alternative to bothtraditional, hierarchical, bureaucratic organiza-tions and more recent, market-like forms ofservice delivery based on the ‘contracting out’ ofpublic-sector activities, often termed the ‘NewPublic Management’. Proponents of this perspec-tive argue that widespread use of the Internetmeans that the traditional application of ICTs inpublic bureaucracies, based around inward-facing mainframe computer systems that origi-nated in the 1960s, should now be superseded byoutward-facing networks in which the divisionbetween an organization’s internal informationprocessing and its external users effectively be-comes redundant. Government becomes a ‘learn-ing organization’, able to respond to the needs ofits citizens, who are in turn able to influencepublic bureaucracies by rapid, aggregative feed-back mechanisms like e-mail and interactivewebsites.A second, less radical, school of thought

suggests that e-government does not necessarilyrequire greater public involvement in shapinghow services are delivered, but instead indirectlybenefits citizens through the efficiency gains andcost savings produced by the reduction of inter-nal organizational ‘friction’, chiefly via the auto-mation of routine tasks and disintermediation.Networks are also at the core of this perspective,but it is the ability of the Internet and intranetsto ‘join up’ and co-ordinate the activities ofpreviously disparate government departmentsand services that is seen as its most attractivefeature. In this view, citizens are perceived mainlyas the ‘consumers’ of public services like health-care information, benefits payments, passportapplications, tax returns and so on. This hasbeen the dominant model in those countries thathave taken the lead in introducing e-governmentreforms.E-government is not without its critics. Some

suggest that changes are limited to a ‘managerial’agenda of service delivery more consistent withthe New Public Management and that the oppor-tunities offered by the Internet for invigorating

democracy and citizenship might be missed(Chadwick and May 2003). Other criticisms are:that the conservatism of existing administrativeelites will scupper any prospects of decisivechange; that issues of unequal access (bothwithin and between states) to online services arebeing neglected; that large corporate IT interestsare exercising an undue influence on the shape ofe-government due to their expertise; that tradi-tional face-to-face contacts with public services,especially those associated with welfare systems,cannot be satisfactorily replaced by web-basedcommunication; that the cost savings promisedby reforms have been slow to materialize; andthat distintermediation of traditional representa-tive bodies (parliaments, local councils) mayoccur, to the detriment of democracy.Whatever the claims made for e-government,

perhaps its most significant feature from theperspective of the information sciences is thatthe Web browser and the Internet, with theirassociated standards, protocols and file formats,brought together under the umbrella of theWorld Wide Web Consortium (W3C), will formthe foundation of public sector use of ICTs forthe foreseeable future. The most popular ways oftransferring data across the Internet – fromsecure transactions, to compressed graphics, vi-deo and sound – will be used by governmentsfrom now on. The days of large-scale, oftenByzantine, tailor-made systems that rapidly dateare perhaps coming to an end. Networks areeasier to build and maintain than ever before,and it is much simpler for governments to inter-face their internal networks with the outsideworld.

References

Chadwick, A. and May, C. (2003) ‘Interaction betweenstates and citizens in the age of the Internet: ‘‘e-government" in the United States, Britain and theEuropean Union’, Governance 16(2).

UK National Audit Office (2002) Better Public Servicesthrough E-Government, HC704–1, HMSO.

US National Performance Review (1993) Re-Engineer-ing through Information Technology: AccompanyingReport of the National Performance Review, GPO.

Further reading

Barney, D. (2000) Prometheus Wired: The Hope ForDemocracy in the Age of Network Technology,University of Chicago Press [a well-written account].

E-Governance resources: www.rhul.ac.uk/sociopolitical-science/e-governance).

E-GOVERNMENT 153

Egovlinks (www.egovlinks.com).Margolis, M. and Resnick, D. (2000) Politics as Usual:The Cyberspace ‘Revolution’, Sage [for a verysceptical view].

SEE ALSO: information society

ANDREW CHADWICK

EAST ASIA

The region is comprised of China (the People’sRepublic of China: PRC), Japan, Korea(the Republic of Korea, the Democratic People’sRepublic of Korea) and Taiwan (the Republic ofChina). Hong Kong has been a Special Adminis-trative Region of PRC since 1997. A distinctivefeature of the region is the size of the population,political tensions and economic development.The huge population is a major informationmarket for IT and ICT services and products.Nations in East Asia have been a good informa-tion market and they will continue to be so.Factors that may inhibit further development,especially of the internet, include language-processing capability, character set and encodingstandards, weak national bibliography data-bases, and bibliographic utilities.

Writing systems and Chinese characters

The writing systems of East Asia are based onChinese characters (scripts) that have been devel-oped since around the third century bce. Chineselogographic (ideographic) characters have mean-ings and readings of each character that evolvedthrough the ages and with geographic variations.The Chinese character set, however, is stable inits logographic and semantic features so thatwritten materials could be commonly assimilatedacross the region. Thus the languages of China,Japan and Korea are different but all use theChinese characters following their own conven-tions. However, the characters have evolved inChina, Japan, Korea and Vietnam with variationsin shape and meaning according to the needs andconventions of local language.In China, the government introduced a simpli-

fied character set in 1956 as part of its nationalliteracy policy. This had a great impact oncharacter conventions in neighbouring countries.The shapes of the simplified characters keep theoriginal forms of radicals so people in Korea andJapan are able to identify the original character.In Korea, printing by movable type was

invented in ce 1234. Hangul, the Korean pho-netic alphabet, which originally had twenty-eightcharacters, was established by Sejong the Greatof the Yi dynasty in ce 1443. Hangul became theKorean national characters after the SecondWorld War. There are variations of Hangulbetween South and the North Korea.It is believed that Wang In, a Korean monk,

took the Analects of Confucius and the Thou-sand Characters Text – a primer of Chinesecharacters – to Japan in ce 285. Local develop-ments derived phonetic symbols of forty-eightKana, based on the Japanese pronunciation ofChinese characters, and this became the basiccomponent, together with Chinese characters, ofthe Japanese writing system.The total number of Chinese characters is

supposed to be about 100,000. Variant shapesexist in each language. New Chinese charactersare constantly created by combining radicals forpersonal names, especially in Hong Kong. How-ever, the number of domestic creations of Chi-nese characters in Korea and Japan are less than100 in each language after 1,700 years. LearningChinese characters up to the level needed fornewspaper reading (3,000 characters in the caseof the Japanese language) is a lengthy business.

ROMANIZATION (TRANSLITERATION)

Romanization or transliteration of Chinese, Ja-panese and Korean has been practised for a longtime. For example, the Vocabulario da Lingoa deIapan, a Portuguese–Japanese dictionary wascompiled and published in 1603 by Jesuit priestsstationed in Japan. The dictionary has entries oftransliterated Japanese words of the period.Other Christian missionaries devised translitera-tion schemes for languages in East Asia duringthe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whichcould then be used for printing.The modern transliteration schemes were cre-

ated during the nineteenth century. The Wade–Giles system for Chinese, the McCune–Reischauer system for Korean and the Hepburnsystem for Japanese are famous and widely usedexamples. These schemes are applied not only forlanguage training but also for filing catalogue(see catalogues) entries in libraries. Each lan-guage has its own filing order but when Westernnames and domestic names are filed together,romanization is the inevitable choice. A transli-teration scheme based on pronunciation, how-ever, can be unsatisfactory, not least in whether it

154 EAST ASIA

is developed by native speakers or non-nativespeakers. In an attempt to produce generallyacceptable schemes, modern governments in EastAsia introduced new revised schemes during thenineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Kunreimethod for Japanese was introduced in 1937 and1954, the Pin Yin method for Chinese in 1958and the latest scheme for Korean in 2000. In thecase of Korean, there have been several revisionsof the scheme and a mixed version is nowcommonly used.

COMPUTER CHARACTER SET STANDARDS

Computer diffusion in East Asia has been phe-nomenal, especially since 1995. Computer devel-opment work was started in the 1950s in eachcountry. Until around the mid-1970s, nationallanguage support was unavailable because of thescripts and the large number of characters in theEast Asian languages. Encoded character sets hadto be developed to facilitate natural languageprocessing; these were used with Western pro-ducts in the early stages of development.Although the conventions by which the charac-ters are used in the three languages differ fromeach other, their fundamental characteristics arethe same. In particular the Chinese character setis open-ended, i.e. new characters can emerge bygovernment policy, by voluntary addition or bymistake. Thus it is impossible in theory to get acomplete set of Chinese characters in eachlanguage.In the last thirty years of the twentieth century,

effort was devoted to establishing standard char-acter codes and sets in three languages. Duringthe 1970s, all three countries established nationalstandards for a computer character set in onebyte based on ASCII, and followed this with thedevelopment of national standards of domesticChinese characters in two bytes. They are Japa-nese JIS C 6226 in 1978, Chinese GB 2312 in1980, Chinese (Taipei) CNS 11643 in 1986 andKorean KS C 5601 in 1987. CCCII code createdin Taiwan in 1980 became the East AsianCommon Character (EACC) for the US ResearchLibraries Group (RLG) and others, and thenbecame ANSI Z39.64: 1989.In the computer industry, de facto standards

are common practice. Big 5 was developed inTaiwan in 1984 for Chinese characters, and theShift JIS code was developed for Japanese perso-nal computers during the 1970s. Both standardsare in widespread use.

The publication of the Unicode 1st edition in1980 and UCS (Universal Character Set: ISO10646) in 1993 had an impact on the computerindustry, its customers and governments in EastAsia, and indeed on worldwide users of Chinesecharacters and the East Asian languages. Thethree governments made tremendous efforts toharmonize the development of the Unicode, ISO/UCS and national standards for computer char-acter sets. At the beginning of the twenty-firstcentury, it seems that the technical harmonizationhas been achieved. The next step is the changeover to the Unicode/UCS environment amongusers. It is estimated that a company-widechangeover of the character code in a bigcompany would need investment in a scale ofseveral million (US) dollars.

NATIONAL MARCS AND BIBLIOGRAPHIC UTILITIES

Developing the capacity of natural languageprocessing in Chinese characters made it possibleto create and maintain national bibliographicdatabases (marc) in the national languages ofEast Asia. The standards are the China MARC,the Japan MARC and the KOR MARC. House-keeping, technical processing and circulationsystem control all started during the 1970s.The National Diet Library (NDL), Tokyo,

was founded in 1948 and is the nationalparliamentary library controlled by the legisla-ture (www.ndl.go.jp/e/index.html). It startedcomputerization of its operations in1970. Priorto the publication of Japan MARC in 1981, acataloguing system for Japanese materials(1977) and a printed weekly list of publications(1978) were implemented by NDL. The JapanMARC is unimarc compatible and covers 2.7million catalogue records since 1864. The WebOPAC (see opacs) of NDL holdings is a verypopular website. The second NDL, the newKansai-Kan, is due to be opened in 2002 in Naranear Osaka.The National Library of China (known as The

Beijing Library) was established in 1909; it nowholds some 23 million items (www.nlc.gov.cn/english.htm). It started computer utilization inthe middle of the 1980s and established theChina MARC in 1990. China MARC format isIFLA UNIMARC compatible, and was estab-lished as a cultural professional standard (WH/T0503–96) in 1996. The China MARC databasecovers 1.1 million bibliographic records of Chi-nese books published since 1979.

EAST ASIA 155

The National Library of Korea (NLK), Seoul,was established in 1945 and holds 4.1 millionitems (www.nl.go.kr/eng/index.php3). It startedcomputerization of bibliographic services in1976, backed by a government plan for computerapplications for administration. KOR MARCprinted-card distribution was started in 1983.The KOR MARC format is a national standard(KS X 6006–2), is usmarc compatible, covers1.8 million bibliographic records and is operatedon the KOLIS system (KOrean LIbrary System),based on the Windows system. NLK has run theKorean Library Information Network (KOLIS-NET) since 1991. The digital library Pro-gramme was started in 1998 and holds 59million pages of scanned images.Bibliographic utilities were developed in the

region during the 1980s and 1990s. They areNII/NACSIS (Japan) (www.nii.ac.jp/index.html),KERIS (Korea) (www.keris.or.kr/eng/eng.html)and CALIS (China) (www.calis.edu.cn). A com-mon feature is that these three organizationswere all established primarily for academia andmaintained by government funds as not-for-profitorganizations. In 1984, a shared cataloguingsystem was installed in Japan, which becameNACSIS-CAT. It was designed as a relationaldatabase system based on the entity-relationshipmodel. As of 2001, 1,200 libraries in 900universities among 1,200 higher-education insti-tutions in Japan were participating in NACSIS-CAT, which now contains 6.1 million biblio-graphic records and 58.6 million records ofholdings. NACSIS was transferred to the Na-tional Institute of Informatics (NII) in 2000.NACSIS/NII offers an online shared cataloguingsystem, and an interlibrary loan requests system,electronic journals, scanned journal articlesand opacs.In 1994, the Korea Research Information

Centre was established by the Ministry of Educa-tion and transformed into the Korea Educationand Research Information Services (KERIS) in1999. The mission of KERIS is the development,management and provision of education andresearch information at the national levelthrough (1) management of the Research Infor-mation Sharing Union, (2) management of theintegrated retrieval system, (3) digital thesiscollection and dissemination, (4) the develop-ment of a research information database, and(5) the management of the interlibrary lend-ing system (L2L). In 2001, 155 university

libraries were participating in the KERIS systemwith a total of 5.4 million bibliographic records.

In 1998, the China Academic Library andInformation System (CALIS) was establishedwith funding from the government; seventy uni-versity libraries participated, with core subject-centres at Beijing University, Tsinghua University,the China Agriculture University and the BeijingMedical University as well as seven regionalsubcentres covering the whole country. The mis-sion of CALIS is shared cataloguing, interlibrarylending, document delivery, document digiti-zation, providing an Internet portal (see por-tals and gateways), running an electronic-journal licensing consortium (see electronicjournals), and so on.

Bibliographic utilities in East Asia share com-mon obstacles such as copyright legislation andcopyright clearance mechanisms for documentdelivery as well as multimedia database creation.Network governance has been a standing issueamong organizations such as national libraries,national science and technology informationcentres, and academia. All of these institutionsare affected by population structure, the pricerise of publications in general and the price riseof online and printed journals in particular,licensing copyright clearance issues, professionaleducation and training, and competence in devel-oping new services.

Further reading

CALIS (2002) (www.calis.edu.cn/).Gong, Y. and Gorman, G.E. (2000). Libraries andInformation Services in China, Scarecrow Press.

Inoue, Y. (2000) ‘People, libraries and the JLA commit-tee on intellectual freedom in libraries’, IFLA Journal26: 293–7 [deals with a range of ethical andprofessional issues in relation to librarianship inJapan].

Lee, P. and Um, Y.A. (1994) Libraries and Librarian-ship in Korea, Greenwood Press.

National Diet Library (2002) (www.ndl.go.jp/e/in-dex.html).

National Library of China (2002) (www. nlc.gov.cn/english.htm).

National Library of Korea (2002) (www.nl.go.kr/eng/index.php3).

Negeshi, M. (1999) ‘Trend of electronic libraries inJapan, with emphasis on academic informationservices’, ICSTI Forum 31 (www.icsti.org/icsti/forum/fo9907.html#negeshi) [a list of selected elec-tronic library sites in Japan, including links].

NII [Japan] (2002) (www.nii.ac.jp/index.html).Oshiro, Z. (2000) ‘Cooperative programmes and net-

156 EAST ASIA

works in Japanese academic libraries’, Library Re-view 49: 370–9.

EISUKE NAITO AND TAKASHI TOMIKUBO

ECCLESIASTICAL LIBRARIES

Libraries that are part of, or associated with, theChristian churches, and their institutions andactivities.

The Middle Ages

Within seventy years of the death of Jesus Christ,the religion he founded was relying on thewritten word for its survival and transmission.The writing and copying of books was central tothe Christian tradition, and hence great impor-tance was attached to the storage and protectionof collections of them. Collections of liturgicaland other Christian texts are found in associationwith all the various traditions that developed inthe Middle East, North Africa and Europe in thefirst four centuries of the Common Era. After thecollapse of the Roman Empire in the West in theearly fifth century ce, all institutional librarieswere ecclesiastical for over 600 years. They wereusually attached to cathedrals or monasteries andcomprised collections of manuscript booksstored near to study areas or altars where theywere used, rather than in library buildings. Theycontained standard works: the Bible and itscommentaries, the works of the church fathers,lives of the saints and liturgies. Chronicles, canonlaw and other secular subjects were introducedgradually. In the early Middle Ages, books wereproduced in monastic scriptoria but after thefounding of universities in the thirteenth centurya lay book trade emerged to supply theirlibraries.From this time literacy and libraries were no

longer monopolized by the Church, but ecclesias-tical libraries continued to be of importance. Thefifteenth century saw the founding of the VaticanLibrary by Pope Nicholas V, but lay libraries,particularly those of humanist scholars, alsobecame increasingly common. The Reformationand the invention of printing produced an ex-pansion of book ownership at all levels of societyand a decline in the fortunes of traditionalecclesiastical libraries. In England the dissolutionof the monasteries (c. 1540) brought about thedispersal of manuscript books from cathedralsand other religious houses. Cathedral libraries

were re-established under Protestant deans andchapters but in a diminished form.

Early modern period

The seventeenth century saw an enormous ex-pansion in ecclesiastical libraries despite religiouswars on the Continent and civil war in Britain. InCatholic Europe the Society of Jesus was promi-nent in establishing libraries (as it was in theAsian and American colonies of Catholic powers,notably Spain), old-established abbeys renewedtheir collections and buildings, and two librarieswere founded by cardinals, the Ambrosiana inMilan (1609) and the Mazarine in Paris (1643).In Britain, cathedral libraries, after sufferinglosses in the Civil War, were refunded with largedonations of money and books from the higherclergy. Sir Christopher Wren was associated withthe design of two new cathedral libraries, atLincoln where a library was built between 1674and 1676, and at St Paul’s where a library in theupper west end was included in the rebuiltcathedral.In 1610, Archbishop William Bancroft be-

queathed his books to his successors at LambethPalace to form a public library, and a library wasadded to Sion College, a meeting place forLondon clergy, in 1630. Individuals also foundedlibraries in the seventeenth century that wereeither intended for the use of the clergy, orcontained a high proportion of religious andtheological literature, such as the library set upby Archbishop Thomas Tenison in St Martin-in-the-Fields, London. In Ireland the library ofTrinity College, Dublin, had been enlarged in1661 by the addition of Archbishop JamesUssher’s books and in 1701 Archbishop Narcis-sus Marsh founded what has been described asIreland’s first public library in Dublin.

Parish libraries

Parish churches since the late Middle Ages hadbegun to acquire small collections of books forthe improvement of their parishioners; the textswere often chained to desks in churches. In themid-sixteenth century the Reformation broughtdestruction of Roman Catholic books but also aseries of injunctions ordering the placing ofcopies of the Bible, and other books, such asErasmus’s Paraphrases and John Foxe’s Martyrs,in parish churches.The late seventeenth century saw the

ECCLESIASTICAL LIBRARIES 157

beginnings of the parochial library movement.Individuals often gave books, or money forbooks, to parishes for the use of either theincumbents or the parishioners, including thatleft to Grantham by Francis Trigge in 1589 andto Reigate by Andrew Cranston in 1701. Thename of Thomas bray (1656–1730) is foreverassociated with the movement by the Society forPromoting Christian Knowledge to supply li-braries to poor parishes. By the time of Bray’sdeath about sixty-five ‘Bray libraries’ had beenestablished.A number of parish libraries were chained.

Chaining had begun to be used in the laterMiddle Ages as a way of confining referenceworks and popular books to a library. Herefordand Wells cathedrals still have chained collec-tions, but in most other libraries the chains wereremoved in the late seventeenth century, excep-tions being the parochial library at WimborneMinster (founded 1685) and All Saints church,Hereford (founded 1715).In Scotland James Kirkwood instigated a

similar campaign to that of Bray in 1704, whenlibraries were ordered to be placed in parishesthroughout the Highlands. As in England indi-viduals also gave book collections to parishesand, as in England, their content was mainlytheological. A notable example was theLeighton Library of 1,300 volumes, given forthe benefit of the clergy of Dunblane andopened in 1688. The Bray movement spread tothe English colonies in North America, andsimilar drives towards the creation of librariesfor clergy and laity can be found in theProtestant countries of Northern Europe, espe-cially in Scandinavia.

Nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Parish libraries continued to be founded into thenineteenth century, but as literacy spread othersubjects began to jostle with theology for popu-larity and the predominance of Anglican librarieswas challenged. The Society of Friends had alibrary in the City of London from 1673 and theBaptists also, from 1708. The non-conformistswere very keen to present sound and wholesomeliterature to a wide audience of readers and thiscould be found at the Unitarian library in theWest End of London and the Methodist Libraryat Brunswick Chapel (founded 1808). Dr Wil-liam’s Library, set up in 1729 under the will of a

Presbyterian minister Daniel Williams, has nowgathered in a number of these non-conformistcollections.The twentieth century saw a decline in the

fortunes of ecclesiastical libraries with historicand modern collections struggling for survival.There has been a trend towards amalgamation,for example the removal of parish libraries tolarger repositories. Reading religious literature isnot part of popular culture as in the past.Greater need for security, the use of informationtechnology and shrinking funds are just three ofthe problems that now face ecclesiastical li-braries at the beginning of the twenty-firstcentury.

Further reading

Bloomfield, B.C. (1997) A Directory of Rare Book andSpecial Collections in the United Kingdom, 2nd edn,Library Association Publishing.

Ker, N.R. (1964) Medieval Libraries of Great Britain,2nd edn, Supplement (1987), Royal Historical So-ciety. [Various cathedrals have now produced his-tories with chapters on their libraries.]

Perkin, M. (forthcoming) Directory of Parochial Li-braries, 2nd edn, Bibliographical Society.

SEE ALSO: monastic library

SHEILA HINGLEY

ECONOMICS OF INFORMATION

Information: definition, economic rolesand economic properties

DEFINITION OF ‘INFORMATION’

The economics of information will be consideredwithin the following definition:

Information is that property of data that repre-sents and measures effects of processing of them.

Processing includes data transfer, selection,structuring, reduction and conceptualization. Fordata transfer there is an accepted measure of theamount of information (the shannon or ‘en-tropy’ measure), but it is inappropriate for morecomplex processing in which value, economic orotherwise, is important (Arrow 1984: 138).Hayes (1993) has proposed measures for someof the other levels of processing.In that definition, ‘data’ is taken as equivalent

to physical ‘recorded symbols’, exemplifiedby printed characters; by binary characters in

158 ECONOMICS OF INFORMATION

magnetic, punched or optical form; by spokenwords; or by images. Whatever the physicalform may be, it becomes a recorded symbolwhen it is interpreted as representing something.

It is therefore necessary to recognize bothphysical and symbolic aspects of both entitiesand processes. The following matrix (Table2) illustrates with examples of economic con-texts:

Table 2 Matrix of entity and process

This matrix will be used to summarize themacroeconomic structure of national economiesin distributions of the workforce among types ofindustries and types of processes. It will also beused to summarize the micro-economic distribu-tion of costs within industries.Each of the two dimensions, though shown as

a dichotomy, is a spectrum reflecting the relativeimportance of the two polar positions. Forexample, ‘consumption’ is a mix of physical andsymbolic: one needs food to live, so it is aphysical entity and consumption is a physicalprocess, but one uses food to represent a lifestyleand both entity and process become symbolic –what Veblen (1899) called ‘conspicuous con-sumption’. As one moves in economic develop-ment from subsistence through capital formation,to capital control, to social control, the role ofcapital shifts from physical to symbolic.For the processing dimension, the spectrum is

exemplified by the types of data processes. Datatransfer is essentially physical, involving themovement of signals. Selection is a mixture ofphysical and conceptual, decisions being sym-bolic but selection itself being physical. Analysis

is symbolic and can remain so, though it is likelyto be translated into physical realizations indisplay formats. Data reduction is almost purelysymbolic, levels such as conceptualization evenmore so.There can be transition from quadrant to

quadrant in the matrix. An example is thetransition of persons from manual labour intosports, and the conversion of what may havebeen simply physical effort into a game. Asanother example, concepts may be made realthrough artistic performance, and physical pro-ducts may be derived from artistic performances.

ECONOMIC ROLES OF INFORMATION

The writings of the economists concerning in-formation almost universally focus on its role indecision-making. (Some relevant references in-clude Von Neumann and Morgenstern 1952;Arrow 1984; Laffont 1989; Philips 1988). Butinformation clearly is important in operationalmanagement beyond use in decision-making.This role is supported by management informa-tion systems. Furthermore, information is a resultof environmental scan to ensure that there isknowledge of external reality in decision-making.Information can serve as a substitute for

physical entities. ‘telecommuting’ replaces themovement of people with the transmission ofdata. Exploration through imaging replaces ex-ploration through surgery.Information is used to influence and persuade.

Advertising serves buyers wanting to learn aboutproducts and vendors wanting to sell them. Itsubsidizes a wide range of information media.Information is essential in education, serving

the process of learning, supplementing interac-tion with teachers and providing (in books,media and databases) much of the substance. Itmay be an educational objective in itself, sinceamong things to be learned are the tools foraccess to and use of information.Information is the substance of cultural en-

richment, entertainment and amusement. Peopleare willing to pay for it, which is the basis for theentertainment industries. In the matrix of Table2, these are represented by ‘writing and compos-ing’, ‘sports’ and ‘performing arts’.Information can be a product, a commodity –

something produced as a package. And informa-tion can be a service. Indeed, the majority of‘business services’ (the national economic ac-count that includes consulting) are information

Entities Processes

Physical Symbolic

Agriculture Data input

Physical Manual labour Data storage

Personal services Data output(e.g. reports)

Sports Intellectualgames

Symbolic Performance arts Writing andcomposing

Classroom lecturing Programmingand mathematics

ECONOMICS OF INFORMATION 159

based. Information can be a capital resource,especially for companies that produce informa-tion products and services. For them, databasesare the means for producing copies for distribu-tion, the source for derivative products andservices, and the basis for developing new pro-ducts and services. They are likely to be themajor capital investment, more important thanequipment or buildings.

GENERAL ECONOMIC PROPERTIES OF INFORMATION

Given its definition and roles, information is aneconomic entity with both costs and values, andpeople differ in their perceptions of the balancebetween the two. Beyond that, though, informa-tion has more specific properties of economicimportance.

. While information is represented in physicalform, that form can be changed withoutchanging its content.

. In contrast to physical goods, intellectualgoods can be created with limited physicalresources, and frequently as a by-product ofother operations. Information is easily andcheaply transported. The first copy representsmost of the costs in creation, and reproductioncosts are relatively small. As a result, it can beproduced and distributed with minimal deple-tion of physical resources.

. There is an evident and direct relationshipbetween physical goods and the materials usedin producing them. One knows exactly howmuch steel is needed to produce a car. Butthere is no comparably direct relationshipbetween any kind of good – physical orsymbolic – and the information used in itsproduction. The value of research, marketinformation or advertising is uncertain, at bestprobabilistic, and much of the value is poten-tial rather than actual.

. There is a complex relationship between thetime of acquiring information and the value ofit. For some, the value lies in immediacy –yesterday’s stock information may be worthlesstomorrow. For others, the value is likely to bereceived in the future rather than the present.

. Persons differ greatly in perceptions of thevalue of information, in kinds of use, in abilityand willingness to use, in assessments of costsand in ability to pay. Typically the distributionof use of information is highly skewed, withsmall percentages of users frequent in their use

and the great majority infrequent.. Use of information is affected by the distanceusers must travel to get access to it. The theorystates that the use of any facility decays as thedistance increases, as a function of the cost oftravel; if the cost is linear, the decay isexponential and if the cost is logarithmic, it isquadratic. This theory applies to informationresources (Hayes and Palmer 1983).

. An accumulation of information has morevalue than the sum of the individual valuesbecause it increases the combinations that canbe made. The information and communicationtechnologies (see information and commu-nication technology) have greatly in-creased the ability to make combinations. Thenumber of databases, their size, the means forprocessing and relating them, the ability to usethem – all are growing exponentially.

. There are immense economies of scale. Com-bined with the value in accumulation, thisprovides strong incentives for sharing informa-tion, especially since, once available, it can bedistributed cheaply, which makes sharing easy.

. Information is not consumed by being used ortransmitted to others. It can be resold or givenaway with no diminution of its content. Manypersons may possess and use the same infor-mation, even at the same time, without dimin-ishing its value to others. All these imply thatinformation is a public good.

. However, there is the need to invest in thecreation, production and distribution of infor-mation and that implies a wish to recover theinvestment. Furthermore, there may be valueassociated with exclusivity in knowledge, sothere must be an incentive to make it availableto others. This implies that information is aprivate good.

. Most information products and services liesomewhere between pure private goods andpure public goods, and the same informationmay alternate as a public and private good atdifferent stages of information processing anddistribution.

. Given that mixture of public and private good,private rights must be balanced with the rightsto use the information. copyright is onemeans of doing so, and the copyright clauseof the Constitution of the USA embodies thisbalance: ‘The Congress shall have thepower. . .to promote the progress of scienceand the useful arts by securing for limited


times to authors and inventors the exclusiverights to their respective writings and discov-eries’ – progress implying use and rightsimplying protection.

The macroeconomics of information

BACKGROUND

In The Information Economy (1977), poratadded an ‘information’ sector to the usual threesectors of national economies – agriculture, in-dustry and services. As a basis for economicassessment, Table 3 provides a comparison of thedistribution of workforce among sectors (the‘information sector’ and the other three combinedas ‘non-information sectors’) and functions foreconomies at three levels of development (Hayes1992).

In 1998, the percentage of the US workforceemployed in the information industries wasabout 32 per cent, much greater than 22 percent in 1990 and the 20 per cent shown in Table3 for 1980, so there has been a substantialincrease in information even in the economy ofthe USA.Within the information sector, information

functions can be classified into four groups:management functions, support functions (pri-marily clerical in nature), equipment functions(hardware and software), and substantive func-tions (involved in the production and distribu-tion of information). Information industriescan be classified into four categories (see Table4):

NATIONAL POLICY PLANNING

Nations and corporations can gain economic

Full-scale development, representing economies like that in the USA in the 1980s

Category of function

Category of industry Non-informationfunctions

Informationfunctions

Organization total

Non-information sectors 50% 30% 80%

Information sector 6% 14% 20%

Substantial development, representing most other industrialized economies




Organization total



Limited development, representing most peasant-based economies




Organization total



Table 3 Illustrative levels of development for information economies


values from an information-based economy, butbalancing them are barriers (see below):

Values from use of information

. Better workforce, better trained and morecapable of dealing with problems.

. Better product planning and marketing, basedon more knowledge about consumer needs.

. Better engineering, based on availability anduse of scientific and technical information.

. Better economic data, leading to improvedinvestment decisions and allocation of re-sources.

. Better management from improved communi-cation and decision-making.

Barriers to use of information

. Costs are incurred in acquiring information.

. It is likely that the return is over the long term,while the expenditure is made immediately.

. Except for the information industries them-selves, information is not directly productive.

. Rarely are results clearly attributable to theinformation on which they were based.

. Accounting practice treats information as an‘overhead’ expense, subject to cost-cutting.

The barriers can deter companies from makinginvestments in information resources. That doescreate opportunities for information entrepre-neurs, but there will be risks for them.On balance, the benefits would seem tooutweigh the barriers, so macroeconomic policiesshould try to alleviate the barriers to informationdevelopment, encourage information entrepre-neurs, assure that information resources are

available when needed and prepare managers touse information. The implications for nationalpolicy planning are shown below.

National policy implications

General economic policies

. Encourage entrepreneurship.

. Shift from low technology to high technology.

. Shift from production of physical goods toinformation goods.

Develop the ‘information economy’

. Encourage effective use of information inbusiness.

. Provide incentives for information industries.

. Develop information skills.

Management of information enterprises

. Establish technical information skills

. Develop information support staff skills

The micro-economics of information

INCOME TO THE PROVIDERS OF INFORMATION PRODUCTSAND SERVICES

The revenues for the information industries inthe USA in 1990 and 1998, as percentages ofgross national product and absolute dollars, areshown in Tables 5 and 6 (Statistical Abstract ofthe United States 1993, 2000):Of special importance is the steady year by

year increase, for the past decade, in expendi-tures for ‘Business Services’, reflecting growinguse of information in the economy.

THE COSTS OF INFORMATION

Costs occur in the following stages of informa-tion production and distribution:

1 Information must be created, by generationand processing of data; these are authoringfunctions.

2 It must be assessed for publishability; these areeditorial functions.

3 It must be processed for the generation of amaster; these are composition functions.

4 Products and/or services will be produced.

5 The products and services will be marketed.

6 They will be distributed. The stages exemplifythe schematic used in the definition of infor-mation (see Table 7)

Categories Examples

Informationproduction

Research and developmentAuthoring and composing

Informationdistribution

Publishing and librariesTelevision and movies

Informationtransactions

TelecommunicationBanking and brokerage

Informationequipment

Computer hardware and softwareTelecommunications

Table 4 Categories of organizations in theinformation sector of the economy


The costs for authoring, editorial and compo-sition will be treated as capital investments; thosefor production, marketing and distribution asdelivery costs. In practice, the costs of authoringusually are borne by authors, compensated for byroyalties and thus part of the costs of sales forthe publishersToday, three forms of distribution need to be

recognized: (1) printed and film, (2) magnetictapes (VHS-VCR) and optical disks (CD-ROMand DVD), and (3) electronic. For the first two,distribution is by a combination of wholesaledistributors, retail outlets and libraries. Forelectronic, by television (broadcast, cable andsatellite) and the Internet.

Table 8 provides a qualitative summary of therelative importance of each form of distributionfor several types of information. In that sum-mary, ‘primary’ means that the form is the initialmeans for distribution, the major source ofincome and the basis for recovering most if notall of the capital investment; ‘secondary’ meansthe form is a significant alternative means fordistribution; ‘tertiary’ means that the form isspeculative, with income still too small to besignificant; blank means the form is of nosubstantial significance. The assessment forbooks with respect to non-print distribution andfor scholarly journals with respect to CD-ROMdistribution may be too pessimistic, but the factsare that the current income from them is minus-cule.For distributors and retail outlets, capital

investments are primarily in physical plant,though there will be some in inventory. Thosefor libraries are in physical buildings and equip-ment, but most significantly in their collectionsand associated technical processing. Deliverycosts for distributors, retail outlets and librariesare largely for staff. (For all retail establishmentsin 1997, capital expenditures represented about20 per cent of total costs, and staff 80 per cent.)

Information industries US data for 1990 US data for 1998

Transaction industries 4.9% $274 billion 7.1% $629 billion

Hardware and software industries 3.4% 190 billion 7.6% 665 billion

Production and distribution industries 14.0% 783 billion 17.7% 1,545 billion

Total for information industries 22.3% 1,147 billion 32.4% 2,839 billion

Gross National Product 100.0% $5,600 billion 100.0% $8,750 billion

Table 5 US distribution of revenues in percentages of GNP and absolute dollars I

Details of production and distribution 1990 1998

Book publishing 0.3% $15 billion 0.3% $29 billion

Journal publishing 0.3% 15 billion 0.3% 30 billion

Entertainment 3.2% 180 billion 3.8% 330 billion

Formal education 7.0% 392 billion 6.9% 601 billion

University research and development 0.4% 21 billion 0.3% 27 billion

Business services 2.9% 160 billion 6.0% 528 billion

Total 14.1% $783 billion 17.6% $1,545 billion

Table 6 US distribution of revenues in percentages of GNP and absolute dollars II

Entities Processes

Physical Symbolic

Physical Production Marketing

Distribution

Symbolic Composition Creation

Editorial

Table 7 Information production and distributionprocesses


For the Internet, capital investments are inhardware and software for processing and com-munication. Delivery costs are for staff andcommunication access charges. Unfortunately,any estimates for Internet costs are uncertain.First, costs occur at several points – commu-nication services, network backbones, domainservers, internet service providers and userfacilities. The costs for network access arelargely independent of actual use, being connec-tion charges related to bandwidth and reflectinganticipated demand. Second, the rate of growthof the Internet is so rapid that data on onecomponent of operations, reported at one pointin time, cannot be compared with data foranother component, reported at another pointin time. Third, there are mixtures of funding –public, institutional, advertising and individualusers – and many of the costs are subsidized,buried in other accounting categories.

Complicating the assessment of Internet costsis the fact that many of them are borne by theusers instead of by the producers and/or distribu-tors. The costs of local storage and printing areborne by the user, and they are not negligible.Users spend time in accessing, downloading andmanaging the digital files.

Despite those difficulties, one analysis (Hayes1999) estimated that the yearly delivery costs foraccess to a digital library on the Internetwould be distributed 25 per cent for communica-tion, 50 per cent for staff and 25 per cent foramortization of equipment.

THE MICRO-ECONOMICS OF BOOK PUBLISHING

The text of a book is usually the creation of anauthor. The return on that investment is usuallyderived from royalties, typically 10 per cent ofthe list price of the book. For scholarly and

professional books, there usually is no royalty.Less than 1 per cent of authors actually getpublished and only half of those are reallysuccessful (Hartwick 1984).

Estimates can be made of the costs for print-form distribution. Table 9 simplifies and gener-alizes from data reported by Dessauer (1981),Bingley (1966) and Machlup (1962), showingcosts of print-form distribution as percentages oflist price. Data are not available to make com-parable estimates for CD-ROM or Internet dis-tribution, and sales of ‘electronic books’ are stillminuscule (Streitfeld 2001).

Editorial functions include locating and encoura-ging authors, working with them in creatingsuitable manuscripts and assessing the value,marketability and suitability for production. Thefunctions in production management includecopy-editing, formatting and organizing the con-tent, and managing composition or transition tothe production master. To these must be addedoverhead and general administrative costs cover-ing the wide range of corporate costs–benefits,space, supplies, etc.

Forms of distribution

Types of information Printed/film Magnetic/optical Television/Internet

Books Primary Tertiary Tertiary

Scholarly journals Primary Tertiary Secondary

Software Primary Secondary

Databases Secondary Primary

Motion pictures Primary Secondary Secondary

Television Secondary Primary

Table 8 Importance of forms of distribution

Royalties 10%

Capital costs 30%

Editorial 5%

Composition 25%

Delivery costs 30%

Production 14%

Distribution 16%

Discount 30%

Table 9 Costs of print-form distribution aspercentages


The functions in production are those neces-sary for a marketable, distributable product –printed, bound and warehoused. Books must bemarketed and distributed. In practice, these func-tions are shared between the publisher and theseller or distributor, with the former primarilyresponsible for promotion and the latter forselling. The costs for the seller or distributor arecovered through a discount, typically in the orderof 30 per cent of the list price.Of these, the operating expenses and composi-

tion (30 per cent of the total) are here treated ascapital investments; those for production anddistribution (again, 30 per cent of the total), ascosts for delivery.

THE MICRO-ECONOMICS OF SCHOLARLY JOURNALPUBLISHING

A typical research faculty member spends be-tween 20 and 50 per cent of the year in research;beyond that personal time, funded by academicsalary, there may well be added costs funded bygrants or contracts. The outcome averages twoor three published research articles per year, eachof perhaps twenty pages. For research faculty therewards for such creativity are rarely, if ever,derived from income from the publication itself;instead, they come from academic advancement,tenure and scholarly reputation.Again, estimates can be made of the costs for

print-form distribution, but data are not avail-able to make comparable estimates for CD-ROMor Internet distribution. Table 10 summarizesand simplifies detailed estimates of functionalcosts (see King and Tenopir 1998).

Note that the composition costs are substantiallygreater than for books, reflecting the morecomplex nature of scholarly journal publication.The costs for editorial work, composition, gra-phics and G&A will be taken as capital costs; allothers, as delivery costs. Note that there are nocosts for royalties (since few scholarly journalspay the authors) or for discounts to distributors(since subscriptions are handled by the publish-ers).

THE MICRO-ECONOMICS OF DATABASES AND DIGITALLIBRARIES

Databases and digital libraries include digitizedtext, numerical data files, images, referencedatabases and bibliographic catalogues. Theyhave become, through the Internet, a widespreadmeans of electronic publication. There are nodata on which to estimate the distribution ofcosts between capital and delivery functions.Beyond the costs of the producer and distribu-

tor, there will be costs incurred by the users or byinformation intermediaries – reference librarians,information brokers or information entrepre-neurs. In King et al. (1983), the staff time for anaverage search was estimated at about fiftyminutes; at a professional salary of $15 per hourplus overhead at 100 per cent of direct costs, thatwould be a cost of $25. The estimated directcosts of searching a reference database are shownin Table 11.The royalties represent the payment to the

database producer to cover their capital invest-ment and costs in storage and delivery; the othercosts, including that for the intermediary, at $25,are for delivery.

THE MICRO-ECONOMICS OF MOVIES AND TELEVISION

The creation of a motion picture is a complexinteraction among producers, directors, writers,actors, cameramen, set designers and crew. Thecosts are huge – multimillion-dollar budgets inthe case of movies, hundreds of thousands for atelevision programme, tens of thousands for anepisode in a television series. The tangible resultsare a master negative or magnetic tape. Fromthat master come the distribution copies for

Capital costs 61%

Editorial 32%

Composition 29%

Delivery costs 39%

Production 26%

Distribution 13%

Table 10 Estimates of functional costs aspercentages

Table 11 Estimated direct costs of searching a reference database

1985 Royalties $38 Computer $35 Telecom $5

1978 Royalties $20 Computer $50 Telecom $10


presentation in theatres and on the televisionscreen.

Vogel provides pictures of the distribution ofcosts at break-even (see Table 12).

THE VALUES OF INFORMATION IN USE

Value of information to individualsThe value of cultural enrichment, entertainmentand amusement as uses of information is demon-strated by the willingness of people to pay forthem. Motion pictures, television, theatre and thearts, sports – these are all major, multibillion-dollar industries, supported both by consumersof them and by advertisers.As shown in Table 13, Vogel (1986: 11)

estimates time and expenditures by adults in1981 in selected leisure activities. They representover half of the waking time of a person andnearly 3 per cent of the Gross National Product(GNP). By any measure, that is a substantialcommitment of time and resources!The other major individual use of information

is for education and personal development. Statis-tical Abstract of the United States reported in2000 that the total expenditure in 1998 for formaleducation, both public and private at all levels,was $601 billion. Thus, expenditures for formaleducation represent about 7 per cent of the GNP.Beyond that are those for industrial training. A

study by the Research Institute of Americareported that more than $30 billion was spent in1986 (about 0.7 per cent of the GNP) for formalemployee training but that an additional $180billion was spent for on-the-job training. Fortune(1993: 62–64) uses the figure of $30 billion asthe magnitude of formal industrial training pro-grammes in 1993. The American Society forTraining and Development (ASTD 1999) re-ported that expenditures for formal employeetraining in 1995 were $55.3 billion (again about0.7 per cent of the GNP). Consistently for thepast decade, hours for informal on-the-job train-ing have been from two to three times that forformal training (Statistical Abstract 2000).

Value of information services to professionalsIt has been estimated that professionals spendnearly 60 per cent of their time communicatingand working with information (Carroll and King1985). They incur costs in obtaining informationand in using it, but it has been estimated that thedirect benefits to them are as much as ten timesthose costs. More important than direct benefits,though, are increases in productivity measured byresults produced (reports, management publica-tions, research plans and proposals, presenta-tions, consultations and substantive advice).

Value of information in commerce and industryBusiness and commerce need information in sup-port of operational management, business plan-ning and decision-making. Information is essentialfor product development, marketing, financialmanagement and manufacturing operations.In view of the importance of information to

business, a business plan should identify the roleof information in support of the business objec-tives, so that any potential investor can assess theextent to which it has been recognized. Informa-tion is important for support of product researchand development, for access to finance, formarketing, for knowledge of government regula-tions, for use of industry standards and formanagement of personnel. The returns to profit-ability from investment in information are realand large (Hayes and Erickson 1982).

Motionpicture

Television

Production costs 20% 40%

Distribution costs 80% 60%

Table 12 Distribution of costs at break-even

Source: Vogel (1986: 101–25)

Hours perperson/year

Expenditures($ millions)

Television 1,511 $21,600

Radio 1,196 5,900

Newspapers 200 19,500

Records and tapes 190 6,900

Magazines 135 9,000

Leisure books 70 4,100

Movies 11 3,000

Spectator sports 10 2,300

Cultural events 4 1,300

Miscellaneous 25 7,500

Total 3,352 $81,100

Table 13 Time and expenditures by adults in1981 in selected leisure activities

Source: Vogel (1986: 11)


References

Arrow, K.J. (1984) The Economics of Information,Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (vol. 4 ofThe Collected Papers of Kenneth J. Arrow).

ASTD (1999) American Society for Training andDevelopment: State of the Industry Report, Arling-ton, VA: American Society for Training and Devel-opment.

Bingley, C. (1966) Book Publishing Practice, London:Crosby, Lockwood & Son.

Carroll, B. and King, D.W. (1985) ‘Value of informa-tion’, Drexel Library Quarterly 21 (summer): 39–60.

Dessauer, J.P. (1981) Book Publishing: What it Is, Whatit Does, New York: R.R. Bowker.

Fortune (1993) 127(6) (22 March): 62–4.Hartwick, J.M. (1984) Aspects of the Economics ofBook Publishing, Ontario: Queens University, Insti-tute for Economic Research.

Hayes, R.M. (1999) Economics of Digital Libraries(http://www.ime.usp.br/~cesar/simposio99/hayes.htm).

—— (1993) ‘Measurement of information and commu-nication: A set of definitions’, Information andBehaviour 4: 81–103.

—— (1992) ‘A simplified model for the fine structure ofnational information economies’, in Proceedings ofthe NIT ’92 Conference, Hong Kong, 30 November–2 December 1992.

Hayes, R.M. and Erickson, T. (1982) ‘Added value as afunction of purchases of information services’, TheInformation Society 1(4) (December): 307–38.

Hayes, R.M. and Palmer, S. (1983) ‘The effects ofdistance upon use of libraries: Case studies based ona survey of users of the Los Angeles Public Library,Central Library and branches’, Library and Informa-tion Science Research 5(1): 67–100.

King, W. et al. (1983) Key Papers in the Economics ofInformation, White Plains, NY: Knowledge IndustryPublications.

King, D.W. and Tenopir, C. (1998) ‘Economic costmodels of scientific scholarly journals’, ICSU PressWorkshop, Keble College, Oxford, UK, 1998 (http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/icsu/kingppr.htm).

Laffont, J.J. (1989) The Economics of Uncertainty andInformation, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Machlup, F. (1962) The Production and Distribution ofKnowledge in the United States, Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press.

Philips, L. (1988) The Economics of Imperfect Infor-mation, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Porat, M.U. (1977) The Information Economy: Defini-tion and Measurement, Washington, DC: US Depart-ment of Commerce, Office of Telecommunications.

Statistical Abstract of the United States (1993, 2000)US Department of Commerce.

Streitfeld, David (2001). ‘E-book saga is full of woe –and a bit of intrigue’, Los Angeles Times, 6 August2001.

Veblen, O. (1899) The Theory of the Leisure Class,Chicago: Macmillan.

Vogel, H.L. (1986) Entertainment Industry Economics,New York: Cambridge University Press.

Von Neumann, J. and Morgenstern, O. (1952) Theory

of Games and Economic Behaviour, Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press.

Further reading

Bowker Annual of Library and Book Trade Informa-tion (1988), New York: R.R. Bowker Company.

Burns, C. (1986) The Economics of Information,Washington, DC: Office of Technology Assessment,US Congress.

Bysouth, P. (ed.) (1987) The Economics of Online,London: Taylor Graham, Institute of InformationScientists.

Dizard, W.P. (1985) The Coming Information Age: AnOverview of Technology, Economics and Politics,2nd edn, New York: Longman.

Egan, B.L. (1991) Information Superhighways: TheEconomics of Advanced Public Communication Net-works, Boston: Artech House.

Galatin, M. and Leiter, R.D. (eds) (1981) Economics ofInformation, Boston: Nijhoff.

Hayes, R.M. (2001) Models for Library Management,Decision-Making, and Planning, New York: Aca-demic Press.

Kingma, Bruce R. (2000) Economics of Information: AGuide to Economic and Cost-Benefit Analysis forInformation Professionals, 2nd edn. Englewood, CO:Libraries Unlimited

McCall, J. (ed.) (1982) The Economics of Informationand Uncertainty, Chicago: University of ChicagoPress.

Machlup, F. and Leeson, K. (1978) Informationthrough the Printed Word: The Dissemination ofScholarly, Scientific and Intellectual Knowledge,New York: Praeger.

Martyn, J. (1983) The Economics of Information,London: British Library.

Parker, M.M. (1988) Information Economics: LinkingBusiness Performance to Information Technology,Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Rubin, M.R. (1983a) Information Economics andPolicy in the United States, Denver: Libraries Un-limited.

—— (1983b) The Information Economy, Denver: Li-braries Unlimited.

Rubin, M.R. and Huber, M.T. (1986) The KnowledgeIndustry in the United States, Princeton, NJ: Prince-ton University Press.

Shapiro, Carl and Varian, Hal R. (1999) InformationRules, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Wolpert, S.A. (1986) Economics of Information, NewYork: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

SEE ALSO: book trade; communication;consultancy; cultural industries; information;information management; informationprofessions; information society; intellectualproperty; knowledge industries; mass media;scholarly communication; transfer oftechnology

ROBERT M. HAYES


ELECTROCOPYING

Copying of a print or other work from hard-copyform to a machine-readable form, and to anothermachine-readable form or back to hard copy asrequired. A list of forms that electrocopyingmight take, includes:

. Re-keying for electronic storage.

. Optical scanning.

. Transmission from one computer to another(via a network or by datacasting).

. Computer printout.

. Transmission by fax to a computer.

Electrocopying offers flexibility of format, im-proved access potential and opportunities forrights owners to develop new sources of revenue.At the same time it has been widely seen ascreating threats to rights owners who can be-come less able to control distribution of theirworks, and can consequently suffer loss ofrevenue and damage to the integrity of thematerial.

Further reading

Barrow, E. (1998) ‘Digitisation: issues and solutions’,Learned Publishing 11: 259–263.

Cornish, G. ‘Electrocopying’ (http://www.niss.ac.uk/education/hefc/follett/wp/).

SEE ALSO: digitization

ELECTRONIC BOOKS

The result of integrating classical book structure,or rather the familiar concept of a book, withfeatures that can be provided within an electronicenvironment is referred to as an electronic book(or e-book), which is intended as an interactivedocument that can be composed and read on acomputer. From the conceptual side, it is anattempt to overcome the limitations of paperbooks by adding a series of useful features thatare made possible through the nature of anelectronic environment. The main features ofelectronic books are that they are dynamic,reactive and can be made available in differentformats and/or editions in a short time. For thisreason the translation from paper to electronicenvironment is not appropriate for every type ofpublication and for every type of reader: theprocess of reading and the tasks readers areattempting to complete have a central role in

judging the suitability of this translation. In anycase the cognitive overhead that results from thespecial environment chosen (i.e. the computer)represents a valid reason for carefully consideringthe appropriateness and the method of realizingthis conversion. The fact that technology is ableto represent documents on the screen is not asufficient reason for translating every piece ofpaper into electronic format.It is important to define different kinds of use

corresponding to different types of document.These range from ancient manuscripts to modernexamples of hyperliterature.

Examples of electronic books

A conceptual distinction can be made betweenelectronic books that implement the book meta-phor in different ways. It is possible to delineatea hierarchy starting from those that imitate thepaper book in all its physical components to theso-called cyberbooks that do not have anythingin common with the paper book apart frombeing a tool to present information to readers.Among the book imitators it is useful to identifyadditional subclasses each of which focuses on adifferent aspect of the book metaphor and givesgreater or lesser emphasis to the features inher-ited from the paper book.This classification covers the following classes:

. Page turners.

. Scrolling books.

. Portable books.

. Multimedia books.

. Hypermedia books.

. Cyberbooks.

PAGE TURNERS

Page turner books can be divided into those thatimitate the original paper book, and those thathave no paper counterpart and imitate the gen-eral idea of a book, i.e. the book metaphor.Among those which have a paper counterpartthere are different levels of closeness, from thosethat maintain all the visual features of theoriginal book by using a picture of the originalpages, to those that use a graphic template toimitate the original book but do not allow thereader to interact with it in the same way as apaper book. An interesting example of a pageturner book is the Mercury project. It is based onthe idea of a full-text electronic library (Arms

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and Michalak 1990) and has been developed atCarnegie Mellon University. The project aimswere to demonstrate that current technology(high-speed networks, high-resolution screens,multimedia facilities), and the techniques forprocessing electronic documents, make it possibleto build such libraries. Mercury is also evaluatinga number of different approaches for acquiringand storing documents (e.g. scanning documentsand saving them as images or capturing docu-ments in machine-readable format). Very similarto the Mercury project is CORE (ChemistryOnline Retrieval Experiment) (Lesk 1991), whichhas produced a prototype for the storage, search-ing and displaying of primary scientific journaldata in electronic form together with relatedgraphical information such as tables, graphics,etc. The Visual Book (Landoni 1997) representsa particular interpretation of the electronic book,based mainly on the visual aspects of the realbook, its physical features, such as dimensions,thickness, page form and general design style.

SCROLLING BOOKS

Scrolling books are ones where text is presentedaccording to a scroll metaphor.This was the classic way to write text on

parchment and in modern times this metaphor isvery close to that used in word processorenvironments. This strategy lets the designerdetermine the page size based on the spaceavailable and dimension of the screen. The page,as a logical and physical unit, no longer exists,nor does any reference to page numbers or to thepage sequence. The text scrolls almost withoutany physical limitation. As a result the electronicscrolling book is portable on different platformsand does not have any dependency on screendimension. However, readers lose one of theclassical and fundamental keys to accessinginformation in a book, the page number, andthey can easily get lost in the flow of informa-tion. The book metaphor is kept in its logicalstructure. The information is presented accordingto a book-style hierarchy, made of chapters,subchapters, paragraphs and sections. Anotherimportant observation is that information in thisclass of electronic book is made of text andgraphics, even if there may be some hypertextualfeatures such as the presence of links to browsethe electronic book. This is still a very traditionalway of interpreting the concept of a book inelectronic terms and for this reason it is closely

related to the paper book. Examples of scrollingbooks with more sophisticated hypertextual in-terfaces are Dynabook and Superbook (Egan etal. 1991). Both of these provide full-text index-ing, links, navigation and orientation through adynamic table of contents and a multiwindowtext display. An interesting aspect of these twosystems is the fact that they provide the cap-ability for automatically importing text that isavailable electronically in different formats. TheHyperTextBook (Crestani and Melucci 1998) is agood example of a well-targeted experiment increating electronic books with particular atten-tion to the book structure. A further step in thedevelopment of successful scrolling books isrepresented by the WEB Book project (Wilson1999), where the same textbook used in Crestaniand Melucci’s experiment was redesigned byfollowing an adaptation of Morkes and Nielsen’sguidelines in order to maximize its overallusability.

PORTABLE BOOKS

Portable books are becoming more and morecommon, as appropriate technology has devel-oped. They imitate the book as a portable toolfor providing information. A side problem is thatthey have to deal with limitations in screen sizeand resolution and efficiency, but these are alltechnological rather than conceptual aspects.Portable books are divided into hardware andsoftware applications. Hardware devices areusually in the shape of slates; to use a metaphorborrowed from the history of writing, they tendto be light and simple to interact with, andprovide high resolution and possibly colours tomake reading a pleasant enough experience. Theidea is that they provide a tool for reading – thecontainer – where users can visualize and readany sort of content in the appropriate format.The software applications, also known as e-

book readers, provide extra functionalities suchas annotations, bookmarks, different fonts andcolours to help users in their reading/scanningprocess. They can sit on a number of differentplatforms ranging from desktop computer topalmtops (hand-held devices) as well as onspecific hardware for portable e-books.The area of portable electronic books has

received a boost in 2001 from the interestshowed by Microsoft. A series of brand newproducts has just hit the market.These all share the same philosophy and could

ELECTRONIC BOOKS 169

be better named portable electronic book read-ers. E-books have to be light, provide highresolution, support basic functionalities (book-marks and search), allow a certain level ofcustomization, conform to reasonable standardsand possibly take advantage of the Web phenom-enon. There are no assumptions on the kind ofaudience, nor on the usage of the e-booksavailable to read through these e-books viewers.

MULTIMEDIA BOOKS

Multimedia books represent a further step awayfrom the paper book. The contents of such booksare no longer simply electronic text or picturesbut a mixture of different contributions such asvideo, sound, animation, text and pictures. It isno longer possible to keep this sort of enrichedform of information inside the physical border ofa classical book. That is why the electronicenvironment is the natural one for this class ofbook. They still borrow essential features fromthe book metaphor by either imitating its physi-cal appearance or keeping the same logicalstructure. The metaphor is enlarged to considerthis new form of information as generic bookcontents and to organize it in the new bookcontainer according to new needs and presenta-tion paradigms (Barker et al. 1994; Barker1996).

HYPERMEDIA BOOKS

hypermedia books present textual material andintegrate it with other related sources, such asvideo, sounds and pictures, and provide thereader with alternative reading/browsing paths.The resulting book is an augmented version ofthe original. Hypermedia books inherit all theproblems related to the use of hypertext andhypermedia, such as orientation problems andthe risk of confusing users with too muchinformation. A rich subset of hypermedia booksare those, now ever more common, whichare available on the World Wide Web. Anothergroup of electronic books that are widely avail-able are those on tape where actors read forthe reader/listener pieces from classical litera-ture.

CYBERBOOKS

Cyberbooks are completely free from any physi-cal/conceptual dependence on the paper book, asthey have only appeared in electronic form. Inthis context the term book is used in its broadest

sense as a repository for information. On theother hand they depend very much on thedynamic nature of their context, the computer.In this sense they can be defined as active bookswith which readers can interact. They are part ofan alternative new line in modern literature,called post-modern literature, which closely in-tegrates computer culture with the classical hu-man one.

From paper to electronic books

After this brief survey on existing examples ofelectronic books it is time to introduce someconsiderations on one of the crucial issues relatedto their production, that is how to define if apublication is suitable for electronic translation,on the assumption that not all of them are. Anelectronic environment allows changes and up-dating of original information, provides differentviews/readings of the same document, integratesmultimedia sources of information, permits inter-change of data and offers software supportonline. All these facilities, while being useful forsome types of publication, are not appropriatefor every kind of book; different kinds of readingrequirements make electronic translation more orless useful for the reader. In particular, books thatare commonly read in their entirety and in alinear way are not as suited to electronic transla-tion.On the other hand, publications that are

consulted rather then read, such as referencebooks, suggest a different kind of reading that isgeared to problem-solving, and are more suitedto electronic support. The reader of these typesof publication is more involved in using theircontents than in simply reading them. Theelectronic support plays an important and mean-ingful role by offering the user more facilities; thecrucial issue is to choose which are the mostrelevant and how to include them in the electro-nic-book design.Before translating existing paper books from

paper to electronic form the designer shouldconsider whether the user will prefer it to thepaper version containing the same information;this can happen in the following situations:

. If its paper version does not completely satisfythe reader.

. If there is no paper version and the electronicversion can solve problems of dissemination.

. If reading from the screen is not a problem, i.e.

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the book is going to be ‘used’.. If the electronic environment is easily availableto the user.

Future developments

There is already a great number of electronicbooks available on the market or in prototypebut still it is not clear why and for whom theyhave been created.Electronic books should be produced only

when they can provide added value to the papercounterpart. A well-founded initial choice iscrucial for future electronic books. After thedecision to produce an electronic book has beenmade, particular attention has to be paid torepresentation, by following the example of thetraditional publishing process that has focusedon the improvement of the typographical techni-ques in order to get a better presentation forinformation. And finally additional functional-ities have to be provided so that electronic bookscan exploit better the potentiality of their elec-tronic media. In this way electronic books willturn into enhanced versions of paper books, notjust empty book-similes.Electronic books can undoubtedly share the

same space and even the same audience of paperbooks as long as they are properly designed andimplemented. As Jay Bolter (1991) wrote,‘Printed books could remain abundant or evensuper abundant, as they are now, and will losetheir status as the defining form of symboliccommunication.’

References

Arms, W.Y. and Michalak, T.J. (1990).‘Carnegie Mel-lon University’, in C. Arms (ed.) Strategies forLibraries and Electronic Information, Bedford, MA:Digital Press.

Barker, P. (1996) ‘Living books and dynamic electroniclibraries’, The Electronic Library 14: 491–501.

Barker, P., Richardson, S. and Benest, I.D. (1994)‘Human–computer interface design for electronicbooks’, in D.I. Raitt and B. Jeapes (eds) Proceedingsof the Online Information 94, 16th InternationalOnline Information Meeting, London 6–8 Decem-ber, Oxford: Learned Information, pp. 213–92.

Bolter, J.D. (1991) Writing Space: The Computer,Hypertext, and the Mediation of Print, LawrenceEarl-baum Associates.

Crestani, F. and Melucci M. (1998) ‘A case study ofautomatic authoring: From a textbook to a hyper-textbook’, Data and Knowledge Engineering 27: 1–30.

Egan, D.E., Lesk, M.E., Ketchum, R.D., Lochbaum,C.C., Remde, J.R., Littman, M. and Landauer T.K.(1991) ‘Hypertext for the electronic library? COREsample results’, in Proceedings of Hypertext ’91, SanAntonio, New York: ACM Press, pp. 299–312.

Landoni, M. (1997) ‘The visual book system: A studyof the use of visual rhetoric in the design ofelectronic books’, PhD thesis, Glasgow: Departmentof Information Science of the University of Strath-clyde.

Lesk, M. (1991) ‘The CORE electronic chemistrylibrary’, in A. Bookstein, Y. Chiaramella, G. Saltonand V.V. Raghavan (eds) Proceedings of the 14thAnnual International ACM/SIGIR Conference onResearch and Development in Information Retrieval(SIGIR91), New York: ACM Press, pp. 93–113.

Wilson, R. (1999) The Importance of Appearance inthe Design of WEB books, Glasgow: Department ofInformation Science of the University of Strathclyde(MSc dissertation).

SEE ALSO: digital library; Human–ComputerInteraction; information and communicationtechnology

MONICA LANDONI

ELECTRONIC DATA INTERCHANGE

Electronic data interchange (EDI) is a method forconducting business transactions across net-works, with the exchange of invoices, ordersand other documentation carried out in a stan-dardized manner between the computers of trad-ing companies. A major objective is, bystandardizing and simplifying, to shorten thetime between ordering and delivery. There arenow tens of thousands of companies using EDIthroughout the world. The European Unionsupported its expansion in the mid-1990sthrough a number of cross-border pilot projects,designed to show that it can benefit both smalland large businesses. EDI is a critical tool for e-commerce, not least in the book trade and hencein the process of library supply.

Further reading

Harris, R. and Sillman, M. (1996) Electronic DataInterchange: Implementation Guide, HMSO.

ELECTRONIC DOCUMENTDELIVERY

Electronic document delivery (EDD) is the trans-fer of information from publisher or library to

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user by electronic means. EDD can be used as atool for a document delivery system.

Further reading

Morris, A., Woodfield, J. and Davies, J.E. (1999)‘Experimental evaluation of selected electronic docu-ment delivery systems’, Journal of Librarianship andInformation Science 31: 139–44.

ELECTRONIC FUNDS TRANSFER

The transmission of electronic messages record-ing financial transactions directly from thecomputer of the initiating institution to that ofthe receiving institution, so that a transactioncan be accounted for immediately. Where thetransaction is captured at point of sale, such asat a supermarket checkout, this is described as‘electronic funds transfer at point of sale’ or,more commonly, EFTPOS. The system is in-creasingly used in the retail book trade, partlybecause it can also be valuable as a stock controlsystem.

ELECTRONIC INFORMATIONRESOURCES

Electronic information resources (EIR) have theirorigins in experimental computer systems devel-oped for the storage and retrieval of biblio-graphic data during the 1960s. By the end ofthat decade some of the major bibliographicdatabases (such as Chemical Abstracts and IndexMedicus) were available in magnetic tape ver-sions that were searchable in offline batch mode.During the 1970s and 1980s, the increasingavailability of this machine-readable data to-gether with the emergence of both real-timeinteractive computing and computer networksenabled the online information industry toemerge. Initially the major scientific biblio-graphic databases became available in machine-readable form. Commercial vendors, many ofwhom have now ceased to exist, aggregated thedatabases and made them available for searching.The interaction used an interface that nowappears arcane, consisting as it did of a com-mand language that required learning and a setof incomprehensible error messages. There was arapid increase in the number of bibliographicdatabases available, extending into the socialsciences and humanities, and into medium-sized

mission-oriented databases. Bibliographic data-bases were followed by factual databases. Gen-erally these were highly structured and containedmaterial such as chemical properties but therewere also encyclopaedias and newspapers. Theusers of these databases were normally trainedinformation professionals within academic andcommercial organizations, searching on behalf oftheir clients.During the 1980s, academic libraries began

to transfer from card catalogues to onlinepublic-access catalogues (opacs). The signifi-cance of this development was that for the firsttime most of the searches were undertaken byend-users, and system designers started to de-sign their systems with this in mind. At about thesame time as OPACs became widely available,the cd-rom emerged as an information deliveryvehicle. CD-ROMs freed the database suppliersfrom the grips of the online service providers andthe constraints of their connect-time chargingmechanisms. Suppliers of CD-ROM informationproducts experimented by making availablemany different types of information through thismedium. Suppliers came and went. However thesignificant contribution of the CD-ROM wasthat it enabled the suppliers to develop far moreuser-friendly interfaces, These could be used bysearchers who were not information profes-sionals. The widespread availability of CD-ROM products, together with the appearance ofOPACs, created a marked increase in the search-ing of electronic information resources by profes-sional workers of all descriptions. The searchingof electronic information resources had movedonce and for all beyond the province of theinformation professional.Throughout this period, the information that

was publicly available was provided by commer-cial producers who had subjected the informationto appropriate quality-control mechanisms.Furthermore the normal method of retrieval wasthe creation of a query statement containingcriteria that the sought items must match.Usually this consisted of terms that had to bepresent, linked together by Boolean operators orother facilities provided by the search software.These facilities might have been made explicitlyavailable to the searcher or they might have beenimplicit, for example through the use of searchboxes. The search partitioned the database intothose items that met the search criteria and those

172 ELECTRONIC FUNDS TRANSFER

that did not with the assumption that the formerwere relevant whilst the latter were not.Since the late 1960s, information retrieval

researchers have developed a variety of alterna-tives to the Boolean retrieval model. Rather thanpartitioning the database into retrieved and notretrieved, these attempted to rank the items inthe database such that the searcher was presentedwith items in the order of decreasing relevance.There was only very limited adoption of theseapproaches by either CD-ROM producers or theonline information vendors.The emergence of the world wide web has

enabled a revolution in electronic informationresources. This environment differs from theearlier situation in that:

. The available information is not restricted totext but includes large numbers of images,audio and multimedia items so that it is moreappropriate to think of them as informationobjects rather than documents.

. The information available is an amorphousmass to which anyone can add if they haveeven a limited knowledge of HTML and thusthe available information is no longer subjectto quality-control mechanisms prior to pub-lication.

. The information is not structured to facilitateretrieval, but through the hypertext links it isstructured to facilitate browsing and easymoving between information objects. Linkscan all too readily be broken.

. The Web browser environment has continuedthe trend towards user-friendly interfaces thatwas initiated by the development of CD-ROMand Windows.

In addition to enabling this vast uncontrolledmass of information objects to be made avail-able, the Web also provides access to quality-controlled electronic information resources fromthe traditional information aggregators such asDialog. Further it provides a vehicle whereby anincreasing number of electronic versions of for-mal publications, such as electronic versions ofrefereed journals, is accessible. Finally it offersaccess to an expanding range of quality-con-trolled information such as electronic journalsand newsletters of which there has never been aprint equivalent. From the perspective of thesearcher, the situation has become vastly morecomplex.

Alongside considerable change in the type andscale of available EIR, there has been an evenmore remarkable change in the users of theseresources. Use of EIR has moved from being anesoteric activity undertaken by information pro-fessionals, and a slowly increasing band of otherprofessional people, to an action undertakenevery day by countless millions around theworld.The surge in the availability of electronic

information, coupled with the attractiveness ofWeb-based interfaces, has further enhanced thenotion that information seeking in the electronicage is a simple process. The reality, of course, isthat the plethora of information sources meansthat effective retrieval of the best availableinformation has become even more complex. Onthe one hand the internet serves simply as anaccess mechanism to the quality-controlled infor-mation products made available by informationaggregators such as Dialog, or publishers such asISI and the major academic publishers such asElsevier. On the other hand the Web enablesanyone to make available resources on any topicwith no regard to the quality or validity of thatinformation.A range of tools has been developed to enable

retrieval of material from the Web. These includea large number of search engines, directories,gateways and portals (see portals and gate-ways).The search engines automatically create huge

databases of items on the Web. The indexing andupdating of these databases is done automaticallyby software. It is often forgotten that even thelargest of these search engines, such as Googleand Alta Vista, provide access to but a smallproportion of the resources available on the Web.Based on the assumptions that these searchengines will often be used by unskilled searchers,these search engines often make use of the IRresearch techniques of the 1960s as the basis forproviding the user with output that has beenranked by presumed relevance to the input query.A common problem with such systems is that theuser can be faced with thousands if not millionsof references. A further problem is that they maywell direct the user to old or redundant sites.Given that these search engines are based upondatabases that are automatically created, andthus there is no quality control on the materialindexed, the searcher is often faced with a largeproportion of irrelevant material of doubtful

ELECTRONIC INFORMATION RESOURCES 173

quality. An inescapable conclusion is that thesearcher must become increasingly competent inthe judgement of the quality of electronic infor-mation resources.An alternative approach to that of the search

engine is the directory approach where access isprovided to a much smaller set subset of theInternet that has been chosen by human selectorswho have considered the quality of the websiteand then provide access to the information via astructured hierarchy (in effect a controlled voca-bulary). This approach reduces considerably thenumber of items drawn to the searcher’s atten-tion and increases the relevance of the items, butthis is achieved at the expense of marked reduc-tion in the number of items retrieved. Yahoo! isthe pre-eminent exponent of this approach.However, this clear distinction is slowly disap-pearing as search engines experiment with direc-tory access and directories incorporate searchengines.A less well-known approach is the subject

gateway exemplified in the United Kingdomby gateways such as SOSIG (www.sosig.ac.uk)for the social sciences and EEVL (www.eevl.a-c.uk) for engineering. Useful as these gatewaysare in providing access to quality-controlledresources selected for their relevance to highereducation, the reality is that they offer access toonly a minute proportion of the resourcesavailable on the Web and they remain lightlyused.The emergence of this new information land-

scape has caused information professionals towork together with other professional groups toconsider the metadata requirements of the newlandscape. Whilst initiatives such as dublincore are of potential importance, it remains tobe seen whether they can have a significantimpact in the unordered world of the Web.Information professionals face a challenging

future tackling a range of problems created bythe new information landscape. Amongst theseare:

. Developing approaches to electronic archivingwhich ensure that quality information objectsremain accessible over time.

. Developing simple to use yet effective mechan-isms to allow users with a range of skills toaccess the information that they require. Sincethis has not been mastered successfully for textand research in areas such as content-based

image retrieval and music retrieval, this re-mains a considerable challenge.

. The successful integration of electronic infor-mation resources to developments in digitaland hybrid library research.

. Understanding the relationship between elec-tronic information resources and the rapidlydeveloping virtual learning environments andmanaged learning environments.

In summary there has been a vast increase incomplexity of electronic information resources.The challenge is to make them accessible inuseful ways for a hugely enlarged community,many of whom are inevitably unskilled in the useof the resources.

Further reading

American Library Assocation (2002) Guidelines forthe Introduction of Electronic Information Resourcesto Users (http://www.ala.org/rusa/stnd_electron.html)[visited 24 June 2002].

Large, A., Tedd, L. and Hartley, R.J. (1999) Informa-tion Seeking in the Online Age: Principles andPractice, Bowker Saur.

Marchionini, G. and Komlodi, A. (1998) ‘Design ofinterfaces for information seeking’, in M. Williams(ed.) Annual Review of Information Science andTechnology (ARIST) 33: 89–130 [despite its title, itcovers much relevant material and offers access tothe research literature].

R.J. HARTLEY

ELECTRONIC JOURNAL ARCHIVES

Peer-reviewed journals

There currently exist at least 20,000 peer-reviewed journals, across all scholarly andscientific disciplines, published in most of theresearch-active nations and tongues of the world.The (at least) 2 million articles that appear inthem annually are only accepted after they havesuccessfully met the quality-standards of theparticular journal to which they were submitted.There is a hierarchy of quality standards acrossjournals, from the most rigorous ones at the top– usually the journals with the highest rejectionrates and the highest ‘impact factors’ (the num-ber of times their articles are cited by otherarticles) – all the way down to a virtual vanitypress at the bottom.The responsibility for maintaining each jour-

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nal’s quality standards is that of the editor(s) andreferees. The editor chooses qualified experts(‘peers’) who then review the submissions andrecommend acceptance, rejection or various de-grees of revision.In the past, journals were not concerned with

archiving. Their contents appeared on paper; thejournal’s responsibility was the peer review, edit-ing, mark-up, typesetting, proofing, printing anddistribution of the paper texts. It was thesubscribers (individual or institutional) who hadto concern themselves with the archiving andpreservation, usually in the form of the occupa-tion of space on library shelves, occasionallysupplemented by copying onto microfiche as aback-up. The main back-up, however, was the(presumably) preserved multiple copies on indivi-dual and institutional library shelves around theworld. It was this redundancy that ensured thatrefereed journals were archival and did notvanish within a few days of printing, as ephem-eral newspapers and leaflets might do.In recent decades, journals have increasingly

produced online versions in addition to on-paperversions of their contents. Initially, the onlineversion was offered as an extra feature forinstitutional subscribers, and could be receivedonly if the institution also subscribed to thepaper version. Eventually, institutional site-licences to the online version alone became adesired option for institutions. For approximatelythe same price as a paper subscription, onlinelicences offered much wider and more conveni-ent access to institutional users than a singlepaper subscription ever could do.

Archiving

This new option raised the problem of archivingagain, however: Who owns and maintains theonline archive of past issues? In paper days, itwas clear that the subscriber owned the ‘archive’,in the form of the enduring paper edition on theshelf. But with digital texts there is the questionof storing them, upgrading them with eachadvance in technology and in general seeing to itthat they are permanently accessible to all in-stitutional users online.If the journal maintains the online archive, (1)

what happens when an institution discontinuesits subscription? No new issues are received, ofcourse, but (2) what about past issues, alreadypaid for?

And (3) are publishers really in a position tobecome archivists too, adding to their traditionalfunctions (peer review, editing, etc.) the functionof permanent online archiving, upgrading, migra-tion, preservation and search/access-provision?Are these traditional library and digital libraryfunctions now to become publisher functions?There is not yet a satisfactory answer to any ofthese questions, but the means of implementingthem, once we decide on what the correctanswers are, have meanwhile already been cre-ated.

Implementing online archiving

First, a means was needed to make the digitalliterature ‘interoperable’. This required agreeingon a shared metadata tagging convention thatwould allow distributed digital archives to shareinformation automatically, so that their contentswere navigable as if they were all in the sameplace and in the same format. An unambiguousvocabulary had to be agreed upon so that digitaltexts could be tagged by their author, title,publication date, journal, volume, issue, etc.(along with keywords, subject classification, cita-tion-linking and even an inverted full-text indexfor searching).

These ‘metadata’ tags could then be ‘har-vested’, both by individual users and by searchengines that provided sophisticated navigationcapabilities. In principle, the outcome would beas if each of the annual 2 million articles in the20,000 peer-reviewed journals were all in oneglobal archive.

This shared metadata tagging convention hasbeen provided by the Open Archives Initiative(OAI) (http://www.openarchives.org) and is beingadopted by a growing number of archives,including both journal archives and institutionalarchives. The OAI convention, however, does notanswer the question of who should do thearchiving: journals or institutions.

Another growing movement, the BudapestOpen Access Initiative (BOAI) (http://www.soros.org/openaccess/) is likely to influence this out-come. To understand the form this may take, wehave to distinguish two kinds of archives: ‘openarchives’, which are all OAI-compliant archives,and ‘open-access archives’, which are not onlyOAI-compliant, but access to their full-text con-tents is free.

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The case for online archiving

Explaining why and how free online access is theoptimal and inevitable solution for this specialliterature (of 20,000 peer-reviewed journals) goesbeyond the scope of this article, but it is based onthe fact that this literature differs from mostother literatures in that it is without exception allan author give-away: none of the authors of theannual 2 million refereed articles seeks royaltiesor fees in exchange for their text. All theseauthors seek is as many readers and users aspossible, for it is the research impact of thesearticles – of which a rough measure is thenumber of times each is cited – that brings theseauthors their rewards (employment, promotion,tenure, grants, prizes, prestige). It is not subscrip-tion/licence sales revenue that brings authorsthese rewards: on the contrary, these toll-basedaccess-barriers are also impact-barriers, andtherefore at odds with the interests of researchand researchers.Hence, from their authors’ point of view, the

optimal solution for archiving is that the archivesshould be open-access archives. There are twoways to achieve this. One is that (1) the journalsshould add archiving to their existing servicesand make the contents of their archives open-access.This is on the face of it a rather unrealistic

thing to ask from journals, for it asks them totake on additional expenses, over and above theirtraditional ones, and yet to seek no revenue inexchange, but instead give away all their contentsonline. It becomes somewhat more realistic if weanticipate a future time when there is no longerany demand for the on-paper version, and so it,and all its associated expenses, can be eliminated,by downsizing to only the essentials.It has been estimated that if journals per-

formed only peer review, and nothing else,becoming only quality-control service-providersand certifiers, then their expenses per articlewould be reduced by about 75 per cent. Theaverage revenue per article is currently $2,000(the sum of all subscription, licence and pay-per-view income, mostly paid by institutions). Butthis still leaves $500 per article to be recovered,somehow: How to do it if the text is given awayfor free?We will return to this question in a moment,

noting only that it is still futuristic, becomingrelevant only when there is no longer enough

demand for the paper version to cover all thecosts it had in the past. There are conceivablysources for covering a cost of $500 per article,including research grants and other possiblesources of institutional or governmental subsidyin the interest of open access to research. Butthere is another possibility, not calling for sub-sidy.The second way to achieve open-access ar-

chives – an immediate rather than a future-contingent way like (1) – is (2) through theauthor/institution self-archiving of all peer-reviewed articles in institutional eprint archives.Institutions create open-access eprint archives forall of their own peer-reviewed research output(http://www.eprints.org). This provides immedi-ate open access to the entire peer-reviewedjournal literature for all would-be users, every-where.While the on-paper versions continue to be

sold and bought, that continues to be the ‘true’archive, and all publication costs are covered theold way (through subscription and licence pay-ments to journals). But if and when the dayarrives when there is no longer any demand ormarket for the publisher’s paper version, institu-tions will already have the 100 per cent annualwindfall savings out of which to redirect the 25per cent needed to cover the peer review costs fortheir own annual research output. And at thatpoint the interoperable, OAI-compliant institu-tional eprint archives will also become the truearchives of the peer-reviewed journal literature.

Further reading

Harnad, S. (2001) ‘The self-archiving initiative’, Nature410:1,024–5.(http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/16/42/index.html).

Odlyzko, A.M. (2002) ‘The rapid evolution of scholarlycommunication’, Learned Publishing 1: 7–19 (http://www.si.umich.edu/PEAK-2000/odlyzko.pdf).

SEE ALSO: citation analysis; digital library;scholarly communication

STEVAN HARNAD

ELECTRONIC JOURNALS

A journal that is available in electronic formthrough an online host. Electronic journals haveexisted experimentally since the late 1970s, but itwas only in the 1990s with the mushroomgrowth of the internet and the development of

176 ELECTRONIC JOURNALS

the world wide web that they became com-paratively common. The great benefit of electro-nic journals is that the user can access directlythe individual paper or article which s/he re-quires, typically from a desktop workstation,without having to find a part or volume in alibrary and then find the specific item.Despite their obvious advantages to users,

however, electronic journals have developedrather more slowly than the technology wouldhave allowed. There has been significant resis-tance among academics – perhaps surprisinglymost notably in the scientific community – partlybecause of a belief that the traditional techniquesof journal editing were being ignored. In parti-cular, there was suspicion that papers were notfully refereed; as a result, electronic journalscommanded less prestige than traditional printedjournals, good papers were not submitted tothem and something of a vicious circle wascreated. Only now is this being broken (Ander-son et al. 2001). Moreover, there is a concernthat electronic journals may have only a limitedlifespan; the creation of electronic-journalarchives is an important step forward in over-coming this suspicion.From the perspective of the publishing indus-

try, electronic journals present a different, butequally significant, problem. Traditionally, jour-nal publishers have sold their products on sub-scription, mainly to academic libraries,although also to some in other sectors. Subscrip-tions to electronic journals are differently struc-tured, with the end-user being charged for eachaccess to a paper. In practice, libraries buy alicence, typically on an annual subscription basis,to give access to the journal for all its ownregistered users. Although this system workswell, it is forcing the publishers to reconsidertheir approach to journal publishing, and espe-cially to the cost of subscriptions to journals inall formats.Despite all the current issues, however, it

seems likely that electronic journals will becomethe normal mode of scholarly communica-tion in many disciplines (not only in thesciences) in the not too distant future.

References

Anderson, K., Sack, J., Kraus, L. and O’Keefe, L.(2001) ‘Publishing online only peer-reviewed biome-dical literature: Three years of citation, authorperception, and usage experience’, Journal of Elec-

tronic Publishing 6 (www.press.umich.edu/jep/06–03/andreson.html).

Further reading

Journal of Electronic Publishing (www.press.umich.edu/jep/).

Tenopir, C. and King, D.W. (2000) Towards ElectronicJournals, Special Libraries Association.

SEE ALSO: book trade; communication;electronic books; serials librarianship

ELECTRONIC LIBRARY

An organized collection of electronic documents.The term digital library is now normallypreferred.

ELECTRONIC MAIL

A method of sending messages, data files, etc. byelectronic means from one computer with net-work access to another. The receiving terminal isusually equipped with a storage area, or mailbox,in which the messages are deposited. Users canread their incoming messages on-screen whenthey choose and, if they wish, print them out ordownload them on to a disk. Its advantages overpostal services are speed and reliability; and overtelephone communication, the availability of amessage received at any time in a permanent andconvenient form. Files of substantial size can besent via e-mail almost as easily as the informalexchanges that are encouraged by the user-friendliness of the medium. The earliest use of e-mail seems to have been in 1972, after which thenow-familiar conventions (such as the use of thesymbol) and emoticons were quickly developed.It has become the ubiquitous means of commu-nication for internet users throughout theworld, and indeed has been argued to have beenone of the drivers for the expansion of theInternet in the 1980s and 1990s. The use of e-mail, however, still raises important issues ininformation transfer, arising from its lack ofsecurity. Solutions to this that are being exploredmainly involve new methods of data encryp-tion.

Further reading

Palme, J. (1995) Electronic mail, Artech House.

SEE ALSO: communication; computer security;

ELECTRONIC MAIL 177

information and communication technology;information management

ELECTRONIC PUBLICINFORMATION SERVICES

Information available directly to the generalpublic through electronic systems.For most of history, access to information has

been the preserve of the few. In more recenttimes, the public has had the mass media toaugment word of mouth, but most informationsources remained in the hands of the specialists.Prestel was the first significant publicly acces-

sible information system. This was developed inthe 1970s by Fedida and Malik, and used astandard telephone line to connect to a centralcomputer. The display, intended for a domestictelevision, consisted of ‘frames’ (screens) ofinformation, but these were severely limited bothas to the amount of text displayed (forty char-acter per line) and the quality of graphics. Effectssuch as colour change were achieved with hiddencharacters between words, and the graphics werecomposed of ‘graphic characters’ – groups ofcoloured squares (‘pixels’) that together could bearranged to form a picture. Although undoubtedtalent was employed by designers to create theframes, the graphics were crude and angular.The technology became known generically as

‘viewdata’, but, unlike the similar French mini-tel system, Prestel was not a popular success. Inpart, this was due to competition from teletext,which supplied ‘pages’ that looked similar toviewdata frames, but did so using spare capacityin the television picture signals.Teletext services were normally free, and no

phone connections were involved. Decoders andhandsets became routinely included in nearly allstandard televisions sold. Most television broad-casters, including terrestrial, satellite and evencable services, ran teletext services. The informa-tion carried covered television-related topics suchas programme times, news and magazine-stylecontent, but also a wide range of data such asstock market prices, weather forecasts and travelinformation. Commercial television also carriedadvertising.In the 1980s and 1990s, viewdata had some-

thing of a revival. Political pressures on nationaland regional governments to become more openresulted in many of them seeking ways to widen

the distribution of information about their activ-ities. One of the solutions commonly adoptedwas the development of local viewdata systems.These were accessed via microcomputers locatedin public buildings, especially libraries. In manycases the viewdata frames were held on themicrocomputers themselves, rather than on acentral computer, removing the need for tele-phone connections. Another popular solutionwas to update the frames held on the microcom-puters via a single telephone connection in themiddle of the night.Microcomputers modified to show only a

specific viewdata service were called ‘kiosks’. Ina more rugged version, kiosks were also placed inopen public areas such as streets and bus sta-tions.These methods, and various custom solutions,

were adopted by other public bodies to provideinformation on employment services, travel, tour-ism and health.The development of the internet and, more

particularly, the world wide web, drew evenmore organizations to publish information inelectronic form. In the late 1990s, those localauthorities that had developed viewdata systemsbegan to abandon them in favour of this moresophisticated medium. Beside the advantages ofimproved display and organization of informa-tion, the new websites could be accessed by amuch larger section of the population either athome or in the workplace.Local government sites tended to supply de-

tails of their services and contact information, aswell as community information for the area theyserved. However, the growth of Web-based in-formation brought about a broadening of thetype of material carried and the technology usedto display it. geographic information sys-tems (GIS), for instance, might be used todisplay community information, such as thelocation of schools, overlaid on a map of thearea.Increasingly during this period of develop-

ment, local authority reports and minutes werebeing published on the Web, and a number ofauthorities broadcast their council meetings livevia their website (webcast).Other information providers included national

and local newspapers. The BBC, who maintaineda website in support of its broadcast pro-grammes, also provided public information abouta number of British cities, and included the use of

178 ELECTRONIC PUBLIC INFORMATION SERVICES

cameras to monitor city traffic conditions (‘Jam-Cams’).A number of UK central government depart-

ments developed their own websites, and theCentral Computer and TelecommunicationsAgency (CCTA) not only published guidelines inthis area, but also acted as a ‘portal’, linkingmost government and related sites.There was a major increase in central govern-

ment interest in this technology following theelection of the 1997 Labour government. A whitepaper was produced on ‘Modernising Govern-ment’. In this, all government services were to beprovided electronically where practical, to give around-the-clock service. The concept becameknown as e-government, and included informa-tion about government services and other moreinteractive features, such as online form submis-sion. A set of standards known as the Govern-ment Interoperability Framework (e-GIF) wasdeveloped to underlie the initiative and ensureworking compatibility between government sites.This made HTML, XML and related protocolsstandard for display and data structures, andprovided for an extension of the dublin coresystem of metadata.The government reasoned that Internet access

via computer ownership alone was unlikely tobecome universal within a reasonable period oftime. There was fear of a developing ‘digitaldivide’ causing ‘social exclusion’ of those withoutaccess to electronic services. Four platforms weretherefore included in e-GIF. These were Internetbrowsers, public kiosks, WAP phones and digitaltelevision.Digital television was planned to supersede

analogue broadcasting within the first decadeof the twenty-first century, and carried with it theability to provide sophisticated, interactive text-based services. Broadcasters were already usingthis to augment programmes in a way thatteletext had been unable to do. At the start ofthe century, a number of local authorities, hous-ing associations and trusts grouped togetherprovide a means of communicating directly withtenants, and supply interactive services using thistechnology.Another group that it was feared would be

isolated were those with visual disabilities. Gov-ernment guidelines were published to establishappropriate Web design that was as inclusive aspossible. A new portal, UK Online, was openedto create an easy access to government and

related Web facilities without demanding signifi-cant search skills.Even so, some continued to argue that such

technological solutions required skills that werenot universal. Surveys had shown that peoplepreferred to talk to human beings rather than usemachines. As a result, some authorities turned tocall-centre technology. This allowed members ofthe public to speak over the phone to trainedoperatives who had access to various electronictools, and were able to mediate between the dataand the client.

Further reading

Modernising Government (www.cabinet-office.gov.uk/moderngov).

Office of the E-Envoy (www.e-envoy.gov.uk).Society of Public Information Networks (SPIN)(www.spin.org.uk).

UK GovTalk (www.govtalk.gov.uk).UK Online Portal (www.ukonline.gov.uk).

SEE ALSO: e-government; videotex

GOFF SARGENT

EMOTICON

Said to be based on a contraction of ‘emotionicon’, but, whether that is the actual origin ornot, the term refers to the smiley faces thatpunctuate the electronic mail communication,chat and newsgroup postings of many internetusers. They consist of a short sequence of lettersand symbols that when viewed by tilting thehead to the left emulate a facial expression.They are used to reinforce the feeling that amessage is intended to convey, and can be takenas a means of communicating in the spirit ofnetiquette.

EMPIRICISM AND POSITIVISM

Empiricism is the view that experience, observa-tion or sense data are the only or the mostimportant way of acquiring knowledge, both inordinary life and in science. Although empiricismcan trace its origin to Aristotle, modern empiri-cism developed like classical rationalism fromdifferent ways of drawing epistemological lessonsfrom the scientific revolution consummated byNewton. Together, rationalism and empiricismconstitute the two main tendencies of Europeanphilosophy in the period between scholasticism

EMPIRICISM AND POSITIVISM 179

and Kant. Empiricism is connected to Britishthinking, rationalism to Continental thought(Garrett and Barbanell 1997: ix).positivism’s central claim that science is the

highest form of knowledge and that philosophytherefore must be scientific, that there is onescientific method common to all science, and thatmetaphysical claims are pseudoscientific, was inconflict with the empirical tradition.The logical positivists of the mid-twentieth

century tried to reconcile the two positions.They also attacked metaphysics but broughtin the empiricist tradition. They argued thatsensory knowledge was the most certain kindof knowledge and that any sentence not directlyabout sensory experience should be translatableinto observational sentences. Those sentencesthat could not be so translated were rejectedas meaningless. This view implied that knowl-edge is divided into theoretical and observableknowledge, and that theoretical conceptsand sentences must be defined in observationalterms. Good science consists of a priori logicand cumulated sense data, and is value free.All science can be united and reduced tophysics.Positivist assumptions have influenced the use

of statistics in the social sciences, including LIS.Positivistic views implicitly treat research as amechanical, purely logical process. Typical ofpositivism is also its anti-realism. Research isseen as reports of correlation between observa-tional variables. Underlying cause is regarded asmetaphysics and thus ignored. The same appliesto knowing the essence or nature of something.Positivism is closely related to behaviourism, theview that all knowledge about psychologicalphenomena must be studied by observing thebehaviour of organisms (e.g. users in LIS). Theprinciple of methodological individualism impliesthat positivists reduce the study of all collectivephenomena, e.g. institutions, ideologies and so-cial norms, to the study of attributes of indivi-duals.The strength of positivism is its methodology

for eliminating kinds of errors related to theresearchers’ subject. By applying control groups,experiments, statistical methods, etc. subjectivityis eliminated and intersubjective data are estab-lished. In this regard it is opposed to hermeneu-tics, which find it impossible to eliminatesubjectivity, but which try to explicate thesubjective presumptions as much as possible.

One could say that the relative strength ofpositivism compared to hermeneutics is its meth-odology for processing empirical data, while itsrelative weakness is its methodology for consid-ering theoretical and conceptual aspects concern-ing what data to consider relevant in the firstplace. Positivism produces intersubjective con-trolled data, but such data are often criticizedfor being trivial or even ideologically biased bymore hermeneutically or critically oriented re-searchers. Positivists can, for example, providereliable data about correlations between race andintelligence. They tend to ignore, however, thedifferent conditions in which races have todevelop their intelligence in the society.In popular myth positivism is regarded as

quantitative science. This is not so. Both quanti-tative and qualitative research can be positivist ornon-positivist. Neither is positivism ‘hardscience’ or objective science. Positivism is anepistemology that has been declared dead, butit still continues to dominate many researchareas. Many shortcomings can be avoided byapplying other approaches, of which criticalrealism and hermeneutics are very important.Such alternatives are more concerned with ob-servations as manifestations of different layers ofreality or underlying causes and mechanisms thatcannot always be translated into observationalterms. They regard methods as something thatare not universal and a priori, but must bespecified in relation to the specific object ofresearch. They have also undercut the motiva-tions for behaviourism and methodological in-dividualism.Positivism has been called ‘the invisible philo-

sophy of science’ because its adherents regard itas the solely scientific approach and tend toavoid or ignore philosophical problems. It is notregarded by itself as a school or a paradigm,merely as a science. This is the reverse of, forexample, hermeneutic or feminist epistemologythat recognize and label their approach as oneamong others.

Empiricism and positivism in LIS

If we regard LIS as a field of research, we shouldregard the strength and weaknesses of differentepistemologies and try to apply the best ones.Positivist assumptions have dominated in, forexample, many kinds of user studies and experi-ments in IR. It has produced large amounts of

180 EMPIRICISM AND POSITIVISM

fragmented data of dubious relevance. The pro-blem is not that such studies are empirical orquantitative, but that they suffer from othershortcomings from the positivist inheritance.Mainstream information science can benefit fromthe discussions about the shortcomings of positi-vism.There is another important implication for

LIS. LIS is about selecting, organizing, seekingand intermediating information and knowledge.Most of that information is produced by implicitpositivist norms, which affects its quality, value,organization, language, etc. Hjørland (2000)summarizes a description of how the definition,delimiting and structure of the social sciences restupon positivist views, which are currently incrisis, and why the classification of this areaseems anachronistic. If LIS is to find principles ofclassification, information seeking, etc. for thisarea, it must go through an analysis of implicitpositivistic norms.

References

Garrett, D. and Barbanell, E. (eds) (1997) Encyclopediaof Empiricism, London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers.

Hjørland, B. (2000) ‘Review of Wallerstein (1996)Open the Social Sciences, Stanford, CA: StanfordUniversity Press I’, Knowledge Organization 27(4):238–41.

Further reading

Alston, W.P. (1998) ‘Empiricism’, in Routledge Ency-clopaedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London: Rou-tledge.

Kincaid, H. (1998) ‘Positivism in the social sciences’, inRoutledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0,London: Routledge

SEE ALSO: epistemology; information theory;philosophies of science; research in library andinformation science

BIRGER HJØRLAND

ENCRYPTION

The encoding of data that is to be transmittedthrough telecommunications systems so that onlyauthorized users can read it. Encryption isnormal for all data transmitted across the Inter-net with decryption software being built into therecipient computer’s system and programs. Thereare various Data Encryption Standards that arewidely used for this purpose. Encryption is an

essential element in protecting the confidentialityof transmitted data, and is especially importantin commercial uses, where sensitive personal datais involved (such as in health informatics sys-tems), and for government data.

Further reading

Soh, B.C. and Young, S. (1998) ‘Network system andWorld Wide Web security’, Computer Communica-tions 20: 1,431–6.

SEE ALSO: data security; espionage; privacy;surveillance

ENCYCLOPEDIA

A database or reference book containinginformation on all subjects, or limited to aspecial field or subject, arranged in systematic(usually alphabetical) order. The form lends itselfideally to multimedia and interactive formats,and on CD-ROM was one of the first genres tobe produced in the form of electronic books.

END-USER

Distinguishes the user for whom an informa-tion and communication technology pro-duct or information service is designed, from thedevelopers, installers, administrators, system op-erators, information scientists, librarians andservice personnel who are, in some sense orother, also users. It reflects the fact that mostinformation technologies and services involve achain of interconnected product components andhuman activities at the end of which is the user,but ‘end’ is still generally redundant. Its useful-ness is in distinguishing between users whorequire a finished product or service (end-users),and intermediaries who might use a product thathas not been fully tested for development pur-poses or handle raw or unprocessed informationon behalf of an end-user.

ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software ismostly recognized as standard package software,usually sourced from one vendor, which providessupport for a wide range of core businessprocesses in a variety of organizations.

ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING 181

The origins of ERP software

ERP software evolved from Manufacturing Re-source Planning (or Materials RequirementsPlanning) (MRP) software. MRP software beganto be introduced into organizations throughoutthe 1960s. At this stage the software was used toprovide support for work in manufacturing-based organizations. The software could helppeople manage production through the use ofelectronic records such as stock held that werelinked to bills of materials and work in progress.For example, an organization that made carsmay need thousands of different parts to go intomaking that car – the record of this would be thebill of materials. Therefore in order to satisfy anorder for a car, they would need to make surethey had all the parts in stock. The MRP soft-ware would therefore enable personnel to checkstock levels and work in progress at the organi-zation and calculate what parts they might needto make or order to fulfil the order for the car.MRP software was then developed further intoMRPII software and this included functionalityrelating to the management of finance in anorganization. ERP software is merely a furtherevolution of the idea of using IT to help in themanagement of resources, but on an enterprisescale. ERP software therefore provides supportfor other areas such as human resources anddistribution services.

The rationale for ERP software adoption

Much of the rationale for the adoption of ERPsoftware to support organizational business pro-cesses is inextricably linked with legacy informa-tion system (Legacy IS) problems. Legacy IS canbe viewed as the inter-related organizational andtechnological situation. Very simply, organiza-tions were having problems with their Legacy IS,and ERP software was seen as a way of over-coming these difficulties.From a technical perspective, many people in

organizations were using IT-based standard soft-ware or custom-developed systems that had beenimplemented generally at least a decade before,and these often presented organizations with anumber of problems. They had usually beendeveloped and/or maintained over a number ofyears by different people leading to high levels ofentropy and complexity. These changes weresometimes not very well documented: meaningthat dealing with problems, developing the soft-

ware or performing routine maintenance wasbecoming a resource-intensive activity. Further-more, throughout the 1990s the year 2000 (Y2K)problem emerged and this required people inorganizations to have very good knowledge ofthe workings of the software they used in orderthat they could take corrective action.Inextricably linked with the technological

viewpoint of the Legacy IS problem was theorganizational one. Strategies had shifted formany organizations from local to global, andIT support was required to co-ordinate this.Tied to the internationalization of markets wasincreased global competition in many areas andconsequently there was a requirement to stream-line operations and become (more) customer-facing. This translated for many into a movefrom a functionally based organization towardsone that was process oriented. However, be-cause of the problems of their Legacy IS, peoplein organizations found it very difficult to gettheir software to support new strategies and forsome it was impossible. Consequently, the adop-tion of standard software, especially ERP soft-ware, was seen as the preferred remedialstrategy.

The ERP software response and itspotential implications

As ERP software is standard software, manyorganizational members saw this as an opportu-nity to implement a new IT (and sometimesorganizational) infrastructure that would wipeaway the existing problems. ERP software wasbought pre-coded (pre-programmed/pre-built)and like much standard software was fullydocumented. This translated into a decision tooutsource maintenance and development work toa third party with the idea that this would betaken care of by an ongoing service contract andfuture upgrades. ERP software was also Y2Kcompliant, had multilingual and multicurrencycapabilities, and supported a process-orientedorganization structure. The overwhelming viewwas that the software dealt with Legacy ISproblems and, consequently, the market grewtremendously throughout the 1990s.During the 1990s there was rhetoric about the

need for ERP software and it is only really sincethe late 1990s that a more realistic view of it hasemerged. ERP can be a very good solution fororganizations, yet many have found that they

182 ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING

cannot fully capitalize on its status as standardsoftware. This is because organizations can bevery different in terms of their functionalityrequirements (what they want a piece of softwareto do). Organizations will somewhat change theways that they work in line with the ERPsoftware in order to maximize the benefits of itsadoption. That is, they will not tailor the soft-ware, and thus can keep taking upgrades and donot have to undertake unnecessary maintenancethemselves. However, some organizations havefound it absolutely necessary to tailor the soft-ware as certain functionality, critical to theorganization, is missing from the standard soft-ware. This customization, or modification, variesin nature. Ultimately, however, it leads to in-creased maintenance activity that has the poten-tial to put organizations in the problematicposition they first chose to remedy by implement-ing ERP software.

Further reading

Holland, C.P. and Light, B. (1999) ‘A critical successfactors model for ERP implementation’, IEEE Soft-ware 16: 30–6.

Klaus, H., Rosemann, M. and Gable, G.G. (2000)‘What is ERP?’, Information Systems Frontiers 2:141–62.

Light, B. (2001) ‘The maintenance implications of thecustomisation of ERP software’, The Journal ofSoftware Maintenance: Research and Practice 13:415–30.

Markus, M.L. and Tanis, C. (2000) ‘The enterprisesystem experience – from adoption to success’, inR.W. Zmud (ed.) Framing the Domains of ITResearch: Glimpsing the Future through the Past,Pinnaflex Educational Resources, pp. 173–207.

SEE ALSO: information systems; organizationalinformation policies

BEN LIGHT

ENUMERATIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

A list of documents, ideally comprehensive,compiled on some predetermined basis, whichcan be geographical, chronological or topical. Itcan also be confined to the work of a singleauthor or works in a particular genre.


EPHEMERA

Ephemera has been described as the ‘minor

transient documents of everyday life’. The con-cept encompasses the poster or leaflet of politicalactivity or theatrical promotion; the packaging orcontainers of commercial products, such as theplastic bag or cigarette packet; personal memen-tos like the business or birthday card, or theprinted aspects of popular culture, such as theseaside postcard, record sleeve or comic. As wellas by private collectors, museums and recordoffices, ephemera is collected by all types oflibrary, both generally or in particular formats,or because of its place or subject associations.Major UK collections include the John JohnsonCollection in the Bodleian Library and theRobert Opie Collection at the Museum of Adver-tising and Packaging, Gloucester. Public librarylocal studies collections in particularusually contain much ephemera for their locality,such as election literature, posters, programmesand handbills.

Value of ephemera

Interest in ephemera, and in particular thatof the private collector, are met by the Ephe-mera Society, founded in 1975 by MauriceRickards, of which there are offshoot associa-tions in Austria, Canada, Australia and theUSA. It publishes a quarterly journal, TheEphemerist (1975–), and a Handbook andDealer Directory. In 1993 Rickards’s owncollection, housed in over one hundred custom-made boxes, was transferred to the Universityof Reading to form part of the newly createdCentre for Ephemera Studies in the Departmentof Typography and Graphic Communication(www.rdg.ac.uk/Acadepts/lt). Such a centre,with its symposia, workshops and publications,has helped to overcome the possible undervalu-ing of ephemera, for it is part of the documen-tary evidence for the study of society, bothpast and contemporary. Its particular valueis that it records the transactions and concernsof everyday life, grassroots opinions and aspectsof popular culture – information that may not befound elsewhere. It is also useful as a sourceof illustration, and for the contribution itcan make to the history of printing, graphicdesign and the use of language. In manylibraries, however, it may only be collected forits current information rather than its long-termvalue.

EPHEMERA 183

Problems of definition

While the definition offered at the beginning ofthis entry gets to the heart of the matter andhas the virtue of brevity, it does not whollyadequately define it. Indeed, given ephemera’smany forms, it is unlikely that any satisfactorydefinition could be agreed upon by all thoseinterested in its collection. Makepeace (1985)discusses the various definitions that have beenput forward and provides a checklist of itemsthat might be called ephemera. Collecting li-braries should, therefore, consider how it is tobe defined in their own context, bearing inmind its various types, the collecting activitiesof other institutions and the need to distinguishit from miscellaneous official publications,minor publications and grey literature (whichmay escape bibliographical listing), and frommaterial that can usually be seen as belonging todistinct categories, such as photographs, news-papers, periodicals and stamps. Where formerlylibraries may have been principally concernedwith the retrospective collection of survivingitems of ephemera, which were often treatedwith the bibliographical and conservation con-siderations given to rare books, such a definitionwas perhaps unnecessary. However, now thatthere is an increasing awareness of the need tocollect contemporary items in a proactive waybecause of their documentary value, potentiallylow survival rate and likely future high cost ascollectables, this becomes a more central con-cern.

The problems of ephemera

Even with a ‘definition’ of ephemera, the collec-tion, organization, storage and exploitation of acollection of contemporary printed ephemeraposes a number of difficulties for the librarianthat, unless taken into consideration, may limitthe impact of what is collected and curtail its useand usefulness. These have been summarized asproblems of excess and access (Clinton 1981):the large amount of contemporary material thatis available for collection; the need for better,particularly subject, access to individual collec-tions at the local level and awareness of collec-tions and their contents at the national level.Failure to consider these issues of ‘excess andaccess’ by individual libraries can result inunfocused, haphazard collections from a re-stricted range of acquisition sources, which are

given minimal processing for information re-trieval and may also be subject to inadequateconservation and unsuitable storage.

EXCESS

Because of the sheer quantity of printed ephe-mera it is unlikely (and probably unnecessary)that libraries will be able to collect comprehen-sively, except in some well-defined areas, andthere are dangers of both duplication and omis-sion by libraries and other institutions collectingwithin the same geographical area or subjectfield. Solutions to these problems demand anunderstanding of the present collecting positionin a given area, the existence of collectionpolicies for ephemera within its libraries andother institutions, and a framework for a co-operative scheme for its collection.A research project carried out in Wales (Dewe

and Drew 1994) found, however, that evenwhere libraries had collection policies and col-lected ephemera, it was not necessarily dealt within such documents or it was dealt with ininsufficient detail. At the national level, forexample, the National Library of Wales wasfound to have no formal policy or machinery forcollecting ephemera but did acquire it from avariety of sources. The outcome of the projectwas a set of guidelines (which could act as amodel for other regions) that made proposals forthe effective collection of ephemera at the na-tional and local levels in Wales, particularly bypublic library local studies libraries, and stressedthe leadership and collecting roles of the nationallibrary.

ACCESS

A somewhat different solution to the problem ofephemera was suggested earlier (Pemberton1971), through the creation of a National Docu-ments Library, at the then British Museum, andthe compilation of a National Register of Collec-tions by the proposed National Documents Li-brary. The first suggestion was not pursued bythe british library, although its role as acollector of ephemera has been the subject ofinternal discussion. However, the idea was takenup in a more modest way by the NationalLibrary of Scotland, which, although collectingephemera for some years, adopted a policy onthe collection and treatment of current Scottishephemera only in 1985, although this is not doneon a co-operative basis with other Scottish

184 EPHEMERA

libraries. The second suggestion was investigatedand something similar to the National Register ofArchives advocated (Clinton 1981), but this wasnot proceeded with either. In Australia, however,the State Library of New South Wales haspublished a Directory of Australian Ephemera(Robertson 1992), and one of the outcomes ofthe Welsh project was the proposal for thecompilation of a UK directory. While they donot meet the suggested detailed subject approachof a national register, in the absence of thisregister such directories help publicize the exis-tence, availability and broad scope of collections.Because of its slightness and varied size,

ephemera is usually housed separately from othermaterial and may be arranged by a mixture offormat and broad subject groupings; for exam-ple, posters are often kept together, and leaflets,programmes, small notices and similar items canbe filed together within appropriate subjectgroupings. Rarely do such arrangements caterfor detailed subject access to the material, andthe allocation of resources for fully documentingindividual items of ephemera, even though theyare to be retained permanently in many in-stances, does not appear a priority. Dependingupon the nature of the collection, better subjectaccess may be obtained by libraries classifyingmaterial according either to a scheme already inuse, e.g. dewey decimal classification, or toan in-house one. The National Library of Scot-land has devised such a scheme based on ninemajor subject categories plus three format cate-gories, all with appropriate subdivisions. Mate-rial is not catalogued, but classified by the natureof the organization producing the material,regardless of subject content, and the year ofaccession is added to the class mark so thatmaterial is stored chronologically in its boxes.Thus, without the index that had been proposed,broad subject access is provided to potentiallyuseful material.

Removing barriers

Since the early 1960s, the importance of ephe-mera as part of a nation’s documentary heritagehas gradually been recognized in the UK andconditions are being created (through collectionpolicy formulation and local information plans,for example) to assist its wider and improvedcollection. This needs to be followed by bettermanagement in terms of its organization and

access and preservation. In Australia, the issueof collecting responsibilities within its three-tierlibrary structure – national library, state andpublic libraries – is one of current professionaldebate (Dewe and Drew 1993). The way forwardfor the documentary heritage of Australia, in-cluding ephemera, emphasizes distributed respon-sibility for its collection and nationalbibliographical accessibility through the Austra-lian Bibliographic Network.

References

Clinton, A. (1981) Printed Ephemera: Its Collection,Organisation and Access, Bingley.

Dewe, M. and Drew, P.R. (1994) A Collection Policyfor Printed Welsh Ephemera: A Report and Guide-lines, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Departmentof Information and Library Studies.

—— (1993) ‘The collection of printed ephemera inAustralia at national, state and local levels’, Interna-tional Information and Library Review 25: 123–40.

Makepeace, C.E. (1985) Ephemera: A Book on itsCollection, Conservation and Use, Gower.

Pemberton, J. (1971) The National Provision of PrintedEphemera in the Social Sciences, University of War-wick.

Robertson, A. (comp.) (1992) Directory of AustralianEphemera Collections: A Listing of Institutions andIndividuals in Australia Collecting Ephemera, StateLibrary of New South Wales.

Further reading

Collection Management, (2001) 25: 37–80 [three pa-pers from a conference on ephemera in archives].

Price, L.O. (1997) ‘The preservation of ephemera’,Popular Culture in Libraries 4: 35–46.

Rickards, M. (2000) Encyclopedia of Ephemera, BritishLibrary/Routledge.

—— (1978) This Is Ephemera: Collecting PrintedThrowaways, David & Charles.

SEE ALSO: collection management

MICHAEL DEWE

EPISTEMOLOGY

The science of organizing ideas in their exactcorrespondence with outward things or knowl-edge; the study of the nature and vitality ofknowledge. Epistemology underlies the theory ofknowledge and is thus the philosophical founda-tion of information theory.

SEE ALSO: sociology of knowledge

EPISTEMOLOGY 185

ESPIONAGE

In general terms, the illegal gathering of secretinformation of any kind, often by means ofagents or monitoring devices.Rival powers have been seeking strategically

important information about one another sincethe beginning of recorded history. This informa-tion, when used for decision-making, is called‘intelligence’. The connection between intelli-gence-gathering and libraries is fairly new, havingseveral preconditions: first, the realization by thepolitical and military sectors that knowledge,specifically scientific and technical knowledge,can win wars and economic dominion; second,the existence of a well-established network ofpublications serving as international vehicles ofthis knowledge; and, third, the development oflibraries from storehouses into points of accessand delivery of published information. All ofthese conditions existed by the third decade ofthe twentieth century.The First World War, with its mustard gas and

Zeppelin air raids, demonstrated the importanceof applied science to the military, and for the firsttime attention was focused on library collectionsas a means of monitoring strategic enemy activ-ity. Great Britain, until 1914 dependent onGermany for strategically important optical andchemical imports, established in 1916 a govern-ment Department of Scientific and IndustrialResearch, with libraries and documentation cen-tres for each branch of industry to monitorpublications – German publications included –in these fields.In the battle for economic survival during the

interwar years, Germany’s Weimar governmentsubsidized two new institutions to bolster Ger-man scientific intelligence-gathering: the Notge-meinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft(predecessor of today’s Deutscher Forschungs-gemeinschaft), which financed an acquisitionscentre at the Prussian State Library to co-ordi-nate and subsidize the collection of specializedforeign literature for Germany’s libraries; and theGerman government-founded Reichszentrale fürwissenschaftliche Berichterstattung, a centre forthe photo-reproduction of foreign journals thatin the 1930s and early 1940s was located in thelibrary of the Technische Hochschule in Berlin.But the most ambitious scientific and technicalintelligence-gathering programme of the interwaryears was that of the Soviet Union, whose Bureau

for Foreign Science and Technology (BINT)maintained an outpost in Berlin from 1920 to1928 to publish Russian translations of the new-est Western science and disseminate them toSoviet libraries.By 1939 a new information technology, micro-

film, was in use in European and US researchlibraries and it would play an important role inscientific intelligence-gathering in the comingwar. The Germans used it in supplying theirscientists with copies of US and British journalsthrough the Reichszentrale; after 1942 Germansubscribers to the Referatenblatt, a periodicalindex of enemy journal articles, could receivemicrofilms of the originals from Berlin. Many ofthe Allied journals were supplied to the Refer-atenblatt by German agents in Lisbon. After theland route to Portugal was cut off by theinvasion of Normandy in June 1944, the Ger-mans tried novel means to ensure the supply. InNovember 1944 two German agents were landedby submarine on the coast of Maine in anunsuccessful mission to proceed with their micro-film camera to New York Public Library andphotograph technical journals for dispatch toGermany. The Germans also developed the ‘mi-crodot’, a much-reduced microfilm that couldcontain an entire issue of a technical journal andbe secreted in the ‘period’ hole punctured inpaper by a manual typewriter. Microdots wereused by the Germans to send copies of Alliedpublications from Mexico to Berlin.On the Allied side, the British were the

pioneers in the use of microfilm for scientificespionage. In 1941 the Association of SpecialLibraries (ASLIB) established a service to deliverto British libraries microfilm copies of strategicGerman journals cut off by the British continen-tal embargo. In 1942 the US Office of StrategicServices (OSS) began to contribute to the ASLIBservice journals collected clandestinely by OSSagents operating on the periphery of the Reich.From 1943 on, these journals were reprinted byphoto-offset by Edwards Brothers of Ann Arbor,Michigan, under licence from the US Departmentof Justice, which had seized the journals’ copy-rights. By the end of the war, reprints of 116journals published within the Reich were avail-able to US and Commonwealth libraries bysubscription from Edwards Brothers.Some of the intelligence-gathering techniques

developed during the Second World War wereadapted for Cold War use. In 1946, for example,

186 ESPIONAGE

the acquisitions activities of the OSS were takenover by the Office of Technical Services, whicheventually evolved into today’s US NationalTechnical Information Service (NTIS).There were also many new initiatives taken in

both the Western and Soviet camps that affectedlibraries. In the USA in 1950 the NationalScience Foundation was established; it oversaw atranslation (see translations) programme ofSoviet scientific works. In England, one of thearguments used to rally support for the openingof the National Lending Library for Science andTechnology in 1962 was the undersupply ofSoviet journals in British libraries. The mostgrandiose system of all for gathering enemyscientific intelligence was the Soviets’ All-UnionInstitute for Scientific and Technical Information(VINITTI), founded at the Soviet Academy ofSciences in 1952. Not yet signatories of theinternational copyright convention, the Sovietsduring the 1960s were able to use new photo-duplication technologies to disseminate heavilycensored versions of Western scientific journalsto their libraries and laboratories.The logical outgrowth of the increased impor-

tance of libraries in intelligence-gathering wastheir emergence as targets for counter-intelligenceactivities (counter-intelligence being the protec-tion of strategically important information). Inthe Soviet Union this protective process beganeven before publication, with editorial censorshipand the alteration of maps and charts. In theWest, counter-intelligence focused on the point ofuse, namely the library. Thus in the 1980s the USFederal Bureau of Investigation launched its‘Library Awareness Program’, which sought (un-successfully) to recruit librarians’ help in identi-fying suspicious use of freely available librarymaterials.In recent decades large corporations have used

intelligence-gathering techniques to learn of com-petitors’ products and services. The fields of‘technology watching’ and ‘business intelligence’,of which industrial espionage is but one aspect,have become discrete disciplines, with their ownjournals and specialists. Like all forms of intelli-gence-gathering activities, those of the businessworld rely greatly on libraries.

Further reading

Richards, P.S. (1994) Scientific Information in Wartime:The Allied–German Rivalry 1939–1945, Stamford,CT: Greenwood.

SEE ALSO: military intelligence; Russia and theformer Soviet Union; scholarly communication

PAMELA S. RICHARDS

EUROPEAN UNION INFORMATIONPOLICIES

European Union (EU) information policies aremade throughout the EU institutions and theiradministrative units, and address a number ofareas. EU information policies include guidelinesand legislation concerned with economic andindustrial competitiveness, data protection,copyright, intellectual property, privacy,electronic public-information services, e-government, digitization, preservation, andeducation and lifelong learning. EU informationpolicy also covers issues relating to the transpar-ency of the EU’s own administration and decision-making processes, and the ease of access to EUinformation by Europe’s citizens. EU informationpolicy is not solely concerned with the EUmember states, but also with the candidatecountries for EU membership. Although EUinformation policy was previously made in afragmented fashion, there has been significantlygreater dialogue and cohesion since the reform ofthe European Commission in 2000. This is anarea that changes rapidly, with substantialamounts of information available only on theInternet.The EU is managed by five main institutions.

The European Commission (EC) is made up oftwenty Commissioners appointed by the na-tional governments of each member state. Itcarries out EU policies, implements the budget,verifies application of EU law by member statesand brings forward proposals for new legislationand activities. The Council of Ministers com-prises government ministers from each memberstate. It discusses proposals put forward by theEC, suggests amendments and ensures thatnational interests are represented. The EuropeanParliament (EP) consists of 626 members(MEPs) democratically elected from the memberstates. The EP adopts legislative proposals andthe budget, normally through the co-decisionprocess with the Council of Ministers. It alsoexercises democratic supervision over all EUexecutive activities, including the activities ofthe EC. The European Court of Justice has thetask of interpreting EU law, mainly through

EUROPEAN UNION INFORMATION POLICIES 187

cases brought by individuals and firms ormember states against the EU institutions,by one EU institution against another or by theEC against a member state. The Court ofAuditors monitors all financial transactions inthe EU.

What is the EU policy on information?

EU information policy is complex, but can beseen to have two basic themes. These are theimportance of information services to the Eur-opean economy, and the importance of informa-tion services to the citizens of Europe’s civilsociety.The EU aims to implement its information

policies in several ways. It aims to encourageresearch, to establish a framework of regulationsand standards designed to generate competitive-ness and encourage economic growth, and tosupport the development of applications andcontent that will enable all European citizens tobecome stakeholders in the information so-ciety. It looks at issues of closer co-operationbetween EU institutions in all information andcommunication matters, and examines ways ofbringing EU information to citizens.The EU aims to make Europe the most

competitive and dynamic knowledge-based econ-omy in the world, capable of sustaining eco-nomic growth with more and better jobs, andwith greater social cohesion. A major buildingblock in achieving EU information policy goals isthe eEurope initiative. Launched in December1999, the subsequent eEurope 2002 Action Planof June 2000 set out a roadmap to achieveeEurope’s targets. The Action Plan identifiedthree main objectives: a cheaper, faster secureInternet; investing in people and skills; andstimulating the use of the Internet.In seeking to establish a cheap, fast and secure

Internet, the EU identifies the need to providecheaper and faster Internet access for all citizensby means of the liberalization of telecommunica-tions regulations, and the availability of low-cost,high-speed networks. Faster Internet access forstudents and researchers will ideally be madeavailable, and secure networks and smart cardsdeveloped. In the interests of social inclusion, theEU sees these developments as being madeavailable to all citizens, including those in remoteand less developed areas.Investing in people and skills is crucial to

getting people into jobs and encouraging eco-nomic competitiveness. The EU actively en-courages the deployment of the Internet inschools to prepare students for working in theinformation economy. It encourages memberstates to invest in education and training, includ-ing lifelong learning, in order to stimulate digitalliteracy among employees and to create employ-ment opportunities. Participation for all citizensin the knowledge-based economy is crucial to fullsocial inclusion. The EU recognizes the impor-tance of educating people in making use ofelectronic access to public information, and theopportunities offered by electronic participationin decision-making processes.Stimulating the use of the Internet is vital to

EU information policy, both for the economy andfor the information needs of the citizen. The EUaims to promote measures to accelerate electro-nic commerce, provide electronic access to publicservices, address the issues of healthcare online,provide European digital content for global-widenetworks and develop intelligent transport sys-tems. Consumer confidence and issues of copy-right and data protection need to be addressed inorder to fully achieve the objective of encoura-ging Internet use in all areas of public and privatelife.eEurope is not the only EU information policy

initiative. The linked eLearning initiative seeks tomobilize the educational and cultural commu-nities, as well as the economic and social playersin Europe, in order to speed up changes in theeducation and training systems for Europe’smove to a knowledge-based society. Additionally,the EU also funds programmes researching in-formation issues. These include the eContentprogramme and the Information Society Technol-ogies (IST) Programme.

Further reading

eEurope (http://www.europa.eu.int/information_society/eeurope/index_en.htm).

eEurope 2002: Creating a EU Framework for theExploitation of Public Sector Information (2001)(http://www.cordis.lu/econtent/psi/home.html).

eContent programme (http://www.cordis.lu/econtent/).eLearning (http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/elearning/index.html).

EU Information Society policies (http://www.europa.eu.int/pol/infso/index_en.htm).

Information Society (2001) (http://www.europa.eu.int/scadplus/leg/en/lvb/l24100.htm).

Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme(http://www.cordis.lu/ist/).

188 EUROPEAN UNION INFORMATION POLICIES

SEE ALSO: business information service;economics of information; research in library andinformation science; telecommunications

ROSALIND JOHNSON

EVIDENCE-BASED HEALTHCARE

Evidence-based healthcare advocates the collec-tion, interpretation and integration of valid,important and applicable evidence. Such evi-dence may include symptoms or perceptionsreported by the patient, physical signs observedby the clinician and findings derived fromrigorously conducted research. Irrespective ofits origin, the best available evidence, moderatedby sensitivity to a patient’s circumstances andpreferences, is harnessed to improve clinicaldecision-making.This model of clinical knowledge manage-

ment therefore promotes research evidence inmaking decisions that affect the health ofindividual patients or whole populations. Indoing so, evidence-based healthcare seeks toaddress information overload (requiring clini-cians in internal medicine to read nineteenarticles per day every day of the year to keep-up-to-date) and information delay (a ten- tofifteen-year delay between publication of re-search findings and their promotion as routinepractice in textbooks). It also acknowledges theinevitability of information decay (deteriorationof a clinician’s knowledge from the time of theirqualification), unless practitioners develop life-long learning strategies for replenishing thatknowledge.

The rise of evidence-based healthcare

Evidence-based medicine first emerged fromMcMaster University, Canada, in the early1990s. Whereas the statistical focus of its pre-decessor, clinical epidemiology, seemed detachedfrom direct patient care, evidence-based medicinedemonstrated increasing sophistication in apply-ing research at the bedside. The paradigm soonencompassed specific branches of medicine suchas psychiatry and dentistry, and related domainssuch as nursing, pathology and pharmacotherapy.By the mid-1990s a broader term, evidence-basedhealthcare, was a portmanteau for wide-rangingactivities promoted within and outside medicine.The late 1990s saw evidence-based healthcare

spread to contiguous fields such as education,social services, human resource management andcriminology. This attests to the potential of themodel for any profession with a substantiveknowledge base and a requirement for informeddecision-making. An even broader term, evi-dence-based practice, captures the commonalityof approaches across a broad spectrum of profes-sional endeavour.

The process of evidence-basedhealthcare

Evidence-based healthcare emphasizes four requi-site information processes: problem specification(focusing the question), searching the literature,filtering search results and critical appraisal(assessing retrieved items for validity, reliabilityand applicability). These processes may be con-ducted by intermediaries, such as librarians orinformation officers, on behalf of busy cliniciansor, increasingly, by end-users themselves. Theyare followed by clinician-specific tasks such asapplying the results to individual patients andevaluating clinical and professional performance.

Impact on health informationmanagement

The impact of evidence-based healthcare on theinformation profession is threefold. First, librar-ians are involved in the production of evidence,searching across multiple databases to retrieverigorous studies for use in developing practiceguidelines or systematic reviews. Such reviewsefficiently summarize the literature addressing agiven question. They aim to be systematic,explicit and reproducible and thereby minimizebias. Review methods are quality assured byguidance produced either nationally, by the UKNHS Centre for Reviews and Dissemination atthe University of York, or internationally, by theCochrane Collaboration. The Cochrane Colla-boration is an international organization dedi-cated to the production, maintenance anddissemination of systematic reviews of health-care. The Campbell Collaboration, a recent sib-ling of its Cochrane namesake, has similarobjectives but is targeted at systematic reviewsof education, legislation and social care. Systema-tic reviews and guidelines are very resource-intensive and are typically supported by informa-tion workers associated with an academic re-search unit, a professional organization or a

EVIDENCE-BASED HEALTHCARE 189

regional or national health technology assessmentagency.Second, librarians working for local health

organizations provide services, training and re-sources to enable staff to address specific clinicalquestions. This clinical orientation has led to theresurgence of librarians attached to clinical teams(clinical librarians) and even to a new role – theinformationist. Librarians are learning how tobreak down a clinical question into its compo-nent parts, typically using a Patient InterventionComparison Outcome (PICO) anatomy. They arealso becoming familiar with methodological fil-ters – groups of search terms associated withrigorous research studies – as developed byMcMaster University. Many librarians partici-pate in critical appraisal skills programmes thatutilize specially developed checklists to ensurethat essential criteria are addressed when evalu-ating research. Specialist value-added evidencedatabases augment traditional bibliographic pro-ducts such as MEDLINE. These include theCochrane Library (for systematic reviews andrandomized controlled trials), the Database ofAbstracts of Reviews of Effectiveness, Best Evi-dence (a database of one-page critically appraisedsummaries) and the NHS Economic EvaluationDatabase (for cost-effectiveness studies). The riseof evidence-based healthcare has coincided withthe growth of the Internet with an increasingnumber of tools and resources bypassing tradi-tional publishing routes to become availabledirectly via the World Wide Web (see, forexample, Netting the Evidence at www.nettingtheevidence.org.uk).Finally, involvement by librarians in evidence-

based healthcare has led to interest in evidence-based librarianship. Such cross-fertilization of anovertly biomedical model to librarianship posesmany challenges. Librarianship requires a moreaccommodating definition of evidence and thedevelopment of new tools (such as checklists)and databases to accommodate different modelsof working. Rigorous research is less plentifulwhile established evidence-handling techniquesneed to be translated or adapted to apparentlyincompatible domains.

Wider impact of evidence-basedhealthcare

Evidence-based healthcare has had a pervasiveimpact on health information management. The

examples above are directly attributable to theparadigm but more tangential links lie in pro-ducts of an evidence-based era such as the UKNational Electronic Library for Health and theNational Health Service’s telephone (NHSDir-ect), and Web-based (NHSDirectOnline) enquiryservices. Given the progress of evidence-basedhealthcare over little more than a decade, itsinexorable rise seems destined to continue formany years to come.

Further reading

Eldredge, J.D. (2000) ‘Evidence-based librarianship: Anoverview’, Bulletin of the Medical Library Associa-tion 88: 289–302.

Gray, J.A.M. (2001) Evidence-Based Healthcare: Howto Make Health Policy and Management Decisions,2nd edn, Churchill-Livingstone.

Sackett, D.L., Richardson, W.S., Rosenberg, W.M.C.and Haynes, R.B. (2000) Evidence-Based Medicine:How to Practice and Teach EBM, 2nd edn, Church-ill-Livingstone.

Trinder, L. and Reynolds, S. (eds) (2000) Evidence-Based Practice: A Critical Appraisal, BlackwellScience.

ANDREW BOOTH

EXCHANGE PROGRAMMES

A means of acquiring printed materials thatwould otherwise be unattainable either becauseof financial restrictions or because they are notavailable through established trade channels. It isknown that, as long ago as the seventeenthcentury, exchange of publications was takingplace, as when the Royal Library of Francereceived English, German and Chinese publica-tions in exchange for duplicates. Formal ex-changes of sets of public documents betweengovernments are generally termed ‘official ex-changes’, while the informal arrangementsamong learned associations and institutions in-volving the interchange of all types of publica-tions are deemed to be unofficial (Einhorn 1972).Establishing an exchange programme is a

relatively time-consuming process. A suitablesupplier has first to be identified, then contacted,and if a successful agreement is negotiated supplyof publications can consequently be expected.The administrative process has been considerablyspeeded up with the development of electroniccommunications since the 1980s.Items that are used for exchange by either

party can be their own publications, duplicates

190 EXCHANGE PROGRAMMES

received from elsewhere or titles that have beenpurchased for the purpose of the exchange. Anexchange can be set up as:

. A one-for-one exchange, where similar mone-tary worth can be surmised.

. A block exchange, where several titles arethought to be of roughly equivalent value.

. Open exchange, where no definitive value canbe established and materials are supplied asand when they are published.

It may be said that exchange is a form ofbarter that is hard to quantify as usually no realvalues are available. In this case the worth of anexchange item can only be realized in the usemade of it.An important area of exchange has been

between the West and russia and the formersoviet union and the other former socialistcountries of central and eastern europe.Following the Second World War, informationfrom the Soviet Union was of great significanceand interest to the West, particularly that con-tained in scientific publications. This, with theaccompanying growth of Soviet Studies in uni-versities, led to extensive exchanges of publica-tions. The two basic elements that influenced theestablishment of strong exchange agreementswere (1) the unavailability of publications fromthe communist countries on the market, leavingexchange as the only way for Western libraries toobtain some publications, and (2) the weakcurrencies of the communist countries, whichencouraged a willingness among institutionsthere to develop reliable exchange programmesin exchange for Western publications. Since theearly 1990s, the market has become more open.This, however, is not a speedy process and it willbe several decades before the need for exchangeswith the region will vanish.Exchange programmes of materials in the

languages of east asia, particularly those fromChina and Japan, also play an important part inlibrary acquisitions. Again, this system is ne-cessary as many research publications are not forsale, due to government regulations.The basis for exchange programmes changes

with the economic and political climate at anytime. For example, during the communist periodmany libraries in the USSR and Eastern Europewere supplied with several copies of each pub-lication from the state publishing houses. These

were ideal for use in their exchange programmes.In most of these countries this supply of multiplecopies is no longer forthcoming. Since the 1990s,although large libraries with sufficient funds havebeen able to continue with exchange pro-grammes, many smaller libraries are finding itdifficult. In the West, exchange librarians arealways conscious of the need to monitor the cost-effectiveness of exchange programmes versuspurchasing. Electronic document delivery is alsobeginning to have an impact on exchange pro-grammes, which may now be seen as lessnecessary than was formerly the case.unesco has always promoted international

exchange of publications and the UNESCOHandbook on the International Exchange ofPublications, first compiled in the 1950s, was acomprehensive work on the subject published inone volume and in four languages. At a timewhen library exchanges were developing, thispublication explained the exchange process indetail and highlighted the value of such transac-tions between nations. For those wishing toinitiate exchange agreements, The World ofLearning, published annually, contains usefuladdresses, and a publication with proven contactaddresses is East–West Links. Directory of In-formation Providers in the Former Soviet Unionand Central-Eastern Europe (Hogg and Ladi-zesky 1996).

References

Einhorn, N.R. (1972) ‘Exchange of publications’, En-cyclopedia of Library and Information Science 8,New York: Dekker, p. 283.

Hogg, R. and Ladizesky, K. (1996) East–West Links.Directory of Information Providers in the FormerSoviet Union and Central-Eastern Europe, BritishLibrary Document Supply Centre.

The World of Learning (annual) Europa.United Nations Educational Scientific and CulturalOrganization (1964) Handbook on the InternationalExchange of Publications, 3rd edn, Paris: UNESCO.

Further reading

Deal, C. (1989) ‘The administration of internationalexchanges in academic libraries: A survey’, LibraryAcquisitions: Practice and Theory 13: 199–209 [auseful survey citing several valuable items for addi-tional reading].

Zilper, N. (1986) ‘Assessment of contemporary researchmaterials exchanges between American and SovietLibraries’, in M. Tax-Choldin (ed.) Libraries andInformation in Slavic and East European Studies:Proceedings of the Second National Conference of

EXCHANGE PROGRAMMES 191

Slavic Librarians and Information Specialists, NewYork: Russian Publishers, pp. 486–503.

SEE ALSO: collection development

KATHLEEN LADIZESKY

EXPERT SYSTEMS

Computer programs that solve problems or giveadvice, with explanations when appropriate, byemploying a reasoning mechanism using storedknowledge and data relating to a specific pro-blem situation.

General applications

As a practical implementation of research intoartificial intelligence, expert systems (ES),also described as knowledge-based systems, havebeen developed as an attempt to propagate, via acomputer program, the knowledge and skills ofexperts who are engaged in tasks such as diag-nosis, interpretation, prediction, instruction, de-sign and monitoring. Through the developmentof such systems, organizations seek improved andconsistent performance at places where relevantexpertise is not otherwise accessible. ES have

evolved from initial attempts to emulate intelli-gent behaviour on a computer (by capturing andrepresenting the knowledge of experts usingheuristics), to include relatively straightforwardapplications, which take advantage of easy-to-useexpert system development packages. As arte-facts embodying knowledge they can be regardedas potential sources of information and advicefor the library user, accessed over local andpublic networks.


EXTRANET

A private network using the Internet protocolto share a company’s information with suppliers,partners, customers or other businesses. Anextranet can be viewed as an intranet openedto a wider range of users so as to provide acompany with an effective forum for workon projects, obtaining bids, sharing of news,joint training programmes and ongoing commu-nication over co-operation. Security is crucialso that firewalls, encryption and other net-work and computer security features areessential.

192 EXPERT SYSTEMS

F

FACETED CLASSIFICATION

1 A scheme of bibliographic classificationbased on the analysis of subjects according toa set of fundamental concepts, usually person-ality, matter, energy, space, time. All modernschemes of classification are faceted to acertain degree, e.g. they provide tables ofconstant numbers for divisions relating to timeand space. A classification scheme that allowsthe classifier to build up a description of aparticular document from various unit sche-dules can be called ‘faceted’, ‘synthetic’ or‘analytic-synthetic’.

2 Classification schemes whose terms aregrouped by conceptual categories and orderedso as to display their generic relations. Thecategories or ‘facets’ are standard unit-sche-dules and the notation for the terms from thesevarious unit-schedules is combined as appro-priate, in accordance with a prescribed orderof permutation or combination.

SEE ALSO: organization of knowledge;Ranganathan, Shiyali Ramamrita

FARRADANE, JASON (1906–89)

British information scientist and founder memberof the institute of information scientists.His career was devoted to the scientific

approach to information handling, a theme hesketched out in his paper at the Royal SocietyScientific Information Conference in 1948. Edu-cation for information science was not avail-able in Britain until he established courses atNorthampton College of Advanced Technology

(now City University, London). He was the firsteditor of the Bulletin of the Institute of Informa-tion Scientists and editor in chief of InformationStorage and Retrieval.His chief theoretical contribution was to rela-

tional analysis, which he developed during the1960s as a counter to the artificiality of existingclassification and indexing systems. From hisstudy of the psychology of thinking he derivednine categories of relations to express the rela-tionships between concepts in documents. Due totheir complexity, however, relational indexingstructures did not lend themselves easily tocontemporary computer applications and havethus remained rather as a theoretical develop-ment.

Further reading

Yates-Mercer, P.A. (1989) ‘An appreciation of JasonFarradane’, Journal of Information Science 15: 305–6.

SEE ALSO: information science education

FEE-BASED SERVICES

Fee-based services are those that offer to provide arange of information on demand in return forpayment. They may be provided as one part ofa range of library and information services, otherparts of which may be offered without a directcharge, e.g. as within a public or academic librarysetting, or could be the sole activity, or part ofa range of commercial services, available fromcompanies operating in the private sector. Thesecould include a number of different typesof organization ranging from societies andassociations to independent information

brokers and large information publishing com-panies.

Why they exist

However large and comprehensive the collectionof information and related service provisionmaintained by an organization may be, it isunlikely to be self-sufficient in terms of its abilityto provide the total information requirement ofthat organization at all times, either in terms ofsubject coverage or format, or often in terms oftimeliness. Private individuals also have the needfrom time to time for specialist information, notnecessarily work-related and not always readilyavailable from local or free sources, includingthose available on the Internet. Both groups willtherefore want to be able to meet their specialistneeds as they arise and the only means could beby purchasing a tailor-made information productfrom a reliable information provider. Thereforethe first reason is likely to be market demand.A second reason for the initial existence, but

not always continuance, of fee-based services, ispressure from senior management, who in turnmay be responding to corporate, or local andcentral government, policies. Library and infor-mation services may be perceived as havingconsiderable commercial potential, either as aunique or specialist collection in a particularsubject area, or as serving a given geographicalregion. However, to develop a viable commercialservice requires thorough market research andresource planning by those who will be runningit, as well as long-term support and commitmentby the parent body.

The providers

These cover a range of organizations across thepublic and private sectors, including nationallibraries, public libraries, educational insti-tutions, membership associations, informationbrokers, specialist consultants, market re-search organizations, database producers andpublishers. Private companies may also maketheir own internal information service availableto external clients on a fee-paying basis. In publicand national libraries fee-based services are oftenset up as autonomous units with their ownseparate budgets, and run alongside the free coreservices. Staff may be employed specifically towork within the fee-based service, or may takeon duties elsewhere in the organization. Staff

expertise and knowledge will be a key element ofany fee-based service. One area in which aconsiderable number of fee-based services havebeen successfully set up is that of businessinformation (Where to Buy Business Information1999). Services may be listed on websites, inbrochures and sometimes, as in the case of localservices, via the local press.

How they operate

Having established that there is a market for afee-based service, those putting a fee-based ser-vice in place have to set out a policy andprocedures for its effective and efficient opera-tion (Webb and Winterton 2002). Considerationwill have to be given to appropriate deliverymethods, as well as to information sources, tomeet expressed user needs. The user should thenbe able to see a detailed statement of what isavailable, where and when, what it will cost andwhether the provider accepts liability for, orguarantees the accuracy of, the informationprovided. There may be a standard charge forcertain services, e.g. photocopying, online search-ing or an individual quotation given for each job.Charges will vary according to the amount oftime taken, the expertise and level of staffinvolved, the sources used and the overall pricingpolicy. Users, or clients, may have a choice ofpayment methods, e.g. payment in advance,subscription, payment on delivery, or in arrearsby invoice or credit card.

What is provided

As noted above, a large number of fee-basedservices provide business information of variouskinds, including company, financial and relatedlegal information, as well as carrying out marketresearch. Also on offer across a range of subjectareas are monitoring and alerting services, ab-stracting and indexing, mailing list maintenance,mail shots, translation services, fax and e-mailbureaux, arrangement of conferences, training,desktop publishing, economic and statisticalforecasting and commentary, report writing anda variety of research services. Information can beprovided at regular intervals, as with currentawareness services, or on a one-off basis, and invarious formats, e.g. as a printed document or inelectronic form. Delivery can be by post, courieror electronic means. Speed and confidentialityare likely to be key determinants in the choice of

194 FEE-BASED SERVICES

delivery method. Other fee-based services couldinvolve the buying-in of information expertise,rather than just information itself, as is indicatedby some of the services listed above.

The users

There are a number of organizations that do nothave their own internal library or informationresource. Although most will have access to theInternet they may not have the time or theexpertise to benefit fully from its use (Pedley2001). Nor will all the information requirednecessarily be available directly. Such organiza-tions could rely heavily on the use of a range ofexternal information providers for various pur-poses. Money saved through not supporting aninternal service becomes available for the pur-chase of information from an outside service.Other organizations, even those with an in-houseinformation service, choose to make occasionalor regular use of external services to complementtheir own resources. The third category wouldcover individuals who require information fortheir own private purposes. They may obtainsome information from a free source, whichmight then refer them on to a fee-based servicefor more detailed research. In order to be able totake advantage of such services, potential usersneed to be aware of their existence. Thereforedirectories, lists and reviews of services, as wellas providers’ own brochures, need to be widelyavailable. Professional groups, associations andpublishers could help identify specialist consul-tants.

References

Pedley, P. (2001) The Invisible Web, London: ASLIB.Webb, S.P. and Winterton, J. (2002) Fee-Based Servicesin Library and Information Centres, London: ASLIB.

Where to Buy Business Information (1999) East Grin-stead: Bowker-Saur

SEE ALSO: business information service;consultancy; information professions; liability forinformation provision

SYLVIA WEBB

FIBRE-OPTICS

Thin strands of highly transparent glass or plasticthat will carry data in the form of pulses of laserlight. They carry broadband signals that sup-

port a wide range of services to the home andworkplace.


FICTION

Imaginative writing that usually takes the formof novels and short stories.

The value of fiction

We may live in an information society but wealso need to satisfy people’s imaginative needs.Fiction is an art form that possesses a uniquepersonal quality not found in other media.Nothing can replace the one-to-one communica-tion between the author and the reader throughthe printed word, nothing can simulate thatinterweaving of text and imagination that is theexperience of reading: the British novelist Mar-garet Drabble denies that novels are a frivolity, aluxury or an indulgence, contending that they arein fact a means of comprehending and experien-cing and extending our world and our vision. Ata time of increasing concern about literacylevels, the potential for public libraries topromote imaginative reading is very great.

The fiction industry

In 1999 108,000 books were published in theUK. Fiction was by far the largest category,accounting for some 9,700 titles. That is equiva-lent to more than twenty new novels for everyday of the year. Sales of fiction account foralmost a quarter of the total estimated value ofthe book sector.The incredible array of choice means that it

can be difficult to keep up to date with or todiscover new novelists. Reviews of new titles arefeatured in many newspapers; however, manybooks are never reviewed at all. Most academictexts tend to concentrate on established writers;however, The Novel Today (Massie 1990) pro-vides a manageable introduction to contempor-ary British fiction. The Good Reading Guide(McLeish 1988) is also very accessible. It con-tains short features on some 300 authors, de-scribing the kinds of book they write andsuggesting books that might make interestingfollow-ups.

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What do people like to read?

Surveys by Euromonitor (Mann 1991) haveconsistently shown that fiction accounts for overtwo-thirds of the books being read at any onetime. The most popular categories of fiction areromance and crime/thrillers (each accounting forabout 15 per cent of all books being read),modern novels and historical novels (each ac-counting for about 9 per cent), and war/adven-ture books and classic titles (each accounting forabout 5 per cent). By contrast, the most popularnon-fiction subject is biography, accounting for 6per cent of all books being read. The Euromo-nitor surveys also consider how people obtain thebooks they read: over one-third of the bookscurrently being read had been bought (includingpurchases through book clubs), about one-thirdhad been borrowed from libraries and probablyless than one-fifth had been borrowed fromfriends or relatives. The rest were gifts or werealready in the home.

Fiction in public libraries

Fiction is very popular in public libraries, ac-counting for 326.2 million loans during 1990–1(Sumsion and Fossey 1992). The stock is heavilyused: adult fiction accounted for 38 per cent ofactive lending stock in 1991 but for 58 per centof book issues. The government-funded publiclending right (PLR) pays a royalty to authorsfor the loans of their books from public librariesand the PLR listings indicate the most popularauthors. In 1993 the leading five authors were allfiction authors: Catherine Cookson, AgathaChristie, Danielle Steel, Dick Francis and RuthRendell (PLR 1993). The PLR data also demon-strates the diversity of the public’s taste inliterature, showing, for example, that the classicsare still widely read. The PLR lists were used inthe compilation of Who Else Writes Like? (Huse1993). This is a readers’ guide to fiction authorsbased principally on a list of popular authors, towhich a number of librarians and fiction specia-lists have added other names and alternativeauthors whose genre and writing style are verysimilar.

Promoting fiction reading

There has been much debate about whetherlibraries exist to give people the books they wantor the books that those in authority believe the

people need. The best approaches to fictionpromotion should make no judgements aboutwhat is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ reading but encouragecreative reading and help readers decide forthemselves what they want to read next. Theyshould also take into account the findings ofreading research. Goodall (1991) describessuccessful fiction promotions carried out byseveral UK library authorities. Libraries can alsolearn from the book trade in promoting fiction;for example, the annual awarding of the BookerPrize has now become a major media event andwinning the Prize can increase sales of a bookdramatically. There are also benefits to be gainedby joint fiction promotion schemes, which caninvolve publishers, booksellers and book suppli-ers as well as library authorities. A strikinglysuccessful example of such co-operation in theUK is the ‘Well Worth Reading Scheme’(Kempthorne 1991).

References

Goodall, D. (1991) in M. Kinnell (ed.) ManagingFiction in Libraries, Library Association.

Huse, R. (ed.) (1993) Who Else Writes Like? A Read-ers’ Guide to Fiction Authors, Library and Informa-tion Statistics Unit, Loughborough University.

Kempthorne, B. (1991) ‘Still well worth reading about:Well Worth Reading – the third chapter’, PublicLibrary Journal 6(6): 157–61.

McLeish, K. (1988) Good Reading Guide, Bloomsbury.Mann, P.H. (1991) in M. Kinnell (ed.) ManagingFiction in Libraries, Library Association.

Massie, A. (1990) The Novel Today: A Critical Guideto the British Novel 1970–1989, Longman.

PLR (annual press release available in January fromPLR, Bayheath House, Prince Regent Street, Stock-ton-on-Tees, Cleveland TS18 1DF).

Sumsion, J. and Fossey, D.R. (1992) LISU AnnualLibrary Statistics 1992, Library and InformationStatistics Unit, Loughborough University.

Further reading

Kinnell, M. (ed.) (1991) Managing Fiction in Libraries,Library Association.


DEBORAH L. GOODALL

FID

The FID (International Federation for Informa-tion and Documentation), formed in 1895 andeffectively dissolved in 2002, was an interna-tional professional association of institutions and

196 FID

individuals involved in developing, producing,researching and using information products, in-formation systems and methods, and in themanagement of information.

Membership and structure

FID membership included National, Interna-tional, Institutional, Sponsoring, Corporate andPersonal Members from nearly 100 countries. Itwas governed by a General Assembly and Coun-cil, and there were strategic groups to advise theCouncil on membership, liaison and training.Operational advice groups worked with theSecretariat on conferences and congresses; mar-keting and public relations; projects; publica-tions; training issues; and product development.There were six regional commissions – for

Western, Eastern and Southern Africa (FID/CAF);Asia and Oceania (FID/CAO); Latin America(FID/CLA); the Caribbean and North America(FID/CNA); Northern Africa and the Near East(FID/NANE); and Europe (FID/ROE). Its rangeof professional concern could be seen through itscommittees, which covered classification; educa-tion and training; information for industry;information policies and programmes; intellec-tual property issues; social sciences documenta-tion and information; and the Universal DecimalClassification (UDC). Special interest groupsdealt with archives and records management;banking, finance and insurance information; en-vironmental information; executive informationsystems; information for public administration;roles, careers and development of the moderninformation professional; quality issues in theinformation sector; and safety control and riskmanagement. There was also a Corporate Mem-bers network and a task force on global informa-tion infrastructures and superhighways.

Professional programme, activities andpublications

FID had seven main programme areas, coveringprofessional development; business, finance andindustrial information; information policy; infor-mation science; information and communicationtechnology; information processing and products;and information management. FID’s functionsand activities focused on education and training;conferences and seminars; publications and pro-jects; personal networks; and consultancy ser-vices. It operated two international clearing

houses for education and training, and informa-tion policy issues. Publications included the FIDNews Bulletin, Education and Training News-letter, International Forum on Information andDocumentation and a series of Occasional Pa-pers.

Universal Decimal Classification

When FID was formed as the Institut Interna-tional de Bibliographie (IIB) in 1895 by Paulotlet and Henri La Fontaine, one of theobjectives was to create a Répertoire bibliogra-phique universel (RBU), which resulted in thedevelopment of the universal decimal classi-fication (UDC). UDC is a numerical system forthe classification and retrieval of information. Itis maintained by a not-for-profit Consortium ofPublishers of UDC together with the FID and iswidely used internationally for scientific andtechnical information as it is not dependent onany one alphabet or language. In March 1993the UDC Consortium completed the compilationof the first authorized machine-readable versionof the UDC schedules.

Tokyo Resolution

To mark its 100th anniversary, FID developedperhaps its last notable contribution, the TokyoResolution on a Strategic Alliance of Interna-tional Non-Governmental Organizations in In-formation. This resolution was intended to be amanifesto for future decades that wouldstrengthen the collaboration between informa-tion-oriented non-governmental organizations(NGOs) and associations in the information age.It expressed deep concern with global problems;open and unrestricted access to information;universal human rights; universal literacy, life-long learning, education and training; the impor-tance of change; the information gap betweenvarious countries and societies; and the need forNGO collaboration, consultation and strategicplanning. Its high ideals and sense of the realitiesof the information society are a fitting mem-orial to an organization that played an importantrole in the world of information work for over100 years.

The end of FID

A deepening financial crisis that resulted in fail-ure to pay debts, staff salaries and operating

FID 197

costs gradually brought FID to a point at whichthe Secretariat had to be closed down and itsoffice furniture auctioned off in 2002. Theexisting Council’s terms of office expired at theend of 2001 and no elections were held toreplace them. Although FID was not dissolvedas a legal entity at this time, it effectively ceasedto exist. Its archive continues to be held by theRoyal Library at the Hague, Netherlands, andwill be safeguarded by the UDC Consortium.

Further reading

Goedegebuure, B.G. (1994) ‘Celebrating FID’s centen-nial – the Tokyo Resolution’, FID News Bulletin 44:115–17.

SEE ALSO: information professions; libraryassociations

STELLA KEENAN, REVISED BY EDITORS

FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL

A file transfer protocol (FTP) provides facilitiesto transmit data and files between host-specificformats and networked standard form. Thispermits file transfer to take place between other-wise incompatible systems across a network.


FILM

Sequential still photographic images on celluloidthat give the illusion of movement when pro-jected. Also referred to as motion pictures andmovies.

History

Primitive moving pictures were available beforethe invention of photography, in the form of, forexample, optical toys based on the phenomenonof persistence of vision. The actual inventor offilm is uncertain. Thomas Edison invented thekinetoscope in 1890 but this was not strictlyspeaking a projected film system. There are manyother candidates, including the Lumière brothersin France (1895) and William Friese-Greene inEngland (1889). However, the problems with theprecise definition of what constitutes projectedfilm and complications such as the amount ofwork done for Edison by William Dickson make

a definitive date and inventor almost impossibleto ascertain (Happé 1971).The novelty of early film meant that initially

even the most basic short documentary topicwould be successful, but the new medium soondeveloped more complicated narrative systems.Black-and-white silent film established itself asthe major entertainment medium of the earlytwentieth century. At the same time it began toprovide a unique social and historical documen-tary record of the period.Although there had been many earlier experi-

ments with sound, a practical sound system wasnot actually introduced until 1927, and fromthat date silent film was made virtually redun-dant. Various forms of colour film were alsoavailable (including hand tinting) before theTechnicolor three-colour process was used in1935. Colour very gradually increased in popu-larity but did not dominate feature film produc-tion until the 1960s. Other developments haveranged from short-lived gimmicks (for example3D film) to more significant alterations such asthe introduction of Cinemascope in 1953, whichchanged the ratio of feature films from 1.33:1to 2.35:1.Increasing interest in films as an art form led

to greater interest in preservation and to thefounding of national bodies such as the BritishFilm Institute (founded 1933) and the AmericanFilm Centre (founded 1938), and co-operationthrough the Fédération Internationale des Ar-chives du Film (FIAF), founded in 1938.The study of film as a serious art form has also

led to the creation of a vast body of historicaland theoretical writing.

Formats

There have been various minor film formats butthe most commonly used have established them-selves as suitable for certain specific uses. Mostfeature films have been shot on either 35 mm or70 mm film. Because of the great cost of camerasand projectors for the larger formats, smaller 16mm film has been normally used for educationaland short films. A large 16 mm film hire systemwas established, which also made feature filmsavailable in this format for educational and non-professional bodies. Home use of film was nor-mally in 8 mm until 1964, when Super 8 mmbecame available.The latter use of film has virtually been super-

198 FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL

seded by videotape, which is also now the mostcommon method for the storage of non-archivalfilm collections. archives may also make videosavailable for viewing rather than expensive filmduplicates or rare originals. Although there arelarger tape formats available for professionalbroadcast quality, the most common videotapeformat for library or home use is the half-inchVHS videocassette. Although VHS became thepredominant format in the 1980s, there are stillproblems of incompatibility due to nationalvariations in broadcast standards. Equally it doesnot have a long enough life to make it suitablefor archival purposes.

However, the comparative robustness of video-cassettes, combined with their low cost and easyoperation, has meant that they have made filmsmore accessible to their audience than everbefore. It seems likely that video tapes will inturn be replaced by the optical disk formatknown as DVD, a high-quality multimedia digi-tal format increasingly used for the commercialdistribution of feature films for home use. In-deed, as digital cameras make inroads into thetraditional market for still photography, it ispossible that the whole medium of film willeventually disappear or least be superseded forall normal purposes.

Preservation and storage

Early film stock was nitrate-based, which meansthat it is unstable and subject to both naturaldeterioration and spontaneous combustion.Much early film has been lost in this way andmany archives have been engaged in a race toduplicate nitrate film on to safer acetate stockbefore it is destroyed. Nitrate and acetate filmhave to be stored separately and both arenormally held on circular cans, which can bebulky and difficult to store. Handling can easilydamage film and to minimize risk film alwaysneeds to be projected by someone who isprofessionally qualified.

The cost of film and the difficulties of storagehave made large collections impractical for allbut the most affluent of libraries or archives.Where rare or original films are held there is alsoa tension between the need for preservationand the provision of reasonable access for libraryusers. DVD shares both the qualities and thefaults of all digital objects in this respect.

Classification and cataloguing

There is no widely recognized ‘purpose-built’classification system for film. Existing systemssuch as Dewey or UDC are sometimes used inpreference to individually designed systems. Col-lections may be filed in an order that is deemedmore appropriate, for example alphabetically bytitle for feature films or in date order for newsfilm.The cataloguing of film has been described as

‘probably more expensive and demanding thanany other form of information source’ (Kent etal. 1971: 108).There are several codes available, including the

ASLIB Film Production Librarians’ Group FilmCataloguing Rules (1963) and the anglo-amer-ican cataloguing rules. Feature films in parti-cular cause problems in relation to authorship.As well as the director’s there may be importantcontributions from scriptwriters, producers, ac-tors, cinematographers, art directors and de-signers. Indexing all the relevant names orproviding one-word plot summaries or stockshots can obviously be very time-consuming,and can be particularly aided by computerizedsystems (Tucker 1988). Although documentaryfilm may normally involve fewer personnel itmay include many subjects worthy of indexentries. Film libraries that hold short stock shotsof numerous subjects require easy access throughindexing even though the extracts may have noobvious title or ‘author’. In all of these casesthere is a need for catalogues to be able to reviewfilms in some detail.

References

Happé, B.L. (1971) Basic Motion Picture Technology,Focal Press.

Kent, A., Lancour, H. and Daily, J.E. (eds) (1971) TheEncyclopedia of Library and Information Science,vol. 20, Marcel Dekker Inc., p. 108.

Tucker, G. (1988) ‘The STRIX system in HTV FilmLibrary’, Audio Visual Librarian 14: 82–3.

Further reading

Harrison, H.P. (1973) Film Library Techniques, FocalPress.

SEE ALSO: broadcasting; cultural industries;knowledge industries; multimedia librarianship;preservation

DAVID HUXLEY

FILM 199

FILTERING

Filtering is most commonly used to refer to theemployment of software packages designed toidentify and block access to internet content,although it also applies to the same process inany networked environment. This process isdependent upon the monitoring of usage,which raises privacy issues. Although the termfiltering is invariably used as if it meant filteringand blocking to exclude content, it is worthremembering that it can be applied with equalvalidity to filtering to select content throughrecommender systems.

Filtering software

Access to content can be filtered across a wholenetwork, within a specific organization, at thecomputer of a family or an individual or by aprovider of public access facilities. Softwareproducts that can achieve this are widely avail-able and are often referred to, by the name ofone of the early entrants into the market, as ‘NetNannies’. Other products that are, or have been,available are Cyber Patrol, Cyber Sitter, NetShepherd, Smart Filter, Surf Watch and Web-sense. In the first place, all of them depend onaccurate monitoring of usage. They will keeptrack of what happens on a network or anindividual computer, recording keystrokes, timeand date, name of program executed and thespecific workstation on which activities occur. Asan example, Surfcontrol publicizes its CyberPatrol software as a secure and customizablemeans to protect children from websites thatcontain pornography, incitement to hatred, de-pictions of violence and a range of other disturb-ing or unacceptable content. The company alsopoints out that it has integrated this into a rangeof systems and applications such as firewalls,proxy servers, search engines and ISP services, soas to offer systems protection against securitybreaches and inappropriate internal usage.Filtering software identifies and blocks content

on the basis of one or more criteria. It can blockon the basis of:

. A ‘stop list’ of named sites. Someone, usuallythe supplier, has to create and update the list,but users can generally customize the listthemselves. The software can also usually beset to exclude all sites except those specificallyallowed.

. Particular words, parts of words and particu-lar types of images (such as those with patchesof flesh-tone colour). This approach is alsodependent on the creation and management ofa list, in this case of unacceptable words.

. Ratings that have been applied to a site. Thiscan be done by the owners of the site, or bysome third-party agency, according to anagreed system. Metadata facilities for a ratingto be applied to a site exist, in the form of thePlatform for Internet Content Selection (PICS).PICS will support whatever ratings system ischosen, but the dominant system is that of theInternet Content Ratings Association (www.rsac.org).

The basic technical case and rationale for filter-ing was well put by Paul Resnick, then Chair ofthe working group that developed PICS (Resnickand Miller 1996). If a filtering product is to beapplied, making a good choice is vital. Apartfrom the publicity material put out by suppliersof filtering products, there are also good numbersof product reviews available. Schneider (1997) isthe most systematic, but Heins and Cho (2001)collate reports on nineteen different products,including all the best-known ones. Schneidersuggests a seven-stage process prior to operatingfiltering that includes an assessment of needs,testing products and adjusting the product that isactually purchased and installed.

Ethics of filtering

Whilst the individual’s choice to filter, or not, isentirely their own concern, the most common useof filtering is to circumscribe children’s access toInternet content. Many parents are not onlyafraid of bad effects on their children from certainkinds of WWW text, graphics and video, but alsoof the danger that they will exchange messageswith potential corrupters. It is for these reasonsthat filtering systems are frequently advertised aspermitting parents to control their children’sInternet use. When a child’s Internet access is viaschool facilities, parents generally expect theschool authorities to act in loco parentis, and thisgenerally means restricting access by somemethod, most usually filtering. Schools havewell-defined objectives concerned with studentlearning, and filtering can be seen as merelyensuring that access to resources is appropriatelyfocused on a set of learning objectives.

200 FILTERING

Some parents, however, are wary of imposingtheir own views on their children through filter-ing. There is a body of international law andstatements of principle on children’s rights, in-cluding the United Nations Convention on theRights of the Child. Its provisions apply to youngpeople up to the age of eighteen and set out indetail how the law should both protect andrespect their rights. In particular, Article 13affirms that the right to freedom of expression(including the rights to seek and receive informa-tion) applies to children as well as adults. Article17 then goes on to specify that states shouldensure that children have access to informationand material from a diverse range of sources andmedia, including books published for children.This Article then goes on to call for ‘appropriateguidelines for the protection of the child frominformation and material injurious to his or herwell-being’. Examples of guidelines and sets ofrules for safe Internet use that parents can teachto their children can be found in various placeson the Web, for example Guidelines for Parents(www.missingkids.com).The question of filtering generally arises where

there is any kind of public responsibility foraccess, for instance in the work or office context.Pornographic images and text from the Internetare sometimes blatantly displayed or circulated inoffice e-mail systems with a clear intention ofgiving offence to colleagues (particularly womencolleagues). Managers have an obvious responsi-bility to prevent this, so that employees can carryout their duties without gratuitous interference.Monitoring and filtering the company’s systemare obviously attractive forms of intervention.They seem capable of preventing the occurrenceof this kind of delicate managerial problem, andallow management to argue that reasonable carehas been taken. Disciplinary measures, includingdismissal in one or two high-profile cases, havetaken place. More difficult ethically are casesinvolving files of pornographic material left onthe hard disks of computers used by an employeethat might also be used by colleagues. Such caseshave also attracted disciplinary measures, on thegrounds that an unsuspecting discoverer has beenharassed. It could well be claimed that in suchcases the person responsible for the computerhad not harassed anyone, but had suffered aninvasion of privacy. Their real offence waspersonal use of company facilities.

Filtering in libraries

Many information professionals reject any filter-ing of public-access facilities, such as those foundin libraries and information centres, on principleas the introduction of a form of censorship.This is the argument adopted by the AmericanLibrary Association. There are also practicalobjections to the filtering of public-informationfacilities. Experience shows that systems makevirtually no distinction in blocking between whatis legal and what is not. This can often disadvan-tage those who need access to content that islegal, such as that on safe sex or sexual health,particularly if they are too diffident to insist ontheir entitlements. At the same time, there isstrong pressure for filtering in libraries particu-larly from pressure groups in the USA (FamilyFriendly Libraries, Library Watch, Enough isEnough, Coalition for the Protection of Childrenand Families, etc.) that exist almost entirely topromote filtering. Burt (1997) has put a cogentcase for filtering in libraries along similar lines.In the UK there is an industry body, the InternetWatch Foundation, which favours filtering andencourages the reporting of objectionable contentfor possible police action.Practice in libraries is similarly polarized.

Many libraries do filter, but others do not.Baseline data on the prevalence of either ap-proach is lacking (Willson and Oulton 2000).What is common in both cases is the existence ofan acceptable use policy (AUP). These docu-ments form a kind of contract between libraryand user, setting out, amongst other things, whatmay be accessed and what may not. Users areoften asked to sign as evidence of their assent tothe policy. A copy of the AUP may be handed toeach user, it may be displayed in the form of aposter or it may appear on screen at the begin-ning of each Internet session, sometimes requir-ing a reaffirmation of acceptance. Examples ofAUPs are widely available from library websites,and there are collections assembled for the use ofthose drafting or revising their own policies suchas Acceptable Use Policies: A Handbook(www.pen.k12va.us/go/VDOE/technology/AUP/home/). Filtering may have a role in the policy,but in other cases the assent of users to thepolicy, coupled with a certain amount of super-vision of the access points, may be consideredsufficient action on the part of library manage-ment.

FILTERING 201

References

Burt, D. (1997) ‘In defense of filtering’, AmericanLibraries 28: 46–8.

Heins, M. and Cho, C. (2001) Internet Filters: A PublicPolicy Report, National Coalition Against Censor-ship (www.ncac.org/issues/internetfilters.html).

Resnick, P. and Miller, J. (1996) ‘PICS: Internet accesscontrols without censorship’, Communications of theACM 39: 87–93.

Schneider, K. (1997) A Practical Guide to InternetFilters, Neal-Schuman.

Willson, J. and Oulton, T. (2000) ‘Controlling access tothe internet in UK public libraries’, OCLC Systemsand Services 16: 194–201.

Further reading

Sturges, P. (2002) Public Internet Access in Librariesand Information Services, Facet Publishing.

PAUL STURGES

FINDING AID

The term normally used by archivists as a generaldescription of the calendars, indexes, cataloguesand similar tools provided in record offices andarchives.

SEE ALSO: archival description; archives

FIXED LOCATION

A method of assigning a specific position to abook in a library, in relation to other books andperhaps to a specific shelf. A mark is assignedwhich identifies that position. Absolute and un-changing fixed locations are normally only foundin older libraries and collections that are kept intheir original rooms or buildings. This is knownas a shelf mark or class mark, the latter termreflecting the fact that classification numbers(sometimes abbreviated in the case of complexfaceted classifications) are often used toderive the location mark. Fixed location isnormally associated with closed-access li-braries. The mark is recorded in the catalogue,which must be consulted before the book can beretrieved. Subject retrieval of any book kept in alibrary organized on this system is achieved bythe existence of an index to the catalogue or withthe assistance of subject bibliographies.

FLOPPY DISK

The ubiquitous portable electromagnetic disk

storage medium independent of and external tothe computer in which it is used. Originally madein 8 1/4 in.- and 5 1/4 in.-diameter size andmounted in flexible plastic envelopes, floppiesare now 3 1/2 in. in diameter and maintained inrigid plastic, with a metal sliding cover to protectthe disk surface.

FONDS

A term used by archivists for a group ofdocuments emanating from a distinct and singlesource. It is similar to the use of the termcollection in the context of special collectionsin rare book libraries and manuscript li-braries. Although the word is most common inEuropean usage, it is also used by Anglophonearchivists to imply something that is a moresignificant unit than a mere collection of docu-ments. The principle of respect du fonds iscentral to all rules concerning the arrangementof the contents of archives, where it is consideredvital not to disturb the context that establishesand supports the provenance of documents.

SEE ALSO: archival description; archives

FORGERY

Fabrication or alteration of a document with theintent to injure the interests of another. Docu-ment forgery is exemplified by the production offake currency notes. Text forgeries include suchclassics as the Donations of Constantine (whichallegedly conferred secular authority on thePope), the ‘Shakespeare’ plays written by WilliamHenry Ireland and the epistles of ‘Phalaris’. Amore esoteric form of forgery, of interest tobibliographers, is the creation of fake firsteditions of real works, a practice probablyinvented and certainly perfected by Harry Bux-ton Forman and Thomas James Wise.

SEE ALSO: bibliography; book trade

FREE-TEXT SEARCHING

Searching in which all aspects of the records in adatabase may be searched for terms chosen bythe user, rather than terms occurring in apredetermined controlled vocabulary.

202 FINDING AID

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION

A statutory right of access by the public toofficial information, particularly in the form of aFreedom of Information (FOI) Act, has existed inthe USA since 1966 and in Australia, Canada andNew Zealand since 1982, but Britain has onlyhad an equivalent statute since 2000. OtherEuropean countries with FOI laws include Fin-land (enacted in 1951), Norway and Denmark(1970), Holland and France (1978). Sweden hashad such legislation for more than 200 years: itsFreedom of the Press Act of 1766 required thatofficial documents should ‘upon request immedi-ately be made available to anyone’.

FOI laws

Under FOI laws applicants specify the informa-tion to which they seek access, and must besupplied with copies of relevant documents orrecords within a fixed time. The right is notabsolute. FOI laws typically exempt informationwhose disclosure would be likely to harm de-fence, foreign relations, national security, lawenforcement, the commercial activities of thegovernment or third parties and personal privacy.Applicants who believe that information hasbeen improperly withheld may appeal either tothe courts or, in some countries, first to anOmbudsman, commissioner or tribunal. Thelegislation is seen as a means of improving theaccountability of government, preventing secrecybeing used to avoid embarrassment or legitimatecriticism. Because the legislation gives the citizena direct right of access to official information itempowers the individual, allowing people tomake more informed choices and to play agreater role in influencing decisions and exposingthe policy-making process to more effectivescrutiny.

UK experience

The UK experience has been revealing, because itsets proponents of open government against adeeply ingrained tradition of official conceal-ment. Slow and uneven progress towards greaterfreedom of information was made in the form ofa number of limited disclosure statutes, many ofwhich resulted from private member’s bills orEuropean legislation. The Consumer Credit Act1974 allows individuals to see credit referenceagency files on themselves. The data protec-

tion Act 1984 provides access to personalinformation held on computer. The Local Gov-ernment (Access to Information) Act 1985 pro-vides access to local authority meetings andconnected documents. The Access to PersonalFiles Act 1987 allows individuals to see manuallyheld social work and housing records on them-selves. The Access to Medical Reports Act 1988allows people to see a medical report written bytheir doctor for an insurance company or em-ployer. The Education (School Records) Regula-tions 1989 allow access to school records. TheAccess to Health Records Act 1990 providesaccess to manually held health records. TheEnvironmental Information Regulations 1992provide access to environmental information heldby public authorities.At the same time, there was repeated pressure

for comprehensive FOI legislation in the form ofprivate member’s and ten-minute rule bills in theHouse of Commons. Notably, Mark Fisher’sRight to Know Bill (1992) proposed not only ageneral right of access to information held bypublic authorities, but also a right to certainprivate sector information. It also sought toreform the 1989 Official Secrets Act, in particu-lar by providing that anyone charged with mak-ing an unauthorized disclosure of protectedinformation should be able to argue that thedisclosure was justified in the public interest. Thebill, which had all-party support, completed itscommittee stage in the House of Commonsbefore being talked out in July 1993.Instead of a statutory right, a Code of Practice

on Access to Government Information was intro-duced in April 1994. The code committed gov-ernment departments and certain other bodies toreleasing information on request, subject tofifteen broad categories of exemption. Exemptinformation may be released if the public interestin openness outweighs any harm that may result.Departments are also required to publish internalguidance affecting the public and to reveal thefacts and analysis that have led to major policydecisions. Complaints about non-compliancewith the code can be made, via an MP, to theParliamentary Ombudsman, who can investigateand recommend disclosure. Not surprisingly, thisfailed to satisfy the demand for FOI rightsequivalent to those in other democracies.The Labour government of 1997 was elected

with a manifesto pledge to enact a FOI law. Thispledge it redeemed, after considerable further

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION 203

debate, with the Freedom of Information Act2000. To a certain extent the Act merely drewtogether existing rights under the 1994 Code ofPractice and the other legislation mentionedabove. The Act obliges ‘public authorities’ bothto respond to requests for information, and toadopt and maintain a publication scheme. AnInformation Commissioner (formerly the DataProtection Commissioner, and now responsiblefor both measures) is responsible for approvingpublication schemes. There are exemptions to theAct, but few of these are absolute, most beingsubject to a ‘public interest test’ by which adecision must be made as to whether the publicinterest in withholding information is greaterthan in disclosing it. A major consequence of theAct is that each public authority will now havean enormous incentive to create an integratedrecords management system so as make itspublication scheme possible and to facilitateresponses to information requests. The scopeand complexity of this has been cited by thegovernment in delaying full implementation ofthe Act until 2005, the last permitted date.However, some will see this as yet anothermanifestation of official resistance to openness.

Further reading

Birkinshaw, P. (1988) Freedom of Information: TheLaw, the Practice and the Ideal, Weidenfeld &Nicolson.

Campaign for Freedom of Information (1994) OpenGovernment Briefing No. 1, Testing the OpenGovernment Code of Practice, CFI.

SEE ALSO: information policy

MAURICE FRANKEL, REVISED BY THE EDITORS

FREENET

A generic term that describes an organizationwhich makes Internet access available withoutcharge to all users. Freenet facilities are widelyused by individuals, but are also of importance inthe provision of unofficial community infor-mation.

FREEWARE

Copyright software that is offered as a contribu-tion to the common good for use by individualsand non-profit organizations at no charge. It isquite distinct from non-copyright software

programs that are in the public domain. Sincethe copyright is asserted, its programming cannotbe incorporated directly into new products thatmay be developed by a user of the freewareproduct. The software is not intended to be sold,issued under licence (see licences) or otherwisedistributed in a commercial enterprise, and suchbodies are expected to contact the creator tonegotiate costs and terms of use. Freeware is alsodistinct from shareware, though both share theethos of the open-source movement.

FRIENDS OF THE LIBRARY

Associations of persons, often informal but some-times constituted as separate legal bodies, de-voted to supporting individual libraries or groupsof libraries, by providing political, moral, volun-teer and financial assistance.The phrase is first recorded in the title of La

Société des Amis de la Bibliothèque Nationale etles Grandes Bibliothèques de la France, foundedin 1913, although there were numerous preced-ing informal associations organized to supportprivate and corporate libraries and book clubs,and individual friends of libraries have existedsince the formation of libraries themselves. (Themost famous in the United Kingdom is, perhaps,Sir Thomas bodley, who revived the library nownamed after him.) The Friends of the Bodleianwas founded in 1925, as was the Friends ofHarvard University Library, and David EugeneSmith formed the Friends of Columbia UniversityLibrary in 1928, while in the United Kingdomthis was followed by the Friends of the NationalLibraries in 1931. By this date similar bodiesexisted for the libraries of Yale, Princeton andJohns Hopkins universities, and in 1935 theamerican library association founded itsFriends of Libraries Group and issued its firstadvisory leaflet Remember the Library, a titlewith admonitory overtones. (The library asso-ciation, and its successor body cilip, have notso far followed suit by attempting to mobilizethese bodies.)By 1978 a directory of such organizations in

the USA listed more than 20,000 such groupsthroughout the country, while New York Statealone listed 238 similar bodies in 1982, theearliest dating from 1929. In 1979 they allbanded together to form ‘Friends of LibrariesUSA’, a co-operative lobbying organization that

204 FREENET

provides advice to member societies and seeks topromote concerted policies for the benefit oflibraries, particularly in relation to tax privi-leges.In the United Kingdom bodies of friends exist

for many major university and research libraries– including, for example, Cambridge, Edinburgh,London and Lambeth Palace – and they can befissiparous. For example, the Friends of theBodleian has spawned separately constituted‘American Friends’, ‘German Friends’, ‘JapaneseFriends’ and ‘South African Friends’. The brit-ish library belatedly formed its friends organi-zation in 1989, and public libraries in the UnitedKingdom are now following suit with bodiessuch as the ‘Friends of Lorn Libraries andMuseums’ (1991).Friends usually comprise devoted readers and

patrons with some assistance, outside normalworking hours, from professional librarians em-ployed in the library. They are often recognizedas charitable bodies with tax-exempt status, andmembership normally carries no special privi-leges, but requires payment of a membership feeand/or annual subscription, support for thelibrary and all its activities, a duty to influenceopinion and improve the public relations andpromotion of the library and its image, and,most frequently, the obligation to assist in raisingfunds on its behalf. Funds raised in this way arenot normally used to finance the basic activitiesof the library in the provision of buildings,payment of staff and the purchase of books, butto supplement income, to provide extra facilitiesand equipment for readers and staff, to assistwith pump-priming cash for innovations, to raisemoney for special purchases of expensive booksand other library materials, and to catalogue orpublish catalogues of special donations (seedonations to libraries), other acquisitions orexhibitions. These groups often organize lectures,tours of the library and meetings with theprofessional staff, visits to neighbouring libraries,the publication of a library newsletter and othersocial and community activities. It is increasinglyrecognized that groups of friends may providevolunteers to supplement professional staff in

giving informal guiding (see guiding and signs)and assistance for users of the library or occa-sional visiting groups of students. The organizingcommittee, or directing board, often embodies exofficio representatives of the library managementto help and advise it.

Further reading

Brewer, F.J. (1961) ‘Friends of the library and otherbenefactors and donors’, Library Trends 9: 453–65.

Day, A.E. (1976) ‘Friends of the National Libraries’,New Library World 77: 219–21.

Dolnick, S. (ed.) (1990) Friends of Libraries Source-book, 2nd edn, American Library Association.

Friends of the Bodleian (1925–) Annual Report.Friends of the National Libraries (1931/2–) AnnualReport.

Furber, K., Gwyn, A. and McArthur, A. (1975) ‘Friendsof the library’, College and Research Libraries 36:272–82.

Krummel, D.W. (ed.) (1980) Organizing the Library’sSupport: Donors, Volunteers, Friends, UrbanaChampaign, IL: Graduate School of Library Science.

Munch, J.B. (1988) ‘College library friends groups inNew York, New Jersey and Connecticut’, Collegeand Research Libraries 49: 442–7.

Wallace, S.L. (ed.) (1962) Friends of the Library:Organization and Methods, American Library Asso-ciation [see also her summary article in the Encyclo-pedia of Library and Information Science (1973),vol. 9, pp. 111–31].

BARRY BLOOMFIELD

FUZZY LOGIC

A method of representing smoothly variable(analogue) functions on digital computers. It is amultivalued logic that deals with uncertainty andimprecision in knowledge representation by usingsofter boundaries between the logic values. Fuzzypredicates would include ‘small’ and ‘large’;fuzzy quantifiers would include ‘most’ and‘some’; fuzzy truth values would include ‘verytrue’ and ‘mostly true’. Rules can be written forthe execution of statements such as ‘if thepatient’s temperature is high and there are othersymptoms of fever, then treat with aspirin’. Thusfuzzy logic has applications in text retrievaland expert systems.

FUZZY LOGIC 205

G

GADAMER, HANS-GEORG (1900–2002)

German philosopher whose system of philosophi-cal hermeneutics, derived in part from theconcepts of Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserland Martin Heidegger, was widely influential,not least upon information science.

Educated in the humanities at the universitiesof Breslau, Marburg, Freiburg and Munich, heearned his first doctorate at Freiburg in 1922. Hetook a second doctorate under Heidegger atMarburg in 1929, and lectured there in aestheticsand ethics, being named Extraordinary Professorin 1937. Two years later he was appointedProfessor at the University of Leipzig. He subse-quently taught at the universities of Frankfurt amMain (1947–9) and Heidelberg (from 1949). Heremained there until his death, becoming Profes-sor Emeritus in 1968.

Gadamer’s most important work, Wahrheitund Methode (1960; translated as Truth andMethod, 1975), is considered by some to be themajor twentieth-century philosophical statementon hermeneutical theory (the nature of under-standing and interpretation). His influence spreadthrough his many pupils, prominent amongwhom was Jürgen habermas.

Further reading

Warnke, G. (1987) Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Traditionand Reason, Cambridge: Polity Press.

GARFIELD, EUGENE (1925–)

Information scientist and originator of publishedcitation indexes.

Born in New York City and educated at Colum-bia University in Chemistry and Library Science,he very quickly went on to found a tiny company,producing the predecessor to Current Contents ina converted chicken coop. Whilst running thecompany, which took the name institute forscientific information (ISI), he studied for aPhD in Structural Linguistics from the Universityof Pennsylvania. In this he applied modern linguis-tics to the indexing of chemical information. In thesame year, 1961, he published the first citationindex that covered a broad spectrum of scienceliterature, in this case in genetics.ISI became a major information company,

based on the success of Current Contents andScience Citation Index. However, citation index-ing is not merely a means of providing research-ers with bibliographical information but alsoa ‘tool for quantitative investigation of thesociology of scientific disciplines. Citation beha-viour as a means of acknowledging intellectualdebt reveals the intellectual influence of ideasand the structure of communication within andacross disciplines. If information about citationsis cumulated in a convenient and searchableway, such as that provided by the ISI’s citationindex databases, then empirical study becomespossible in ways not possible before. Citationstudies in information science research owealmost everything to the ideas and work ofGarfield.

Further reading

Cronin, B. and Atkins, H.B. (2000) The Web ofKnowledge: A Festschrift in Honor of Eugene Gar-field, Medford, NJ: Information Today.

SEE ALSO: citation analysis; current contents lists

GATEKEEPER

Someone, not necessarily an information profes-sional, who facilitates the transfer of informationby informal methods, such as sending notes ormentioning publications, or recommending peo-ple with special knowledge to colleagues. Agatekeeper is the type of person to whom othersgravitate to discuss ideas or look for help infinding material from the literature. Librariansuse professional knowledge, skills and competen-cies to the same ends and can thus work highlyeffectively by identifying gatekeepers and work-ing through them.

Further reading

Sturges, P. (2001) ‘Gatekeepers and other intermedi-aries’, ASLIB Proceedings 53: 62–7.

SEE ALSO: communication; informationprofessions; sociology of knowledge

GATEWAY

A term used, primarily in the academic commu-nity, for a browser giving access to Web-basedinformation resources. The more common termfor this tool is portal (see portals and gate-ways).


GATEWAY LIBRARY

A term sometimes used in the USA for hybrid

libraries in which both physical documents anddigital objects are provided for users.

GAZETTEER

Geographical dictionary listing and locating,usually by means of grid references, the names ofplaces or features, and frequently also providinga varying amount of descriptive, geographical,historical or statistical information.

GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATIONSYSTEMS

Definition

Everyone has their own favourite definition of aGeographic Information System (GIS: oftentermed Geographical Information Systems out-side the USA), and there are very many tochoose from. According to Longley et al.(1999), GIS is:

. A software product, acquired to perform well-defined functions (GIS software).

. Digital representations of aspects of the world(GIS data).

. A community of people who use these toolsfor various purposes (the GIS community).

. The activity of using GIS to solve problems oradvance science (doing GIS).

Table 14 describes some different definitions ofGIS, along with the types of users who mightfind them useful.

Table 14 Different definitions of GIS and types of users

A container of maps in digital form The general public

A computerized tool for solving geographicproblems

Decision-makers, community groups, planners

A spatial decision support system Management scientists, operations researchers

A mechanized inventory of geographicallydistributed features and facilities

Utility managers, transportation officials, resourcemanagers

A tool for revealing what is otherwise invisible ingeographic information

Scientists, investigators

A tool for performing operations on geographicdata that are too tedious or expensive orinaccurate if performed by hand

Resource managers, planners

Source: Taken from Longley et al. (2001: 10)

GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS 207

History and development

The first GIS was the Canada Geographic In-formation System, which was designed in themid-1960s as a computerized map measuringsystem. In a separate development in the late1960s, the US Bureau of the Census developedthe DIME (Dual Independent Map Encoding)system, which provided digital records of all USstreets and supported automatic referencing andaggregation of census records. Critically, earlyGIS developers recognized that the same basicneeds were present in many different applicationareas, from resource management to the census.

GIS did not develop as an entirely new area,however, and it is helpful to think of GIS as arapidly developing interdisciplinary meetingplace. Amongst the contributors to the field,the separate needs of cartographers and map-ping agencies led to the use of computers tosupport map editing in the late 1960s, followedby the widespread computerization of mappingfunctions by the late 1970s. Military needs havealso been of sustained importance throughoutthe development of GIS – initially arising out ofthe development of military satellites in the1950s, right through to the later developmentof Global Positioning System (GPS). Most

military applications have subsequently founduse in the civilian sector. The modern history ofGIS dates from the early 1980s, when the priceof sufficiently powerful computers fell below$250,000 and typical software costs fell below$100,000. In this sense, much of the history ofGIS has been technology-led.

GIS architecture

Today’s GIS is a complex of software, hardware,databases, people, procedures and networks,all set in an institutional context (Figure 11).

An effective network, such as the Internet orthe intranets of large organizations, is essentialfor rapid communication or information sharing.The Internet has emerged as society’s mechanismof information exchange, and in a typical GISapplication will be used to connect archives,clearing houses, digital libraries (see digitallibrary) and data warehouses. Recent yearshave seen the development of methods forsearching this storehouse, and the developmentof software that allows the user to work withdata in remote Internet locations. GIS hardwarefosters user interaction using the WIMP (Win-dows, Icons, Mouse, Pull-down menus) interface,and takes the form of laptops, personal data

Figure 11 Six parts of a GISSource: ESRI

208 GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS

assistants (PDAs), in-vehicle devices and cellulartelephones, as well as conventional desktopcomputers. In many applications, the user’sdevice is the client, connected through the net-work to a server. GIS software is created by anumber of vendors, and is frequently packaged tosuit a diverse range of needs – ranging fromsimple viewing and mapping applications,through software for supporting GIS-orientedwebsites, to fully-fledged systems capable ofadvanced analysis functions. Some software isspecifically designed for particular classes ofapplications, such as utilities or defence applica-tions. Geographical databases frequently consti-tute an important tradable commodity andstrategic organizational resource, and come in arange of sizes. Suitably qualified people arefundamental to the design, programming andmaintenance of GIS: they also supply the GISwith appropriate data and are responsible forinterpreting outputs.

GIS and GIScience

Geographic information systems are useful tools,but Longley et al. (2001: Chapters 1 and 2)demonstrate that their usage raises frustratingand profound questions. How does a user knowthat the results obtained using GIS analysis areaccurate? What principles might help a GIS userto design better maps? How can user interfacesbe made readily understandable to novice users?These are all questions of design, data andmethods that are stimulated by our exposure toGIS or to its products, and GIS use can begalmost as many questions as it answers. Resolu-tion of these questions is central to the emergentfield of geographic information science (GISc)(Goodchild 1992), which studies the fundamentalissues arising from the creation, handling, storageand use of geographically referenced informa-tion.Today, GIS remains fundamentally a subject

concerned with creating workable real-worldapplications. But the advent of GISc has broughtheightened awareness that effective use of GISrequires sensitivity to, and depth of understand-ing of, all aspects of geographic information. Italso brings the recognition that the intellectualheart of this young but fast-developing disciplinelies in understanding core organizing principles,techniques and management practices, rather

than mastering much more transitory softwaresystems or following current academic fashions.Above all, GIS is a very exciting area of activity,which has very much to offer students interestedin tackling geographical problems in the realworld.

References

Goodchild M.F. (1992) ‘Geographical informationscience’, International Journal of Geographical In-formation Systems 6: 31–45.

Longley P.A., Goodchild M.F., Maguire D.J. and RhindD.W. (eds) (1999) Geographical Information Sys-tems: Principles, Techniques, Management and Ap-plications, New York: Wiley.

Further reading

CASA (1999) ‘The GIS timeline’ (www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/gistimeline/) [an excellent summary of the history ofGIS].

Longley P.A., Goodchild M.F., Maguire D.J. and RhindD.W. (2001) Geographic Information Systems andScience, Chichester: Wiley.

SEE ALSO: map

PAUL A. LONGLEY

GESNER, CONRAD (1516–65)

Humanist scholar and bibliographer. Althoughothers had done important work before him,Gesner’s project for the Bibliotheca Universalis,a bibliography of everything ever published inthe European languages of scholarship, was onsuch a monumental scale as to justify identifyinghim as the most significant early pioneer of thesubject.Born in Zurich, he was appointed as Professor

of Greek at the newly founded University ofLausanne in 1537. Four years later he left for achair in Physics and Natural History at theCollegium Carolinum in Zurich, where he re-mained for the rest of his life. He was the authorof seventy-two works published in his lifetimeand left eighteen more unfinished. They cover awide range of disciplines, including botany,zoology, philology, cookery, geology and miner-alogy.Although the Bibliotheca Universalis, which

was issued in four folio volumes, fell far short ofits hoped-for comprehensiveness, it was still amassive achievement. Two abridgements quicklyappeared (1551, 1555), supplements were issued

GESNER, CONRAD 209

as early as 1555 and expanded new editions wereassembled by his pupils Josias Simler (1574) andJohann Jacob Frisius (1583). Gesner’s entriesinclude not only author and title information,but also in many cases imprints, chapter andsection headings or other contents descriptions,and occasional critical annotations. In manyways the project for Universal BibliographicControl began with Gesner.

Further reading

Besterman, T. (1936) The Beginnings of SystematicBibliography, Oxford University Press.

GOPHER

A computer facility, or navigational aid, forsearching out specific content from the internet.The gopher allows the user to search the Internetusing free-text search terms. Although they wereof great importance in the 1980s and early1990s, gophers have been largely replaced incommon usage by web browsers.

GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING

The production of a form of official publica-tions by a government printer or publisher, orby government departments and agencies them-selves, for information, educational or historicalpurposes. Notoriously hard to trace and obtain,they are a classic form of grey literature. Inmany countries, government documents are nowmade available electronically, thus making amajor contribution to e-government.

GRAPHIC USER INTERFACE

Graphic User Interface (GUI) is the generic termfor a mechanism that enables people to commu-nicate with computers based on graphics ratherthan solely on text. It is also known by theacronym WIMPS (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pull-down menus), after the four key elements ofthese interfaces. Screen graphics are used todisplay windows, icons and menus, and a mouseor similar pointing device is used to select them.This type of interface was developed by Xeroxand first commercially exploited in the form ofthe Apple Macintosh personal computer in the1980s, followed by the development of the nowubiquitous Microsoft Windows software. GUI is

now the normal means of interface with compu-ters for all but the most technical of users.

SEE ALSO: Human–Computer Interaction;information and communication technology;Windows

GRAPHICS

Generically the term is used to describe diagrams,drawings, etc. that give a visual representation ofa person, place or phenomenon. In computingthe term has been adopted with the sole specificmeaning of information ‘drawn’ on screen, ratherthan displayed as lines of text. It may consist oflines, curves and shapes entered as freehanddrawings (with a mouse or graphic tablet),copied by means of a scanner or generated bysoftware (for example, bar charts). Graphics arenow a familiar feature to all computer users.

GREY LITERATURE

Publications that are not available through nor-mal book trade channels. Examples of greyliterature are reports, doctoral dissertations andconference proceedings. It is very difficult, how-ever, to give a conclusive definition of greyliterature. Organizations working with thesedocuments therefore prefer to give not a defini-tion but a general description. It will be clear thatsome dissertations and conference proceedingsare indeed available through normal booksellingchannels. Government reports are often availablethrough booksellers and subscription agents. Theabove definition is therefore clearly not water-tight, but it is in practice a useful one.

Who is publishing grey literature?

Among the authors of grey literature there aremany whose parent body or funding institutionfeels that there is no serious need to publish injournals. They do not seek a high citation rate;financing of their future projects does not dependon it. Their prime objective is to disseminate theinformation as quickly and inexpensively aspossible to a sometimes-restricted group of peo-ple or organizations that might be interested in it.They want to avoid the considerable delayinvolved in journal publication.The development of information and com-

munication technology, especially such pro-

210 GOPHER

ducts as desktop publishing, makes it easy tobring the publication process under one’s owncontrol. The main types of body that issue greyliterature are research institutes, universities,international, national and local authorities, andindustrial firms. There are, of course, otherreasons for publishing grey. Some reports arepublished grey because they have commercialvalue. Even if this commercial value is no longerpresent, industry tends to keep this materialconfidential. Other reasons for publishing greyare that the content is expected to be of interestto only a very limited group of people or that it istoo long or too short for normal commercialpublication. There may be other reasons. Thefact is, however, that most of the grey literaturethat is handled by libraries and database produ-cers is produced by established bodies andorganizations.

The quality of grey literature

Organizations that produce grey literature cannotafford to issue low-quality reports if they valuetheir reputations. One could consider internalquality control to have nearly the same selectiveeffect as a peer review in ‘white’ literature.Traditionally, quality research is supposed to bepublished ‘white’. Much of the grey literature,however, will never be published ‘white’ becauseof the reasons mentioned. Moreover, databaseproducers that enter grey documents in theirdatabases may have selection criteria, of whichquality is a principal one. Admission onto adatabase will be permitted only if it is acceptablein the view of subject specialists. So the quality ofgrey documents should not be considered to be aproblem for the user of grey literature databases.

Document delivery

Many grey documents are disseminated as amatter of routine to sister institutions and gov-erning bodies. Here we see the first real problemof grey literature, the dissemination pattern. Thesmall print runs are distributed very selectively,with poor publicity. Because of the interdisciplin-ary nature of research, grey literature will reachonly a proportion of interested researchers. Evenif a researcher hears that a report in the fieldexists, it is often very difficult to trace thepublishing organization; if it is located, it can bevery hard to obtain a copy. In many cases, thenumber of copies produced is so small that only

a few are available to meet requests. Moreover,most of these organizations have no staff experi-enced in, or concerned with, document delivery.A visit to the library will therefore often befruitless for a researcher. Since the acquisition ofgrey literature is difficult, many libraries prefer toacquire only ‘white’ literature.


Grey literature is not commonly entered intogeneral databases. The producers of databasessuch as Biosis and Medline can hardly cope withthe extensive output of journal literature, and,because of this, and the difficulties of collectinggrey literature, they have excluded it from cover-age. Special attention to grey literature has,however, been given by the producers of specia-lized international databases in the field oftechnology. Many users of these databases arethemselves producers of grey literature whorecognize its value. Because grey literature isdifficult to acquire, some of them have estab-lished national centres in countries that producegrey literature in their subject area. From theabove, one might imagine that the biblio-graphic control and availability are managedquite well. All researchers need to do is to searchthe specialized database relevant to their subjectfield and they will find all the grey literature theyneed. There are, however, two further problems:the interdisciplinary nature of research and thecosts involved in database publishing. To becomprehensive, a national centre needs to coverpublications of organizations other than those inits subject area. Furthermore, the costs of theacquisition and database publication of onerecord describing a grey document are so highthat limits have to be imposed on input. Forthese reasons the coverage of grey literature onrelated subject fields will be limited. In the end,the researcher will find only a selection of theexisting grey publications in the chosen database.

Grey literature databases

The most important grey literature databases areSIGLE and NTIS. SIGLE (System for Informationon Grey Literature in Europe) is produced byEAGLE (European Association for Grey Litera-ture Exploitation) (Wood and Smith 1993).EAGLE has members and national SIGLE centresin Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Ger-many, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, the Nether-

GREY LITERATURE 211

lands, Spain and the UK. Annually 41,000records are added to SIGLE from all fields ofscience and technology. NTIS, a service of the USDepartment of Commerce, is producing a data-base mainly in the field of technology and relatedsciences. Annually 75,000 records are added tothe database. It can be accessed at www.silver-platter.com/catalog/sigl.htm.

Electronic grey literature

Personal communication has always been anexcellent means of information exchange infrontier research. Next to contacts in meetingsand writing, the researchers quickly adapted tothe use of electronic networks. The number ofspecific discussion files is increasing tremen-dously. Users who do not belong to the in-crowdof a specific file will remain unaware of existinginformation. In view of the interdisciplinarynature of information this is most undesirable.In fact these networks confront the user and theinformation professional with a new type of‘grey’ document. As for the printed ‘grey’ docu-ments, bibliographic databases are needed tomake this electronic information available to abroader public. Measures should be taken forquality control and storage. The exponentialgrowth of informal communications using theInternet has both increased the quantity of greyliterature and diversified its formats. The use of asearch engine (see search engines) to search foralmost any term will reveal electronic greyliterature emanating from a multitude of sources.The more formal manifestations include e-prints,some in formal archives, various kinds of net-base directories and websites, often running intohundreds.

References

Wood, D.N. and Smith A.W. (1993) ‘SIGLE: A modelfor international co-operation’, Interlending andDocument Supply 21(1): 18–22.

Further reading

Alberani, V. and De Castro, P. (2001) ‘Grey literaturefrom the York Seminar (UK) of 1978 to the year2000’ Inspel 35: 236–47.

Farace, D. (1993) Proceedings of the First InternationalConference on Grey Literature, Amsterdam: Trans-Atlantic.

Wessels, R.H.A. (1994a) ‘The importance of interna-tional cooperation for grey literature availability’,Alexandria 5(3): 185–92.

—— (1994b) ‘Infrastructure of scientific and technicalinformation’, in World Infrastructure 1994, London:Sterling Publications Limited, pp. 93–4.

—— (1993) ‘Libraries and publishers; Competitors orcomplements’, NVB-WB Cahier 5: 50–5, Den Haag:NBLC (in Dutch).

SEE ALSO: bibliographic control; documentdelivery; government publishing; knowledgeindustries; official publications; publishing

R.H.A. WESSELS

GUIDING AND SIGNS

Guiding is the process of matching library/infor-mation service users with their information andother needs and requirements without the needfor staff assistance.Signs are the static, physical resources used to

communicate the required information to users inorder to achieve effective guiding.

Guiding

The fundamental aim of a good library guidingsystem is to answer the question: ‘Where do I goto find. . .?’ A library and information serviceguiding (or wayfinding) system enables users firstto orient themselves within the service quickly,efficiently and without stress. It then directsthem, following the rule of general to specific,to the correct destination for their informationrequirements, identifies that destination and ex-plains, to a greater or lesser extent, the nature,scope and content of the particular resource towhich the guiding system has conducted them. Ifthe system operates successfully, users’ informa-tion requirements are satisfied comprehensivelyand without the need to consult library/informa-tion service staff. Good guiding maximizes self-help, thus freeing staff resources for more cost-effective work. It also promotes positive userperceptions of efficient, confident and successfullibraries/information services.

Signs

Signs are the means by which successful guidingis achieved. They are a static, impersonal methodof communicating information and should meetthe following criteria for maximum effectiveness:clear, consistent and visually co-ordinated; ar-ranged logically and sited at appropriate loca-tions, following a sequence which leads from thegeneral to the specific; visible and easy to use;

212 GUIDING AND SIGNS

aesthetically pleasing and professional looking inorder to reinforce corporate image and an im-pression of an efficient service; flexible, adapta-ble and inexpensive to maintain.

TYPES OF SIGN

There are two basic categories of signs forlibraries and information services: signs thatdirect users to specific destinations and signs thatexplain the features of individual resources.Content and location of all categories of sign arefundamental considerations in implementing asuccessful scheme.

DIRECTIONAL SIGNS

Directional signs range from all-inclusive re-sources such as library directories to signs thatidentify individual destination points (e.g. ‘En-quiry Desk’). Floor plans and directional symbols(e.g. arrows) are included in this category.

EXPLANATORY SIGNS

Explanatory signs contain general information(e.g. opening hours), more precise informationon individual aspects of the library service(e.g. how to use a workstation) or instruct-ions on emergency procedures. Warning signs(e.g. ‘No Smoking’) are also included in thiscategory.

CONTENT OF SIGNS

The minimum amount of information consistentwith the successful transmission of the intendedmessage is required. Signs should be clear andsimple to use and aimed at communicating the fullmessage to the maximum number of potentialusers. Language and terminology should be clear,concise, unambiguous and jargon-free. Formalconsistent language should be used, but phrasedin a welcoming style. Cultural and ethnic issuesmust be taken into account and gender-specificlanguage avoided. Diagrams are useful devices touse when written language is inappropriate.

LOCATION OF SIGNS

Signs should be located at appropriate decisionpoints identified by a survey of traffic flowroutes.

DESIGN OF SIGNS

The production of library signs to professionalstandards is the norm. In-house production ofsigns should be limited to temporary notices

required to meet immediate or short-term needs(e.g. training courses, meetings, etc.). Advicefrom external design consultants should be pro-cured. Sign panels should be of standard sizesand formats, readily visible but not excessivelyobtrusive and fixed in a manner appropriate tothe location (i.e. flat wall-fixings, ceiling suspen-sions or wall projections). There are manymaterials and designs available for sign panelsand they should be selected on the basis of theirsuitability for individual circumstances in con-sultation with professional design consultants.Colour-coding should be used sparingly, standar-dized throughout and utilizing strong shades only– a sizeable proportion of the population iscolour-blind. Consistency is the principal consid-eration in sign design but, this notwithstanding,signs should be reasonably adaptable and flexiblein order to be able to absorb changes. Thelegibility of the typeface used for signs incorpo-rates the following considerations: style of letter-ing (e.g. seriffed or non-seriffed letter faces –Helvetica is a popular style); size and positioningof letters and words; use of upper- and lower-case letters; roman or italic typeface; and thick-ness, or weight, of the print. The complex natureof libraries/information services renders the useof symbol signs such as pictograms (e.g. lavatorysigns) generally inappropriate, although arrowsigns (preferably left and right directions only)are used. Symbols can be confusing and theprinciples of visibility and consistency are parti-cularly important if they are selected for use;standard symbols such as those produced by theISO are recommended.

Managing library guiding and signing

A systematic management approach to librarysigning and guiding is required, with a fullyformulated schedule of activities from initialconceptualization of a project to full implemen-tation and subsequent continuous review. Athorough study of the guiding requirements ofpotential users of the service should be con-ducted in order to establish a firm basis for theenterprise. The project should be accorded anappropriate degree of professional status by theappointment of a senior member of staff tomanage the scheme, and professional designconsultants should be engaged to advise on theproposed undertaking. A reputable firm shouldbe contracted to produce and install the signs.

GUIDING AND SIGNS 213

In-house production of signs should observe thesame principles of professional appearance, con-sistency and aesthetics as professionally pro-duced signs; the senior professional appointedto manage the guiding system for the organiza-tion should also co-ordinate the production ofthese signs. A sign manual for the organizationshould be drawn up for future reference pur-poses.

Further reading

Pope, L.G. (1982) ‘Library signs and guiding’, unpub-lished MLS thesis, Department of Library andInformation Studies, Loughborough University ofTechnology [an illustrated comparative study ofthree library guiding schemes; also considers theprinciples of library signing and guiding].

Reynolds, L. and Barrett, S. (1981) Signs and Guidingfor Libraries, Clive Bingley [the standard text onlibrary signs and guiding; comprehensive and wellillustrated].

SEE ALSO: user studies

MICHAEL CHANEY

GUTENBERG, JOHANN(1395–1468)

Regarded in the West as the inventor of printingwith movable type, but it must be noted that ineast asia, Korea in particular, printing had alonger heritage. Gutenberg’s invention does seemto have been an independent technical achieve-

ment. It took place between 1440 and 1450, insomewhat shadowy circumstances, but its signifi-cance in the history of world civilization is notseriously disputed.Evidence about his life is extremely fragmen-

tary and unfortunately there is no printed bookthat actually bears his name, despite the reliableattribution of several masterpieces of printing tohim. It is unlikely that Gutenberg had any directknowledge of the printing techniques that hadbeen developed in China and Korea. In any case,his invention was fundamentally different. Thekey to it was a method of casting metal types,each bearing one letter or other character, iden-tical to each other and reusable. He adopted theform of press used by bookbinders (and perhapsvintners) to make his impressions.Gutenberg himself produced few books and

soon lost his investment. His invention, however,was taken up by others, and knowledge of itspread (largely through Germans) to the LowCountries, Italy and France, and gradually to theoutlying parts of Europe. By the 1480s printingwas well established, and by 1500 the commer-cial production of manuscript books in the Westhad almost ceased.

Further reading

Scholderer, V. (1970) Johann Gutenberg, British Mu-seum.

SEE ALSO: book

214 GUTENBERG, JOHANN

H

HABERMAS, JÜRGEN (1929–)

German philosopher and sociologist whose criti-cal appraisal of Western institutions and ration-ality draws on influences from Kant, Marx andother key figures in the philosophical tradition aswell as the outstanding sociological theorists. Hiswork has proved applicable in a wide variety offields including epistemology and hermeneu-tics, and has influenced ideas not only ineconomics and public policy, but also on thetheory of information systems, informationtheory and on our understanding of the infor-mation society.

Born in Dusseldorf, he studied in Gottingen,Zurich and Bonn, obtaining his doctorate in1954. He was assistant to Theodor Adorno atFrankfurt (1956–9) and is often referred to as asecond-generation member of the FrankfurtSchool of philosophy. He has held posts at anumber of institutions in Germany and theUSA, notably with gadamer at Heidelberg andonce again at Frankfurt where he succeededAdorno.

His theory of communicative action (also thetitle of his most important work, The Theory ofCommunicative Action (2 vols, trans. ThomasMcCarthy, Boston, 1984 and 1987) is based ontruthfulness, critique and the development ofrational consensus. His approach has never beendetached from everyday reality and he has alwayspromoted discussion on matters of public concern.

Further reading

White, S.K. (ed.) (1995) The Cambridge Companion toHabermas, Cambridge University Press.

HARD COPY

Used in a cluster of closely related senses as arecord on card or paper, to distinguish it from arecord on microfilm or magnetic tape; a printedcopy of machine output in readable form; or,more generally, human-readable copy producedfrom information held in a form not easilyreadable.

HARD DISK

A disk storage medium on which the recordingsurfaces are rigid, in contrast to a floppy disk,where the recording surface is flexible. It may behoused within the case of the computer (internalhard disk) or within its own case (external harddisk). The storage capacity of hard disks isincreasing all the time; indeed they are oftenconfigured on a server in a way that makes twoor more disks appear to be a single object, thustheoretically providing unlimited space. Capacityup to 400 gigabytes is not unknown, although itis still uncommon.

HARDWARE

The physical components of a computer system,consisting of four elements: the processor thatexecutes the programs; the memory that storesprograms and data; the peripherals, used to storedata longer term and to exchange commands andinformation with users; and the input/outputdevices that interconnect the above. It is perhapseasier to think of it as those parts of a computerthat are not software.

HEALTH AND SAFETY

Information work generally involves the use of acomputer, which means that information workersshould be aware of the possible adverse healtheffects of using such technology and how riskscan be reduced, and be conversant with govern-ment legislation on the issue.

Possible adverse health effects

Numerous allegations have been made about thehealth implications of using visual display units(VDUs), arousing much media attention. Overthe last ten years an increasing number of VDUoperators have complained of muscular achesand pains, eye discomfort and visual fatigue,stress and, in a few cases, skin rashes. Concernshave also been raised about radiation emissionsand the possible adverse effects VDUs may haveon unborn foetuses and epilepsy sufferers.VDU operators report a high incidence of

muscular discomfort, particularly in shoulders,neck, hands and wrist. Pain may also occur in theback and legs. Most of the recent publicity hasbeen focused on repetitive strain injury (RSI),which is being increasingly referred to as work-related upper-limb disorders (WRULDs).WRULDs cover a variety of complaints but allresult in the operator experiencing pain in thejoints, usually in the fingers but possibly also inthe wrists, elbows or elsewhere, which may betemporary at first but, if unchecked, can result inpermanent damage. Generally, muscular discom-fort is influenced by three factors: the length oftime operators have to adopt a fixed position, theintensity of computer use and the design of theworkstation.Eye discomfort and visual fatigue can be

caused by a number of factors. These includeglare on the screen, a poorly contrasted andunstable screen display, too long being spentworking at a VDU and the user not having thecorrect eye appliances for computer work (Mor-ris and Dyer 1998).Occupational stress can occur in any type of

employment. In VDU work it can be linked topoor job design, particularly where jobs areeither too pressured or are monotonous; inflex-ible working procedures; inadequate supervision;poor training; and inappropriate managementstyle. Poor environmental conditions (such asdepressing décor, inadequate space, bad lighting,excessive noise and poor heating), unergonomic

workstation design and unfriendly software canalso contribute to stress.Skin rashes, which may take the form of

occasional itching to reddening (erythema), givingthe appearance of sunburn, are thought to becaused by a combination of low humidity levelsand the presence of high levels of static. Increasingthe humidity levels and treating carpets withantistatic fluids have been found to alleviate mostproblems.The suggestion that VDUs emit harmful radia-

tion is now largely discounted. Recent legislationdoes not require VDUs to be tested for emissions(HSE 1992a). Similarly, it is now generallybelieved that VDU use is not associated withadverse pregnancy outcomes (Brent et al. 1993).Epilepsy is not caused by VDU work but the use

of a VDU can cause seizures for those sufferingfrom a rare form known as photosensitive epi-lepsy. Consequently, it is inadvisable for sufferersof this rare condition to work with VDUs.

Reducing health risks and legislation

Many of the health risks can be reduced withcareful choice of equipment and software, ergo-nomic workstation design and improved jobdesign. Guidance in assessing and reducinghealth risks is given in the UK Health and Safety(Display Screen Equipment) Regulations 1992.Essentially the Regulations require employers to:

. Assess and record the identification of hazards,the evaluation of risks and the extent of healthrisks.

. Comply with the minimum requirements forworkstations covering equipment, the environ-ment and the software interface.

. Provide eye and eyesight tests, and pay for thecost of special corrective appliances needed forVDU work.

. Provide adequate health and safety training inthe use of workstations.

. Provide employees with adequate informationon all aspects of health and safety relating totheir workstations and the Regulations.

Other UK legislation includes the Health andSafety at Work Act 1974 (HSC 1992), and themore recent Regulations – the Management ofHealth and Safety at Work Regulations 1999(HSE 1999), the Workplace (Health, Safety andWelfare) Regulations 1992 (HSE 1992b) and theProvision and Use of Work Equipment Regula-

216 HEALTH AND SAFETY

tions 1998 (HSE 1998). The ergonomics ofdesign and use of IT in offices is also covered inthe British Standard, BS EN ISO 9241–5–1999.

The issues are, of course, universal, andsimilar legislation or recommendations exist inmost industrialized countries. The EuropeanUnion has taken a particular interest in thesubject under the broad umbrella of its concernfor social actions relating to health in the work-place, through the European agency for Safetyand Health at work. Its Risk Assessment forDisplay Screen Equipment is a particularlyuseful source (http://europe.osha.eu.int/good_practice/risks/msd/risk_links.asp?id¼3). In theUSA, the Department of Labor has overallresponsibility for this field, through its Occupa-tional Safety and Health Administration; therelevant documents can be found at www.osha.gov/STLC/computerworkstation/index.html).

References

Brent, R.L., Gordon, W.E., Bennett, W.R. and Beck-man, D.A. (1993) ‘Reproductive and teratologiceffects of electromagnetic fields’, Reproductive Tox-icology 7: 535–80.

British Standards Institution (1999) Ergonomics Re-quirements for Office Work with Visual DisplayTerminals (VDTs), BS EN ISO 9241–5–1999, BSI.

Health and Safety Commission (HSC) (1992) A Guideto the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, HSEBooks.

Health and Safety Executive (HSE) (1999)Managementof Health and Safety at Work, Approved Code ofPractice, HSE Books.

—— (1998) Provision and Use of Work EquipmentRegulation, Approved Code of Practice and Gui-dance, HSE Books.

—— (1992a) Display Screen Equipment Work, Gui-dance on Regulations, HSE Books.

—— (1992b) Workplace Health, Safety and Welfare,Approved Code of Practice, HSE Books.

Morris, A. and Dyer, H. (1998) Human Aspects ofLibrary Automation, Gower [gives detailed guidanceand advice specifically directed at LIS practitioners].

Further reading

Health and Safety Executive (HSE) (2002) Workingwith VDUs (www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/indg36.pdf).

SEE ALSO: Human–Computer Interaction;information and communication technology;information professions

ANNE MORRIS

HEALTH SCIENCE LIBRARIES

Libraries that support the information needs ofthe education, research, management and prac-tice of healthcare. The library’s users includestudents, teachers, research scientists, health ser-vice managers, planners and epidemiologists,doctors, nurses and paramedical staff and theconsumers of healthcare, patients and carers.Libraries with a healthcare interest will thereforebe found in government departments, healthauthorities, primary, community and acute (hos-pital) services, higher-education institutions, re-search institutes, drug companies, publiclibraries and the voluntary sector (Ryder2002). The literature and information support,which is now required by this variety of user,extends beyond biomedical and health sciences toeconomics, ethics, engineering, statistics, law,management theory, the behavioural sciencesand knowledge management.

History and development

Collections of medical books are known to haveexisted in ancient Egypt, China, Greece andRome (Norman 1991), and some of them werepreserved in the medieval monasteries of WesternEurope. A catalogue of Dover Priory (1389) lists118 medical books, including Hippocrates, Galenand Rhazes. Medical libraries in their own rightbegin to be seen with the establishment ofmedical schools in the ancient universities. Forexample, Florence (1287), Paris (1395) andAberdeen (1495) are known to have had specialmedical collections.The major spur to the growth of medical

libraries in the United Kingdom was the creationof medical corporations (Royal Colleges) andmedical societies in the seventeenth and eight-eenth centuries. London, Edinburgh and Dublinwere all major centres of teaching and a myriadof institutions were founded in each city, manywith their own libraries. In London, eighteensocieties agreed to merge as the Royal Society ofMedicine in 1907, the prime mover for this beingSir John MacAlister, the Society’s first Secretaryand Librarian, later to be President of thelibrary association (Godbolt and Munford1983). The Society’s library is now one of theprimary medical libraries in the UK, with250,000 volumes and 2,000 current periodicals.In the USA, the National Library of Medicine

(NLM) played a critical part in the development

HEALTH SCIENCE LIBRARIES 217

of medical library services. Founded in 1836from the library of the Surgeon-General’s Office,it owes much of its success to its Librarian, JohnShaw Billings (1836–1913), who created theIndex-Catalogue of the Surgeon-General’s Office(vol. 1 published in 1880), as well as originatingthe monthly Index Medicus in 1879, the precur-sor of so many index and abstract publications.The first half of the twentieth century was

characterized by consolidation in the higher-education sector, with universities in the UK andthe USA concentrating on collection develop-ment and co-operative schemes. The 1980s and1990s were characterized by major externalchanges in higher education and healthcareprovision. These required a clearer vision forlibrary services, more flexible and assertive atti-tudes, stronger co-operative and multidisciplinarynetworks, the exploitation of technological devel-opments and the adoption of management skillsto demonstrate accountability and quality. Fromthe mid-1990s, health science libraries haveresponded to the growth of the Internet andelectronic publishing by developing their ownelectronic profile within organizational intranetsand marketing services to the user’s own desktop.

Health and education service changes

Organizational changes first emerged in Britainin the 1960s within the National Health Service(NHS), when statutory obligations for postgrad-uate medical education led to a major increase inthe number of postgraduate libraries in generalhospitals. The immediate impact of this was thatthe number of staff providing library services toNHS personnel rose by 72 per cent (to 1,302staff) between 1978 and 1985 (NHS RegionalLibrarians’ Group 1987). This, in turn, led to therecognition of a strategic co-ordinating role atthe regional level and the appointment of anumber of ‘Regional Librarians’ (Forrest andCarmel 1987).Healthcare reform has been a major driver for

change with a succession of reorganizations andofficial directives, many of which have stressed‘the need for extensive, comprehensive, accurateand up-to-date information (of all types) tosupport the work of NHS staff at all levels, andin addition to provide information for healthcareconsumers’ (Brittain 1993). Such an information-rich environment has obviously provided oppor-tunities for information professionals, and the

publication of Information for Health (NHSExecutive 1998), the NHS Information Strategy,embedded library and information services as acore NHS function by stating that ‘better care forpatients, and improved health for everyone,depend on the availability of good information,accessible when and where it is needed’ withTrusts tasked to ‘provide every NHS professionalwith online access to the latest local guidanceand national evidence on treatment’. The estab-lishment of Workforce Development Confedera-tions (Department of Health 2000) will introducefurther managerial and organizational changes tohealth libraries in the UK.The transfer of nurse education to the higher-

education sector (UKCC 1986) and the emphasison continuing professional development in nur-sing have had major implications for the provi-sion of information services to nursing. Basicnurse training has moved from a hospital-basedapprenticeship to an academic, research-orientededucation. The number of nursing schools hasbeen dramatically reduced as they merge and areintegrated into university faculties. Within medi-cal teaching, the reduction in the amount offactual content to be learned and the applicationof student-based learning principles (GeneralMedical Council 1993) will require closer liaisonwith curriculum planners and a greater emphasison emerging networked learning environments.The Follett Report (Higher Education Funding

Council 1993) provided a significant milestonefor the state of health science libraries in Britishhigher education in the mid-1990s. It was arguedthat pressure from rising student numbers, short-age of accommodation and high inflation inbook and journal prices could be alleviated byaddressing a more central and strategic institu-tional role, clarifying objectives and exploitingnew information technology. The resulting Re-source Discovery Network (http://www.rdn.ac.uk/about/) is a ‘free Internet service dedicatedto providing effective access to high qualityInternet resources for the learning, teaching andresearch community’, which hosts the major UKInternet health and medicine resource catalogue,OMNI (http://omni.ac.uk/).The NHS Research and Development Strategy

has been the impetus for a number of initiatives‘to secure a knowledge-based health service inwhich clinical, managerial and policy decisionsare based on pertinent information about re-search findings and scientific and technological

218 HEALTH SCIENCE LIBRARIES

advances’ (Department of Health 1991). Theseinclude the Cochrane Library, the NHS Centrefor Research and Dissemination and ultimatelythe National Electronic Library for Health(http://www.nelh.nhs.uk) where librarians haveplayed a critical role in undertaking systematicreviews and critically appraising the literature. Inparticular, the librarian’s role in supporting evi-dence-based practice, clinical effectiveness andtraining in critical appraisal has given addedvalue to the profession’s status (Booth andWalton 2000). The concept of knowledge man-agement, with the differentiation between expli-cit and tacit knowledge, is now encouraginghealth librarians to enhance their roles by identi-fying new strategies to support organizationaldevelopment (Booth 2001).These changes have produced a professional

sector that is highly conscious of its image, itsneed for continuous learning and its responsibil-ity to develop the next generation of healthscience information workers (Health LibrariesReview 1995). In the USA, the Medical LibraryAssociation (MLA) has published Platform forChange (Medical Library Association 1992),which outlines the knowledge and skills requiredfor the twenty-first century. In the UK, theLibrary Association has developed the Frame-work for Continuing Professional Development,which is being used by individual health sciencelibrarians as a tool to assess and plan profes-sional development, as well as by employers toundertake training needs surveys and to demon-strate commitment to professional development.

Professional co-operation

Perhaps more than in any other UK library sector,staff working in health science libraries have setup a proliferation of associations, subject groups,networks and pressure groups. Each one under-takes meetings, conferences, resource sharing,publishing and representative activities. The Li-brary Association Health Libraries Group (http://www.la-hq.org.uk/groups/hlg/index.html) is thelargest, with over 2,300 members, and amongstother activities it organizes an annual conferenceand publishes the Directory of Health Libraryand Information Services (Ryder 2002). Othergroups include the University Medical SchoolLibrarians Group (http://www.umslg.ac.uk/umslg.html), Consumer Health Information Con-sortium (http://omni.ac.uk/CHIC/), Medical In-

formation Working Party (http://library.bma.org.uk/miwp/miwp.htm), University HealthScience Librarians (http://www.sbu.ac.uk/lis/uhsl/executive.html), the SCONUL Advisory Commit-tee on Health Services (http://www.sconul.ac.uk/health/index.htm) and the NHS Regional Librar-ians Group (http://www.nthames-health.tpmde.ac.uk/rlg/index.htm).The establishment, in 1995, of a UK ‘Health

Panel’, arising from the initiatives of the Libraryand Information Co-operation Council (LINC)with representatives of many of the abovegroups, is an attempt to minimize the fragmenta-tion and speak with ‘one voice’. This group hasbeen reconstituted as the Health Libraries andInformation Confederation (http://wwwlib.jr2.ox.ac.uk/linchealth/) with a particular remit toinfluence policy makers.In the USA, national co-ordination and leader-

ship are more effective with the clearer roles ofthe NLM and the MLA. The NLM provides thenational framework for resource sharing throughthe National Network for Libraries in Medicine(NNLM), and in research and developmentthrough the National Centres for BiomedicalCommunications and Biotechnology Informa-tion. The MLA (http://www.mlanet.org/), theprofessional body for medical librarians, withover 5,000 members, is responsible for accredit-ing professional competence, sets standards onquality of service and undertakes a major pro-gramme of training and staff development.Supra-national professional organizations exist

in Africa, South America, Asia and in Europe(http://www.eahil.org/). As well as offering anoften rare opportunity for professionals to meetat conferences, these organizations undertakeimportant practical work, such as the compila-tion of the African and Latin American IndexMedicus (collecting much ‘fugitive’ information)and the production of local catalogues and unionlists through which ILL requests can be satisfiedlocally. Finally, the International Federation ofLibrary Associations (ifla), through its Biologi-cal and Medical Sciences Section (http://www.ifla.org/VII/s28/sbams.htm), provides a forum foraddressing global issues. In particular it organizesthe five-yearly International Congress on MedicalLibrarianship. In 1995 this was held in Washing-ton, DC, and in 2000 was held in London, whereit attracted over 1,400 participants (http://www.icml.org). In 2005, the Congress will behosted in São Paulo, Brazil.

HEALTH SCIENCE LIBRARIES 219

References

Booth, A. (2001) ‘Managing knowledge for clinicalexcellence: Ten building blocks’, Journal of ClinicalExcellence 3: 187–94.

Booth, A. and Walton, G. (2000) Managing Knowledgein Health Services, Library Association.

Brittain, M. (1993) ‘Information and the health of thenation’, ASLIB Proceedings 45: 53–60.

Department of Health (2000) A Health Service of allthe Talents: Developing the NHS Workforce, De-partment of Health.

—— (1991) Research for Health, Department ofHealth.

Forrest, M. and Carmel, M. (1987) ‘The NHS RegionalLibrarians’ Group’, Health Libraries Review 4: 160–3.

General Medical Council (1993) Tomorrow’s Doctors:Recommendations on Undergraduate Medical Edu-cation, GMC Education Committee.

Godbolt, S. and Munford, W.A. (1983) The Incompar-able Mac. A Biographical Study of Sir John YoungWalker MacAlister (1856–1925), Library Associa-tion.

Health Libraries Review (1995) 13(1) [theme issue onContinuing Professional Development].

Higher Education Funding Council (1993) Joint Fund-ing Council’s Library Review Group Report (Chair:Sir Brian Follett), Higher Education Funding Councilfor England.

Medical Library Association (1992) Platform forChange. The Educational Policy Statement of theMLA, Medical Library Association.

NHS Executive (1998) Information for Health: AnInformation Strategy for the Modern NHS 1998–2005, Department of Health.

NHS Regional Librarians’ Group (1987) Census ofStaff Providing Library Services to NHS Personnel1985, NHS RLG.

Norman, J.M. (ed.) (1991) Morton’s Medical Biblio-graphy: An Annotated Checklist of Texts Illustratingthe History of Medicine (Garrison and Morton), 5th

edn, Scolar Press.Ryder, J. (2002) Directory of Health Library andInformation Services in the United Kingdom andRepublic of Ireland, 11th edn, Library Association.

UKCC (1986) Project 2000: A New Preparation forPractice, United Kingdom Central Council for Nur-sing, Midwifery and Health Visiting.

Further reading

Booth, A. and Walton, G. (2000) Managing Knowledgein Health Services, Library Association.

Bulletin of the Medical Library Association (quarterlyjournal of the Medical Library Association).

Carmel, M. (ed.) (1995) Health Care Librarianship andInformation Work, 2nd edn, Library AssociationPublishing.

Health Information and Libraries Journal (quarterlyjournal of the Library Association: Health LibrariesGroup).

SEE ALSO: evidence-based healthcare; speciallibraries; university libraries

JOHN VAN LOO

HERITAGE SITES ANDMONUMENTS INFORMATION

The information base that supports our knowl-edge and understanding of heritage sites andother historic monuments, buildings and land-scapes is a complex and specialized field ofactivity. It is essential, however, if we are tounderstand them as fully as possible.

Monument inventories

The desire to identify, record, understand, ex-plain and enjoy the heritage of our historic sitesand monuments is characteristic of a society thatvalues its history and culture. The creation ofinformation about the historic environmentthrough archaeological and architectural surveyand the dissemination of information is central tothis desire. Structured, accessible and properlyreferenced records of the historic environment,including archaeological sites, the built environ-ment and historic landscapes, are maintained atan international level and, in many countries, ata national, regional and/or local level. They maybe known as inventories, records, lists or regis-ters of sites and monuments or of the historicenvironment. In some countries, separate inven-tories of archaeological sites and historic build-ings are held. In other countries, including theUK, there are trends to integrate these records asholistic records of the historic environment.

Inventories of sites and monuments are estab-lished for the purposes of protection, conserva-tion, planning, education and leisure. They mayfocus on monuments, buildings and landscapeswith statutory designations and/or protection,but they may also include records of destroyedmonuments and/or monuments at risk. They maycontain the evidence to support assessments ofarchaeological and/or architectural potentialwhen new developments are considered in anenvironmental planning framework. They maybe detailed or summary, selective or comprehen-sive and be topographically or thematicallybased. Monument inventories will only be effec-tive for their purpose if they are dynamic, being

220 HERITAGE SITES AND MONUMENTS INFORMATION

updated systematically as new knowledge comesto light.At an international level, lists of World Heri-

tage Sites of outstanding universal value aremaintained by the United Nations Educational,Scientific and Cultural Organization (unesco)(see www.unesco.org/whc). At a national level,monument inventories are usually curated bygovernment or other public bodies. Increasinglythey are likely to be computerized, at least atindex level. They may have access to the func-tionality of spatial (geographical) informationsystems and imaging technologies as well asholding primary archives such as surveys, re-ports, photographs and measured drawings. Thesurvey material that supports monument inven-tories is often captured in digital form (seebelow) and may be archived digitally. Monumentinventories in some countries will still consist ofhard-copy records, such as index cards, oftensupported by overlays depicting the locations ofmonuments on a map-base. In a growing numberof countries, monument inventories are beingWeb-enabled, with user-interfaces incorporatingeducational and interpretative material. Concernshave been expressed in some countries, includingthe UK, that uncontrolled access to monumentdata can aid treasure hunters and burglary,however.For an example of a national inventory, see the

US National Register of Historic Places(www.cr.nps.gov/places.html). For a state-basedexample in Australia, see www.heritage.nsw.gov.au. In Europe, the EU-funded Council of Europeproject, European-Heritage Net (www.european-heritage.net) provides signposting to the exis-tence of national monument inventories. In theUK, the Historic Environment Information Re-sources Register (HEIRNET) provides informa-tion about monument inventories and otherrelevant resources (see www.ads.ahds.ac.uk/cata-logue/HEIRNET/html). The national inventoriesfor England, Scotland and Wales are known asNational Monuments Records (see www.english-heritage.org.uk, www.rcahms.gov.uk/canmore.html and www.rcahmw.org.uk/nmrw/collecting.html, respectively), while in Northern Ireland theinventory is maintained by the Environment andHeritage Service (www.ehsni. gov.uk/BuiltHeri-tage).For a national photographic record of statu-

tory listed historic buildings being developed byEnglish Heritage, see www.imagesofengland.org.

uk. In England and Wales, many local authoritiesmaintain local intensive Sites and MonumentsRecords (see HEIRNET above and/or member-ship of the Association of Local GovernmentArchaeological Officers (www.algao.org.uk)).For Scotland, see membership of the Associationof Regional and Island archaeologists (www.scotlink.org (click on /members2000/aria)).

Data standards

A number of organizations have developed andpublished data and other standards for monu-ment inventories, including the InternationalCommittee for Documentation of the Interna-tional Council of Museums (ICOM/CIDOC)and the Council of Europe. For a nationalstandard and a thesaurus of monument typesdeveloped by English Heritage, see www.rchme.gov.uk/midas.

Public and private archives

Inventories are structured records created forheritage purposes. Many historic public andprivate archives also contain information thatwill help inform the documentation and inter-pretation of the historic environment, but havenot been created specifically for that purpose.These will be found in national, regional andlocal archive institutions, as well as the archivesof companies, institutions and estates. These mayinclude government and private records of landmanagement and transfers, taxation and wills,design, construction and transport. For an inter-national list of archive repositories, see www.unesco.org/webworld/portal_archives.

For a national list of archive repositories inEngland, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland,see www.archivesinfo.net/uksites.html. Historicrecords of architects’ firms, including architec-tural drawings, are often deposited in architec-tural libraries and museums. For members of theInternational Confederation of Architectural Mu-seums, see www.icam-web.org (click on ‘about’).The British Architectural Library is an exampleof a national institution holding historic archi-tects’ records (see www.riba-library.com). InScotland, the National Monuments Record holdshistoric records of architectural practices (seeabove). There is a trend for archives repositoriesto make their catalogues available online. For theEnglish strand in the UK archives network, see

HERITAGE SITES AND MONUMENTS INFORMATION 221

the A2A (Access to Archives) database (www.a2a.pro.gov.uk).

Surveys of heritage sites andmonuments

Monument inventories usually consist of high-level records of a large number of items.Detailed surveys of individual historic build-

ings and archaeological sites are also made for avariety of reasons. They can be undertaken toobtain a fuller understanding of the developmentof the building or site; for the purpose ofacademic study; to inform planning decisions orto support historical research. Records made forother purposes (such as insurance plans or landsurveys) can be valuable sources of material toinform this process of understanding and theiruse forms a part of the compilation of moredetailed surveys for inventory purposes.Much attention has been given to the meth-

odologies of compiling a record for the purposesof historical analysis. It is helpful to definedifferent levels or intensities of recording. Mostrecords will combine a written description andanalysis with a visual record made by drawingand photography. It is, however, not possible toprescribe forms and levels of record for allcircumstances, and it is often necessary to varythe content of a record to provide elements tosupplement existing surveys or reflect particularaspects of the site or building. Whilst surveys ofarchaeological sites and historic buildings vary indetail, there is an increasing awareness of theneed to look at the relationship between build-ings and their setting and, conversely, archaeolo-gical/topographical features in relation to thepresent above-ground structures.

Written survey reports

The simplest level of survey is essentially adescriptive visual record, supplemented by theminimum of information needed to identify thesite or building’s location, age and type. It istypically used when the aim is to gather basicinformation about large numbers of buildings orsites for statistical sampling, for a pilot project,identification for planning purposes or for pro-tection, and whenever resources are limited andmuch ground has to be covered in a short time.With buildings, this type of survey is made fromexterior inspection only, though the interior maysometimes be seen. Pro forma recording forms

are often used. Limited summary analysis ispossible by this method, which can be of use inthe wider context in understanding the overallmorphology or evolution of a site or settlement.It is often useful to produce a sketch plan tosupplement the map base.

At the most complex end of the spectrum, afully analytical survey will include all the ele-ments of the simplest, with the addition of asystematic written account of the building orsite’s origins, development and use. The recordshould include an account of the evidence onwhich the analysis has been based, allowing itsvalidity to be re-examined. It will also include allvisual records required to illustrate the site orbuilding’s appearance and structure, and to sup-port a historical analysis. The information willmostly have been obtained through a closeexamination of the site or building itself, butshould relate it to the wider typological, stylisticor historical context and importance. It shouldalso include the results of documentary researchand be fully supported by comprehensive mea-sured surveys and photography.

Most surveys lie somewhere between thesetwo extremes, but should always include ele-ments of description and analysis, clearly distin-guished, and adequate visual support material.This can take the form of photographs, sketchesor full measured surveys.

Photographic survey

A photographic survey offers a full visual record,and can be compiled considerably quicker than ameasured survey or illustrative sketch. It is theprimary means of record in aerial survey, linkedclosely to a map base to identify, locate anddepict historic sites and landscapes. In buildingsurvey, photography is routinely used for illus-trative purposes and is the most practical meansof recording a building that has complex decora-tion or historic furnishing. It is also of primaryimportance in recording townscapes or identify-ing spatial relationships between rooms in abuilding or visual elements in a designed land-scape such as a park or formal garden. Aphotographic record should always include basiclocation information and captions indicatingwhich element of the site or buildings is shownor the direction in which the photograph istaken.

222 HERITAGE SITES AND MONUMENTS INFORMATION

Survey drawings

Surveys are made by direct measurement usingeither hand survey methods with tapes and rodsor by Total Station Electronic Distance Measur-ing (EDM) equipment on larger and more com-plex sites. Measured surveys may be augmentedby other techniques designed to record detail,such as photogrammetry and rectified photogra-phy. The advantages and disadvantages of eachof these processes must be understood beforethey are employed in the course of recording.The use of GPS (Global Positioning System)equipment, based on a constellation of satellites,gives high levels of accuracy in positioning sitesand is of particular use in the survey of archae-ological landscapes. The scale of drawings de-rived from a survey should be appropriate to thesubject surveyed – typically 1:100, 1:50 or 1:20for buildings and up to 1:500 or 1:1,000 forlandscapes. Scales and north points should al-ways be included. The use of a standard conven-tion set aids comparison of different sites andbuildings.

Digital survey data

Survey information is now often produced indigital form, whether as a word-processed file, anEDM survey of a site or a CAD drawing. Whilstin theory it is possible to store all such materialin digital form, the pace of change in computerhardware means that some storage formats havealready become obsolete, and it may be necessaryto transfer data between different types of mediato ensure their continued readability. It is there-fore advisable to hold a hard copy of all datadeposited in digital form. Whilst the digitalrecord can provide information not susceptibleto reproduction on paper (e.g. three-dimensionalviews, or the ability to examine minute areas of adrawing in close detail), the paper archive at leastensures the currency and accessibility of most ofthe information.

Further reading

Council of Europe (2001) Guidance on Inventory andDocumentation of the Cultural Heritage, Council ofEurope.

—— (1999) Core Data Standards for ArchaeologicalSites, Council of Europe.

English Heritage (2000) Informed Conservation, Eng-lish Heritage.

International Committee for Documentation of theInternational Council of Museums (1995) Draft

International Core Data Standard for ArchaeologicalSites and Monuments, ICDICM.

Morris, R.K. (ed.) (2000) The Archaeology of Build-ings, Tempus.

RCHME (1998) Recording Archaeological Field Monu-ments: A Descriptive Specification, Royal Commis-sion on Historical Monuments in England.

—— (1996) Recording Historic Buildings: A Descrip-tive Specification, 3rd edn, Royal Commission onHistorical Monuments in England.

SEE ALSO: archival description; GeographicInformation Systems

NIGEL CLUBB AND BOB HOOK

HERMENEUTICS

Hermeneutics is the art of interpretation. Theword goes back to the Greek god Hermes, whowas thought to have delivered the messages ofthe gods to human beings. Hermes translated themessages into human speech and thus became asymbol of the task of translation between differ-ent orders, times and places.The oldest development of hermeneutics was

connected to the interpretation of the Bible, oflaws and of other difficult texts. Some haveargued that the interpretation of the Bible mustalways be literal because the word of God isexplicit and complete. Thus literal interpretationis one kind of hermeneutic interpretation. Othershave insisted that the biblical words must alwayshave a deeper ‘spiritual’ meaning because God’smessage and truth is self-evidently profound.Thus, for example, allegorical interpretationinterprets the biblical narratives as having asecond level of reference beyond those persons,things and events explicitly mentioned in thetext. A particular form of allegorical interpreta-tion is the typological, according to which thekey figures, main events and principal institu-tions of the Old Testament are seen as fore-shadowing persons, events and objects in theNew Testament.In the long and important history of herme-

neutics only a few contributions can be men-tioned here. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) developed hermeneutics into a single dis-cipline, embracing the interpretation of all texts,regardless of subject and genre. At each level ofinterpretation we are involved in a hermeneuticalcircle: we cannot know the correct reading of apassage in a text unless we know, roughly, thetext as a whole; we cannot know the text as a

HERMENEUTICS 223

whole unless we know particular passages. Wecannot fully understand the text unless we knowthe author’s life and works as a whole, whichrequires knowledge of his texts. We cannot fullyunderstand a text unless we know about thewhole culture from which it emerged, but thispresupposes knowledge of the texts that consti-tute the culture. In the latter 1800s WilhelmDilthey (1833–1911) sought to defend the huma-nities against the growing competition from thesciences. He thought that hermeneutics could bedeveloped into a humanistic method that couldproduce objective knowledge.In the twentieth century Martin Heidegger

(1889–1976) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) are the most important contributors.Heidegger distinguishes three modes of people’sinvolvement with their surroundings:

. An everyday mode of practical activity.

. A reflective problem-solving mode.

. A theoretical mode.

In picking up a hammer to nail something,hermeneutic understanding is already at work.Pre-understanding can be put into words, but bythis action the original hermeneutical relationbetween person and world is reified. Knowledgeis always perspectival and situated. There is noescape to an absolute view without presupposi-tions. Human knowledge is always an interpreta-tive clarification of the world, not a pure,interest-free theory. It is a mistake of Westernscience to believe that methods can construct aplatform above the knower’s historical situation.One can, however, become aware of one’s ownprejudgements through an interaction with othersand with documents.

Philosophy of science

Some philosophers have seen positivism as thephilosophy of the natural sciences and hermeneu-tics as the philosophy of the humanities.Although there may be a kernel of truth in thisstandpoint, it represents too simplistic an under-standing. Kuhn (1970 [1962]) can be seen as ahermeneutic interpretation of the sciences be-cause it conceives of scientists as governed byassumptions that are historically embedded andlinguistically mediated activities organizedaround paradigms that direct the conceptualiza-tion and investigation of their studies. Scientificrevolutions imply that one paradigm replaces

another and introduces a new set of theories,approaches and definitions. According to Malleryet al. (1992), the notion of a paradigm-centredscientific community is analogous to Gadamer’snotion of a linguistically encoded social tradition.In this way hermeneutics challenge the positivistview that science can cumulate objective facts.Observations are always made on the back-ground of theoretical assumptions: they aretheory-dependent.

Library and Information Science

Because hermeneutics is about interpretation oftexts, it is in a way an obvious method for LIS.Research methodologies have been dominated byviews that take the laboratory as a model. Itshould be obvious for LIS to defend a method,which makes the library a model for research.Research in Library and Information Science

has been dominated by a positivistic view.Among the few researchers who have pointed tothe shortcomings of positivism and tried toinform LIS on hermeneutical alternatives areBenediktsson (1989), Budd (1995), Capurro(1985), Cornelius (1996), Hansson (1999) andWinograd and Flores (1987). Hermeneutics mayat first glance seem disappointing for positivistic-minded and technology-oriented researchers.Hermeneutics does, however, make room forhuman interpretation that cannot be automated.Thereby it makes room for using people ininformation work as well as for developingqualitatively better information systems and ser-vices. In this connection there is a problem,however, in that researchers with knowledge ofboth hermeneutics and information retrieval areextremely rare.

References

Benediktsson, D. (1989) ‘Hermeneutics: Dimensionstowards LIS thinking’, Library and InformationScience Research 11: 201–34.

Budd, J.M. (1995) ‘An epistemological foundation forlibrary and information science’, Library Quarterly65: 295–318.

Capurro, R. (1985) ‘Epistemology and informationscience’, lecture given at the Royal Institute ofTechnology Library, Stockholm, Sweden (also avail-able at: www.capurro.de/trita.htm#III. Hermeneu-tics and Information).

Cornelius, I. (1996) Meaning and Method in Informa-tion Studies, Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Hansson, J. (1999) Classification, Libraries and So-ciety: A Critical Hermeneutic Study on ‘Klassifika-

224 HERMENEUTICS

tionssystem för Svenska Bibliotek’ (the SAB-System),Borås, Sweden: Valfrid.

Kuhn, T.S. (1970 [1962]) The Structure of ScientificRevolutions, Chicago, IL: University of ChicagoPress.

Mallery, J.C., Hurwitz, R. and Duffy, G. (1992)‘Hermeneutics’, in S.C. Shapiro (ed.) Encyclopaediaof Artificial Intelligence, vol. 1, 2nd edn, New York:John Wiley & Sons. pp. 596–611.

Winograd, T. and Flores, F. (1987) UnderstandingComputers and Cognition: A New Foundation forDesign, New York: Addison-Wesley.

Further reading

Inwood, M. (1998). ‘Hermeneutics’, in Routledge En-cyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London:Routledge.

SEE ALSO: Kuhn, Thomas S.; philosophies ofscience

BIRGER HJØRLAND

HEURISTICS

A set of techniques for problem-solving thataccepts the goal of finding a good solution, butperhaps not the best possible solution. Heuristicsfunctions may be based on trial and error,exploring potential solutions, looking at theiroutcomes and revising the procedure. A heuristictechnique is precisely that likely to be employedby the user of libraries when searching forinformation or a document. The search is mod-ified as it progresses, each piece of informationor document found tending to influence thecontinuing search. Heuristics are often employedin artificial intelligence systems.

SEE ALSO: information-seeking behaviour

HISTORICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

A branch of bibliography dealing with thehistory and methods of book production, includ-ing the study of printing, binding, paper-making,illustrating and publishing. In recent years histor-ical bibliography has tended to be subsumed intothe broader study of the history of books, but itsbasic techniques and a knowledge of its principalfindings are still essential to rare book librarians.

HISTORY OF LIBRARIES

The history of libraries resides within boundariesdefined by its literature. Although libraries as

institutions have existed for thousands of years,serious and systematic study of their historycame largely in the first decades of the twentiethcentury after formal library education hadfound a home in colleges and universities. Herelibrary school students and scholars benefitedfrom a nurturing research environment, andmany were encouraged to explore the origins oflibrary institutions. As a result most libraryhistory has been written either by library stu-dents completing thesis and dissertation require-ments for advanced degrees, or by library andinformation science educators and some practis-ing professionals influenced by a reward struc-ture the academy extended to its members forpublishing results of their research. Much excel-lent work has been done, although it seems to besomewhat isolated from the mainstream of aca-demic endeavour in some departments (Blackand Crawford 2001).The scope of library history literature has not

spread itself evenly across the world, or evenwithin particular societies in particular regions ofthe world. The literature of library history largelyreflects a Western bias. Several factors explainthis skewed coverage. Because libraries have beenmostly concerned with collecting the printedproducts of literate societies, oral societies (likemany African cultures) that did not evolve ahistory of library institutions had no reason togenerate a literature of library history. In addi-tion, native cultures colonized by imperialpowers had little incentive to study institutionsimposed upon them by a dominant group thatdefined the role these institutions would play inthe process of subjugating native populations.Also, societies in which formal library studies arelargely late twentieth-century phenomena hadnot had adequate time to develop a substantialliterature.The literature of library history also reflects a

white heterosexual male middle- to upper-classperspective, because libraries were generally sup-ported and staffed by these people. Only in thelast quarter of the twentieth century did libraryhistorians begin to explore the role that women,the working classes and ethnic and racial mino-rities had on libraries, both as employees and asusers. Finally, the literature of library history hastended to glorify rather than critically analyselibrary institutions and their services. Researchfocused mostly positive attention on the profes-sion’s leaders and interpreted library history

HISTORY OF LIBRARIES 225

largely independently of the sociocultural envir-onments in which libraries operate.But within these narrowed confines, library

history has nonetheless enjoyed a prosperousexistence. Several serials (Libraries and Culture;Library History; the Japanese Journal of LibraryHistory) provide important conduits for libraryhistory articles. Good compendia exist in libraryhistory encyclopaedias and handbooks (WayneA. Wiegand and Donald G. Davis, Jnr’s Encyclo-pedia of Library History, 1994; Fritz Milkau’sHandbuch der Bibliothekswissenschaft, 1955;and Alan Kent, Harold Lancour and Jay Daily’smultivolume Encyclopedia of Library and Infor-mation Science, 1968–). Library history biblio-graphies include Sharon Chien Lin and MarthaC. Leung’s Chinese Libraries and Librarianship:An Annotated Bibliography (1986) and DonaldG. Davis, Jnr and John Mark Tucker’s AmericanLibrary History: A Comprehensive Guide to theLiterature (1989). There are several good his-tories of libraries within countries (for Italy, seeEnzo Bottasso’s Storia della biblioteca in Italia,1984; for India, A.K. Ohdedar’s Growth of theLibrary in Modern India, 1489–1836, 1966; forGermany, Wolfgang Thauer and Peter Vodosek’sGeschichte der öffentlichen Bücherei in Deutsch-land, 1990; for Spain, Hipolito Escolar Sobrino’sHistoria de las bibliotecas, 1990; and for France,the multivolume Histoire des bibliothèques fran-çaises, 1988–92). Unfortunately, however, as ofthis writing no comprehensive textbook coveringworld library history exists.Model biographies of library leaders include

Edward G. Holley’s Charles Evans: AmericanBibliographer (1963) and W.A. Munford’s Ed-ward Edwards: Portrait of a Librarian, 1812–1886 (1963). Exemplary histories of particularlibrary institutions include Phyllis Dain’s NewYork Public Library: A History of Its Foundingand Early Years (1972), Doris C. Dale’s TheUnited Nations Library: Its Origins and Devel-opment (1970), Maria Siponta de Salvia’s TheVatican Library and Its Treasures (1990) andEdward Miller’s That Noble Cabinet: A Historyof the British Museum (1973). Good works thatcover types of library institutions include Mo-hamed Makki Sibai’s Mosque Libraries: AnHistorical Study (1988) and Raleigh Skelton’sMaps: A Historical Survey of Their Study andCollecting (1972). Except for the USA and theUnited Kingdom, however, the history of libraryassociations has received little attention. And

remarkably little library history attempts tomeasure the impact of any library on its userpopulations.The generally positive approach to library

history was directly challenged in 1973 whenMichael Harris published ‘The purpose of theAmerican Public Library: A revisionist interpre-tation of history’. The essay countered conven-tional thinking by hypothesizing that elite groupsorganized and funded US public libraries to helpcontrol working and immigrant classes. Manylibrary historians initially dismissed the argu-ment, but its basic tenet persisted and in theUSA ushered in a revisionist literature thatincluded Dee Garrison’s Apostle of Culture: ThePublic Librarian and American Society (1979)and Rosemary Ruhig DuMont’s Reform andReaction: The Big City Public Library in Amer-ican Life (1977).In part, revisionism was finally able to pene-

trate library history literature because its practi-tioners increasingly began to research largervolumes of relevant primary source materials,rigorously to apply a greater variety of researchmethods to their data and to adopt researchmodels and paradigms developed in cognatedisciplines. And with the emergence of ‘book’ or‘print culture history’ in the latter decades of thetwentieth century, library historians were offeredan opportunity to carve out a niche in a broaderinterdisciplinary area already pushing beyond atraditional Western white male middle-class het-erosexual perspective that approaches its subjectfrom the ‘top-down/inside-out’, to a more en-compassing multicultural worldview that in-cludes analysis from the ‘bottom-up/outside-in’.Recent work has encompassed issues of gender(Kerslake and Moody 2000), and broader socialissues (Black 2000).

References

Black, A. (2000). ‘Skeleton in the cupboard: Social classand the public library in Britain through 150 years’,Journal of Information, Communication and LibraryScience 7: 17–26.

Black, A. and Crawford, J. (2001). ‘The identity oflibrary and information history: An audit of libraryand information history teaching and research indepartments and schools of library and informationstudies in Britain and Ireland’, Library History 17:127–31.

Kerslake, E. and Moody, N. (2000) Gendering LibraryHistory, Liverpool: John Moores University andAssociation for Research in Popular Fiction.

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Further reading

‘Library history research in the international context:Proceedings of an International Symposium, 1988’(1990) Libraries and Culture 25: 1–152.

Manley, K.A. (ed.) (2002) A special issue of LibraryHistory (18(1)) in honour of Peter Hoare.

Wertheimer, A.B. and Davis, D.G. (eds) (2000) Aspecial issue of Libraries and Culture (35(1)) for thefiftieth anniversary of the Library History RoundTable.

SEE ALSO: ecclesiastical libraries; Islamiclibraries; oral traditions; women in librarianship

WAYNE A. WIEGAND

HOST

A computer that can provide services to anumber of simultaneous users, frequently atremote locations as well as those situated at thehost site. In library and information work theterm has two main manifestations: online hostand network host.

Online host

A host computer that provides the public at largewith access to software and independently pro-duced electronic databases for the purposes ofselective retrieval of information. Users access theremote service via terminals or PCs connected viaa telecommunications or wide-area net-work link. In the vast majority of cases theservice is provided commercially to registeredusers only, either on a subscription basis or (moreusually) according to the amount of individualuse measured in terms of the time for which theuser is connected (connect time) and/or theamount of information viewed, printed or down-loaded.Additional services offered by online hosts

may include document ordering; electronicmail; downloading arrangements; communica-tions, search interface and accounting software;selective dissemination of information (SDI);current awareness services; and gateways toother systems.dialog is the largest online host in the world.

Internationally, there are hundreds more, includ-ing CompuServe, DataStar DIALOG (Europe),Dow Jones, ESA-IRS, FIZ Technik, FT Profile,InfoPro Technologies (BRS and Orbit Online),Mead Data Central, NewsNet, QL Systems and

Questel, to name a small but well-known selec-tion of the larger hosts.

Network host

Any computer that provides network applica-tions (such as electronic mail or file transfer) overa wide area network such as the internet orJANET. The host may be linked directly to thenetwork or via a gateway on an intermediatecomputer or network server.

A direct network connection can be providedfor members of an organization either through itscentralized computing service or (in the case ofthe Internet) through any number of distributedPCs or workstations on a local-area network(LAN). Of the two, the former scenario is morecommon, as provided in many academic institu-tions, where access to JANET and/or the Internetis via the university computing service. In thiscase, the local systems administrator will nor-mally control what network applications aresupported and how they are implemented on thehost. Where each PC, workstation or LAN serveris actually an Internet host in its own right, usersmay obtain access to the full features of thenetwork and may (in theory at least) control thesoftware they choose to use for network access.

At an institutional level, indirect connectionsto a network via an intermediate host may be aconvenient way to access services without takingout a separate and possibly very expensivesubscription. One example is the gateway pro-vided by major online hosts’ electronic mailservices (such as DIAL-MAIL and Data-Mail onDIALOG and DataStar respectively) to theInternet (for delivery of messages to Internetsites). Indirect connections, however, may not(depending on the sophistication of the gateway)offer the full range of network facilities. Theoperating procedures may not be entirely seam-less either.

Where the network host is not the user’sdesktop computer, access to it can be via:

. A modern and dial-up telephone line

. A dedicated or multiplexed serial connection

. A local area network link.

Further reading

Majka, D.R. (1997) ‘Remote host databases: Issues andcontent’, Reference Services Review 25: 23–35.

HOST 227

SEE ALSO: electronic-journal archives;knowledge industries; World Wide Web

GWYNETH TSENG

HOT SPOT

An area on the computer screen, such as a wordor part of a graphic, that the user can activate byindicating it with the mouse pointer and click-ing, in order to follow a link to an associatedunit of information. It is the essential principleof hypertext, and the basis for the links thatallow the user to move around the world wideweb and elsewhere on the internet by clickingon links.

HUMAN–COMPUTERINTERACTION

Computer Interaction (HCI) is a generic termthat describes all the activities concerned with theresearch, design, analysis, development, imple-mentation and evaluation of the interactionsacross the interface between computer applica-tions and human beings (often called users oroperators) who are interacting with the applica-tion. The main emphasis of HCI activity is ondesigning safe, reliable and usable systems, thusthere has been an increasing emphasis on ‘user-centred’ design (as opposed to ‘technology-centred’ design) where the requirements, objec-tives and limitations of the intended users drivethe design of the interface. HCI has wide applic-ability, covering hardware Design (specific in-put and output devices, and their characteristics),Interface Engineering (the actual design of theinterface and its relationship with the wholesystem design) and Social and OrganizationalIssues (such as group working or managementstructures).

Evolution of the term ‘HCI’

The original term used was Man–Machine Inter-action (MMI), which came into prominence inthe 1970s as computer processing power andmemory became available for supporting inter-face design, initially through an alliance ofcomputer scientists and psychologists. The termhas fallen out of favour because of its gender-specific implications. Two other related terms areMMS (Man–Machine Systems) still in common

use in the process control area, and HumanFactors (HF), which evolved out of ergonomics.However, both these terms have wider applica-tion than HCI (or MMI), since they coverinteractions with machines and systems, ratherthan with computers alone. In the USA, HCI isoften known as Computer–Human Interaction(CHI).

The technology of the interface

Human–Computer Interaction is achievedthrough a variety of communication media.Examples of different media include:

Output media text, graphics, sound, music, speech,colour, animation, still pictures, movingvideo.

Input media text (keyboard, handwriting), gesture(mouse, pen, data glove, eye-movement),audio (voice or sound).

Output media are currently more closely attunedto human information processing characteristics.Input media are still rather primitive, requiringtraining and output feedback for effective use.Each medium of communication is actually a

language made up of a set of allowable symbols(or lexicon), rules for combining these symbols(syntax) and common usage rules (pragmatics) towhich meaning (semantics) is assigned. For ex-ample, the symbols, syntax, semantics and prag-matics of moving video are derived frompractices in the cinema or used on television.Media are often used in parallel on the sameinterface. They can be combined in an unsyn-chronized or synchronized manner (e.g. soundand moving pictures). In the synchronized casethe combination may often form a new medium.Most interfaces involve a collection of media,

often in use at the same time. The term ‘multi-media interface’ however is usually reserved forinterfaces involving at least the use of text,colour, graphics, animation, sound or video.

HCI research areas

The HCI designer needs to be familiar withhuman psychological and physiological abilitiesand limitations, current interface technologies,task analysis techniques, evaluation strategies,the rules of social interaction and organizationalor environmental influences. HCI is thereforeof a multidisciplinary nature, bringing togethera number of disciplines including computerscience, psychology, ergonomics, ethnography,

228 HOT SPOT

linguistics, social psychology, artificial intelli-gence and engineering. For convenience, HCIcan be divided into the following research areas.

INPUT–OUTPUT DEVICES

Although building input and output devices ismainly an electronic engineering activity, the HCIinterest is in the specification of such devices andtheir evaluation.

SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURES, TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES

There is a considerable HCI interest in designingarchitectures that support human–computercommunication. Early attempts included UserInterface Management Systems (UIMS), whichtried to separate out the presentation, dialogueand task aspects of the application. In the 1990sthere was a significant move towards the useof Direct Manipulation Interfaces utilizing Gra-phical User Interfaces (GUIs). object-orientedtechnology has also had a major impacton recent architectural approaches. Many toolsand techniques have been developed to assistHCI designers (screen formatting, interactionanalysis, the standard ‘look-and-feel’ ap-proaches, interface creation, etc.) but bettertools are still needed. Tools for creating inter-faces using object-oriented techniques have be-come commonplace. Recently, sets of co-operating software agents have been suggestedas a way forward towards the creation ofintelligent and/or adaptive interfaces. Such inter-faces can anticipate the user and make allowan-ces for human frailty.

DESIGN METHODOLOGIES AND DESIGN RATIONALE

There is a need for HCI design methodologies.Multimedia developments have provided a largechoice of media but design guidelines are practi-cally non-existent. Some informal guidelines doexist (Browne 1994), but these are incompleteand need interpretation. The ‘look and feel’ of aninterface is now an important issue and involvesconsistent representations across the whole inter-face. These are provided by toolkits supported bydocuments (style-guides).Design rationale is a relatively new research

area. It involves the recording of design decisionsas they happen, in a structured way, so that laterchanges may be checked against the originalrationale. An example of a design rational isQOC (Maclean et al. 1991).

COMPUTER-SUPPORTED CO-OPERATIVE WORK (CSCW)

This involves the support of simultaneously co-operating users (usually in remote locations) whoare endeavouring to reach a common objective.Examples might include a video conference,shared use of word processors or shared drawingpackages. In such situations ethnography canoffer useful analysis tools.

USABILITY

Usability is the next most important goal afterutility. HCI workers define usability in terms ofeffectiveness, learnability, flexibility and usersatisfaction. (Shackel 1990). One technique thathas been explored for improving the matchbetween a computer and a user is the user model.User models are static (or dynamic) representa-tions of the user that can be interrogated todevelop a systems view of the user (preferences,weaknesses, habits, etc.). Currently, user model-ling is still rather primitive.

INTERACTION STYLES AND DIALOGUE DESIGN

Interaction with the user has usually been sup-ported by some form of metaphor or interactionstyle. In command line processing, the userprovides commands (with parameters) and thecomputer reacts by carrying out the commands.For inexperienced users, menus are used thatlimit choice and give a sense of closure. Othermetaphors used include form filling and directmanipulation (Shneiderman 1983) where usersmanipulate graphical objects on the screen mi-micking the actions required. The desktop meta-phor, where many aspects of the interface areportrayed as actions on a desk, is an example ofdirect manipulation. As a consequence, Graphi-cal User Interfaces have become popular. Anotherimportant principle used in direct manipulationinterfaces is WYSIWYG – What You See Is WhatYou Get, implying a one-to-one relationshipbetween, say, printed output and screen content.Dialogue design involves the structure of the

interaction across a set of commands, manipula-tions, etc. and is concerned with conversationalstyles, consistency and transitions.

USE OF MULTIPLE MEDIA

With the development of powerful personalcomputers, a large variety of media have becomeavailable to the designer. There are hopes that theuse of such media will provide a more naturalinterface for the average user and greatly

HUMAN–COMPUTER INTERACTION 229

improved interfaces for users with disabilities.However, there is a serious lack of effectiveguidelines as to their use and, at the presenttime, there is much experimentation in progress(for example, on the World Wide Web). Devel-opment of guidelines and design methods willbecome important since we are moving into aworld where end-user technology is becominghighly mobile and powerful. Although heavilyused in human–human communication, auditorymedia are rarely used in HCI.

EVALUATION AND EXPERIMENTATION.

Because HCI is still a fairly new research area,evaluation (usually by experimentation) is impor-tant. There are two radically different ap-proaches – the detailed, carefully controlledlaboratory experiment, and the longitudinalstudy, where actual users are observed in thenormal setting carrying out normal tasks. Bothapproaches have their place. Proper evaluation isimportant because, too often, changes are intro-duced into commercial packages without anyjustification or user-checks whatsoever. Evalua-tion is also essential for assessing the capabilitiesand limitations of new input–output devices.

References

Browne, D. (1994) Structured User Interface Design forInteraction Optimisation (STUDIO), Prentice-Hall[the STUDIO Design Methodology].

Maclean, A., Bellotti, V.M.E. and Moran, T.P. (1991)‘Questions, options and criteria: Elements of designspace analysis’, Human Computer Interaction 6:201–50.

Shackel, B. (1990) ‘Human Factors and Usability’, in J.Preece and L. Keller (eds) Human–Computer Inter-action, Selected Readings, Prentice-Hall, pp. 27–41.

Shneiderman, B. (1983) ‘Direct manipulation: A stepbeyond programming languages’, IEEE Computer16(8): 57–69.

Further reading

Dix, A., Finlay, J., Abowd, G. and Beale, R. (1998)Human Computer Interaction, Hemel Hempstead,UK: Prentice-Hall.

Hellander, M., Landauer, T.K. and Prasad, V.P. (1998)The Handbook of Human Computer Interaction,North-Holland.

Laurel, B. (ed.) (1990) The Art of Human–ComputerInterface Design, Addison-Wesley [a collection ofinteresting papers in HCI research].

Norman, D. (1990) The Psychology of EverydayThings, Basic Books [a very interesting and readablebook on interface design issues].

Raskin, J. (2000) The Humane Interface: New Direc-

tions for Designing Interactive Systems, Addison-Wesley.

J.L. ALTY

HYBRID LIBRARIES

The first identified use of the term hybrid librarywas by Sutton (1996). However, it was almostsimultaneously coined by Rusbridge (1998), thenProgramme Director of the Electronic Libraries(eLib) Programme in the United Kingdom, whopopularized the term and with whose name it isnow associated (JISC 1997). Although largelyconfined to higher education, it is likely that theconcept will spread to other types of library.The term has been used rather loosely in the

literature – even as a synonym for digital libraries(see digital library). Two distinct interpreta-tions are in common usage, the first location-dependent and the second collection-dependent.In the first, a hybrid library may be described asa physical library in which seamless, integratedaccess is provided to all the resources available tothat library, irrespective of medium or location –sometimes known as a one-stop shop. As aseparate strand of definition the hybrid library isused more specifically to describe the integrationof electronic services into a more coherent whole,irrespective of their location. A similar meaningis conveyed by the term gateway library, some-times used in the USA, while the process involvedis often if jocularly referred to as ‘clicks andmortar’ and appears to be in the process of beingsuperseded by the interest in, and increasinglycommonly used term, personal portals. In thelatter case it is often associated with the Dis-tributed National Electronic Resource (DNER),which provides a range of shared services –middleware, content, resource discovery, etc. –which can be assembled to meet local needs.It may seem a statement of the obvious that a

library will provide access to many differenttypes of media, but the essential element ofhybridity is that the user is presented with simpleand unified access. Rusbridge (1998) identifiesfour classes of resource that must be broughttogether: legacy resources, that is existing non-digital resources; traditional resources, that islegacy resources which also exist in digitizedform; new resources that are born digital; andfuture resources that will incorporate accessmethods. Although some work is required to

230 HYBRID LIBRARIES

combine technologies, the hybrid library is seenmuch more as embodying cultural rather thantechnological change. Whether the hybrid libraryis seen as a sort of staging post towards trulyelectronic libraries or whether the idea willdevelop in its own right is as yet unclear.The term was introduced into general parlance

by a call for demonstrator projects by the UKJoint Information Systems Committee (JISC) inMarch 1997 (JISC 1997). Five projects werefunded: Agora, which is building a standards-based broker system; BUILDER, which coversinstitutional issues; HEADLINE is about infor-mation landscapes and the set of resources ofinterest to the user; HYLIFE is about differentclient groups and types; MALIBU is aboutmanagement implications and the developmentof models.By 2000, the term was sufficiently embedded

into both usage and practice that the Universityof Birmingham could be awarded a contract forthe development of Hybrid Information Man-agement Skills for Senior Managers (Birming-ham 2000). The concept has also found favourin the Asia-Pacific region, again in highereducation, and is seen as a key building blockin enhancing the relationship between libraryand university.

References

Birmingham, University of (2000) HIMSS Project(www.himss.bham.ac.uk/Documents/OfficialDocs/PBSummary.html).

JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) (1997)Electronic Information Development Programme:E-Lib Phase 3, Circular 3/97 at www.jisc.ac.uk/pub97/c3–97.html.

Rusbridge, C. (1998) ‘Towards the hybrid library’, D-Lib Magazine July/August (www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26).

Sutton, S. (1996) ‘Future service models and theconvergence of functions: The reference librarian astechnician, author and consultant’, in K. Low (ed.)The Roles of Reference Librarians, Today andTomorrow, New York: Haworth Press.

Further reading

Bundy, A.A. (1999) ‘Partner in learning and research:The hybrid university library of the 21st century’(www.library.unisa.edu.au/papers/hybrid.htm).

e-Lib Phase 3 websites: AGORA (http://hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/agora/scope.html); BUILDER (http://builder.bham.ac.uk); HEADLINE (www.headline.ac.uk/);HYLIFE (www.unn.ac.uk/~xcu2/hylife/summary.

htm); MALIBU (www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/mal-ibu/).

New Review of Academic Librarianship (1989) Aspecial issue (vol. 4) on hybrid libraries.

Oppenheim, C. and Smithson, D. (1999) ‘What is thehybrid library?’, Journal of Information Science 25:97–112.

Pinfield, S. and Dempsey, L. (2001) ‘The DistributedNational Electronic Resource (DNER) and the hy-brid library’, Ariadne 26 (www.ariadne.ac.uk/is-sue26/dner/intro.html).

Rusbridge, C. and Royan, B. (2000) ‘Towards thehybrid library: Developments in UK higher educa-tion’, Paper 001–142-E, 66th IFLA Council andGeneral Conference, Jerusalem (www.ifla.org/IV/ifla66/papers/001–142e.htm).

SEE ALSO: electronic-journal archives; universitylibraries

DEREK G. LAW

HYPERMEDIA

A generic term now widely used for multimediaapplications of the hypertext principle. Thispermits the user to follow associative linksbetween units of information by clicking ona hot spot with a mouse. Web-delivereddocuments are the most familiar form of hyper-media.

HYPERTEXT

The concept of hypertext was developed by TedNelson in 1960. He envisioned a computer-basedsystem that would reproduce what he called‘non-sequential writing’, i.e. the associativerather than logical way in which human mindswork. In effect, this was to be a form ofelectronic browsing, which allowed the usermovement from one ‘page’ to another, to movebetween index and text, and to have the electro-nic equivalent of a finger in a page while lookingat another page (or book, or picture, or any otherinformation-varying object). A working systemwas developed in 1967, but Nelson himselfbecame obsessed with developing a system calledXanadu, which was to be a de facto universallibrary, to which he gave the name ‘docuverse’.Xanadu was impractical, and in any case un-attainable with the software then available, butthe hypertext idea was not forgotten, and whenTim berners-lee began to develop the informa-tion system that was to become the world wide

HYPERTEXT 231

web he reverted to Nelson’s idea. As a result, theWeb is, in effect, the universal hypertext systemthat Nelson had envisaged. The essential princi-ple of hypertext – the ability to move withoutinterruption from one information resource toanother – is fundamental to conducting searcheson the Web.

Further reading

McAleese, R. (ed.) (1999) Hypertext: Theory intoPractice, revised edn, Exeter: Intellect.

Nelson, T. (1987) ‘All for one and one for all’, inHypermedia ’87 Proceedings.

SEE ALSO: information and communicationtechnology; organization of knowledge

232 HYPERTEXT

I

ICON

A small symbol on a display screen, such as thewastebasket (or trashcan) for deleting files,which represents a resource or a function pro-vided by a computer application, hypermediaprogram or graphic user interface.

IFLA

IFLA (International Federation of Library Asso-ciations and Institutions) is the internationalbody representing the interests of library andinformation services and their users. Founded inEdinburgh, Scotland, in 1927 on the occasion ofthe fiftieth anniversary of the UK libraryassociation, IFLA now has nearly 1,800 mem-bers in over 150 countries. The Federation wasregistered in the Netherlands in 1971. The RoyalLibrary of the Netherlands in The Hague pro-vides facilities for its headquarters.

Aims

The Federation is an independent, international,non-governmental, not-for-profit organization.Its objectives are to:

. Promote high standards of provision of libraryand information services.

. Encourage widespread understanding of thevalue of good library and information services.

. Represent the interests of its members.

Core values

A set of core values are embodied in the Statutesof the Federation, including the belief that

people, communities and organizations needfree access to knowledge for their well-being,and that the provision of high-quality libraryand information services help guarantee thataccess.

Membership

The original members of IFLA, national libraryassociations, remain at the heart of the orga-nization. Individual library and informationservices and all kinds of organizations in thelibrary and information sector, ranging frommajor national libraries and research institutesto school libraries, may join as InstitutionalMembers, with special provision for one-personunits. Individual practitioners may join as Perso-nal Affiliates, with special provision for stu-dents. More than thirty corporations in theinformation industry have formed a workingrelationship with IFLA under the CorporatePartners scheme. In return for financial and ‘in-kind’ support, they receive a range of benefits,including opportunities to present their productsto a worldwide audience.

Relations with other bodies

Good working relationships have been forgedwith important international bodies whose inter-ests overlap with those of IFLA. unesco recog-nizes IFLA with Formal Associate Status. TheUN has accorded it observer status, as has theWorld Intellectual Property Organization(WIPO), the World Trade Organization (WTO)and the International Standards Organization(ISO), whilst the International Council of Scien-tific Unions has granted IFLA associate status. Inturn, IFLA has offered consultative status to a

number of bodies, including the internationalcouncil on archives (ICA) and the Interna-tional Publishers Association (IPA). IFLA is afounder member, along with the ICA, the Inter-national Council on Museums (ICOM) and theInternational Council on Monuments and Sites(ICOMOS), of the International Committee forthe Blue Shield (ICBS). The mission of the ICBS,the cultural equivalent of the International Com-mittee of the Red Cross, is to collect anddisseminate information and to co-ordinate ac-tion in situations when cultural property is atrisk.

General Conference

Up to 3,000 library and information specialistsmeet in August in a different host country eachyear at the IFLA conference, the biggest interna-tional gathering of its kind. They meet toexchange experience, debate professional issues,see the latest products of the informationindustry, conduct the business of IFLA andexperience something of the culture of the hostcountry. In addition, many of IFLA’s profes-sional units and core activities hold a range ofprofessional meetings, seminars and workshopsaround the world.

Governance

The General Council, consisting of delegates ofvoting Members, is the highest organ of theFederation. Under new Statutes adopted by theFederation’s Council held in Jerusalem in 2000, itelects the President-elect and members of theGoverning Board by postal ballot. It also meetsevery year during the annual conference, when itconsiders general and professional resolutionsthat, if approved, are usually referred to theGoverning Board or Professional Committee foraction. The Governing Board is responsible forgeneral policy, management, finance and externalrelations. It consists of the President (in thechair), the President-elect, ten elected membersand nine members of the Professional Commit-tee. The Professional Committee directs the plan-ning of IFLA’s professional activities andmonitors their progress. To this end, it adopteda series of professional priorities in January2001, which all IFLA professional units use asthe basis of their strategic plans.

Professional units

The Sections are the primary focus for theFederation’s work in:

. A particular type of library and informationservice (for example National Libraries orSchool Libraries).

. An aspect of the practice of library andinformation science (for example DocumentDelivery and Interlending, or Managementand Marketing).

. A specific region (there are three regionalsections covering Africa, Asia & Oceania, andLatin America & the Caribbean).

Three regional offices located in Dakar, Senegal,Bangkok, Thailand, and São Paolo, Brazil sup-port the regional Sections.All IFLA members are entitled to register for

one or more of the forty-five Sections of theirchoice. Once registered, voting members have theright to nominate specialists for the StandingCommittee of those Sections. The Standing Com-mittee is the key group of professionals whodevelop the programme of the Section, includingresearch activity, publications and its contribu-tion to the annual conference programme. Dis-cussion Groups have also been established tocater for new or relatively ephemeral subjects,which do not require the establishment of aSection. All these units are grouped into eightDivisions, which are represented on the Profes-sional Committee.

Core activities

Issues common to library and information ser-vices around the world are the concern of IFLA’ssix core activities. The Advancement of Librar-ianship (ALP) core activity has a very wide remit,dealing with the broad range of issues specific tothe developing world. Others cover current,internationally important, matters:

. Copyright and other Legal Matters (CLM).

. Free Access to Information and Freedom ofExpression (FAIFE).

. Preservation and Conservation (PAC).

. Universal Availability of Publications (UAP).

. Universal Bibliographic Control and Interna-tional MARC (UBCIM).

Each core activity is hosted by a national library

234 IFLA

or other institution in a different part of theworld.

Publications

IFLA Journal is published five times a year. Eachissue covers news of current IFLA activities,together with in-depth articles selected to appearto reflect the variety of the information profes-sion. Four titles are published each year in themonograph series published for IFLA by K.G.Saur of Munich, Germany. Recent titles includeThe Public Library Service: IFLA/UNESCOGuidelines for Development and Delivering Life-long Continuing Professional Education acrossSpace and Time. The IFLA Professional ReportsSeries, published by IFLA HQ, features reports ofprofessional meetings and guidelines to bestpractice. Recent titles include: Proceedings ofthe Pan-African, Pan-Arab Conference on Publicand School Libraries and Camel Library Servicesin Kenya, a Report on the Assessment of Non-motorized Mobile Libraries. The website IFLA-NET (www.ifla.org) has rapidly become a primesource of information not only about IFLA, butalso about a broad spectrum of library andinformation issues.

Resources

About 80 per cent of IFLA’s income is derivedfrom membership fees. Other sources of incomeinclude sales of publications, contributions fromthe corporate partners and grants from founda-tions and government and international agencies.Twenty donors, including libraries and indivi-duals, contribute to the core activities fund andseven institutions provide accommodation andinfrastructure for the core activities and IFLA’sHeadquarters. Several hundred library and infor-mation professionals contribute their time, ex-pertise and financial resources to the realizationof IFLA’s professional programmes.

Further reading

Website (www.ifla.org).

ROSS SHIMMON

IMAGE RETRIEVAL

The identification and retrieval of visual imagesfrom databases.

This is a significant and growing problem ininformation retrieval. Conventional systemsof indexing and searching are geared to cata-logues or textual databases, in which booleanlogic or free-text searching will take the userto relevant items with comparative ease andaccuracy, using authors, titles, keywords and soon, or through complete searches of the file.Visual images, however, need a different kind ofindexing and retrieval system if they are to becomparably accessible. Essentially two ap-proaches have been developed. The traditionalapproach is to assign indexing terms, which mayrelate to specifically visual features (such asshape), but are more usually a more conventionalindexing term assigned to describe the subject ofthe contents of the image. Such systems havebeen evolved over many decades as means ofindexing and cataloguing visual documents suchas prints, photographs, architectural drawingsand so on. For digital files, however, systems arebeing developed in which the image can beretrieved using key visual indicators such ascolour, texture and shape. These more sophisti-cated systems are likely to become of increasingimportance as the number of such databanksitself increases. (Gudrum et al. 2001).Image retrieval is still a significant problem

that is being addressed through research andexperimentation in a number of countries. It isparticularly important in art libraries, butequally relevant to work in local studies librar-ianship (see local studies collections), rarebook librarianship (see rare book libraries),the documentation of heritage sites andmonuments information, and other fields,from medicine to engineering, in which visualimages are important conveyors of information.The related and complex issues around thesophisticated retrieval of moving images are alsothe subject of research, although these systemsare still at a comparatively early stage of devel-opment (Sandom and Enser 2002).

References

Gudrum, A.A., Rorvig, M.E, Jeong, K-T. and Suresh,C. (2001) ‘An open source agenda for researchlinking text and image content features’, Journal ofthe American Society for Information Science 52:948–53.

Sandom, C.J. and Enser, P.G.B. (2002) VIRAMI: VisualInformation Retrieval for Archival Moving Imagery,London: Library and Information Commission (Re-port 129).

IMAGE RETRIEVAL 235

SEE ALSO: multimedia librarianship; picturelibraries

Further reading

Chu, H. (2001) ‘Research in image indexing andretrieval as reflected in the literature’, Journal of theAmerican Society for Information Science 52: 1,011–18.

INCUNABULA

Books printed before the year 1501; the literalmeaning is ‘cradle books’. Although such booksare rare and usually valuable, they are not reallydifferent from those printed in 1501 and theyears immediately afterwards. Nonetheless, theyhave been treated as a separate group since thelate eighteenth century and incunabulists havedeveloped their own techniques for studyingthem, as well as compiling large catalogues andbibliographies.

Further reading

Hellinga, L. and Goldfinch, J. (eds) (1987) Bibliogra-phy and the Study of Fifteenth Century Civilization,British Library.

SEE ALSO: rare-book libraries

INDEX

An organized grouping of terms intended tofacilitate access to a document or collection ofdocuments in any medium or format. It isnormally alphabetical. The most familiar form isthe index to a book or series of books, indicatingat what place or places topics, places or personsare mentioned by page number or some otherindicator of location. The term is also used todescribe a finding aid to the position of materialin a library collection, more or less synony-mously with catalogue (see catalogues).Although the principles of analysis used areidentical, however, an index entry merely locatesa subject, whilst a catalogue entry also includesdescriptive specification of a document con-cerned with the subject.


INDEXING

Analysing the contents of a document (book,

pamphlet, audiovisual or machine-readable item,etc.) or collection of documents and translatingthe results of the analysis into terms for usein an index – an organized grouping of suchterms to allow location and retrieval of infor-mation.

Kinds of index

Indexes may include entries for a range ofcategories, including personal, corporate andgeographical names; subjects; titles of works;first lines; quotations; abbreviations; acronymsand initialisms; citations; numbers; and dates.Examples of indexes include an index to classi-fied catalogues in a library or other collection,an index to a group of periodicals and an indexto an individual periodical, book or other docu-ment. Although indexes, other than numericaland date indexes, are usually arranged alphabeti-cally, there are examples of classified and alpha-betico-classed indexes such as Index to ThesesAccepted for Higher Degrees in the Universitiesof Great Britain and Ireland and EngineeringIndex.

Purposes of indexes

The main purpose of an index is to facilitate thespeedy location of specific items of information.The index rearranges the material, bringingtogether scattered references to a topic. A goodindex indicates what is not in a document andso is a valuable aid to selection. It can also limitwear and tear on a document, because it savesa reader from having to flip through thecomplete text each time a piece of informationis sought.

Standards for indexing

The ISO standard on indexing (British StandardsInstitution 1996) usefully defines the function,type and features of indexes and gives advice oncontent and general organization, arrangement ofentries in indexes and presentation of indexes.This derives from an earlier British standard(British Standards Institution 1988) which itreplaces.

Features of a good index

Accuracy is an obvious requirement of an indexand the index should normally be comprehensive– though certain limitations on comprehensive-

236 INCUNABULA

ness may be allowable if clearly explained. Termsshould be used consistently and consistency ismore likely to be achieved if a reliable thesaurusis used, indexing decisions are systematicallyrecorded and work on the same index done bymore than one indexer is carefully co-ordinated(British Standards Institution 1988: clause 4.4).There should be enough ‘see also’ cross-refer-ences to connect related items in the index. ‘See’references should be used for synonyms andalternative forms of name, but in the case of abook index it is often more economical, as wellas being more helpful to the user of the index, tomake additional entries rather than ‘see’ refer-ences.

The computer and indexing

Computers have long been used to produce someforms of index, including string indexes like theentries in Current Technology Index and thesubject index entries produced for the BritishNational Bibliography between 1971 and 1990using PRECIS (the Preserved Context IndexingSystem). Programs are now also available forbook indexes.

Indexing societies

The Society of Indexers was formed in 1957 andthree other national societies are now formallyaffiliated to the British society: the AmericanSociety of Indexers (formed in 1968), the Aus-tralian Society of Indexers (formed in 1976) andthe Indexing and Abstracting Society of Canada/Société canadienne pour l’analyse de documents(formed in 1977). The twice-yearly journal theIndexer is the official journal of all four societies.The British society has published five mono-graphs in a series of open-learning units andmore are in progress.The Cataloguing and Indexing Group of cilip

is also obviously interested in indexing. TheGroup publishes a quarterly journal, Catalogueand Index.

Awards for indexers

In 1960 the library association instituted theWheatley Medal, so called in honour of Henry B.Wheatley (1838–1917). It is awarded annually tothe compiler of the most outstanding index firstpublished in Britain during the preceding threeyears. The Society of Indexers established an

occasional award for outstanding services toindexing in 1977 and designated it the CareyAward in memory of the Society’s first President,Gordon V. Carey (1886–1969). The H.W. WilsonCompany Index Award, presented by the Amer-ican Society of Indexers on behalf of the well-known index publishers, was inaugurated in 1979.The Australian Society of Indexers presented itsfirst Medal, intended to promote standards ofexcellence in indexing in Australia, in 1988.

The future of indexing

Although some indexes to individual documentsand to collections are still produced manually,the future is likely to see increasing use ofcomputers. Wellisch (1991) considers the possi-bility of indexes to individual documents beingintegrated into databases. He refers to experi-ments in the USA and Sweden aimed at achievingthis and points out that such a developmentwould make back-of-the-book indexes availableto a much wider community as well as challen-ging indexers to achieve the highest standards ofquality with regard to comprehensiveness andspecificity of indexes (Wellisch 1991: 407).

References

British Standards Institution (1988) British StandardRecommendations for Preparing Indexes to Books,Periodicals and Other Documents, 3rd edn, BritishStandards Institution (BS 3700: 1988).

Wellisch, H.H. (1991) Indexing from A to Z, H.W.Wilson Company.

Further reading

Cleveland, D.B. and Cleveland, A.D. (1990) Introduc-tion to Indexing and Abstracting, 2nd edn, LibrariesUnlimited.

Lancaster, F.W. (1991) Indexing and Abstracting inTheory and Practice, University of Illinois, GraduateSchool of Library and Information Science.

Mulvany, N.C. (1994) Indexing Books, University ofChicago Press.

SEE ALSO: alphabetization rules; classification;information retrieval; organization of knowledge;standards specifications

K.G.B. BAKEWELL

INFORMATICS

Informatics is the science of information. Itstudies the representation, processing and

INFORMATICS 237

communication of information in natural andartificial systems. Since computers, individualsand organizations all process information, infor-matics has computational, cognitive and socialaspects.Used as a compound, in conjunction with the

name of a discipline, as in medical informatics,bioinformatics, etc., it denotes the specializationof informatics to the management and processingof data, information and knowledge in thenamed discipline.

Terminology

The French term informatique, together withvarious translations – informatics (English), in-formatik (German) and informatica (Italian,Spanish) – was coined by Dreyfus, in March1962 (Dreyfus 1962), and refers to the applica-tion of computers to store and process informa-tion (see also Bauer 1996). The morphology,information þ -ics, uses ‘the accepted form fornames of sciences, as conics, linguistics, optics, ormatters of practice, as economics, politics, tac-tics’ (Oxford English Dictionary 1989); infor-matics encompasses both science and practice.Phonologically, informatics combines elementsfrom both ‘information’ and ‘automatic’, whichstrengthens its semantic appeal. This new termwas adopted across Western Europe, and, exceptin English, developed a meaning roughly trans-lated by the English ‘computer science’ or ‘com-puting science’. Mikhailov et al. advocated theRussian term ‘informatika’ (1966) and the Eng-lish ‘informatics’ (1967) as names for the ‘theoryof scientific information’ and argued for abroader meaning, including study of the use ofinformation technology in various communities(e.g., scientific) and of the interaction of technol-ogy and human organizational structures.

Informatics is the discipline of science whichinvestigates the structure and properties (notspecific content) of scientific information, aswell as the regularities of scientific informationactivity, its theory, history, methodology andorganization.

(Mikhailov et al. 1967)

Usage has since modified this definition in threeways. First, the restriction to scientific informa-tion has been removed, as in business informaticsor legal informatics. Second, since most informa-tion is now digitally stored (Lesk 1997; Lyman

and Varian 2000), computation is now central toinformatics: Gorn (1983) defines informatics ascomputer science þ information science. Third,the processing and communication of informa-tion have been added as objects of investigation,since they are now recognized as fundamental toany scientific account of information.In the English-speaking world the term infor-

matics was first widely used in the compound,‘medical informatics’, taken to include ‘thecognitive, information processing, and commu-nication tasks of medical practice, education, andresearch, including information science and thetechnology to support these tasks’ (Greenes andShortliffe 1990). Many such compounds are nowin use.A June 2002 web search (Google 2002) found

‘informatics’ and various compounds occurringmore or less frequently, with the numbers ofdocuments returned for each term given inparentheses: informatics (1,100,000), bioinfor-matics (691,000), medical informatics (151,000),health informatics (52,800), museum informatics(19,500), nursing informatics (15,600), geoinfor-matics (11,100), neuroinformatics (9,180), socialinformatics (6,840), business informatics (6,610),dental informatics (2,850), molecular informatics(2,630), environmental informatics (2,580), legalinformatics (1,640), chemical informatics(1,230), mobile informatics (492), protein infor-matics (408) and library informatics (303). Someinformatics specializations are named in otherways: for example, what might be called scienceinformatics (1,710) is more usually called e-science (17,700); bioinformatics is often calledcomputational biology (347,000).Each of these areas studies representations and

uses of information, which may be peculiar toeach field of application, but draw on commonsocial, logical and computational foundations.They all involve the use of computing andinformation technologies to store, process andcommunicate information. They all also addressthe interaction of technology with the productionand use of information by individuals and orga-nizations; they develop software, systems andservices that aim to help people interact withinformation, both efficiently and effectively.

The scope of informatics

What these areas have in common is informatics:the focus on information and how it is repre-

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sented in, processed by and communicated be-tween a variety of systems. Representationsinclude paper, analogue and digital records oftext, sounds and images, as well as, for instance,the information represented in a gene and thememories of an individual or an organization.Processing includes human reasoning, digitalcomputation and organizational processes. Com-munication includes human communication andthe human–computer interface – with speech andgesture, with text and diagram, as well ascomputer communications and networking,which may use radio, optical or electrical signals.Informatics studies the interaction of informa-

tion with individuals and organizations, as wellas the fundamentals of computation and comput-ability, and the hardware and software technolo-gies used to store, process and communicatedigitized information. It includes the study ofcommunication as a process that links peopletogether, to affect the behaviour of individualsand organizations.

Informatics as a science

Science progresses by defining, developing, criti-cizing and refining new concepts, in order toaccount for observed phenomena. Informatics isdeveloping its own fundamental concepts ofcommunication, knowledge, data, secrecy, inter-action and information, relating them to suchphenomena as computation, thought and lan-guage, and applying them to develop tools forthe management of information resources.Informatics has many aspects. It encompasses,

and builds on, a number of existing academicdisciplines: primarily artificial intelligence,cognitive science and computer science.Each takes part of informatics as its naturaldomain: in broad terms, cognitive science con-cerns the study of natural information processingsystems; computer science concerns the analysisof computation and the design of computingsystems; and artificial intelligence plays a con-necting role, producing systems designed toemulate those found in nature. Informatics alsoinforms, and is informed by, other disciplines,such as mathematics, electronics, biology, linguis-tics, psychology and sociology. Thus informaticsprovides a link between disciplines with theirown methodologies and perspectives, bringingtogether a common scientific paradigm, commonengineering methods and a pervasive stimulus

from both technological development and prac-tical application.Informatics builds on a long tradition of work

in logic, which provides an analysis of meaning,proof and truth. It draws on probability andstatistics to relate data and information, and onthe more recent tradition of computer science forabstract models of computation and fundamentalnotions of computability (What can be com-puted?) and complexity (How do we deal withthe space and time requirements of a computa-tion scale as we consider problems of differentsizes?). Combining these traditions enriches themall, since they share a common interest ininformation.The science of information provides a new

paradigm of scientific analysis, which concen-trates on the processing and communicationinformation rather than focusing on the electri-cal, optical, mechanical or chemical interactionsthat embody this activity. Focusing on informa-tion provides novel accounts of long-standingphenomena, even in physics (Frieden 1998).Informatics provides accounts of the representa-tion, processing and communication of informa-tion, the conceptual basis for applying computingand information technologies to develop newtools for the management of information indiverse areas, and also the basis for beginning tounravel the workings of the mind.We illustrate the scope and nature of infor-

matics with a brief account of one area in whichinformatics is contributing to library and infor-mation science. With essentially all informationbecoming available online, libraries will focusincreasingly on selection, searching and qualityassessment. The contribution of informatics tothis enterprise is to provide and apply appro-priate techniques for the representation, proces-sing and communication of information. We nowgive an account of some of these techniques, witha focus on textual information.

Representation

The Web was designed as an informationspace, with the goal that it should be usefulnot only for human–human communication,but also that machines would be able toparticipate and help. One of the major ob-stacles to this has been the fact that mostinformation on the Web is designed for humanconsumption. [. . .] The Semantic Web

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approach [. . .] develops languages for expres-sing information in a machine processableform.

(Berners-Lee 1998)

Data on the world wide web makes digitalrepresentations familiar to us all. Texts, imagesand sounds are represented by digital encodings,as patterns of bits. Standards such as ASCII,Unicode, JPEG, TIFF, WAV and MP3 allow forthe encoding, storage, exchange and decoding ofmultimedia information. These representationsmay be indexed and retrieved as individual files,but they are, to varying degrees, opaque tosoftware agents searching for information.Text files are stored as unstructured sequences

of characters. Dividing a text into words, sen-tences and paragraphs is mostly straightforward.Finding keywords in a text file is straightfor-ward, and some search engines incorporate shal-low linguistic knowledge that extends keywordsearch. For example, ‘stemming’ determines themorphological root of a given word form, thusrelating singular and plural forms of a noun, anddifferent moods and tenses of a verb. Searchingfor swan using stemming finds swans, andsearching for goose should find geese (see free-text searching).We can also search for content in other media.

Finding keywords in recorded speech is muchharder than searching a text file: it is both moreexpensive in computing resources and less accu-rate. Finding images with specified content,simply by examining the image automatically, iseven harder (see image retrieval).Extracting information from texts requires

deeper linguistic analysis. For example, searchingnews reports to glean information about com-pany takeovers – who is being taken over, bywhom, what price is being paid, for what –requires a grammatical analysis of individualsentence structures. More complex information– such as finding arguments that support aparticular decision – demands more global ana-lyses of meaning. Text files form a small fractionof society’s data storage (Lyman and Varian2000). However, texts are rich in informationthat is not represented elsewhere, so it is im-portant to make this information accessible. Iftexts are stored in ways that make grammaticaland rhetorical structures transparent, then itbecomes easier for automated tools to accesssuch information.

METADATA

The simplest way of making searching easier is toattach an electronic ‘catalogue card’ to eachdocument. Such data about data is called ‘meta-data’. For example, the dublin core is ametadata standard which specifies a set ofrequired and permitted elements for such acatalogue card. The Resource Description For-mat (RDF) is a general standard for such meta-data.Metadata allows software agents to find,

retrieve and process data. Just as books in alibrary are made accessible by the catalogue, soinformation on the Web is made accessible bymetadata.The semantic web is a project that aims to

provide a common framework for such efforts,by having data on the Web defined and linked insuch a way that it can be used by machines notjust for display purposes, but for automation,integration and reuse of data across variousapplications, so that tomorrow’s programs canshare and process data even when these programshave been designed totally independently.

STRUCTURED DATA

Digital documents allow, in principle, muchricher automated processing – content selection,information extraction, price comparisons ordocument clustering. To facilitate this, data isstructured; documents are given internal struc-ture. There are many different formats forstructured data, some simple in their description,others complex and rich. Many communities ofinterest (biologists, engineers, geologists, busi-nesses) are designing new formats to allow themto put machine-understandable data on the Web.This will allow data to be shared and processedby automated tools as well as by people.

RELATIONAL DATA

Relational databases represent information byrepresenting relations between entities (such asthe relation between book and author, or therelation between book and publisher). Ratherthan exchange whole databases, query languagessuch as SQL allow users to retrieve, from thedatabase, information about specified entities.Relational databases are appropriate for repre-senting uniformly structured data, where allentities of a given type can be represented byspecifying a given collection of relations (everypart has a price, every employee has a manager).

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But these are ill adapted to the open-endednature of information on the Web, where wemay find that one manager also plays in a band,and so have to represent the fact that she playsthe saxophone.

MARK-UP

One common form of structuring is mark-up.Mark-up originated as a means of structuringtext; before the computerization of the printingindustry, mark-up was annotation written by acopy editor on a manuscript, to indicate struc-ture (chapter, heading, paragraph, etc.) and style(italic, bold, etc.). Mark-up now refers tosequences of characters, known as tags, insertedin a text or word processing file. The originaluse of mark-up was to indicate how the fileshould look when printed or displayed. Mark-up is now often used to describe a document’slogical structure, or as a format for describingan abstract logical structure, so-called ‘semi-structured data’ – a replacement for the repre-sentation of structured data by traditional rela-tional databases.Standard frameworks for mark-up, such as

SGML (Standard Generalized Mark-up Lan-guage) and XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language),have been adopted by many metadata initiatives,including the semantic Web, where XML mark-upis used to structure the metadata attached to adocument. An example of SGML mark-up is theHyperText Mark-up Language HTML, linguafranca of the World Wide Web.A general mark-up language such as XML can

be applied to encode content and structure forapplications that go far beyond the originalpurposes of mark-up for typesetting and display.Mark-up can be used to tag entities in adocument (addresses, prices or names), to taglogical roles (author, publisher), to tag logicalconnections, for example linking a price toan entity, or to tag phrases and parts of speechin order to indicate a text’s detailed grammaticalstructure. Applications of XML are found every-where: in bioinformatics and linguistics, inbusiness-to-business applications, in cataloguingand indexing and in scholarly annotation ofancient texts.Mark-up languages define the scope of what

can and cannot be expressed in mark-up. Forexample, XML provides controlled flexibility andallows us to represent semi-structured data thatdoes not fit well in the relational mould. XML

tags come in pairs, 5 author4. . .5 /author4,which act as ‘named brackets’. These bracketsmust be properly nested, thus an XML documenthas a hierarchical structure in which each layer ofthe hierarchy consists of text, interspersed withelements from the layer below tagged with names(such as ‘author’). This allows a mixture ofstructure and free text.Most applications require further restrictions.

For example, HTML is defined by a document-type definition (DTD) that specifies which ele-ments may occur in an HTML document (head-ings, paragraphs, lists, etc.), and structural rules(for example, list elements occur within lists) thatan HTML document must follow. A DTD canspecify as many constraints on the structure asare needed for a particular application, or as few.Thus, an author element might require a sur-name, allow any number of forenames andpermit nothing else.From a scientific perspective, XML and the

structures it allows us to express represent justone of many possibilities for structuring data.The science underlying XML provides an under-standing of the ways in which data may bestructured. It provides query languages andalgorithms for retrieving data in response to aquery. It provides the conceptual frameworkfor understanding how structure may be speci-fied, for example by a DTD, and algorithmsfor checking that a document conforms to aspecified form. It provides the basis for assur-ances of the integrity and provenance of data,and so on.

Processing and communication

Processing is the transformation of data from oneform to another. Information is data interpreted,organized and structured. For example, the Eng-lish documents on the Web form a large dataset;when we use a search engine to count thenumbers of documents containing a given searchterm it finds on the Web, we extract informationfrom this data. The ability to collect, aggregateand organize data allows us to create andrepresent information. Knowledge is informationthat has been analysed so that inter-relationshipsare identified, formalized and represented. Thusprocessing can extract information from data,and transform information into knowledge.These results must then be communicated effec-tively to the user.

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NATURAL-LANGUAGE PROCESSING

Today (2002), machines are widely used fordocument retrieval. Future software agents willuse Natural-Language Processing (NLP) tools toextract relevant information from documents inresponse to user queries, to create summariestailored to the user’s needs, and to collate,assemble and present information derived froma multitude of sources.Human readers see structure in texts: words,

sentences, paragraphs, documents, etc. Theyattribute meanings to documents and structurethese meanings – as facts, arguments and conclu-sions, and so on. Representing, processing andcommunicating structures and meanings in waysthat make these easily accessible to machineprocessing, so that users can easily access in-formation relevant to their needs, are key issuesfor informatics.Automated text-processing tools can tag parts

of speech and annotate grammatical links: theconnection between verb, subject and object; theconnection between a pronoun and the phrase itrefers to. Deeper linguistic processing can dis-ambiguate word senses. Such tools are compo-nents of natural-language understanding. Theyconvert texts into machine-accessible sources ofinformation and provide the basis for a variety ofinformation processing applications.For example, current document retrieval sys-

tems, using keyword search, allow users to finddocuments that are relevant to their needs, butmost leave it to the user to extract the usefulinformation from those documents. Users, how-ever, are often looking for answers, not docu-ments. Information extraction tools, based onnatural-language understanding, find and extractinformation from texts. Such tools, already used,by intelligence analysts and others, to siftthrough large amounts of textual information,will become commonplace. document cluster-ing is another application that draws on natural-language technology. By examining patterns ofword occurrences, together with syntactic andsemantic structures, it is possible to clusterdocuments by topic or to search for documentssimilar to a given example.Automated natural-language generation is also

being applied, to new forms of informationdelivery. Machine-generated text can be used topresent information tailored to the user (Ober-lander et al. 1998). Such tools will be applied topresent information derived from database

queries, information extraction and data mining.Tools for document clustering will be linked tonatural-language generation to provide automa-tically generated summaries drawing on a varietyof sources.Natural-language processing is one example

demonstrating the way in which informaticsrelates to longer-established disciplines. It relieson computer science for underlying software andhardware technologies, and for algorithms thatmake this processing feasible. It draws on logicand linguistics for appropriate representations oflinguistic and semantic structures, on machine-learning techniques from artificial intelligence fortools that extract from large text corpora in-formation on the words and concepts relevant fora particular domain, and on cognitive scienceand psychology for an understanding of howpeople process and react to information.These disciplines are drawn together, in infor-

matics, by the common purpose of understandinghow language can communicate informationbetween human users and a formal representa-tion stored in a machine. This marriage ofcomputational and theoretical linguistics withcognitive psychology and neuroscience has gener-ated new tools, and has also thrown new light onhuman communication.It is clear that information, and hence infor-

matics, must play a pivotal role in any analysis ofhuman communication. Informatics is also trans-forming other areas of science: it provides a newparadigm for analysing complex systems, ascompositions of simpler subsystems that processand communicate information. Long-standingchallenges to scientific analyses, are being trans-formed by the new paradigm. For example, inbiology, informatics provides not just tools fordata-processing and knowledge discovery, butalso a conceptual framework for studying theinformation stored and communicated by genesand processed by biochemical cycles that ‘run thegenetic program’ to produce structure and form.In cognitive science it provides the conceptual

tools needed to develop models of the connectionbetween cognition and the observed structureand function of the billions of neurons that makeup the brain. It also provides the technologiesthat allow us to observe and analyse the structureand operation of the living brain in ever greaterdetail and to test our models by simulation ofvery much simplified subsystems which, despite

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their relative simplicity, are complex beyondanalytical analysis.

Looking forward

The technologies underlying the digital storage,processing and communication of informationare improving relentlessly. Since 1965 these im-provements have followed ‘Moore’s Law’: for agiven price, both processor speeds and memorycapacity double every 18–24 months (Moore1965). Communication bandwidth follows asimilar pattern of growth, but doubles in 12months or less (Poggio 2000). These rates ofexponential growth are predicted to continue,and so processing speed and memory capacitywill increase by a factor of 100, and communica-tion bandwidth by a factor of 1000 or more,every ten years.The combination of digitization and global

connectivity makes data available in unprece-dented volume. It is estimated that humanitycreates more than an exabyte of data each year(Lyman and Varian 2000). Nevertheless, it willsoon be technologically possible for an averageperson to access virtually all recorded informa-tion. The availability of cheap processing willmake it increasingly feasible to restructure datainto knowledge on demand. New technologiesare being developed to automatically organizethis material into forms that can help peoplesatisfy their information needs quickly and accu-rately, realizing, and even surpassing, Vannevarbush’s prescient vision of the ‘Memex’ – ‘adevice in which an individual stores all his orher books, records and communications, andwhich is mechanized so that it may be consultedwith exceeding speed and flexibility’ (Bush1945). These technologies are indeed ‘creating anew relationship between thinking man and thesum of our knowledge’.By 2025, if Moore’s law continues to apply,

we will have, in our pockets and on our desk-tops, computers that each have the raw comput-ing power of the human brain, computers linkedto each other by a telepathic communicationnetwork. We currently have little idea of howwe might structure and program such devices toachieve what we humans find straightforward,but already today’s machines extend our capabil-ities by performing tasks we find impossible. Wecan be sure that technological changes willcontinue to revolutionize the ways we manage,

share and analyse data, and will provide newways of transforming data into information andknowledge.

References

Bauer, W.F. (1996) ‘Informatics and (et) informatique’,Annals of the History of Computing 18(2) (http://www.softwarehistory.org/history/Bauer1.html).

Berners-Lee, T. (1998) Semantic Web Roadmap (http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.html).

Bush, V. (1945) ‘As we may think’, Atlantic Monthly176(1) (July): 101–8 (http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.html).

Dreyfus, P. (1962) ‘L’informatique’, Gestion, Paris, Juin1962, pp. 240–1.

Frieden, B.R. (1998) Physics from Fisher Information: aUnification, Cambridge University Press.

Google (2002) (http://www.google.com/search?q=informatics).

Gorn, S. (1983) ‘Informatics (computer and informa-tion science): Its ideology, methodology, and sociol-ogy’, in F. Machlup and U. Mansfield (eds) TheStudy of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages, pp.121–40.

Greenes, R.A. and Shortliffe, E.H. (1990) ‘Medicalinformatics: an emerging discipline with academicand institutional perspectives’, Journal of the Amer-ican Medical Association 263(8): 1114–20.

Lesk, M. (1997) How Much Information Is There Inthe World? (http://www.lesk.com/mlesk/ksg97/ksg.html).

Lyman, P. and Varian, H. (2000) ‘How much informa-tion?’, The Journal of Electronic Publishing 6(2)(http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/06-02/lyman.html).

Machlup, F. and Mansfield, U. (eds) (1983) The Studyof Information: Interdisciplinary Messages, JohnWiley & Sons.

Mikhailov, A.I., Chernyl, A.I. and Gilyarevskii, R.S.(1966) ‘Informatika – novoe nazvanie teorii naunojinformacii’, Naučno tehničeskaja informacija 12:35–9.

—— (1967) ‘Informatics – new name for the theory ofscientific information’, FID News Bull. 17(2): 70–4.

Moore, G.E. (1965) ‘Cramming more components ontointegrated circuits’, Electronics 38(8): 114–17 (http://www.intel.com/research/silicon/moorespaper.pdf).

Oberlander, J., O’Donnell, M., Knott, A. and Mellish,C. (1998) ‘Conversation in the museum: experimentsin dynamic hypermedia with the intelligent labelingexplorer’, New Review of Hypermedia and Multi-media 4: 11–32.

Oxford English Dictionary (1989) second edition,Oxford University Press.

Poggio, A. (2000) ‘Information and products’, inEnglebart’s Colloquium, The Unfinished Revolution(Stanford http://www.bootstrap.org/colloquium/session_10/session_10_poggio.jsp).

Further reading

Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) web-site (www.aclweb.org/).

Cole, Ron et al. (eds) (1998) Survey of the State of the

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Art in Human Language Technology, Studies inNatural Language Processing, Cambridge UniversityPress; ISBN: 0521592771 (http://cslu.cse.ogi.edu/HLTsurvey).

Cover, Robin (ed.) (2002) XML Cover Pages (www.oasis-open.org/cover/sgml-xml.html).

Graves, J.R. and Corcoran, S. (1989) ‘The study ofnursing informatics’, Image: Journal of NursingScholarship 21: 227–31 (www.nih.gov/ninr/research/vol4/Overview.html).

Martin, W.J. (1988) The Information Society, London:ASLIB.

Musen, Mark A. (1999) ‘Stanford medical informatics:Uncommon research, common goals’, MD Comput-ing (January/February): 47–50 (http://camis.stanford.edu/MDComputing.pdf).

Shortliffe, E.H., Perreault, L.E., Wiederhold, G. andFagan, L.M. (1990) Medical Informatics: ComputerApplications in Health Care, Addison-Wesley.

Social Informatics (www.slis.indiana.edu/si/concepts.html).

Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) (http://trec.nist.gov/).

SEE ALSO: artificial intelligence; communication;computer science; database; databasemanagement systems; Human–Computerinteraction; hypertext; indexing; information andcommunication technology; informationretrieval; information science; informationsystems; knowledge management; knowledge-based companies; machine translation; mark-uplanguages; metadata; neural network; relationaldatabase; search engines; software; stringindexing; World Wide Web

MICHAEL P. FOURMAN

INFORMATION

Information is data that has been processed intoa meaningful form. Seen in this way, informationis an assemblage of data in a comprehensibleform capable of communication and use; theessence of it is that a meaning has been attachedto the raw facts. The conceptual distinctionbetween information and knowledge is thereforerather unclear, although the two terms tend to beused in somewhat different contexts. Increas-ingly, information is the word that is applied inthe broad professional and technical contextrepresented in such phrases as ‘informationtechnology’ or ‘information retrieval’ or ‘infor-mation management’. It is thus used in a generalsense to encompass all the different ways ofrepresenting facts, events and concepts in both

digital and analogue systems, and in all mediaand formats.

INFORMATION ANDCOMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY

The term is used here to describe the design andapplications of systems and equipment for ex-changing data by electrical means between twoor more stations. There are now many kinds oftelecommunication networks used for a diverserange of purposes.

Major events in the history ofcommunications technology

In 1747 William Watson, using a crude electricalgenerator, showed that electricity could be con-ducted along a wire 2 miles long.The first transatlantic cable of gutta-percha-

insulated copper strands was completed in 1858.A ninety word message, sent by Queen Victoriato President Buchanan, which took over an hourto be correctly received, cost about £600 attoday’s prices.Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, invented

in 1876, was constructed from a diaphragm ofgold-beaters skin that moved under the control ofa soft iron armature fixed to its centre whencurrent flowed through an adjacent electromag-net. The circuit was completed by a battery andanother similar telephone.Eventually very large ‘ptts’ were formed to

supply reliable almost unchanging telephoneservice that called for a large capital investment,but advancing technology eroded their founda-tions. PTTs were not well suited to adopting newtechnology – one reason why organizational andregulatory changes to the Packet Switched Tele-phone Network (PSTN) were put in hand inmany countries.Two post-war events initiated major advances

in communication technology. They were thepublication of shannon’s seminal paper and theintroduction of the transistor a few years later.The transistor and the later development ofintegrated circuits enabled complex technologyand coding development to proceed in thedirection of achieving the theoretical channelcapacity.The lack of inexpensive wideband channels is

a major constraint. In ascending order of cost,

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electrical communication channels are formedfrom copper pairs, coaxial cable, optical fibreand satellite links. Fibre, satellite and wirelesschannels have the widest bandwidth.In 1991 – nearly 250 years after Watson’s

experiment – the internet became available tothe general public. Telecommunications thenentered a new epoch.

Data transmission

A basic electrical communication system consistsof a source, an interconnecting communicationschannel and a sink. Often a similar source/sinkdevice is used serving either as a transmitter or asa receiver at both ends of the channel. In such asystem ‘communication’ is normally synonymouswith ‘telecommunication’.The data signalling method may be analogue,

where the signal varies in proportion to thesource data – the method adopted when thetelephone system was designed. Alternatively itmay be digital, where data is sent as codedsequences of signal impulses, the code may beread and processed by a computer, and thesignals are less likely to be confused with noise.These and other advantages now usually makedigital transmission the preferred choice.A general requirement when data is to be sent

and received using the human senses is to workat a rate corresponding to the human assimila-tion rate. When the telephone network, thePSTN, is used for its designed purpose – theexchange of speech signals – its bandwidth,about 2.5 KHz, is adequate for the purpose. Butmethods have been devised for using it for datatransmission. In this case a modem (MOdulatorDEModulator) is used at either end of the line toconvert generated or received signals into a formsuitable for transmission or reception.

MODEMS

Modems are available that will work at speeds upto the limits imposed by the transmission channel.Almost all small computers are fitted with mod-ems these days, enabling them to be plugged into atelephone line to exchange data with other ma-chines. See also the Standards section below. Thedata rate limit is much higher than appears to bethe case from the telephone network’s perfor-mance for speech transmission. A simplified ex-planation of how this is achieved is explained in alater section headed Channel capacity.

Current modem developments have been to-wards new compression systems, sophisticatedmodulation schemes with more bits per symbol,improved methods of error correction and theaddition of functions such as telephone answer-ing machine control. The complexity required forthese functions is embodied in mass-producedchips so prices have dropped. Modem chip setsare now available to provide a wide range ofperformance alternatives and different functions.Slightly increased prices have been accompaniedby far higher speeds so transmission time costshave dropped substantially.

CompressionOne way of increasing the data rate is tocompress the transmitted data, pass the reducedamount of data through the transmission link,and decompress it before use at the receivingpoint. The time taken and transmission costs willbe reduced. A form of data compression wasintroduced by Samuel Morse who noted the sizeof the stocks of letters and hence their frequencyof occurrence, when visiting a local printinghouse. He designed the Morse code accordinglywith E as ‘.’ and Q as ‘_ _ . _’. This generalprinciple is still used, but the modern equivalentis ‘run length coding’ where long strings ofbinary noughts and ones are represented by shortcodes.Compression is particularly useful for colour

picture data where there may be large areas –such as blue sky – where the repeated transmis-sion of single picture elements (pixel) may bereplaced by a code indicating that the same datarepeated per pixel may be replaced by aninstruction ‘keep repeating a blue pixel untilfurther notice’.This, and other methods of taking advantage

of redundancy – data that may be omitted with-out appreciably reducing the information content– can be very effective. There is a marked trendtowards greater use of images particularly overthe Internet. Dial-up access without data com-pression is slow; a wideband channel withcompression the fastest. For example it wouldtake twenty-three minutes to send an uncom-pressed 24-bit 1,600 � 1,200 pixel colour pictureat 33 Kilobits per second (Kbps) over the PSTN.The same picture compressed twenty times andsent over a high-speed leased line at 25 Mbpswould take 0.09 seconds. Motion video picturesrequire yet more bandwidth because while a few

INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY 245

seconds may be tolerable before a still picturecan be viewed, delays in reproducing the se-quence of picture frames required to displaymotion need to be very small.

CHANNEL CAPACITY

Nyquist showed in 1928 that the maximumpossible signalling rate in a communicationchannel with a bandwidth W is 2W. If thebandwidth of a telephone channel is 2.5 KHz amaximum signalling rate of 5,000 elements persecond is possible. If one signalling element isconveyed as a simple ‘on-off’ function, containsone unit of data, or bit, and the channel is usedfor data transmission, the maximum rate is 5,000bps (bits per second).The transmission rate may be increased by

representing the number of bits per signallingelement as different power levels of the element.The receiver then has to distinguish betweenthose different values in the presence of noise(random impulses present in all communicationchannels) instead of simply having to detectwhether the signal power is ‘on’ or ‘off’. Furtherincreases in bit rates require a large number ofsmall changes in signal power that becomecomparable with noise level changes, and biterrors become likely.The adequacy of a noisy channel for transport-

ing data – the channel capacity – was defined byShannon in 1948. Shannon devised an equationfor calculating the capacity (C) of a givenchannel taking account of its bandwidth, signalpower and noise level. ‘C’ represents the amountof data that a channel can carry at somearbitrarily small error rate. Since ideal codingcannot be realized, very small, but not zero, errorrates are achievable. The Shannon equationrepresents a performance yardstick and indicateshow one parameter may be traded for another.Bandwidth – the range of frequencies that achannel will accommodate – is related to the bitrate of data.

Applied channel capacityThe PSTN provides an entry point into custo-mers’ premises. When used for data transmissionthe bit rate may be increased by introducing theIntegrated Services Digital Network – likely to besuperseded by ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Sub-scriber Loop) proposed by Valenti from Bellresearch in 1991. ADSL embodies methods toraise channel capacity by frequency-response

equalization and noise-reducing multi-subchannelmodulation to reduce the effect of cross-talk,interference and impulsive noise. Each of thenumerous subchannels accommodates as manybits as noise allows.The data rate could be up to two megabits per

second (Mbps) or more for over 90 per cent ofthe ‘local loop’ in the UK. About forty-two pagesper second of typical text would be transmittedat this rate, compared with about 1.35 pages persecond over a 64 Kbps ISDN channel. Toincrease transmission rates still further, leasedlines having a wider bandwidth than the PSTNare available. They may employ coaxial cable, orfibre-optic cable (see fibre-optics) of yet greaterbandwidth. Such lines are used by cable televi-sion companies for transporting television sig-nals. Many subscribers are connected to cableTV in industrialized countries. Cable companiesmay also use downstream ‘wireless’ transmissionbroadcasting, to avoid cable-laying. Distribu-tion via wide bandwidth satellite channels isanother possibility. Different upstream paths forboth of these systems via a different medium –e.g. telephone line – are usually necessary.The rate of connection of affordable data

transmission channels to data users has beenmuch slower than the development of the meansof creating and receiving large volumes of data –particularly image data. Images in colour are ingeneral use on Internet sites for sales purposes, tomake the sites more interesting and attractive,and quite frequently in order to increase informa-tion content and presentation by adopting visua-lization techniques. The telephone system hasbeen pressed into service for the purpose, forwhich it was not designed. Attempts are beingmade to extend the system’s capacity as alreadymentioned.

Techno-political issues

DEREGULATION

The first major global application of communica-tions technology was the PSTN – still the mostwidely used system for data transmission.Although this article is about technology, some-thing must be said about the associated politicsthat has had such a strong effect on the course ofits development.Nearly all countries originally chose a con-

trolled monopoly to administer the system butthe copper cable ‘local loop’ or ‘last mile’ part of

246 INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY

it from exchanges out to customers is a severedata bottleneck. The telephone network is ubi-quitous. The number of globally connected loca-tions is enormous – in 1990 it was estimated thatnearly 1,000 million telephones were in use –indicating far more connections than for anyother type of network. It is owned by theincumbent monopolies – the Post, Telegraph andTelephone (PTT) administrations – and repre-sents a huge investment. PTT operations changevery slowly. Governments or their agencies haveset about monopoly deregulation. Deregulationstarted in the USA, and was gradually taken upby the UK and then Europe in the belief thatcompetitive services would stimulate change. InAugust 1993 there was an EC White Paper forGrowth followed by plans submitted in June1994 by commissioner Bangemann to liberalizetelecommunications by 1998. The reforms pro-posed by the Commission are slowly beingadopted.

POLITICAL ISSUES AND THE LOCAL LOOP

Higher speeds are realizable over the phonenetwork by adopting ADSL. ‘Unbundling’ (en-abling competition) of the local loop has beendecreed by the telecommunications regulator.The attitude of the FCC (Federal CommunicationCommission) in the USA might affect UK users.It is believed that if ever there was an optimaltime to build a new local loop that time is now.However, federal policy and industry dictateotherwise.Telecommunications policy in the UK does not

run smoothly. The politics of the local loop arean important current issue. The charges levied bythe largest service provider (BT) are perceived tobe high, and slow access to exchanges needed byADSL competitors has discouraged progress. BTearns revenue from its wideband leased linesavailable for private rental. After the regulatoryagency, OFTEL, was asked to investigate prices,it concluded that they were reasonable, but afterthe investigation BT reduced the rental charge forsome of their lines by 75 per cent. It wasreported that BT had extended the range ofADSL outwards from its exchanges. BT was alsoasked by OFTEL to reduce the annual ADSLrental it charges competitors. It cut it by half. Itis hoped that the UK will now no longer be oneof the slowest countries in Europe to adoptADSL.There is another way of bypassing the local

loop. AT&T thought about introducing radio(‘wireless’) connections in 1997 but did notpursue the idea. In 2000 a US company calledTerabeam proposed to do it using diffuse laserbeams. Cable also has possibilities – using theservices of a local telecommunications companythat may have lower access and line rentalcharges than the major national and internationalproviders.

FIBRE-OPTICS

Fibre-optics was invented in England by Kao andHockham at STC in 1966 but it was the UScompany Corning who exploited the invention.Fibre-optic cables are in widespread use for long-distance communications. In 1988 a UK advisorycouncil (ACOST) proposed that a very largeinvestment should be made to construct a nation-wide fibre-optic network. A refusal was followedby a report from a House of Commons commit-tee that said that this was a golden opportunitymissed.As speeds have increased so has the use of

fibre-optic interconnecting cable. For FDDI – theFibre Distributed Data Interface – an AmericanStandard (ANSI) X3T9.5 was agreed in 1990 foroperations at up to 100 Mbps. A particularrequirement is the connection of LANs, whichmay be working at relatively slow bit rates, to aninterconnecting fibre main ‘backbone’ cable forfast transmission over relatively long distances.FDDI stations use cheap Light-Emitting

Diodes (LEDs) for the transmitting element andPIN Field Effect Transistors (PINFETs) for recep-tion. An FDDI network contains two contra-rotating rings for increased reliability.The replacement of the narrowband exchange-

to-customer cable – the ‘Local Loop’ discussedearlier – by a wideband fibre-optic cable wouldenable transmission speeds through this majorpart of the telephone network to be greatlyincreased.In 1989 it was claimed that all-fibre systems

had arrived but connections between remoteterminals and subscribers’ homes remainedtwisted pair. But more than a dozen manufac-turers were said to be developing equipment toreplace this final kilometre.Ten years later fibre to the home remains a

controversial subject that has not fulfilled theearlier optimism. From 1998 onwards contra-dictory opinions rather than news of large-scaleinstallations seem to have been the rule. It was


then believed that solving the last-mile problemfor electrical signals by cost-effective all-opticalsystems would remain elusive for many years.The magazine Fiber Exchange carried an articlethat illustrated the ongoing controversy: ‘Manyforecasters think fiber to the home and businesswon’t be a significant market for another three tofive years.’ Companies in the business think thisis wrong and ‘claim they have the customerinterest to prove it’.

Standards and protocols

A standard is an attempt to establish a set ofrecommendations to be agreed between partici-pants so that information may be exchangedwithout the introduction of incompatible systemproblems. A protocol is a set of standardizedrules for conducting telecommunications traffic.The CCITT division of the International Tele-

communications Union (ITU known as the ‘ITUStandardization Sector’ since March 1993) andthe Bell Telephone Company made ‘recommen-dations’ independently in the early days, butlatterly international standards have been set bythe CCITT/ITU. For many years a ‘standard’called RS232 (adopted by the CCITT as V24)sufficed to describe the interconnections betweenterminal and modem. It is still widely used.Modems usually conform to ‘V series’ CCITT

standards so that any pair of modems having thesame V number should work together. Perfor-mance advances include higher speeds (over thePSTN in particular), compression, error correc-tion and lower prices. Higher speeds are mainlyachieved by data compression and working atmore bits per baud; susceptibility to noise in-creases accordingly. Error correction reduces theeffects of noise. Compression enables more dataper bit to be transported.Most error detecting/correcting systems are

based on the automatic addition of extra bits toa block of a given number of data bits at thetransmitter to enable a checking procedure to becarried out at the receiver. When an error hasbeen detected, the offending sequence of data bitswill be automatically corrected at the receiver, or(in simpler systems) the receiver will demand aretransmission of the offending sequence.The difficulties caused by incompatibilities

between different computers attempting to inter-communicate prompted the open systems inter-connection (OSI) model that was agreed upon

with great difficulty in the period 1976 to 1986.Information from a sender is presented to arecipient exactly in the manner intended by thesender, regardless of machines, software or enroute variations. It requires that a user’s sourcedata be accompanied by control data, put therepreferably automatically, in the expectation ofencountering a number of ‘managing’ devicesalong the way to deal with particular functions,each device reading the segment of data ad-dressed to it. Each takes the appropriate actionto route onward the unchanged message. Finally,the terminating device must be able to interpretthe instructions addressed to it so that themessage is correctly reproduced.IBM’s SNA (Systems Network Architecture),

with at least 20,000 users – among them beingthe largest organizations in the world – was wellestablished before the OSI proposals. In 1984 adeal was negotiated between IBM and the EC.IBM agreed to publish details of their SNAprotocols. In 1988 IBM announced its supportfor OSI and later included OSI-compatible pro-tocols within its Systems Applications Architec-ture (SAA).The Transmission Control Protocol/Internet

Protocol (TCP/IP) was introduced in the 1970sby the US Department of Defense for the samereasons that OSI was introduced in Europe. TCP/IP has the same objectives as in the OSI model butthe complexity of OSI, and the availability ofready-to-use TCP/IP systems, reduced OSI’schances of widespread adoption. The remarkablegrowth of the Internet with a very large number ofusers the world over has resulted in the adoptionof TCP/IP in spite of European ambitions todevelop a specifically European Internet sup-ported by European standards.

Networks and systems

INTRODUCTION AND TYPES

A telecommunications network is a system con-sisting of communicating devices, such as term-inals, an interconnecting medium, such as cable,and a means of establishing paths through themedium. networks cater for people with infor-mation-intensive occupations, establishing com-municating paths through the medium betweencommunicating devices. The main driving forceshave been the arrival of compact, powerful,cheap technology and the need for business‘communications’.


The network needs to be transparent so thatmessages may be exchanged with users unawareof the complexity of the intervening medium andof the routing procedure. When one user com-municates with another in a different organiza-tion, say overseas, using equipment and networkssupplied by a different manufacturer, the objec-tive of standards is that, in spite of thesedifferences, messages may be satisfactorily ex-changed.

Network types include:

Enterprise Network – a general-purpose networkof any type within a large organization.

Information Superhighway (see below).

Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) – anetwork that provides end-to-end digitalconnectivity to support a wide range ofservices, including voice and non-voice, towhich users have access via a limited set ofstandard multipurpose interfaces. There are‘Basic Rate Access’ (2 � 64 Kbps ‘B’channels for data or voice) or Primary RateAccess (30 B þ 1 Data channel (Europe), 23B þ 1 D channel (USA)). The re-laying ofcables from subscribers to local exchanges isnot necessary since the system has thenecessary bandwidth.

Internet – a global publicly accessible network(see below).

Local Area Network (LAN: see also below) – ashort-distance network designed for dataexchange between terminals and computers.A network adaptor card in the terminal isrequired. It contains the necessary inter-mediate components that work with ‘driver’software – that is, software designed towork with the network being used – oftento IEEE standards in order to satisfactorilyconnect the machine to the network.

Metropolitan-Area Network (MAN) – a ‘SuperLAN’ fibre-optic ring operating at 10 Mbpsor more over an area of about 50 Kms.

Mobile Network (see below).

Wide-Area Network (WAN) – any type of long-distance network.

Wireless Local-Area LAN (WLAN) – a WLANcontains access points to the network usinga spread spectrum radio link connectingusers up to about 300 metres away orinfrared connection points for line-of-sightusers. Spread spectrum involves hopping

between a number of frequencies duringcommunication.

LAN OPERATING PRINCIPLES

The most popular LAN systems in use today areEthernet and Token Ring.Ethernet, a LAN Contention system, uses

Carrier Sense Multiple Access with CollisionDetection (CSMA/CD) transmission. Messagedata travel in packets round a single cable andare captured only by the station to which theyare addressed. All stations listen and only trans-mit when the cable is clear. In the event of twostations transmitting at once, one or other jamsthe network, waits for a period of time ofrandom length and then tries again.In Token Ring systems, supported by IBM and

others, empty data packets circulate and a stationwanting to transmit detects one, enters an ad-dress and data, and empties the packet afterreception when it next comes round. All stationsexamine all packets, accepting only those ad-dressed to them.

NETWORK INTERCONNECTIONS

Several types of devices and software are in use.A router interconnects networks that use

identical protocols. It can handle several connec-tion paths and adopts those with the lowest costpaths.A brouter is a router that includes some of the

functions performed by a bridge.A bridge is used to connect networks with

dissimilar protocols. Bridge functions have beensubstantially increased and some will connectLANs to WANs and manage traffic patterns.A gateway is the most sophisticated of the

interconnecting devices. It is used to interconnecttwo networks with different architectures andmay have to handle different protocols. It couldbe used, for example, to interconnect a networkrunning on an IBM protocol, and another run-ning on a non-IBM protocol.

THE INTERNET

In 1991 the Internet became available commer-cially as an extension of its use by the researchdepartments of corporations under a generalagreement of use for research and educationalpurposes. As early as 1993, domains, such asdepartments within a company, containing 5.5million people having electronic mail ad-


dresses, were searchable. One of today’s esti-mates puts the number of Internet pages at 550billion worldwide. The efficiency of the softwareused by the search engine Google (see searchengines), and the scale of operations, is demon-strated by a search. Google took 0.3 seconds tofind the 26,000 pages containing the phrase‘Internet Growth’ out of the 1,388 million pagesof the World Wide Web – a major part of theInternet – which it covers (August 2001).There have been three phases of Internet

activities – the research phase (up to the mid-1980s), the academic club phase (mid-1980s toearly 1990s) and the public communicationsphase (early 1990s onwards). Valovic, formerlyeditor of Telecommunications Magazine, writes:‘up to 1991 the Internet was the world’s bestkept secret as a behind the scenes academicnetwork’. But then there was ‘a breakthroughthat was going to massively transform commu-nications and most other areas of human endea-vour including business, education, science andentertainment’ (Valovic 2000) This comment isnot an exaggeration. According to Odlyzco, headof mathematics research at AT&T laboratories,Internet backbone traffic is doubling every year(Odlyzco 2000).

THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY

The objective of an Information Superhighway isto provide a global universal telecommunicationnetwork to provide entertainment and informa-tion. In September 1993 the Clinton administra-tion in the USA published a nine-point agenda toencourage the construction of the highway. ThisWhite House agenda aimed to ensure that itwould be available to all at affordable prices.Vice President Gore broadened the concept to aGlobal International Infrastructure in the hopethat all governments would join in. We must‘work toward our goal of connecting every class-room, library, hospital, and clinic to the NII bythe year 2000’, said Gore (Gore 1994).A project of this kind is likely to be con-

strained by:

. Existing telecom regulatory conditions.

. Interconnecting existing disparate networks.

. Developing inexpensive easy-to-use televisionset top boxes for service selection and userinteraction.

. Copyright problems.

. Supply of risk capital.

. Uncertainty about information service needsand markets.

. Standardization requirements.

. The formation of alliances between competi-tive suppliers.

. Change inhibited by lifestyle and expenditurepatterns.

THE GRID OF LEARNING

The Superhighway idea burned brightly for atime but it became overshadowed by the successof the Internet’s world wide web (WWW) andby less generalized networks. In fact the WWW isnow often called the Information Superhighway.The arrival of a new UK government in 1997prompted several proposals from departments oragencies for data highways. Suggestions for NewLibraries, People’s Networks and ‘Grids ofLearning’ were made. Schools, public librariesand a ‘University for Industry’ would be inter-connected. The purpose of the system would beto bring about ‘revolutionary changes’ thatwould provide:

[U]ndreamed of increases in the quantity andquality of detailed information and knowl-edge. . .an information superhighway whichshould not just benefit the affluent.. . .by 2002all schools, colleges, universities and libraries,and as many community centres as possibleshould be connected to the Grid.

Most of the costs, totalling about £500 million,would be incurred over a five-year period.

JANET and SuperJANETThe UK possesses an inter-university high-speednetwork with overseas connections called Super-JANET – originally established as the JointAcademic Network (JANET), an X25 packet-switched network. It interconnected several ma-jor packet-switching exchanges in the UK, whichin turn connected to a number of universities andresearch establishments. It was soon upgraded towork at 2 Megabits per second (Mbps) over mostof its links.Established by the Computer Board in 1984,

by 1990 over 130 institutions were connected toit and to the Internet using the TCP/IP protocol.JANET users are not charged for access, althoughthey may be charged by some of its availableservices. The network was used by librariesmainly for calling up another library’s Online


Public-Access Catalogue (about 50 opacs wereconnected), for document requests via the BritishLibrary’s ARTtel document delivery service orfor connecting to the International PacketSwitched Service (IPSS) and accessing onlinedatabases. Library networking is widely used,encouraged by the UK Office for Library Net-working at the University of Bath.SuperJANET was first discussed in 1989, and

in 1992 British Telecom was awarded a contractto provide and operate this new fibre-opticnetwork working at up to 622 Mbps. Super-JANET first used the Asynchronous TransferMode (ATM) protocol – agreed between theCCITT and ANSI for fast switching over futurewideband networks. ATM uses a packet-switch-ing technology that can handle streams of databoth at constant bit rates, such as audio andvideo data, and at variable bit rates. In mid-2001SuperJANET 4 was introduced – a substantialadvance – using the IP protocol. It consists ofloops running at 2.5 Gbps interconnecting majorcities with further connections out to Metropoli-tan-Area Networks. By mid-2002 the backbonewill be uprated to run at 10 Gbps or 20 Gbps.Work is also in progress to develop the Grid ofLearning system over the SuperJANET network.Meanwhile the rate of transmission over links tothe USA has been increased to 930 Mbps.

Mobile communication systems and devicesSince 2000, there have been rapid developmentsin mobile communications. Major players –mainly telephone incumbent organisations – havehad to pay very large sums of money for rights touse suitable parts of the frequency spectrum, ascarce resource under governmental control. Inthe UK, Vodafone, BT and others paid out over£22 billion. In Belgium three bidders paid theminimum possible amount of 150 million euros.A fourth available licence was not sold. Licenseesbelieve that there will be a huge increase in thenumbers of users, although some of the compa-nies that bought expensive licences have sincefound themselves in financial difficulties. Therehas already been a very large take-up by con-sumers who very quickly see the value of whatthey are willing to pay for a particular service.Perhaps this last comment does not apply toparents who pay for their children’s exchange oftext messages – a major application.GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) is a

faster version that transfers data in packets, to

be followed by UMTS (Universal Mobile Tele-communications Service) – a high-quality globalservice network for mobiles in which a take-everywhere terminal, usable in all environments,public and private, is used. It is claimed thatUMTS will enable high-quality broadband infor-mation commerce and entertainment services atdata rates of up to 2 Mbps.WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) is a

global open-standard protocol for use directlybetween hand-held devices without the need for aseparate computer. It will enable portable com-puters to access the Internet.An intercompany intermachine initiative called

Bluetooth has been developed for special services– for instance between users’ digital cameras. Theservice operates at low power but at high bitrates. It is claimed that it may become anintegrated part of company IT systems.

The outlook

By August 2001, the hitherto steady growth ofinformation and telecommunication technologyand their applications was overshadowed byseveral problems. The economic downturnseemed to have started with the collapse ofInternet companies following unrealistic opti-mism and investment. Deregulation in the USAencouraged competition that has increased be-yond the capacity of markets to support newentries. Frequency spectrum auctions required byorganizations for their third-generation mobileservices have prompted borrowing on a largescale.It has been estimated that accumulated debt in

the telecommunications sector may now be atleast $250 billion. At the end of July 2001, JDS,a very large supplier of optical and other com-munication components in the USA, lost over$50 billion in the year ending June and an-nounced huge job cuts. This enormous lossfollowed losses reported by several other well-known companies such as Nortel (nearly $20million in the second quarter of the year) andVodafone (over $8 billion in a full year). Finan-cial problems at Marconi (GEC renamed) and BThave been well publicized. Corning – a majorsupplier of fibre-optic cable and components –expected 2001 demand to be half that of the year2000.No doubt the area will continue to grow as

before but the above-mentioned near-recession


may last for some time. Larger organizations willsurvive but a number of smaller companies willnot.

References

Gore, A. (1994) ‘Innovation delayed is innovationdenied’, Computer 27: 45–7.

Nyquist, H. (1928) ‘Certain topics in telegraph trans-mission theory’, Transactions of the American In-stitute of Electrical Engineers 47: 617–44.

Odlyzco, A. (2000) ‘Internet growth: Myth and reality,use and abuse’, IMP Magazine: 1–9.

Shannon, C.E. (1948) ‘A mathematical theory of com-munication’, Bell System Technical Journal 27: 379–423, 623–56.

Valovic, T. (2000) Digital Mythologies: The HiddenComplexities of the Internet, Rutgers UniversityPress.

Further reading

Cawkell, T. (1997) ‘The information superhighway: Areview of some determining factors’, Journal ofInformation Science 23: 187–208.

Vetter, R. J., Spell, C. and Ward, C. (1995) ‘Mosaic andthe World-Wide Web’, Computer 27: 49–57.

SEE ALSO: communication; European Unioninformation policies; informatics; informationpolicy; information society; information systems

TONY CAWKELL

INFORMATION AND REFERRALSERVICE

Describes the active mode of information service,of the type traditionally provided by speciallibraries. The attention of users is drawn toinformation held by the library or informationagency in anticipation of demands they mightmake. Preparation and circulation of news-sheets, literature surveys, reading lists, abstracts,etc. are used for this purpose, and in cases wherethe immediate resources of the service are in-sufficient users will be referred to specialistorganizations for further help.

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

Designing, organizing, labelling and creating sitemaps, content inventories and navigationsystems for websites and intranets to helppeople find and manage information more suc-cessfully. Two main approaches can be distin-

guished: top-down, which focuses initially on theinformation content, and bottom-up, which takesuser needs as the starting point. The term isolder than the world wide web, having beencoined in 1976 by Richard Saul Wurman as thetitle of a conference in Philadelphia. He subse-quently began to call himself an InformationArchitect.

Further reading

Rosenfeld, L. and Morville, P. (1998) InformationArchitecture for the World Wide Web: DesigningLarge Scale Websites, O’Reilly.

INFORMATION AUDIT

(1) In its most precise sense an information auditis that process by which a physical verificationand examination of the total information assetswithin an organization takes place, to ensure thatinformation resources which have been acquiredby an organization can be accounted for andlocated. (2) It is now common practice to definethe information audit much more widely, toinclude the initial examination of resources asdescribed above, resulting in an inventory ofinformation resources, then building on that toexplore the way in which information flows, andknowledge is shared throughout an organiza-tion: the mechanisms and channels used, theinformation needs of the organization’s membersand the staffing requirement in terms of knowl-edge and skills to ensure that the organization’stotal intellectual capital is managed andexploited to maximum efficiency.

Aim and purpose

The information audit in its broadest sense isseen as a valuable management tool and part ofcontinuous management review to assist in theprocess of achieving maximum effectiveness ofinformation provision and use. Although ofteninstigated and conducted by library and informa-tion service (LIS) staff, it is not limited to theconsideration of LIS resources only. Its intentionis to establish the total information resource andknowledge base to which an organization and allits constituent parts have access, of which theycan make use and from which they can benefit.The information audit also offers a frameworkfrom which to develop a knowledge audit (Webb

252 INFORMATION AND REFERRAL SERVICE

1998). It aims to consider not only what in-formation is available, but also the means bywhich information and knowledge are gatheredand disseminated throughout the organization,the systems and procedures required for this andthe way in which such activities are managed andco-ordinated. The information audit can form thebase from which an organizational informationpolicy (see organizational information po-licies) can be developed (Orna 1999). It alsoprovides the platform for long-term LIS strategicplanning and service development.

Preparation and planning

What will be needed in advance of the audit itselfwill be a clear profile of the organization, itscurrent and planned activities and objectives,towards which any future information andknowledge management policy and operationcan be directed. Each organization will be differ-ent in terms of sector, activities, objectives,structure and management style, therefore theprofile will assist in the choice of audit methodsand techniques to be used; the design and contentof questionnaires and checklists, and the desiredmix of the user sample. Those conducting theaudit must identify precisely what it is necessaryto investigate, drawing up appropriate checklistsof items to be audited – for example, printedmaterials held such as books, journals, reportsand subject files; electronic sources such as bothinternal and external databases and networks;CD-ROMs; audiovisual material; and other non-print material. Checklists should also coverrelated equipment and systems in use, theirquantities and location. Questionnaires or inter-view schedules will have to be prepared at thisstage as the basis for subsequent user and usagesurveys, and consideration given to appropriatemethods of communication to be used. Decisionswill also be required on the amount and type ofoperational statistics required in support of thefinal analysis and recommendations.

The process

Following the initial planning, the first step in theinformation audit is to carry out a thoroughinvestigation of the information sources andrelated means of access and retrieval that existthroughout the organization. If this involvesarranging visits to other departments and offices,and discussion with individuals, then it is appro-

priate to combine this first step with the nextpart of the process, the information needs analy-sis (Webb 1996). This will consider the informa-tion each person needs in order to carry out theirwork effectively, what they currently use andwhere and how it is obtained, e.g. externally orinternally, through the LIS or from other depart-ments or sources. It could also provide details ofinformation and knowledge which that indivi-dual might contribute to the total organizationalresource. In addition there should be discussionof perceived future needs in terms of bothinformation and service provision, i.e. not onlywhat information is likely to be required butalso, for example, whether current awarenessservices would be helpful and what means ofinformation delivery would be most convenientto the user, e.g. print or electronic, general orspecific (e.g. via the LIS website or individuallydelivered).

Communication

Gathering this information requires some form ofuser survey, usually either by face-to-face inter-view or by the circulation of a questionnaire.Both methods should take as little of the user’stime as possible. This is likely to generate agreater response, as is adequate preparation andunderstanding by all those involved. The LISwebsite offers a useful means of publicizing theaudit and confirming the schedule. It would alsoprovide a channel for questionnaire delivery andpost-audit feedback. If the interview method ischosen, an outline of the structure with a check-list of questions should be drawn up by theperson who will be conducting it, and appoint-ments made with a cross-section of staff at alllevels and representative of all functions of theorganization. In order to ensure maximum co-operation from individuals and departments,appropriate communication of its objectives willneed to be made beforehand. The purpose andstyle of the investigation should be put forwardin positive terms, emphasizing the ultimate ben-efits and the value of the user’s participation,allowing adequate time for individuals to preparetheir response. When the audit has been com-pleted there should be feedback to those whohave participated as well as wider disseminationof the results to inform senior management,whose commitment will be essential to futuredevelopments.

INFORMATION AUDIT 253

Use and benefits

Information audits also involve reviews of sys-tems and procedures, analysis of operations,costing and budgetary reviews, and LIS stafftraining and development needs assessment.Where an organization is pursuing a qualitymanagement policy, the quality manuals andrelated procedures can act as a valuable sourceof reference, often suggesting new approachesand solutions to what might have been viewed aslongstanding problems.As a management technique the information

audit has a lot to offer, particularly if it is usedon a regular basis, rather than as a one-offactivity. It can act as a monitoring mechanism,providing regular feedback on the quality of boththe information itself and its provision; it willassist in short- and long-term financial andmanagement planning; it can help shape overallorganizational policy. To achieve this will involvesetting up follow-up procedures and activities toensure: continued two-way communication withusers; wider information sharing; ongoing staffdevelopment in terms of renewing skills andkeeping up to date in subject knowledge andsources, as well as in professional practice; andcontinuous awareness of and involvement in theactivities of the organization as a whole.

References

Orna, E. (1999) Practical Information Policies: How toManage Information Flow in Organizations, Alder-shot: Gower.

Webb, S.P. (1998) Knowledge Management: Linchpinof Change, London: ASLIB.

—— (1996) Creating an Information Service, 3rd edn,London: ASLIB.

Further reading

Thornton, S. (2000) ‘Information audits’, Chapter 5 inA. Scammell (ed.) Handbook of Information Man-agement, London: ASLIB.

SYLVIA P. WEBB

INFORMATION BROKER

A generic term used to describe individuals ororganizations selling a range of informationservices, of which information broking is one.Information broking is the sale of expertise indetermining the availability of information fromone or more sources, and delivering it in response

to a specific request. The information retrieved iscertifiable in an already published medium, andis not derived by the information broker throughprimary research. Information broking is not thecollecting of information for general dissemina-tion, nor does it involve any process that altersthe information itself. It is an intermediaryfunction that matches information to a requestfrom a third party, for a fee. An example ofinformation broking is the retrieval of documentsidentified from a literature search of online,CD-ROM or printed sources held in a private orpublic collection.

Problems of definition

The diverse and fragmented set of individualsand organizations that act as information brokersare constantly evolving and redefining the natureof their services. Consequently, informationbroking may be a greater or lesser activity thanthe provision of other information services andproducts, which can include information consul-tancy, the outsourcing of information and libraryservices, market research, publications, projectwork and seminars. In the UK, this situation hasresulted in the generic application of the terminformation broker to many varied organizationsand professionals that offer information servicesfor a fee, and which may or may not describethemselves as information brokers. Other titlesused include information consultant, fee-basedinformation service, business research centre,one-stop information shop and infomediary. Theindividuals and organizations acting as informa-tion brokers are considered to fall into twocategories. First, the independent individuals orfirms that set up in business specifically asinformation brokers are characterized by somecommentators as being the ‘pure’ informationbrokers (Wolff-Terroine 1992), and in the USAmake up the group of practitioners for whom theterm ‘information broker’ is reserved (Johnson1994). Second, the term ‘fee-based informationservice’ (see fee-based services) has a popularapplication to information brokerages operatingout of larger privately or publicly owned organi-zations (Crawford 1988). These include informa-tion organizations, professional associations,government organizations, national libraries,academic libraries, public libraries, chambers ofcommerce, etc. Wolff-Terroine (1992) reportsthat in Europe use of the term information

254 INFORMATION BROKER

broker is sometimes restricted to only those whosource information from online databases.

Professional associations

The equivocal parameters of the profession areevident in the diversity of organizations andinterests represented by the few professionalassociations. The European Information Re-searchers Network (EIRENE), which emerged in1989, is considered to be the principal profes-sional association for UK information brokers,who in 1994 accounted for twenty-six of its fifty-six members. EIRENE originally set out as anetworking forum for information professionals,some of whom are not information brokers anddo not engage in information-broking functions.In the USA the Association of IndependentInformation Professionals (AIIP) was formed in1987, and in France the Association des Inter-médiaires en Information (AF2I) was establishedin 1991.

References

Crawford, M.J. (1988) Information Broking: A NewCareer in Information Work, Library Association.

Johnson, A.J.H. (1994) Information Brokers: CaseStudies of Successful Ventures, Haworth Press.

Wolff-Terroine, M. (1992) ‘The brokers in Europe: Arethe chances of success identical for all of them?’, inD.I. Raitt (ed.) Online Information 92: SixteenthInternational Online Information Meeting Proceed-ings, London 8–10 December 1992, Learned Infor-mation, pp. 267–72.

Further reading

DIRECTORIES AND PUBLISHED LISTS OF INFORMATIONBROKERS

Burwell World Directory of Information Brokers 1995/6 (1995) 12th edn, TFPL.

Directory of European Information Brokers and Con-sultants 1994 (1994) 7th edn, Effective TechnologyMarketing and Information Marketmakers [the mostextensive source, with 146 entries based in the UK].

EIRENE Membership Directory 1994 (1994) Manche-ster Business School.

European Commission Host Organization (ECHO) I’MGuide (Telnet echo.lu).

PRACTICAL MANUALS

EUSIDIC, EIIA and EIRENE (1993) Code of Practicefor Information Brokers, EUSIDIC.

Everett, J.H. and Crowe, E.P. (1994) Information forSale, Windcrest/McGraw-Hill.

Rugge, S. and Glossbrenner, A. (1997) The InformationBroker’s Handbook, 3rd edn, McGraw-Hill.

OTHER REFERENCES

Beesley, K. (1994) ‘Information entrepreneurs: UKnational review’, Information Services and Use 14:297–306.

Hyde, M. (1993) ‘Information brokerage comes of age:Profit making and professionalism (national review –United Kingdom)’, Infomediary 6: 77–82.

Mason, F.M. and Dobson, C. (1998) InformationBrokering, Neal-Schuman.

SEE ALSO: information policy; informationprofessions

MATTHEW HALL

INFORMATION ECOLOGY

The study of the inter-relationships betweenpeople, enterprises, technologies and the infor-mation environment. The interaction betweenthese elements in a local environment is treatedas an ecosystem, with human beings at thecentre, encompassing information strategy, in-formation-seeking behaviour, informationmanagement and information architecture.Typical ecosystems might be: a library, with itsusers, resources, librarians and network links;a hospital ward, with its patients, nurses,doctors, monitoring devices and record systems;or a retail company, with sales assistants,advisers, customers, customer and supplier data-bases, catalogues, product specifications anduser manuals.

Further reading

Davenport, T.H. and Prusak, L. (1997) InformationEcology, Oxford University Press.

INFORMATION ENGINEERING

The engineering approach applied to informa-tion systems. At its broadest, the term refers toengineering disciplines covering a spectrum fromsoftware engineering and systems engineering toelectronic engineering. It also has the narrower,but well-known, meaning of a specific methodfor the development of organizational informa-tion systems primarily associated with JamesMartin. This method begins with enterprisemodelling and carries through to the generationof program codes for the system.

SEE ALSO: computer science

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INFORMATION ETHICS

Broadly characterized, information ethics is thestudy of ethical considerations that arise in thestorage, processing, retrieval and use of informa-tion, information systems and informationand communication technology. ‘Informa-tion ethics’ as a field of study arose with theconvergence of many ethical concerns of tradi-tional disciplines such as management and in-formation systems, and library and informationscience, particularly with the emergence andrapid growth of online information systems andservices, and of the internet. For example,privacy and confidentiality have long been aconcern of both business information servicesand library circulation systems, and bothfields have common interests in the security ofsuch systems in public-access, online, networkedenvironments. So too libraries and newspaperswhich have both been concerned with intellectualfreedom and the balance of copyright with fair-use doctrines, and these concerns have heigh-tened with the rapid deployment of informationsources and services on the Internet.

Two perspectives on information ethics

Information ethics can be approached from twoperspectives: (1) its role as information ethics asan ongoing critique in contrast to establishedethical customs, norms and practices with respectto information, information systems and infor-mation technologies, which it critiques andstrives to improve; and (2) its subject domainrelative to other related domains of appliedethics, e.g. computer ethics, cyberethics.The first approach emphasises the word

‘ethics’ in information ethics. In this view, articu-lated by Rafael Capurro, the Director of theInternational Center for Information Ethics(ICIE) (http://icie.zkm.de/research), ethics is seenas both descriptive theory and an emancipatorytheory. As a descriptive theory it analyses thepower structures of different societies and tradi-tions. As an emancipatory theory, ethics is con-trasted with established moral and legal customs,norms and practices, which it continuously,critically evaluates. In the latter view, ethics isseen as a vigilant force, trying to make sure thatthe institutionalized ethical norms of a society, inestablished practices, customs and/or laws, areconstantly checked for continuing to adhere to

ethical values or promote genuinely ethical beha-viour at both the individual and collective level.In the second approach, information ethics has

evolved into at least two frameworks, either (1)as a metadiscipline seen to encompass a varietyof related applied disciplines or (2) as anotherdistinct discipline in relation to the other relateddisciplines. The view (1) that information ethicsis a metadiscipline is taken by the Center forInformation Ethics. Information ethics is seen asan applied ethics that deals with ethical questions‘particularly’ in mass media (media ethics), incomputer science (computer ethics), in thebiological sciences (bioinformation ethics), in thelibrary and information science field (libraryethics), in the business field (business informationethics) and regarding the internet (cyberethics).Such a view may be overreaching in its claims byarbitrarily appropriating disciplines by definition.Particularly problematic is the inclusion of one ofthe sciences (bioinformation ethics) but none ofthe others. While there has been dramatic growthof genetic information in the recent past, and thisis fraught with many ethical concerns, ethicalissues in the use of information and informationtechnologies exist in the other sciences. Whetherbioinformation ethics or science research ethics isor is not in the purview of information ethics,Capurro nonetheless sees information ethics asan inclusive domain, embracing many sub-domains, a kind of metaethics that embraces ordraws upon many fields.A second view (2) sees information ethics as

another kind of applied ethical domain, sharing inand related to other fields, such as computer ethicsand cyberethics. Martha Montague Smith, in herarticle on ‘Information ethics’ in The AnnualReview of Information Science and Technology(ARIST), embraces this view, arguing that:

Issues in computer ethics overlap those ofinformation ethics with emphasis on highstandards for hardware and software design;the management of secure systems, includingmaintaining data accuracy and integrity; theprotection of privacy from the point of view ofthe systems administrator; and the ethics ofcompetition.

(Smith 1997: 339–40)

Others see overlaps between cyberethics andinformation ethics or see computer ethics evol-ving into cyberethics (Sullivan 1996).

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Information ethics and computer ethics

A clear approach to information ethics unfortu-nately cannot be posed by a simple contrast withcomputer ethics, with computer ethics suppo-sedly concentrating on the technical means ofcommunication and networking, while informa-tion ethics focuses on the content of such com-munication. While there are some examples thatsupport this distinction (e.g. inadequate softwaretesting as an issue in computer ethics but not ininformation ethics, and intellectual freedom as anissue in information ethics and not in computerethics), there are many areas that are not so clear(e.g. copyright infringement by making unauthor-ized perfect digital copies; security and theprotection of privacy) and the distinction is notrigorously maintained by different writers. De-borah G. Johnson takes the view that computerethics may eventually disappear. In her view, asinformation technology becomes more and morecommonplace and pervasive in everyday life, itsdistinctive nature will fade and the issue of theethical problem involved in an information tech-nology context would take priority, e.g. indiscussions of privacy, the heart of the discussionwould lie on the principles of privacy, andinformation technologies would be but one as-pect of the problem among others for a particu-lar context (Johnson 2001). In a related view,some prognosticate a future where both termsdisappear. For example, Krystyna Gorniak-Koci-kowska argues that local ethics (ethics associatedwith the local environment, whether regional ornational or philosophical) will be superseded bya global ethic evolving from today’s computerethics (Gorniak-Kocikowska 1996). In a con-trasting view, Luciano Floridi takes the approachthat information ethics is a macroethics thatcould serve as the philosophical foundation forcomputer ethics. In his approach, this macro-ethics would not be useful to solve specificcomputer ethics issues but would provide thegrounds for moral principles that would then beable to create problem-solving procedures incomputer ethics (Floridi 1999). Finally, there areother proponents such as Walter Maner whomaintain that computer technologies in fact havecreated a set of unique ethical problems thatwould not have come about without the emer-gence of computers. To illustrate his case, he usesthe example of a hospital system in Washington,DC, which broke down on 19 September 1989

because its calendar calculations caused an over-flow of a counter in memory, a technical problemof computer architecture that would not haveoccurred in a manual system. He maintains thatcomputer ethics would retain its character overtime, when dealing with those issues essentiallyrelated to computer technology (Maner 1996). Insum, the status of information ethics vis-à-viscomputer ethics is muddled.

Principles of information ethics

While the distinction between computer ethicsand information ethics may not be clear, severalhave tried to articulate principles of informationethics. For example, Richard W. Severson inPrinciples of Information Ethics sees respect forprivacy, respect for intellectual property, fairrepresentation and non-malfeasance as constitut-ing a core set of principles of information ethics(Severson 1997). For related and/or additionalprinciples, see the ICIE site and Thomas J.Froehlich’s Survey and Analysis of Legal andEthical Issues for Library and Information Ser-vices. The latter work establishes five generalethical principles, some potentially competingand conflicting, which are then applied in thecontext of libraries and information centres. Forexample, one principle asserts that we mustrespect the autonomy and rights of individuals.Another one avows the need to seek socialharmony. The action of buying a particularresource for a patron by a collection developerin a library, such as a book on cultivatingmarijuana, would manifest the former principle,but, at the same time, it may conflict with thesecond principle, because its appearance in thelibrary may alienate other patrons and may notpromote long-range social goals (Froehlich1997).

Pervasiveness of information ethics

In both approaches, information ethics is con-ceived to be broad in scope. The Journal ofInformation Ethics, inaugurated in 1992 andedited by Robert Hauptman, asserts that it dealswith ‘ethics in all areas of information or knowl-edge production and dissemination’ includinglibrary and information science, education forinformation professionals, technology, graphicdisplay, database management, privacy, censor-ship, government information and peer review,among others. Many important organizations,

INFORMATION ETHICS 257

such as the United Nations Educational, Scienti-fic and Cultural Organization (unesco) take theposition that information ethics is a part ofglobal justice, founded in the Universal Declara-tion of Human Rights, particularly Article 19,which asserts that ‘Everyone has right to freedomof opinion and expression; the right includesfreedom to hold opinions without interferenceand to seek, receive and impart information andideas through any media and regardless offrontiers’. Among many programmes, The UN-ESCO Observatory of the Information Society(www.unesco.orgwebworld /observatory / index .shtml) frequently addresses issues in informationethics, and UNESCO periodically holds seminarson information ethics and related issues in theinformation society. Among its aims, it seeks topromote ‘principles of equality, justice and mu-tual respect in the emerging Information Society’.UNESCO tracks issues of global justice, andparticularly those with a focus on freedom ofaccess, intellectual property rights, freedomof expression, transborder privacy and cyber-crime.

Information ethics has also emerged in thecurriculum. Several schools of library and infor-mation science have courses or lecture series ininformation ethics. One of the longest standing,the School of Information Sciences at the Uni-versity of Pittsburgh, inaugurated in 1989 alecture series on Information Ethics, under thedirection of Rev. Stephen Alamagno and DeanToni Carbo.

In sum, information ethics is a rapidly growingand multifaceted phenomenon, related to butdistinct from computer ethics and a variety ofother related fields. It is extensively addressed inmany venues, has a journal and websites devotedto it, is the subject of many conferences and hastaken a place in the curriculum of many schools.

References

Floridi, L. (1999) ‘Information ethics: On the philoso-phical foundation of computer ethics’, Ethics andInformation Technology 1: 37–56.

Froehlich, T. (1997) Survey and Analysis of Legal andEthical Issues for Library and Information Services,G.K. Saur.

Gorniak-Kocikowska, K. (1996) ‘The computer revolu-tion and the problem of global ethics’, in T. Bynumand S. Rogerson (eds) Global Information Ethics,Opragen, pp. 177–90.

International Center for Information Ethics (ICIE)

(http://icie.zkm.de/research) [contains extensive bib-liography].

Johnson, D. (2001) ‘Computer ethics in the 21st

century’, Keynote Address delivered at the 4th

ETHICOMP International Conference on the Socialand Ethical Impacts of Information and Communica-tion Technologies, Luiss Guido Carli University,Rome, Italy, 6–8 October.

Maner, W. (1996) ‘Unique ethical problems in informa-tion technology’, Science and Engineering Ethics2(99): 137–54.

Severson, R.W. (1997) Principles of Information Ethics,M.E. Sharpe.

Smith, M. (1997) ‘Information ethics’, in M. Williams(ed.) The Annual Review of Information Science andTechnology 32: 339–66.

Sullivan, P.F. (1996) ‘Ethics in the computer age’, in J.Kizza (ed.) Social and Ethical Effects of the Compu-ter Revolution, McFarland & Company, pp. 288–95.

UNESCO (2002) ‘Legal and ethical issues. Infoethics’( www.unesco.org/webworld/public_domain/legal.html).

UNESCO Observatory of the Information Society(2002) (www.unesco.org/webworld/observatory/index.shtml).

Further reading

Hauptman, R. (1992–) The Journal of InformationEthics.

Information Ethics at the School of InformationSciences at the University of Pittsburgh (www2.sis.-pitt.edu/ethics/).

United Nations World Summit on the InformationSociety (www.itu.int/wsis/), scheduled for Geneva,2003.

SEE ALSO: data protection; freedom ofinformation; information law; informationsociety; medical informatics

THOMAS J. FROEHLICH

INFORMATION LAW

Information law refers to the body of statutes,regulations and court decisions through whichgovernmental entities control public access to,and use of, collections of otherwise unprotectableinformation. The term ‘information law’ doesnot encompass the protection of sensitive perso-nal information, which is governed by humanrights and privacy laws, nor the protection ofinformation expressed in the form of originalprose, music, images or other types of author-ship, which is covered by copyright law. Rather,the subset of ‘information’ regulated by informa-tion law is factual, non-proprietary matter thatbelongs to no single person, yet has economicvalue by virtue of being compiled and distributed

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in a timely, convenient manner. Information lawseeks to provide a monetary incentive for com-mercial enterprises to compile and distribute suchinformation, and in so doing to ensure the great-est possible public access. This entry will describethe various legal theories under which US lawprotects information, and will then discuss thegeneral features of the specialized data protec-tion legislation being adopted in other countriesunder the 1996 EU database directive.

Contract law

The most direct way to protect factual informa-tion is simply for the provider to require users toagree not to copy it. Most data providers imposemandatory terms and conditions on access, oftenin the form of a ‘shrink-wrap’ or ‘click-wrap’licence (see licences) restricting the uses that theuser may make of the information. These agree-ments are generally binding and enforceable,provided that they are truly voluntary.In one leading case, ProCD v Zeidenberg

(1996), a US appeals court found that a clearlyvisible shrink-wrap licence printed on a boxcontaining a CD-ROM telephone directory wasenforceable, because the user’s conduct in open-ing the package could be interpreted as indicatingagreement with the terms and conditions. SinceZeidenberg, several other courts have extendedthe analysis to the online environment, findingvalid contracts when the user makes a clear,affirmative manifestation of assent (see Caspi vThe Microsoft Network (1999) (‘click-wrap’agreement held enforceable) and Register.com vVerio, Inc. (2000) (upholding ‘query-wrap’ agree-ment that bound any user submitting query toplaintiff’s site)).In Pollstar v Gigmania Ltd. (2000), one

California court even allowed a contract claimbased on a ‘browse-wrap’ agreement, where theuser did nothing more than visit the plaintiff’swebsite. Under similar circumstances, however, aNew York court held in Specht v NetscapeCommunications Corp. (2001) that Netscape’s‘browse-wrap’ agreement, represented by a singlesmall box of text inviting the user to review andagree to the terms before downloading or usingthe software, did not give rise to an enforceablecontract. Users were able to download the soft-ware without viewing the licence terms, notedthe court, and might not even be aware that alicence agreement existed, since the ‘invitation’

box was inconspicuous. Further, the court foundthat downloading itself is:

[H]ardly an unambiguous manifestation ofassent. The primary purpose of downloadingis to obtain a product, not to assent to anagreement. In contrast, clicking on an iconstating ‘I assent’ has no meaning or purposeother than to indicate such assent.

Thus, an information provider may generallyrely on written terms of use as a way ofprotecting its data, but only if the terms areclearly visible to the user before access ispermitted, and if the user affirmatively agrees tobe bound.

Trespass to chattels

The ancient common law doctrine of trespass tochattels can also protect information in theonline environment. Defined as unauthorizedinterference with one’s ‘possessory interest’ intangible property, trespass has provided a basisfor prohibiting the use of robot Web-searchingtechnology to retrieve publicly available informa-tion from the Web, and various other perceivedcommercial abuses of the computer equipmentused by data providers. Under this theory, thelaw does not directly protect the informationitself, but only the computer on which it resides.In eBay Inc. v Bidder’s Edge, Inc. (2000), the

trespass theory was invoked to prohibit so-called‘data mining’, whereby the defendant’s auto-mated search program repeatedly visited the eBaysite, and various other auction sites, to permitpotential bidders to locate items without havingto visit each site. The court essentially held thatany use of data gathered in this manner wasimproper, because to gain access the user had tooccupy bandwidth on the provider’s computernetwork. The defendant’s continual searching,entailing more than 100,000 visits per day tothe eBay site, ‘diminished the quality or value ofeBay’s computer system’ even though there wasno physical damage to the network. Where a usermakes less invasive visits to gather publiclyaccessible data from a provider’s computer, how-ever, the trespass theory is not likely to provide abasis for protecting the information (see Ticket-master Corp. v Tickets.com, Inc. (2000)).Under the trespass theory, it is ironic that

intangible facts, circulating in the ethereal realmof cyberspace, may find their most effective

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protection in an ancient doctrine designed toprevent the unauthorized use of physical personalproperty. Futurist John Perry Barlow remarked in1993 that intellectual property law was doomedbecause it governed tangible objects rather thaninformation per se, ‘the bottles not the wine’, touse his analogy; but as the eBay decision demon-strates, the law can still be very useful for thosewho own the bottles.

‘Hot news’ misappropriation

Arising from the 1918 US Supreme Court deci-sion in International News Service v AssociatedPress, the common law doctrine of misappropria-tion originally prohibited a competitor from sell-ing its own rewrites of Associated Press newsreports in a manner that deprived AP of itsrightful window of exclusivity. The doctrine canstill be used to protect so-called ‘hot news’ wherethe value of the information is ephemeral. Underthe 1997 appeals court decision in Nat’l Basket-ball Assn. v Motorola, Inc. (1997), involvingNBA basketball scores delivered to subscribersthrough a real-time pager network, a misappro-priation claim for unauthorized sale of informa-tion requires the provider to establish fiveelements: (1) the information was gathered atsome cost to the provider, (2) the information istime sensitive, (3) the rival provider is free-riding(i.e. not engaged in its own capital-intensiveactivity), (4) the parties are direct competitors,and (5) the rival’s activity would ‘substantiallythreaten’ the provider’s incentive to continuecollecting the information. In the online context,such a misappropriation claim was recentlyallowed to proceed in Pollstar v Gigmania,supra, where plaintiff alleged that defendant’srival website copied time-sensitive rock concertinformation from plaintiff’s site.

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

Enacted in 1984 chiefly to protect computerizedfinancial and medical information, the ComputerFraud and Abuse Act (‘CFAA’) can also addressother forms of alleged information theft. TheCFAA provides that it is a crime to ‘intentionallyaccess a computer without authorization orexceed authorized access, and thereby obtain . . .information from any protected computer if theconduct involved an interstate or foreign com-munication’. It is also a violation to ‘intentionallyaccess a protected computer without authoriza-

tion and as a result of such conduct causedamage’. The statute then defines ‘protectedcomputer’ in a way that arguably encompassesevery device with an Internet connection, anddefines ‘damage’ as ‘any impairment to theintegrity or availability of data. . .that causes lossaggregating at least $5000 in value during anyone-year period’.In the first of several cases to raise the CFAA

in the Web context, the courts found that onlineservices were damaged under the Act when theirfacilities or customer lists were used by thirdparties to propagate spam e-mail transmissions(see Hotmail Corp. v Van$ Money Pie Inc.(1998) and AOL, Inc. v LCGM, Inc. (1998)). InRegister.com v Verio Inc., supra, however, afederal court in New York applied the statutemore broadly, enjoining an Internet servicescompany from using robots to gather WHOISinformation about Register.com’s customers eventhough, as an ICANN-accredited domain nameregistrar, Register.com is obligated to provide thisinformation to the public on request.

EU directive and implementing statutes

Unlike the patchwork of US federal and statelaws described above, the laws of many othercountries are specifically drafted to protect in-formation. In 1996, the European Parliamentissued a directive to harmonize database protec-tion in its member states, and many nations havesince adopted legislation to implement the termsof the directive. As with the theories discussedabove, the assumption underlying the directive isthat data providers make a significant financialinvestment in aggregating and distributing fac-tual information, and this investment should beprotected.The directive defines ‘database’ very broadly,

to include collections of works, data or othermaterials that are systematically or methodicallyarranged and can be individually accessed. Sig-nificantly, this definition encompasses both hard-copy and electronic databases, so even conven-tional printed collections of data such as tele-phone directories fall within the scope of the law.For databases exhibiting no copyrightable

creativity, such as collections of raw numericaldata, the directive creates a new form of protec-tion, premised on protecting the data provider’s‘quantitatively substantial investment in eitherthe obtaining, verification or presentation of the

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contents’. Such protection lasts for fifteen yearsafter completion or publication of the database,but can be renewed indefinitely in fifteen-yearincrements when ‘substantial new investment’ ismade in updating and verifying the database.

Extraction and reuse prohibitions

The heart of the directive is the command thatMember States shall provide for a right toprevent acts of extraction and/or re-utilisation of‘the whole or of a substantial part. . .of thecontents of that database’. Extraction means the‘permanent or temporary transfer of all or asubstantial part of the contents of a database toanother medium by any means or in any form’.Reutilization means ‘any form of making avail-able to the public all or a substantial part of thecontents of a database by the distribution ofcopies, by renting, by on-line or other forms oftransmission’. Public lending is not considered aform of extraction or reutilization.Under these definitions, the extraction and

reutilization rights are only violated with respectto ‘all or a substantial part of a database’. But itis important to note that repeated and systematicextraction or reutilization of even insubstantialportions of a database may violate the directive ifthey conflict with the normal exploitation of thedatabase or unreasonably prejudice the legitimateinterests of the provider. Many small-scale usesare expressly deemed non-infringing, such asphotocopying of non-electronic databases forprivate purposes, teaching or non-commercialresearch, but member states have the option oflimiting these exemptions to particular types ofeducational or research institutions.

References

AOL, Inc. v LCGM, Inc., 46 F. Supp. 2d 444 (E.D. Va.1998).

Caspi v The Microsoft Network LLC, 323 N.J. Super.118 (N.J. App. Div. 1999).

Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and ofthe Council and of 11 March 1996 on the LegalProtection of Databases.

eBay Inc. v Bidder’s Edge, Inc., No. C-99–21200RMW (N.D. Cal. May 24, 2000).

Hotmail Corp. v Van$ Money Pie Inc., 47 U.S.P.Q.2d1020 (N.D. Cal. 1998).

International News Service v Associated Press, 248 U.S.215 (1918).

Nat’l Basketball Assn. v Motorola, Inc., 105 F.3d 841(2d Cir. 1997).

Pollstar v Gigmania Ltd., No. CIV-F-005671 REC SMS(E.D. Cal. Oct. 17, 2000).

ProCD v Zeidenberg, 86 F.3d 1447 (7th Cir. 1996).Register.com v Verio, Inc., 126 F. Supp. 2d 238(S.D.N.Y. Dec. 2000).

Specht v Netscape Communications Corp., No. 00 Civ.4871 (S.D.N.Y. July 3, 2001).

Ticketmaster Corp. v Tickets.com, Inc., 2000 U.S.Dist.LEXIS 12987 (Aug. 11, 2000).

Further reading

Beutler, S. (1996) ‘The protection of multimedia pro-ducts through the European Community’s directiveon the legal protection of databases’, EntertainmentLaw Review 7: 317–28.

Sullivan, A.C. (2001) ‘When the creative is the enemyof the true: Database protection in the U.S. andabroad’, AIPLA Quarterly Journal 29: 317–73.

SEE ALSO: European Union information policies;information ethics; information policy

ROBERT W. CLARIDA

INFORMATION LITERACY

Ways of seeing information literacy

Sometimes interpreted as one of a number ofliteracies, information literacy (IL) is also de-scribed as the overarching literacy essential fortwenty-first-century living. Today, IL is inextric-ably associated with information practices andcritical thinking in the information and com-munication technology (ICT) environment.IL is generally seen as pivotal to the pursuit oflifelong learning, and central to achieving bothpersonal empowerment and economic develop-ment.IL is commonly described as the ability to

access, evaluate and use information. This de-scription is based on the view that IL is anamalgam of skills, attitudes and knowledge, aview that is compatible with the prevailinginterpretation of learning in twentieth-centuryeducation systems. IL is also described as a wayof learning, or as a conglomerate of ways ofexperiencing information use. These descriptionsare aligned to seeing learning as a process, or ascoming to see the world in different or moresophisticated ways. Interestingly, all our descrip-tions of IL have emerged from the educationalsector. Each of them, however, may be readilymodified for use in corporate and communitycontexts.IL is closely related to the ideas of informa-

tion skills and information technology

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literacy. Sometimes, information skills are con-sidered to be one aspect of IL. They may also beseen as the tools that assist the development ofIL, in the same way that study skills may assistthe process of learning. The concepts of IL andIT literacy are usually distinguished to demon-strate the difference between the intellectualcapabilities involved in using information, andthe capabilities required for using technologiesthat deliver or contain ‘information’. This dis-tinction is also made to convey the idea thatprovision of ICTs and associated training in theuse of hardware and software – the focus ofmany government, corporate and educationalprogrammes – is only a starting point in achiev-ing desired reforms.

A brief history of information literacy

The term information literacy was first used byPaul Zurkowski in the 1970s to bring attentionto the needs of people working in the newlyemerging technological environment. Since then,the concept has been taken up mainly by in-formation specialists, and promulgated world-wide through the work of the American LibraryAssociation and the National Forum for Infor-mation Literacy. By the end of the twentiethcentury, IL could be said to be a truly globalphenomenon, with interest evident across allcontinents and sectors.

Information literacy programmes

After the publication of the ALA PresidentialFinal Report, IL was mainly a focus for librariansin the education sector. Towards the end of thetwentieth century, social, governmental and cor-porate attention turned more strongly towardslifelong learning and associated concepts such aslearning communities, learning citizens, learningorganizations and the learning society. As aresult, information specialists in community andworkplace settings began to take a lead inestablishing an IL focus in a wider range ofcontexts. In all sectors, interest in IL foundexpression in designing and implementing learn-ing experiences and information services thathelp people interact with and benefit from theworld of information.Typically, in each sector where IL has emerged

as a focus, the idea has been interpreted andassigned meanings relevant to the institutionalcontexts and their information user groups. IL

programme design has also been typically con-text specific, with IL concerns being adapted forlearning programmes and service design. Advo-cacy for information literacy has also clearlyinvolved promoting cultural change, leading tothe emergence of a strong role for the informa-tion specialist as a change agent.The roles of advocate and change agent have

emerged most strongly in policy development,working with organizational gatekeepers, parti-cularly senior management, and fostering colla-boration with different parts of the organization.Successful advocacy for IL in organizations hasled to the appointment of staff dedicated to ILprogrammes, the development of organization-wide staff development programmes and signifi-cant collaboration, both inter- and intraorganiza-tional, and sometime crossing internationalboundaries.

Information literacy research

The seeds of IL research were sown by the usereducation and bibliographic instructionmovements of the 1980s. Probably the mostinfluential investigation from this period onfuture IL researchers was Carol Kuhlthau’s ex-ploration of students’ experiences of informationuse. Her adoption of naturalistic research ap-proaches led eventually to the construction of amodel describing the process of learning frominformation, and to the description of IL as a‘way of learning’. In the early 1990s the terminformation literacy became prominent and a fewresearchers saw their work as contributing to thisarea. The most notable study from the 1990s isChristina Doyle’s investigation of definitions ofinformation literacy. Her Delphi study, commis-sioned by the National Forum for InformationLiteracy, gained consensus from a range ofpeople and led to a definition and descriptionsthat are widely used. IL research pursued in themid- to late 1990s was characterized by theexploration of different paradigms and the estab-lishment of multiple research agendas. The rela-tional model of information literacy, developedby Christine Bruce and Louise Limberg, was themost significant research outcome from thisperiod. The relational model is grounded in aview of IL as being about the varying ways inwhich people interact with information.By the end of the twentieth century, research

in practice (conducted by or with practitioners),

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applied research (addressing problems pertinentto practice) and pure research (investigating thenature of IL) had all emerged in the IL researchagenda. Researchers adopted a range of focalinterests including: information users, their skillsand attributes; their experiences and perceptions;and their knowledge structures. Other foci wereIL programmes and curriculum issues, for exam-ple the impact of IL on learning outcomes. Manyof these studies were heavily influenced byrelated fields including information seeking anduse research, educational, information scienceand communications research.

Further reading

Breivik, P. (1998) Student Learning in the InformationAge, Oryx Press.

Bruce, C.S. (1997) Seven Faces of Information Literacy,AUSLIB Press.

Bruce, C.S and Candy, P. (eds) (2000) InformationLiteracy around the World: Advances in Programsand Research, Centre for Information Studies,Charles Sturt University.

Loertscher, D. and Woolls, B. (1999) InformationLiteracy Research: A Guide for Researchers andPractitioners, Hi Willow Research and Pub.

Oman, J.N. (2001) ‘Information literacy in the work-place’, Information Outlook (June): 33–43.

Spitzer, K., Eisenberg, M. and Lowe, C. (1998) In-formation Literacy: Essential Skills for the Informa-tion Age, ERIC Clearinghouse on Information andTechnology, Syracuse University.

SEE ALSO: information-seeking behaviour;information society

CHRISTINE S. BRUCE

INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

The application of management principles to theacquisition, organization, control, disseminationand use of information relevant to the effectiveoperation of organizations of all kinds. ‘Informa-tion’ here refers to all types of information ofvalue, whether having their origin inside or out-side the organization, including: data resources,such as production data; records and files re-lated, for example, to the personnel function;market research data; and competitive intelli-gence from a wide range of sources. Informationmanagement deals with the value, quality, own-ership, use and security of information in thecontext of organizational performance.

Introduction

The term ‘information management’ is usedambiguously in the literatures of several fields:in computer science and its applications it isused as a synonym for information technologymanagement (Synott and Gruber 1981) or asidentical to ‘data management’, where the em-phasis is on the structures underlying quantitativedata and their relationship to the design ofdatabases. In business or management studies ithas similar connotations to technology manage-ment, with an emphasis on the relationship ofcommunication and information technol-ogy to business performance and competitive-ness (Synott 1987). In the field of librarianshipand information science it is identified with the‘emerging market’ for information workers (man-agers), whose perception of information em-braces data, organizational intelligence,competitive intelligence, external informationresources of all kinds and the associated technol-ogy (manual or machine) for handling thesedifferent sources. Compared with the other areas,information management in this latter context ismore widely concerned with the meaning ofinformation for the information user and withinformation retrieval issues.

Information management, ‘informationresource(s) management’ and‘knowledge management’

A further difficulty in defining information man-agement arises out of the often synonymous useof the term ‘information resource (or resources)management’ (IRM), the term used by the USNational Commission on Federal Paperwork inits report (1997), where ‘paperwork’, includingelectronic documents of all kinds, was defined asconstituting the information in IRM. This usageappears to limit the idea of IRM, but the reportgoes on to say that an IRM function (in USgovernment agencies) would incorporate a widerange of disparate activities, including recordsmanagement, library management, computersystems, printing and reprography, micro-forms and word-processing centres. Schneyman(1985) elaborates on this definition of IRM tocover five types of ‘information resources’:systems support, including computers and tele-communications; processing data, images, etc.;conversion and transformation, includingreprographics; distribution and communication,

INFORMATION MANAGEMENT 263

including network management and telecommu-nications; and, finally, retention, storage andretrieval, which covers libraries, record centres,filing systems, and internal and external data-bases. He adds that ‘IRM supports IM byproviding the technical capability and overallguidance for IM to do its job’, which he definesas managing the ownership, content, quality anduse of information.This expansion of the idea, of course, takes it

into the difficult area of the interface betweeninformation resources, in the sense of data,documents, etc., and the technology used tomanipulate, manage and transmit those re-sources, with the result that information technol-ogy becomes characterized as an informationresource. This is a source of endless confusion inthe literature so that, for example, when Strass-man (1976) writes on ‘Managing the costs ofinformation’ he is really discussing the problemof accounting for the costs of computer-basedsystems.More recently, the term ‘knowledge manage-

ment’ has entered professional vocabulary, con-fusing the situation further. In the 1990s theconcept of ‘knowledge management’ emergedfrom the management consultancies as yet an-other of the ‘methodologies’ for improving orga-nizational performance, following businessprocess re-engineering, the learning organization,total quality management and all the othermethodologies back to Taylor and ‘scientificmanagement’. Quite what is managed in knowl-edge management is difficult to determine, how-ever. Certainly, it cannot be knowledge, whichis in our heads, or, as Peter Drucker has said,‘between two ears, and only between two ears’(Kontzer 2001). The first text on the subject wasby the Swedish management consultant (nowresident in Australia) Karl-Erik Sveiby (1990)under the Swedish title, Kunskapsledning. Cur-iously, Sveiby himself now says that he does notlike the term and that it decomposes into themanagement of information and the managementof people (Sveiby 2001).From the information systems perspective,

software houses have been quick to re-brandtheir products as ‘knowledge management soft-ware’, rather than groupware, information retrie-val software or even e-mail. This strategy hasbeen referred to as ‘search and replace market-ing’. A stock-market ‘Knowledge ManagementIndex’ exists (Information Technology Toolbox,

Inc. 2002) that follows the fortunes of twenty-seven companies, none of which describes itselfas a ‘knowledge management’ company, and onlyone of which has a product marketed under theknowledge management label. An examinationof the company websites reveals that the majorityof them are marketing some kind of databasetechnology in the form of information retrievalsystems, customer relationship management,groupware, e-commerce, intranet systems, etc.One has to conclude, therefore, that Sveiby’sdecomposition of knowledge management intoinformation management and the management ofpeople is accurate and that no new solution tothe problems of managing information in organi-zations is presented by any of these companies.From the information perspective, therefore,

‘knowledge management’ is simply a more pre-tentious synonym for information management.

The origins of information management

Although earlier uses may exist, informationmanagement and information resources manage-ment achieved a high visibility in the USA in themid-1970s as a result of the work of theNational Commission on Federal Paperwork,the aim of which was to seek a reduction in thecosts incurred by organizations in satisfying thedemands for paperwork by the federal bureau-cracies. Ironically, as porat (1977) notes, theCommission itself required more than 100 in-formation workers and produced a seven-volumereport of almost 3,000 pages!However, the Commission quickly moved

from the position of concern over the physicalvolume of ‘paperwork’ to the real problem of‘information requirements planning, controlling,accounting and budgeting’ (Commission on Fed-eral Paperwork 1977). Porat (1977) addressedthese essentially economic issues in a report forthe US Office of Telecommunications Policy,noting that, in 1967, ‘the total cost of informa-tional inputs [to the federal government] was$50.5 billion’. However, Porat’s definition of the‘information economy’ is very wide, so that itincluded, for example, the research and develop-ment purchases of the government, amounting to$13.1 billion. Only $11.8 billion ‘was in theform of direct purchase of goods and servicesfrom the primary information sector’. By 1970the overall value of information inputs had risento $62.8 billion.

264 INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

In spite of the strong impetus provided by theCommission, however, the idea of informationmanagement did not appear to have penetratedvery far into the governmental structure ten yearslater. Caudle (1988) notes that, in spite of theemphasis in the Paperwork Reduction Act ontreating information as a resource, ‘12 of the 16department IRM managers surveyed concededthat IRM is primarily seen as automation orinformation technology, including telecommuni-cations’ and that ‘There is not a general percep-tion outside the IRM unit that IRM has anythingat all to do with good management’. She alsofound that there was even less of a perception ofIRM as helpful to management at the bureaulevel (i.e. the level below departments in thefederal government), where the idea was equatedalmost solely with the idea of end-user technol-ogy support services.Caudle concluded that the realization that

information is a resource ‘is developing muchmore slowly than the Paperwork Reduction Act’sdesigners likely intended’ and, perhaps with moreoptimism than was justified by the research, that‘once the information technology infrastructure isin place and the IRM offices themselves becomeoperationally mature, IRM office managers andtheir organizations should be ready to takefurther steps toward true IRM’.In the UK, the development of information

management did not receive the same impetusfrom government, which since 1979 has beenconcerned with establishing the concept of the‘market’ in what was the public sector. The sameattitude has prevailed towards information: thus,the report of the Information Technology Advi-sory Panel, Making a Business of Information(1983), was concerned simply to direct attentionto the business opportunities in the informationsector. Later, the government produced guidelinesfor departments on dealing with business inseeking to derive benefit from ‘tradeable infor-mation’ (DTI 1990).There was an attempt, however, to introduce

the fundamental concepts of information manage-ment in government departments when the Cen-tral Computer and Telecommunications Agencyproduced guidelines for departments, followingan investigation into departmental practices(CCTA 1990). One of the main planks of theguidelines was the recognition that responsibilityfor information resources was diffused over dif-ferent sections in most departments and that there

was a need to ensure effective collaborationamong the resource-holders and, possibly, theintegration of these services (particularly datamanagement, records management and libraryand information services) under a single director.The Definitions Task Group of the IRM

Network (1993), which operates under the aegisof ASLIB (Association for Information Manage-ment), has provided a concise description of thenature of information management and asso-ciated ideas. Clarifying somewhat the relation-ship between information management andinformation resources management, the groupassociates the former with the task of managingthe relationship between organizational objec-tives, management processes and informationneeds in the development of an informationstrategy and in deriving from that strategy anIT strategy and an information systems strategy.An information systems strategy is the defini-

tion of systems (technological and otherwise)that are needed to satisfy information needs,whereas an IT strategy defines the way in whichthe technology can support the systems strategy.Information resources management is, then,

defined as applying ‘the general principles ofresources management to identify discrete infor-mation resources, establish ownership and re-sponsibility, determine cost and value, and topromote development and exploitation whereappropriate’.This brief account of the development of

information management serves to show that adegree of consensus can be seen to have emerged,but the relationships to other managerial issuesin organizations are such that considerable scopeexists for confusion over disciplinary or intra-organizational boundaries.

The elements of informationmanagement

Several strands have contributed to the develop-ment of information management. First, it has itsorigins in a variety of fields that have had to do,traditionally, with the acquisition, organization,maintenance and use of documents: archives andrecords management, and librarianship and in-formation science (especially in special librarian-ship and information work). Many of the areasof concern within information management havelong been the concern of other professionalgroups in the information field, including


database design and development, informationstorage and retrieval, and the economics ofinformation.Second, the development of information tech-

nology, and its growing application to all aspectsof information management, has been a strongformative influence. The costs of computer-basedsystems draw direct attention to the issues of thevalue of information and cost–benefit relation-ships in the development of information systemsand services. Where the costs of such systemshave previously been hidden in the work done bya wide range of organizational staff members,their sudden emergence into significance conse-quent upon the introduction of computers hascaused organizations to view information func-tions in a new light.Finally, the wide application of information

ideas, developed in the business schools, widelyaccepted in business, given prominence in thebusiness press and in the media generally, andapplied increasingly in public-sector organiza-tions, has resulted in the acceptance of suchconcepts as strategic planning, cost–benefit ana-lysis, resource management and marketing.

Information requirements

All aspects of information management must begrounded in a consideration of the informationrequirements (or information needs) of customersor clients of the information systems and services.The study of information needs has occupiedinformation science for almost fifty years, butother disciplines, notably computer science, havealso had an interest in the area (Wilson 1994).From the point of view of the designer of

computer-based information systems, it is clearlynecessary to understand what kind of reports aclient needs from a system and, if possible, toknow how the client intends to use the informa-tion contained in those reports. Armed with thisinformation he or she can then try to ensure thatthe system delivers what is needed, when it isneeded.Similarly, providers of competitive intelli-

gence or those who analyse information fromonline information sources must be aware of theinformation requirements of customers if theirwork is to be cost-effective in satisfying users’needs.There are, at least, the following problems

with the idea of identifying information require-

ments, however. First, information requirementschange according to changes in the user’s envir-onment (both the immediate work environmentand the wider environment outside the organiza-tion), making last month’s statement of require-ments less relevant today. Second, informationrequirements change as a consequence of theinformation received, giving rise to new needs orrendering obsolete earlier expressions of need.Third, the relevance of information can bedetermined only by the ultimate user because itwill depend on that person’s subjective, interpre-tative response to the information – that is, onthe extent to which the person can ‘make sense’of the information and incorporate it into his orher knowledge base.The information manager must therefore make

the identification of information requirements arecurrent activity within the organization, seek-ing feedback on information provided, monitor-ing the organization’s changing priorities andcontinually seeking to understand how his orher customers function in the organization.

The information life cycle

The idea of an information life cycle is derivedfrom records management, where the idea ofdocument life cycle is central to the overallprocess. That cycle is set out by Goodman:The life cycle of records includes the following

steps (sometimes referred to as ‘document con-trol’):

. design and creation of records;

. identification;

. authorization;

. verification, validation, auditing;

. circulation, access, loan, use;

. back-up procedures and disaster recoveryplans;

. retention schedules and destruction.

(Goodman 1994: 135)

The life cycle will vary from organization toorganization depending on the nature of theinformation, the means used to organize it, theextent of use and the controls put upon use.The Commission on Federal Paperwork set

out a very basic life cycle, which identified thefollowing five stages: requirements determina-tion, collection, processing, use and disposition,with the following comment on its relationshipto information management: ‘At each of these


stages, information values must be estimatedand measured, costed and accounted for, justas Government now does for any other re-source’ (Commission on Federal Paperwork1977: 43).The life cycle of information in the Depart-

ment of State, referred to by Horton and Pruden(1988) (and slightly revised here), is rather moredeveloped and more directly related to internaldocuments and records:

. Stage 1 draft/revise document.

. Stage 2 clearance or approval.

. Stage 3 formal and informal exchanges ondocument content.

. Stage 4 local retrieval and reuse (either manualor electronic).

. Stage 5 acquisition and indexing by a centralarchive.

. Stage 6 central retrieval and reuse.

. Stage 7 primary and secondary distribution.

. Stage 8 disposition, i.e. permanent retention,limited archiving or destruction.

. Stage 9 systems administration.

The last stage is not so much a stage as theoverall administration of the foregoing stages,involving, for example, security classification,password control for electronic files and otherhousekeeping functions.

Information resources

As noted earlier, there is some confusion over theconcept of information resources, mainly as aresult of the inclusion of technological resourcesin the concept. However, most commentatorsregard the following as constituting informationresources in organizations.

DATA

All organizations generate data about their activ-ities. Thus, a local government department suchas a housing department generates data on itshousing stock, the physical state of the houses,the details of tenants and their rents, and soforth. A manufacturing company generates dataon the production process, recording not only thenumber of items of each product manufacturedin a given time, but also data on the reliability ofthe equipment used to produce those items, theturnover rate and sickness rate of workers, andthe sales by outlet, by region and by sales person.Organizations also collect data on the state of

their markets, the economic circumstances of thecountry or of its exports markets, and so on. Allof these data are important, and some are moreimportant than others because they enable thefirm, for example, to identify potentially profit-able products, markets and export areas. In otherwords, some data have potential for competitiveadvantage and must be maintained securely andeffectively if the organization is to benefit fromhaving them available.

RECORDS

Data are very often associated with records ofevents, objects and persons. For example, apersonnel record identifies an individual andincludes many items of data that define theperson – age, training level, sex, marital status,courses attended, year of entry to the organiza-tion and many more. Again, a project will havemany records associated with its managementand ultimate completion, including all the dataassociated with, for example, product design anddevelopment, prototyping, market testing andfull-scale production. Much of the informationin these records will be textual in character andwill consist of files of reports, test results,correspondence with suppliers, etc. Records ofthese kinds have long been the province ofrecords management and procedures have beenevolved to ensure their effective filing, security,storage and eventual disposal. The techniques ofrecords management are now being applied tocomputer-based files, under the heading of in-formation management.

TEXT

Textual information has long been the provinceof libraries and information centres, concerned,as they have been, with the acquisition, organi-zation, storage and dissemination of printedmaterials, most often from outside the organiza-tion of which the library or informationcentre formed a part, but also often includingthe maintenance of stores of internal reports,particularly in research-intensive organizations.With the development of office automationsystems and the creation of many more electronicdocuments in organizations, the producers ofsuch systems have become increasingly aware ofthe need for effective information retrieval sys-tems to underlie the database of electronic docu-ments.


MULTIMEDIA

All the above, together with sound recordings,graphics, pictures and video, may now existtogether in a single ‘document’. Examples includevarious educational and reference sources pub-lished as cd-rom packages, such as Microsoft’sEncarta encyclopedia; but, increasingly, organiza-tions are finding applications for multimediadatabases in which, for example, word-processeddocuments may have sound comments attachedby readers and may include pictures, for examplein a personal database, or video clips, in recordsheld by a consumer products test laboratory.While the other information resources referredto above may exist in either paper or electronicform, multimedia records require the applicationof information technology.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Information technology embraces computers, tel-ecommunications and software systems that aidthe organization, transmission, storage and utili-zation of what might better be called the ‘knowl-edge resources’ dealt with above. The range ofequipment and the variety of specialized knowl-edge needed for their effective control is enor-mous and for these reasons informationtechnology is often dealt with by different sec-tions in organizations. Thus, telecommunica-tions, including telephone systems and facsimiletransmission systems, are often controlled sepa-rately from the computer resources of the orga-nization. Similarly, functional divisions of anorganization often have more expertise in thematters concerning software packages (for exam-ple, for accounting purposes) than the computermanagers. However, these technologies are mer-ging, so that, for example, electronic mailmay replace internal paper mail systems and, insome cases, external mail systems. Similarly,computer linkages between a manufacturer andthe supplying companies may obviate the needfor communication by other means. Conse-quently, there is an argument for requiringinformation technology (in all of these senses) tobe managed under an umbrella that also coversthe knowledge resources.To these information resources we may add

expert systems and other manifestations ofdevelopments in artificial intelligence, suchas the ‘learning’ systems created through neuralnet technology. Systems of this kind, which drawupon other information resources and the perso-

nal knowledge of individuals, already play animportant, but little documented, role in certainkinds of businesses (e.g. stock trading) and maybecome the principal means by which informa-tion is put to use in support of organizationalobjectives in the future.

The economics of information

As noted earlier, the fact that informationresources have associated costs has been anintrinsic part of the idea of information manage-ment from the beginning. Indeed, the Commis-sion on Federal Paperwork was set up to identifythe ways in which the costs associated withpreparing documentation to satisfy governmentregulations or to bid for government contractscould be reduced.There are, however, broader issues than those of

the costs of information, from the scale of the‘information sector’ of the economy to the ‘value’of information. All of these issues present pro-blems.The most basic of the problems is that of the

value of information, a subject that has con-cerned information scientists for many years. Theproblem is exacerbated because value itself isused in a number of different ways both inordinary speech and in accounting. However,there appears now to be a consensus that thevalue of information can only be considered inthe context of its use and is therefore a user-driven concept not a producer concept. Thismeans that the value of information can bedetermined post facto – after benefits haveemerged from its use in some decision situation– but not before its use. The terms use-value andvalue-in-use were coined to convey this idea (see,for example, Repo 1986). Consequently, it isarguable that an information user must beprepared to bear at least part of the costs ofinformation being provided (i.e. in Taylor’s(1986) terms, those relating to the value-addingprocesses performed on data).In macroeconomics, a topic of abiding interest

is that of the scale of the ‘information sector’ ofthe economy. This question is most closelyassociated with the work of machlup (1962)and of porat (1977), who attempted to definethe information sector and determine its sizerelative to other sectors of the US economy.An attempt to deal with the problems of cost–

benefit relationship is given by Horton and


Pruden (1988) in their account of the methodused by the US Department of State (DoS) toestimate the value of implementing informationmanagement strategies in the Foreign AffairsInformation System (FAIS). The life cycle ofinformation in the FAIS consists of nine stages,from drafting to disposal, and estimates weremade of the amount of time DoS officers wereinvolved with some aspect of this life cycle.Estimates of the likely impact of the new systemson this expenditure of time were then made, as ameasure of the benefits to be derived. The kindsof headings under which benefits might beexpected were:

. Improved productivity (efficiency).

. Improved quality of decision-making.

. Improved performance of tasks (effectiveness).

. Improved learning curve.

. Upgraded work-function importance.

. Automated replacement of certain manualtasks.

. The discontinuation of certain tasks altogether.

. Greater interchangeability of personnel.

. Eliminated intermediate steps.

. Greater task overlapping.

. Less need for clerical support.

. Reduced reliance on paper files.

. Greater reuse of information assets.

. Faster response time.

. Reduced turnaround time.

. Tighter security and reduced violations.

. Decreased instances of lost or missing infor-mation.

Many of these anticipated benefits would beattributable to the use of information technologyrather than being related to the intrinsic char-acter of information, but, of course, unless theinformation itself was of value there would belittle point in investing in the technology.Improvement in productivity is one of the

potential benefits of effective information man-agement noted above. This aspect was touchedupon in the White House Conference on Produc-tivity (Strassman 1986), where it was noted thatthe costs of information workers are almostentirely hidden in the overheads of businesses.Here, of course, information worker means any-one whose primary function in the organizationis to process information – hence, it includes allgeneral managers, finance department staff, per-sonnel managers and many more.

The method proposed by the White HouseConference for determining the productivity ofinformation workers was that ‘The adjusted ratioof labour-value-added (after subtracting opera-tions labour costs) divided by information workercosts should be used as the measure of informa-tion worker productivity at the business-unit levelof analysis’. ‘Labour-value-added’ is defined as thevalue-added remaining after the contributions ofshareholders, suppliers and operating staff havebeen taken into account. However, this clearlyrequires the adoption by organizations of methodsfor determining labour-value-added, of account-ing techniques that collect appropriate informa-tion, and of definitions of different categories ofinformation worker so that the value added bysubcategories may also be determined.The ‘value-added’ approach to the economics

of information is explored in the work of Taylor,who notes that:

Information systems, then are a series offormal processes by which the potential useful-ness of specific input messages being processedis enhanced. These are the steps by whichvalue is added to the items going through thesystem, however those items are defined. . . .These processes add value, whether or not wehave an appropriate definition of value.

(Taylor 1986: 6)

Taylor presents a ‘spectrum’ of value-addingprocesses in information systems, which he di-vides into organizing, analysing, judgemental anddecision processes, each set of processes resultingin the transformation of data to information to‘informing knowledge’ to ‘productive knowledge’and finally to action. A number of the benefitsdescribed by Horton and Pruden above areclearly related to value-adding processes.In common with others, Taylor acknowledges

that the ‘value’ of information is not an intrinsicproperty but something negotiated between thesystem operators and the users. In other words,users of information make judgements about thevalue of information in the context in which theyapply that information.

The tools of information management

Some of the tools of information managementare those derived from the fields that havecontributed to its development; for example,classification and information retrieval from


librarianship and information science; databasedesign and development from computer science;the document life cycle from records manage-ment; communication audits from organiza-tional psychology; and cost–benefit analysis andvalue assessment from business management.Creating a ‘toolbox’ of techniques for the infor-mation manager requires, essentially, a suffi-ciently wide background to be able to knowwhat exists in the contributory fields and to beable to select and integrate techniques to apply tothe problem at hand. There are entries for mostof these topics elsewhere in this work, but sometechniques have become so particularly asso-ciated with the idea of information managementthat they deserve attention here.

INFORMATION AUDITS

The idea of the information audit is derivedfrom financial audits in accounting, which, asEllis et al. (1993: 134) note, are generally‘compliance’ audits, undertaken to ensure thatthe organization is adhering to proper fiscal andlegal standards in its financial management.Information audits take more the character of‘advisory’ audits, which are ‘more concernedwith informing users of existing systems andpractices and with assessing the appropriatenessof existing systems, standards and practices tothe organization’s goal or objectives’.Barker (1990) describes five types of informa-

tion audit: those based on a cost–benefit model;those that seek to map the relationships betweenresources; hybrid approaches (which combinefeatures of the first two); audits of managementinformation; and operational advisory audits,which link organizational objective, informationrequirements and compliance with regulationsand standards.Following her analysis Barker devised a model

information audit consisting of ten stages:

1 Establish the operational objectives anddefine the organizational environment.

2 Determine the information requirements forthe users.

3 Inventory of the information resources.4 Identify system failures and key control

points.5 Evaluate system failures.6 Test key control points.7 Generate alternative solutions for system

failures.

8 Evaluate the alternatives.9 Check conformity of the system with exist-

ing regulations and standards.10 Propose recommendations.

The identification of information resourcesrequires techniques akin to those of cataloguing,i.e. the resources must be described as books aredescribed, according to a standard code ofpractice. The state of New Jersey adopted such astrategy in its ‘InfoFind’ tool, which ‘describesthe state’s information sources and identifies thestate workers who are most knowledgeable aboutthem: the information custodians’ (Stone 1988).

INFORMATION MAPPING

The term information mapping is most closelyassociated with the name of Forest ‘Woody’ Hor-ton but has also been used by Best (1985). Best,however, uses the term in the context of introdu-cing information technology in organizations andtakes a systems analytical approach to developingan IT strategy.Horton, who takes a view of information

resources more in accord with this article, hasbeen responsible for the development of theinformation audit into a highly structured tool,which he calls information mapping, for part ofwhich he has developed a software packageknown as Infomapper. Both the book (Burk andHorton 1988) and the software package presenta highly structured way of identifying andrecording the information resources of an orga-nization, keyed to departments and hierarchicallevels, with indications of ‘ownership’, responsi-bility for updating and other matters such aspurging and disposal. The book, however, goesbeyond the software in setting out, in addition,graphical representations of the information re-source ‘map’, and approaches to measuring thecosts and the value of information.Recently, information mapping has acquired

another meaning, in the guise of ‘knowledgemapping’, by which is meant the identificationof people’s skills and competencies. This idea isan old one in new clothes, first arising in thepersonnel management literature in the 1960s(e.g. Bronstein 1965), resurfacing when main-frame computers replaced 5’’ � 3’’ cards (e.g.Hoey 1972), and having a further lease of lifewhen desktop computer networks became com-mon. The proponents of ‘knowledge mapping’,


however, appear to be unaware of these earliermanifestations of the same concept. However,there is scope for further confusion, because theterm is also used in cognitive science research asa way of determining what is learnt in learningtasks (see, e.g., Herl et al. 1999)

COMMUNICATION AUDITS

The communication audit predates informationmanagement as a tool for the investigation ofcommunication in the field of organization the-ory. Emerging out of that field, it has also founda place in the management of organizationswhere it is used to identify barriers to commu-nication and possibilities for improvement. Inthis area the tools developed by Goldhaber(1974) and Goldhaber and Rogers (1979) forthe International Communications Association(ICA) have had most impact. ICA instrumentshave been used most in exploring communicationbetween management and employees in organi-zations. The role of communication audits wasexplored by Booth (1986, 1988) and, morerecently, by Potter (1990), who categorized com-munication audits as being used to measure: theeffectiveness of introducing IT in an organiza-tion; interpersonal communications; communica-tion between management and employees; theeffectiveness of organizational communications;or public relations activity.Clearly, given the increasing interest in various

aspects of quality management and quality assur-ance, the communications audit has a significantrole to play in ensuring that communicationbetween information services and their customersis fully effective.

Information access, networks andintranets

Determining the appropriate mode and channelof communication is also part of the informationmanager’s role and, in recent years, the emphasishere has shifted from the acquisition of informa-tion resources ‘just in case’ they are likely to beuseful to the organization, to a concept ofacquiring, or providing access to resources ‘justin time’ to be useful. In organizations, theresponsibility for managing internally generatedinformation and data has increasingly come tobe the function of information technology divi-sions, with the acquisition and organization ofexternal resources being the responsibility of the

special library or information service. However,the ubiquity of telecommunications and compu-ter networks both in organizations and inthe world at large is making this distinction lessand less useful. It is probably no exaggeration tosay that the greater part of information neededto understand markets and the market positionof a company is now available electronically,either through specialized providers of businessinformation such as Reuters and Dun andBradstreet, or through publicly available sourcessuch as the websites of newspapers and businessmagazines. Similarly, competitive intelligencecan be ‘mined’ from Internet resources and theproprietary online systems (see, e.g., Halliman2001).Thus, more and more information is brought

into organizations through organizational net-works and their connection to the Internet andthe local application of the technology – intra-nets. The great advantage of intranets lies in therelative ease with which legacy databases can begiven new life and easier access through thedevelopment of Web-based interfaces, as well asin the increased potential for information shar-ing. To some extent intranets have been hailed asthe solution to almost every problem of informa-tion management in organizations, being seen asthe basis for the ‘virtual organization’ or themain tool for ‘organizational learning’ (for arange of views on intranets see, e.g., Bernard1998; Hills 1997; Blackmore 2001). Vaast(2001), in a study of intranets in French compa-nies, found that 1995 marked the point at whichthey became a common phenomenon, but thattheir evolution within companies varied consider-ably. Some used the intranet as a major strategicinitiative, e.g. in merging companies, or inpresenting themselves as ‘leading-edge’ corpora-tions; others allowed the development of depart-mental intranets, without any overall strategicobjective for the company. In a UK study, Leowand MacLennan (2000) found a high acceptanceof intranets as a central part of informationstrategies in banks.Whatever the nature of development, how-

ever, there is little doubt that the intranet andconnection to the Internet has drawn attentionin organizations to the need to access andmanage textual information as much as infor-mation systems have previously managed corpo-rate data.


Access, privacy and security: informationand the law

Information management aims to improve theeffectiveness of organizations by managing infor-mation as a resource – providing access torelevant information in a timely and cost-effec-tive manner. However, this aim carries with it theproblem of determining who needs access toorganizational information and data, whetherthe privacy of individuals needs to be protectedand what levels of security need to be in place toensure not only privacy but also the protection ofcompetitive intelligence.In the UK, the data protection Act of 1984

established the legal basis for the protection ofpersonal data in computer files and providedcitizens with the basis for ensuring that suchinformation was accurate and protected frommisuse. There have been some doubts about theextent to which the aims of the Act have beenrealized, particularly as the cost to the citizen ofobtaining information on the data held is set bythe data-holder and can be high.In Europe generally, the European Commis-

sion’s draft directive on the protection of perso-nal data (Commission of the EuropeanCommunities 1992) is intended to harmonizelegislation across Europe and to require thosestates that have not yet produced such legislationto do so. The overall aims are very much those ofthe UK Data Protection Act but grounded in theEuropean Convention for the Protection of Hu-man Rights. The definition of personal data files,however, is wider, covering not only electronicfiles but also manual files, and a great deal ofuncertainty and confusion exists as to its futureoperation regarding, for example, library catalo-gues and bibliographic databases that might beregarded as constituting personal data.In the USA, the ‘Poindexter Memorandum’

(Systems Security Steering Group 1986) caused aviolent protest when it sought to restrict access togovernment information on the grounds of na-tional security. In seeking to protect what itcalled ‘sensitive, but unclassified’ informationthe memorandum could have led to what wereregarded as wholly unjustified restrictions onaccess to information, and it was ultimatelywithdrawn.In the past, librarians and information man-

agers needed to think of information law almostsolely in terms of copyright but, as Knoppers

(1986) points out, the situation is now verydifferent. He notes that the information managershould

. be responsible for identifying any existinginformation laws that affect the organiza-tion;

. serve as the ‘missing link’ between legalservices. . .the human resources and manage-ment information systems departments, andoperational units of the organization tocoordinate their activities and ensure thatinformation law requirements are being meton a day-to-day basis regardless of theinformation technology used;

. ensure that information law compliance isintegrated into the systems design metho-dology of the organization; and

. advocate changes in information law whencompliance with it inhibits the introductionof new information technologies, therebythreatening the competitiveness and viabi-lity of the firm.

(Knoppers 1986)

Information policy and informationstrategies

information policy may be determined forany level of organization, from the internationalcommunity to the individual organization. In-formation policy has become a subject fordebate at the international level in Europe as aresult of the attempts by the European Commis-sion to aid the development of the Europeaninformation industry.As noted earlier, in the UK the focus of

national policy has been on the business oppor-tunities in the information sector and on ‘trade-able information’ held by governmentdepartments, which might constitute opportu-nities for business as well as earning income forthe departments. More recently, following the USlead, a statement on the public-sector opportu-nities provided by the notion of the InformationSuperhighway (CCTA 1994) has been produced.The idea of the Information Superhighway cameto prominence as a result of the Clinton admin-istration’s declaration of a national (US) Informa-tion Superhighway, building on the achievementsof the Internet (National Telecommunicationsand Information Administration 1993).


Information management has developed out ofthe perception that information is crucially im-portant to the success of business organizationsand to the productivity of public sector agencies.At the organizational level, therefore, an infor-mation policy defines the overall aims andobjectives of the organization in relation toinformation. As Lytle notes: ‘Information policiesrelate to: (i) data, (ii) information processingequipment and software, (iii) information sys-tems and services, and (iv) staff roles andresponsibilities. Formal development of informa-tion policies recognizes information as a strategicorganizational resource’ (Lytle 1988). Thus anaim of policy may be to provide access to theorganization’s data resources for all executiveand managerial level personnel directly from theworkstation. Another aim may be to providecustomized searching of external, online informa-tion resources for planning and marketing per-sonnel.Information strategy deals with how these

policy aims are to be accomplished: thus, thesecond aim above might be accomplished in avariety of ways; for example, by training perso-nal assistants and secretaries in online searching,by commissioning the organization’s library ser-vices to carry out the searches on behalf ofmanagers or by investing in the appropriatesoftware ‘agent’ (such as SandPoint Corpora-tion’s ‘Hoover’) to enable the task to be per-formed automatically and delivered to themanager’s terminal (see Hermans 1997). Each ofthese strategies will have different, associatedcosts, risks and time-scales that need to beevaluated against the anticipated benefits.The National Health Service in the UK pro-

vides an interesting case study of the evolution ofan information strategy and the role of theInternet and intranets in the strategy. In Informa-tion for Health: An Information Strategy for theModern NHS (Department of Health 1998) theaim, set out by the Secretary of State for Healthin the Foreword, was ‘to provide NHS staff withthe most modern tools to improve the treatmentand care of patients and to be able to narrowinequalities in health by identifying individuals,groups and neighbourhoods whose healthcareneeds particular attention’. The objectives, there-fore, were not narrowly informational in char-acter, but related directly to the central functionsof the National Health Service. Subsequent de-velopments in the NHS have been guided by this

overall strategy, both in relation to the profes-sionals working in the system, through NHSnet,which connects General Practitioners, NHSweb(see www.nhsia.nhs.uk/nhsnet/pages/about/intro/nhsweb.asp), and the development of electronicpatient record systems and associated standards,and in relation to the citizen, through NHSDirect Online (see www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk/). TheNHS is a huge organization and implementing aninformation strategy requires the development ofa complex web of standards, technology andelectronic resources.An information policy may have a number of

different dimensions and each dimension mayhave a variety of alternative strategies for itsrealization. Consequently, the strategic plan-ning necessary to define policy and relatestrategies to the financial, personnel and otherresources of the organization is no trivial task.An excellent example of this complexity ispresented by Bowander and Miyake (1992) intheir study of the information managementstrategy of the Nippon Steel Corporation. Thestrategy focused on sustaining the competitive-ness of the company in the world market forsteel and its success is said by the authors to bedue to

(a) intensive scanning for new information;(b) identifying new business opportunities

using IT;(c) rapid information assimilation through

organizational learning;(d) information fusion for generating new

innovations;(e) intensive use of information through

learning by doing and learning by using;(f) building competence for achieving new

business through tie-ups and rapid com-mercial utilization of already availabletechnologies; and

(g) highly forward-looking and intensive in-formation management strategy at thefirm level.

(Bowander and Miyake 1992)

While much of the focus of the paper is on theinformation technology strategies that were im-plemented to support the information strategy, itis notable that the company paid significantattention to information content and informationsharing as the basis for its strategic businessdevelopment.


Warning notes, however, are issued from allsides. For example, Galliers et al. (1994) haveexplored how information strategies fail andtheir conclusions are directly applicable to orga-nizational information policy (see organiza-tional information policies) and strategy.Failure is associated with: (1) the lack of a‘champion’, someone at the highest level in theorganization who takes upon himself or herselfthe task of arguing for resources, negotiating andrestructuring, and otherwise setting the scene forthe attainment of the policy (this is a frequentlyreiterated point in the literature – see, forexample, Wilson 1989a); (2) a condition of rapidchange in the business environment and the aimsof the organization; (3) a lack of mutual under-standing of the aims of the strategy and themeans for its attainment on the part of thedifferent actors in the development process; (4) afailure to provide the appropriate means for‘organizational learning’ so that (3) may be over-come.Sauer (1993) adds to these points the fact that

the implementation of information systems is theproduct of a coalition of stakeholders. One of thestakeholders is the organization set up to developsystems and it relies upon the support of theothers (who have the power to obtain resourcesetc.) to attain its objectives. Failure occurs whenthe system development organization runs out ofsupport because of, for example, failure to meetexpectations, or to deliver on time and withinbudget, or to deliver useful systems.

Strategic information systems

The idea that information has strategic valueemerges out of the idea of information as anorganizational resource and the related conceptof competitive intelligence or environmentalscanning (as the work referred to in the previousparagraph demonstrates). Thus, the informationheld in corporate databases may have strategicvalue in identifying new market opportunities ormay itself constitute new information products.Such new opportunities and new products arestrategic in the sense that they aid the competi-tive position of the organization and, given thetendency in the UK towards the adoption ofmarket-oriented management in public services,today all organizations may need to adopt acompetitive stance.Again, an organization may scan the business

environment for market opportunities, for threatsto present competitive positions, for potentialreplacement products and services for thosecurrently marketed, and for potential acquisi-tions. New products have recently been marketedto enable firms to scan the online databases andInternet resources for competitive intelligence.Such information is strategic information andthe systems designed to acquire, store, organizeand make available for use such information arestrategic information systems. Choo (2001) hasedited a useful series of papers on competitiveintelligence and environmental scanning.However, the use of information in strategic or

competitive ways is not without its hazards, asMarx (1987) has pointed out. The case ofcomputerized reservations systems (CRS) in theairline business is well known: American Airlinesdeveloped its CRS (known as SABRE) and agreedto carry information from other airlines. How-ever, the system was set up in such a way as togive preference to information on American Air-lines’ flights. This was subsequently ruled to beunfair practice and American Airlines had toredesign its system.Marx draws attention to other situations in

which the competitive use of information andinformation systems may constitute unfair com-petition or restraint of trade or contribute to thecreation of a monopoly position in an industry.All of this, of course, confirms the emergence ofinformation as a key resource in business, towhich the same legal constraints must be appliedas are used to prevent monopolistic ownership ofother means of production or distribution.

Education for information management

The state of education for information manage-ment is as diverse as the basis for its definitions.In the UK, the Departments and Schools ofLibrarianship and Information Science (LIS) haveintroduced information management optionsand, in some cases, new degree programmes inthe field, and have made a strong bid within theirinstitutions to be the lead departments in thisnew area. However, there is competition from thebusiness schools (where the focus still tends to beon the strategic role of information technologyand on the consequences of that role for themanagement of IT) and from computer sciencedepartments, which, in the early 1990s, felt theeffect of declining demand for their courses and


which, in consequence, have sought to broadenthe basis for attracting students by offeringcourses in business information systems andinformation management.Attempts to define the information manage-

ment curriculum have been limited, but Wilsonanalysed the contents of key journals in the fieldand found the following categories:

. application areas (such as banking, localgovernment, industry, etc.)

. artificial intelligence

. economics of information (including theinformation industry)

. education for information management

. information management functions (e.g.manpower aspects, strategic monitoring,etc.)

. information policy

. information systems (including databasesystems, decision support systems, legalaspects, organizational impact, etc.)

. information technology (with two mainsubcategories: management aspects andtechnological aspects)

. information use and users

. systems theory(Wilson 1989b: 208)

While the attention given to each of theseelements seems likely to differ, they do seem toconstitute the general core of information man-agement and, indeed, those departments oflibrary and information studies in the UK thathave created information management pro-grammes have produced different mixes ofthe elements depending upon the existingstrengths of the teaching staff. Since the firstedition of this text, the situation has changedlittle: a study by Maceviçiūtė and Wilson (2002)found:

. In the economics of information, a shift to aconcern with wider market economics, ratherthan cost–benefit relationships in the firm.

. Greater concern with organization and humanissues.

. The emergence of information networking, theInternet and intranets as themes.

. Greater concern with telecommunication poli-cies – associated with networking.

. More attention to intellectual property issues –also a consequence of networking etc.

. The proliferation of application areas for

information management concepts.. The emergence of knowledge management, asa virtual synonym for the field.

The situation in the USA is similar andappears to have changed little since Lytle (1988)noted that confusion existed over the educationalbase for information management and claimedthat:

The reason for the confusion is not curriculumoverlap or battles in academia for the latestdegree programme. The primary problem isconfusion concerning what qualities and skillsare required for IRM positions, whether thesepositions have IRM, MIS, or other titles.

Conclusion

Whether information management is a passingfancy or a new way of considering the role ofinformation in organizational performance mustawait the test of time; however, there can be littledoubt that the concept has had a significantimpact on the thinking of professionals workingin a variety of fields. Managers of computerservices have become information managers (andeven directors of information management ser-vices); records managers, archivists, informationscientists and special librarians have changedtheir titles and shifted their professional orienta-tions; and educational institutions have intro-duced new courses in information managementin departments as diverse as computer science,business management and librarianship.Clearly, then, changes have been set in train in

several directions and acceptance of the concept,however defined, is widespread. The history oforganizations, however, is full of ideas that haveattained significance for a time and then fallenaway, either into general acceptance within thebody of management ideas or into whateverlimbo exists for such things. One thinks in thiscontext of ‘scientific management’, ‘organizationdevelopment’, ‘programmed-based budgeting’and the like.If information management is to avoid this

fate a number of things must happen: first, thefunction of information management (rather thansimply the idea) must become accepted as a keypart of organizational structures and processes,so that a constituency can exist as a basis for theother desiderata. In this respect, scale is a


significant feature: government departments, lo-cal government structures and the NationalHealth Service are large enough for the value ofeffective information management to be per-ceived, but the majority of manufacturing firmsare small and medium-sized enterprises. As Ro-berts and Wilson (1987: 74) noted: ‘Informationmanagement, in its information technology mani-festation, is a distant and impractical idea for themajority of manufacturing firms. Most are de-void of levels of information awareness suffi-ciently lively to influence information behaviourand practices in a positive fashion.’Second, a coherent educational programme or

curriculum must emerge in which there is at leasta core of universally recognized elements, so thatthe knowledge base of the information managercan be recognized by prospective aspirants to therole and by employees. In most cases, the situa-tion remains confused, with business schools,computer science departments and departmentsof library and information studies adoptingdiffering approaches to the field, and still, fiveyears after the original publication of this work,there is little sign of the emergence of the desiredcohesion.Third, a research agenda must emerge to

provide the theoretical basis for informationmanagement so that its problem areas can beidentified and explored in a coherent and rigor-ous manner. Again, there is some indication thatthis is happening, in that the relevant journals areaccepting papers from a wide range of sources,including library and information studies, recog-nizing the broad disciplinary approach necessaryto the field. However, one of the key journals inthe field, the Information Management Review,ceased publication in 1993 after only eight yearsin existence and it is evident that either thevolume of research is insufficient to support evena small number of specialist journals or (and thisis probably more likely) researchers wish tomaintain their links with their parent disciplines.In the UK, the situation has been further exacer-bated by the disappearance of the British LibraryR&D Department as a funding agency forresearch in the field. Researchers are now eitherin competition with every other discipline inbidding for resources from the research councils,or are engaged in more applied research forcommercial sponsors and the various agencies ofthe European Commission.

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SEE ALSO: data protection; freedom ofinformation; information; informationprofessions; information science education;library education; market research

T.D. WILSON

INFORMATION POLICY

What is information policy?

Information policy is an important component inthe deliberations of national governments andinternational public bodies, yet it is less immedi-ately visible than other areas of public policy.When we think of health, education or housingpolicy, we can readily identify laws, regulations,responsible cabinet ministers, royal commissions,think tanks and other trappings and apparatus ofgovernment. To a more limited extent, the sameis true of information policy. For example, wehave laws and regulations that exist to regulatethe processing of personal information (e.g. dataprotection), or to create the market conditionswithin which information products and servicescan be traded (e.g. copyright), or to protectnational security (e.g. official secrecy). At thesame time, there are broader policy aims thatdeal with information, not framed in purely legalterms. We have measures that are concerned withcreating information infrastructures – from pub-lic libraries, to the training of informationprofessionals, to the provision of broadbandnetworks in higher education, as well as mea-sures to help achieve an information society.Within the pages of our newspapers, we findfierce debates on the big political issues of themoment, many of which have a strong informa-

tional component, such as the introduction ofcompulsory identity cards or video surveil-lance in our high streets and shopping centres.These highlight some interesting questions forinformation policy, such as: Who owns personalinformation? Should citizens sacrifice some priv-acy in the fight against crime? How shoulddigital broadcasting be financed?Information access and disclosure are critical

elements in the working of participative democ-racies and measures concerning these aspectscan be found in most areas of public policy.The 1993 UK White Paper on Open Govern-ment, for example, lists some forty Acts ofParliament and 280 Statutes, enacted since thewar, which place various restrictions on the useof information, often tucked away within thesmall print of how the consumer credit market,for example, should be regulated (Hill 1994).To be fair, there are many examples of bothlegislation and government practice that conver-sely guarantee the availability of information tothe public in areas as diverse as pollutionregisters, food labelling and agricultural statis-tics. However, if we decide to take a view, atleast for the sake of argument, that we can treat‘access to information’ as an independent vari-able in society, is it not possible to conceive ofthe whole apparatus of information law andregulation, including public libraries, education,broadcasting, universal service, cryptography,freedom of expression and other related conceptsas forming a kind of gigantic ‘informationecosystem’? And, just as in natural ecosystems,is it not the case that each element is interdepen-dent and that even relatively small changes toone component can lead to unpredictable large-scale changes in the rest of the system? It is thiskind of thinking that led to a great deal ofinterest in the notion of ‘national informationpolicies’ in the early 1970s, and to a recent, post-Internet, revival of interest.At its highest level, information policy thus

comprises all the laws, regulations and publicpolicies that encourage, discourage or regulatethe creation, use, storage and communication ofinformation. It follows that information policy isa broad concept and the list of topics below maybe taken as generally indicative of its scope(Chartrand 1986):

. Government information resource manage-ment policy and practice.

278 INFORMATION POLICY

Rafiq

Highlight

. telecommunications and broadcasting pol-icy.

. International communications policy.

. Information disclosure policy.

. Information, confidentiality and privacy.

. Computer regulation and computer crime.

. intellectual property.

. Library and archives policy.

. Government information dissemination.

In many ways, information policy is a proble-matic concept intellectually. What binds togetheran apparently disparate and combustible mix ofissues such as privacy, electronic government,access to official information, internet provi-sion in libraries, academic networks and iden-tity cards? Information policy is an example ofwhat a political scientist might recognize as an‘issue area’, one which draws together a bundleof apparently unrelated concerns around a single(if highly ambiguous) integrating concept – inthis case, the power of information to ‘make adifference’ in the social, cultural and economiclife of the nation.Many commentators on information policy

have noted that it seems very different fromother, more established, areas of public policy.The differences are not difficult to identify.Information policy differs from, say, education,housing or health policy in that:

. It is a relatively new area of policy concern.

. It involves an unusually large and diversenumber of interest groups.

. Decisions about information can have anenormous impact on events and policies inother areas – the reverse is true to a muchlesser extent.

. Information, in contrast with, say, labour orcapital, does not fit into the traditional cate-gories employed by policy analysts.

. Information policies are made at very differentlevels of the political and social structure, fromthe local to the global, and are remarkablyinterdependent

These differences are all, of course, relative. Theymay not be unique (i.e. exclusive) characteristics,but they certainly seem to be atypical of otherareas of public and organizational policy, wherethe issues tend to be relatively more clear cut andthe affected parties less numerous.Of course, a wide range of forces other than

public policy are relevant to a consideration of theissues affecting the creation, use, storage andcommunication of information. These include,among many others, the commercial strategiesadopted by publishers and database providers,consumer behaviour, the influence of pressuregroups and the proliferation of new informationmedia and platforms. One of the characteristics ofinformation policy that makes it a challengingarea to study is that it simultaneously shapes andresponds to the outside world. As an independentvariable, information policy can be thought of interms of its impact and outcomes, both on thewider environment and on the political processitself. When it is viewed as a dependent variable,our attention is drawn to the environmental,cultural, economic and other factors that shapeand guide policy and its implementation (Row-lands 1996). This insight leads us to the viewthat we should define information policy asbroadly and as inclusively as possible. Informa-tion policy is about much more than laws andwhite papers; it is better to think of it as referringto all those societal mechanisms used to controlinformation, and the societal effects of applyingthose mechanisms.Tracing the concept historically, we find the

first systematic national information policiesemerging in the USA in the early 1960s. Againstthe geopolitical backdrop of the Cold War andthe space race, there was an increasing awarenessthat a nation’s stock of scientific and technicalinformation, and its ability to protect and man-age those assets effectively, were becoming criti-cal national security issues. If the needs of themilitary-industrial complex were one factor inthe growing acceptance of the need for high-levelinformation policy, the other integrating con-struct was the emergence of the computer, andlater the network, as a readily identifiable focusand metaphor for information processing. Thediffusion of information and communicationtechnology (ICT) into the fabric of societybrought with it a series of thorny problems asnew techniques for automatically processing dataon a large scale became possible.Historically, information policies have evolved

in direct response to the emergence of specifictechnologies, such as print, telephony, radio orvalue-added and data services. Not surprisingly,the responsibility for these policies has tended tofall within the domain of whichever professionalinformation community was most directly

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concerned with the particular technology in-volved (as librarians, computer scientists, broad-casters or information scientists). In other words,while information policy has been technologydriven, policy analysis and research has typicallybeen discipline bounded. The fragmentation ofinformation policy research is mirrored by afragmentation of policy-making institutions. InBritain, for example, the Department of Tradeand Industry is the lead agency for developingpolicy in relation to tradeable information, stan-dards and intellectual property; while dataprotection is under the jurisdiction of the HomeOffice; legal deposit under the Department ofNational Heritage; and public records under theLord Chancellor’s Department.Prince Metternich once described early nine-

teenth-century Italy, then composed of a collec-tion of regional entities, as little more than a‘geographical expression’. Such a viewpoint hassome relevance to information policy and findsreflection in the long-standing debate aboutwhether we should more properly speak of anall-embracing ‘National Information Policy’ or‘national information policies’. Other publicpolicy areas, like social exclusion, are arguablyjust as fragmented as information policy and acoherent programme to tackle poverty mightwell include such diverse elements as innova-tions in education and training, tax reform, therestructuring of welfare benefits and action onhousing.The question of whether we speak of informa-

tion policy or information policies is not merely asource of vexation for academics. Singular andplural forms represent differing worldviews.Consensual approaches to thinking about aparticular issue area in ways that provide a basisfor decision-making are called ‘regimes’. A re-gime may be thought of as a framework ofshared values and assumptions that sets thecontext within which specific laws and policiesare developed. In education, for instance, there isalmost universal consensus on the need to pro-vide compulsory schooling up to age sixteen andto encourage participation in higher education,and there is a clear understanding of the benefitsof high-quality education in relation to continu-ing economic prosperity. These values transcendparty political divides and frame the debate oneducation policy in terms of the relative merits ofthe means at our disposal, rather than fundamen-tally questioning the ends themselves.

The legal and regulatory environment withinwhich we capture, store, use and process infor-mation is complex and multifaceted. Indeed,taken at face value, many of our informationlaws and public policies appear to be ratheruneasy bedfellows. Thus, we create informationmarkets by treating information as intellectualproperty, while at the same time offering sub-sidized public library services that ‘distort’ theworkings of the marketplace. We endeavour tomake government more transparent and accoun-table through freedom of information legis-lation, while contracting out many formerlypublic services to the private sector, thus placinginformation that was once protected by the cloakof official secrecy into the realm of ‘commerciallysensitive’. Similarly, when we think of some ofthe stories in today’s newspapers, we find ten-sions between the rights of editors to free expres-sion, the rights of certain politicians to safeguardtheir personal privacy, and the balancing widerpublic interest. As the list of specific informationlaws and regulations necessarily expands to copewith the need to respond to new technologiesand applications – inter alia, digital signatures,consumer protection on the Internet, data en-cryption, ‘voluntary’ smart cards and so on – wecan anticipate many more such dilemmas in thefuture (with considerable earnings potential forsuitably qualified lawyers!).What is missing, it seems, in the actuality of

public policy in the UK and other countries is aclear sense of an integrating overview or ‘infor-mation policy regime’. Just how do we makesense of the complex ecology of informationlaws, regulations, information management prac-tices and institutional cultures that shape infor-mation transfer activities at the national level?Information professionals are key stakeholders inthis debate and have a unique opportunity toplay a role in the development of a coherentinformation policy regime.

Information policy as a process

Our understanding of this complex and fascinat-ing topic will be very limited if we restrict ourstudy just to the formal expressions of informa-tion policy: Acts of Parliament, green papers ordiscussion documents. The analysis of policydocuments can be a dull and sterile activity. Wewould do much better to think of informationpolicy as a dynamic process, as an interplay


between various stakeholder groups, vested inter-ests and power structures.

There are many frameworks in the academicliterature to help us better understand thedynamics of policy-making. Some writers viewpolicy-making as the reaction of a politicalsystem to external stimuli, representing politicsas a kind of black box that regulates change inthe outside world, a little like the thermostat thattells your central heating system when to comeon or off. Others view policy-making as theresult of a series of choices or bargains nego-tiated between stakeholders and represent it asan essentially chaotic, non-linear, process deter-mined by shifting networks of power and influ-ence. A review of all the frameworks potentiallyavailable for use in the context of informationpolicy studies is beyond the remit of this ency-clopedia entry, but one immediately useful andproductive way of trying to understand informa-tion policy is to employ a systems approach. Thisrecognises that policy-making comprises a seriesof inputs (people, ideology, expediency, informa-tion, research, investment) and outputs (wealthcreation, better healthcare, access to democracy).By conceiving of information policy-making as aset of INPUT–PROCESS–OUTPUT (I–P–O) ac-tivities for organizing our thinking, we shift tothe view that information policy governs aprocess (such as the storage and transmission ofinformation) rather than a thing (such as tech-nology). ‘Information policy’ might therefore bebetter thought of as a verb than a noun. Just asthe I–P–O model can be used to describe howdata are transformed into information and thenknowledge, so too can it offer insights into

policy-making. So, rather than addressing policyissues relating to a specific advance in softwareor data communications (technology driven) wecan switch our attention to the underlying func-tional aims and objectives of policy.

Conceptualizing policy as a process, ratherthan a specific outcome or event, is very useful.It helps us to understand how policy developsover time and how policy is shaped by (and, inturn, shapes) economic, cultural, organizationaland social factors. Policy is not an abstract ideal;it takes place in an imperfect and sometimesconfusing world. A typical representation of thepolicy-making process breaks it down into aseries of stages and a relatively simple exampleof this approach is illustrated below (Figure 12).

As we move from left to right, a problem isfirst recognized and defined and then finds itselfon a decision-maker’s agenda. Alternative ‘solu-tions’ are developed, presented and rejected infavour of the option that offers the maximum netbenefit (or is the most convenient, expedient orcheapest). This is then officially adopted. Imple-mentation begins and some kind of evaluation ormonitoring procedure is usually invoked so thatany undesirable outcomes can be identified andmitigated against. In many cases, the results ofthat evaluation will require adjustments to bemade earlier in the chain, perhaps resulting in acomplete redesign of the policy. This is a rationaland idealized model of policy-making. It concep-tualizes policy as a planning activity. To a largeextent, once a policy-making process gets under-way, it tends to be continuous. It has been saidthat policy-making has no beginning and no end.This is overstating the case, since it is possible to

Figure 12 Staged model of the policy-making process


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define reasonable starting and termination pointsin a pragmatic way. Within those bounds, how-ever, the process can be regarded as continuous.The power of the staged model is that it offers

us a way of grouping a wide range of apparentlydisconnected decisions, phenomena, observationsand data into meaningful units. It has a certainintuitive appeal that is not easily to be dis-counted. It also has its limitations. Many criticswould immediately point out that real life, withits rough-and-tumble of politics and horse trad-ing, is not nearly as tidy as the model suggests(Rowlands and Turner 1997). Nonetheless this ishow policy-making is most often presented in themedia and many policy-makers would still justifyand defend their own actions, however appar-ently irrational at the time, in terms of this idealframework.Despite their apparent abstraction, theoretical

models can be very powerful and can shape thecourse of events in the real world.

THE NORMATIVE STRUCTURE OF INFORMATION POLICY

Information policy, like public policy in general,derives its values and goals from the dominantpolitical, economic and cultural contexts withinwhich it is forged and developed. This point mayat first seem rather obvious and unremarkable,until we reflect further on some of the implica-tions of the staged model. Why is it, for example,that some issues capture the interest of policy-makers, while others are neglected? Is it justbecause of circumstances, or is it because power-ful lobby groups are able to make themselvesheard above the general din? Even when an issuebubbles up onto the political agenda, the ways inwhich it may be dealt with can vary enormously.Consider the following sequence of events:

Issue identification and problem definition – 1

Issue – people sleeping on the streets of cities.Problem definition – vagrancy.Policy response – tougher forms of policing.

What counts as a problem and how thatproblem is defined depends very much on theway that we perceive it. If we see people sleepingon the streets as a problem of vagrancy, then thepolicy response is more than likely to be framedin terms of law enforcement and policing.

Issue identification and problem definition – 2

Issue – People sleeping on the streets of cities.

Problem definition – homelessness.Policy response – provide low-cost housing.

We might just as easily view the same issue asan indicator of social deprivation or a sign offailure in other policy areas such as communitycare – in which case the policy response willobviously be very different (we might providelow-cost housing, for example, or appropriatemental healthcare).Information policy issues are equally ambigu-

ous. The recent trend towards the electronicdelivery of public services provides a goodexample. Local government has been quick toembrace electronic communications, using e-mail, the Internet and the World Wide Web.Official city websites contain a wide range ofinformation, including ‘What’s On’ guides tolocal activities, council reports and plans, touristinformation and links to local community andvoluntary groups. Many authorities use innova-tive forms of electronic communication to pro-vide information about local services – examplesinclude public libraries with computers hookedup to the Internet, electronic kiosks displayingpages of local information in public places likesupermarkets, and videotelephony for hearing-impaired people. Simultaneously, it is possible tosee these developments as informing and empow-ering local communities and extending democ-racy, as instruments to reduce administrationcosts and head count by re-engineering localgovernment services, as providing a stimulus tothe information industry, as a new weapon in thecouncils’ public relations armoury, or merely asgesture politics, pandering to the technologyfetishists. The truth probably lies somewhere(everywhere?) on this list, but it is not immedi-ately evident where.In other words, issue identification and pro-

blem definition in information policy are hardlyvalue-free. The same is true at all points in thepolicy cycle, even the evaluation of policy out-comes. Economic arguments over whether infor-mation should be treated as a tradeablecommodity or cherished from a public goodperspective abound in the library and informa-tion science literature, perhaps in their mostcrystalline form in relation to intellectual prop-erty rights. The continuing creation and develop-ment of information content requires thatinvestors be properly rewarded for their efforts.


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This means conferring property rights and en-abling a marketplace to develop. On the downside, these property rights may erect a barrier tothe world of ideas for those who are unable to pay.This in turn necessitates a further set of publicpolicies, such as universal service, investment inlibraries, civil R&D, and education, which seekdeliberately to distort the information market-place in favour of the wider public interest.Questions of this kind, which hinge on therespective roles and responsibilities of the stateand the market, and on the rights of creators andusers, are ubiquitous in the professional literature.Aside from monetary considerations, access to

information and knowledge is also a function ofpower structures. In many situations, the widestpossible access to information is seen as a ‘goodthing’ – health promotion, information aboutschool performance, consumer information andaccess to local government records being classicexamples. In other circumstances unfettered ac-cess to information is more problematic – thepolicy advice given to ministers, personal infor-mation, information which might be prejudicialto national security or a firm’s commercialposition. Restrictions on the free flow of infor-mation are sometimes essential, but there isalways a danger that powerful forces in societywill constrict these flows to their own advantage.Progress in our understanding of information

policies depends on finding ways to make ourassumptions, prejudices and values more trans-parent – information policy, like all aspects ofpublic policy, is after all deeply embedded in apolitical and social context. Information policy-makers constantly find themselves between arock and a hard place – just consider thefollowing intractable dilemmas:

. Market-led versus state-led visions of theinformation society.

. Rights of freedom of expression versus rightsof personal privacy.

. The monopoly functions of patents and copy-rights versus their informational aspects andthe needs of users in the UK science base.

. The philosophy of open government versus theretention of official copyright (crown copy-right in the UK) and continuing restrictivelicensing practices (see licences).

The tensions between the main stakeholders(information industry, government, journalists,

celebrities, inventors, library users) in each caseare painfully evident. Without recourse to abroader framework that makes the underlyingvalue systems clear, how can we find a way toresolve these tensions openly and fairly?The model shown in Figure 13 was generated

automatically using a data mining technique(Rowlands 1999). It relates a number of informa-tion policy concepts to one another in a two-dimensional space, depending upon how fre-quently pairs of concepts co-occurred in a largebibliographic database.It is not unreasonable to suppose that closely

related concepts (e.g. fish AND chips) will tendto occur together more frequently in biblio-graphic records than concepts that are lessmutually connected (e.g. fish AND oranges). Ifthe intensity of these relationships is representedby distance, we could construct a map thatwould show ‘fish’ and ‘chips’ quite close to oneanother, while ‘fish’ and ‘oranges’ would bemuch further apart.The concepts in the information policy map

appear to be reasonably coherent and probablywill not come as any great surprise to anyonewith more than a passing interest in the subject.Five clusters of concepts are evident and aresummarized in Table 15.The axes on the map have been set (arbitra-

rily) to originate from the term ‘informationpolicy’. Broadly speaking, concepts lying to theright of the origin seem to relate primarily to thedirect management by the state of its owninternal information resources. From the topdown, these responsibilities extend from thecontrol of sensitive official information (‘Infor-mation protectionism’ cluster), through the effec-tive storage and management of officialinformation (‘Public access’ cluster) to the provi-sion of infrastructures for its wider dissemination(‘Information society and infrastructure’ cluster).In contrast, concepts on the left-hand side of themap seem to more closely match the state’sindirect role as a regulator of private sectorinformation activities. Again, scanning from thetop down, we see the state first acting toconstrict information flows where these are held,for instance, to be invasive of personal privacy(‘Information protectionism’ cluster), then creat-ing the conditions within which market exchangecan take place (‘Information markets’ cluster)and finally mitigating against the worst excessesof the marketplace by guaranteeing fundamental


Figure 13 Information policy concepts

Cluster Label Interpretation

A Informationprotectionism

Regulations and mechanisms controlling information access anddisclosure in the public sphere (e.g. official secrecy) and ininformation markets (e.g. data protection)

B Informationmarkets

Laws and regulations that protect investment in the creation ofinformation content (e.g. copyright) and enable market exchange totake place

C Broadcasting andtelecommunications

Public policies that regulate the mass media and communications,balancing commercial and citizen interests (e.g. universal access)

D Public access toofficial information

Policies and regulations that frame citizens’ access to information heldwithin government (e.g. freedom of information)

E Information societyand infrastructure

Public policy measures to invest (or encourage private sectorinvestment) in the information infrastructure, broadly defined

Table 15 Information policy subdomains


rights of freedom of expression and universalservice (‘Broadcasting and communications’ clus-ter). For the sake of convenience, the y dimensioncan be summarised as expressing a spectrumbetween unrestricted, open (bottom) and re-stricted or controlled (top) information flows.The x dimension seems to indicate two distinctinformation policy roles for the state – as aregulator of information markets (left) and as amajor gatherer and disseminator of informationitself (right).This model offers a new framework for help-

ing us to think first and foremost about thesystem of values – rather than the specific lawsand regulations – that underpin informationpolicy. It may well be illustrative of aspects ofthe information policy ‘regime’ that were dis-cussed earlier.INFORMATION POLICY RESEARCH

It follows from all that has been said above thatinformation policy is a multifaceted and slipperyconcept to get to grips with. The researchliterature on the topic is at the same timerelatively sparse and characterized by a highdegree of literary scatter – it has been estimatedthat academic writings on information policy canbe found in the journals of more than fortydisciplines, from library and information scienceto economics, from law to media studies. Withinthese writings, several distinct modes and stylesof policy research can be identified:

. Policy determination is concerned with howpolicy is made, why, when and for whom.

. Policy content may involve either a descriptionor a critique of a particular policy and how itrelates to other, possibly earlier, policies.

. Policy monitoring and evaluation examines theimpact of policies and how they have per-formed in relation to their original objectives.

. Policy advocacy involves research and argu-ments that are intended to influence the policyagenda.

. Information for policy is a form of analysisthat is intended to feed directly into policy-making processes. This may take the form ofdetailed information and research or advice-giving.

In other words, research into information policycan be disinterested and followed for its ownsake, or it can be undertaken in order to lobbyand change the course of events. Either way, the

stakes are high: information-related issues arebecoming increasingly recognized as critical tomany aspects of the functioning of modernsocieties and we need to ensure that all the rolesthat information plays in our lives (as an eco-nomic commodity, a social good and a privategood) are recognized and supported. Are weready for the challenge?

References

Chartrand, R.L. (1986) ‘Legislating information pol-icy’, Bulletin of the American Society for Informa-tion Science 12: 10.

Hill, M.W. (1994) National Information Policies andStrategies: An Overview and Bibliographic Survey,Bowker-Saur, p. 105.

Rowlands, I. (1999) ‘Some compass bearings forinformation policy orienteering’, ASLIB Proceedings50: 230–7.

—— (1996) ‘Understanding information policy: Con-cepts, frameworks and research tools’, Journal ofInformation Science 22: 13–25.

Rowlands, I. and Turner, P. (1997) ‘Models and frame-works for information policy research’, in I. Row-lands (ed.) Understanding Information Policy,Bowker-Saur, pp. 46–60.

Further reading

Braman, S. (1989) ‘Defining information: An approachfor policymakers’, Telecommunications Policy 13:233–42.

Browne, M. (1997a) ‘The field of information policy:(1) fundamental concepts’, Journal of InformationScience 23: 261–75.

Browne, M. (1997b) ‘The field of information policy:(2) re-defining the boundaries and methodologies’,Journal of Information Science 23: 339–51.

Grieves, M. (ed.) (1998) Information Policy in theElectronic Age, Bowker-Saur.

IAN ROWLANDS

INFORMATION PROFESSIONS

A context for the informationprofessions

The information professions comprise all thosepersons directly engaged in the design, manage-ment and delivery of information, informationcollection and information services to commu-nities of users. Three elements are essential in thisdefinition: (1) engagement in the provision ofinformation services using a collection of infor-mation developed for a community of users; (2)responsibility for the construction, management

INFORMATION PROFESSIONS 285

and movement of information from one situationor place to another; (3) professional decisionsabout information policy and design forcollecting, holding and providing the informa-tion. The responsibilities of an information pro-fessional may address any of these definingelements, but they are likely to appear in combi-nations. In many collections or organizations, asingle information professional may be accoun-table for all of the responsibilities listed above,and more.The most important of the definitive elements

is the presence of a collection – or an array ofseveral information collections – because a col-lection has multiple implications. Informationprofessionals, for example, manage the develop-ment and maintenance of information collec-tions. These collections may take various forms,including: the traditional forms found in a library(see libraries) or archives, such as collectionsof books, journals, manuscripts and otherpaper matter; research tools such as databases,indexes (see index), catalogues and biblio-graphic utilities; and electronic media, includingsound recordings, video and internet re-sources, and the devices to use them.The array of tools and resources might be

quite vast; however, collections of this kind arefinite, and most information professionals willwork within acknowledged limits of content(imposed by an institution, a service communityor an industry). Still, the inclusion of virtual andelectronic tools and resources in any collectionmay make it reasonable to assume that theinformation collection can be conceived of ashaving no practical limits and as linked, at leastin theory, to all other information collections, inany location. Determining and managing theseextensions are also the responsibilities of infor-mation professionals.Regardless of its size, no collection of informa-

tion will be useful without multiple systems forcollection development, acquisitions, bib-liographic control, collection manage-ment and evaluation; the professional presencein such a collection is devoted to assuringintegrity in these systems.

Defining information professions

Professionals who work among information col-lections are typically identified as librarians,archivists or records managers, bibliographers

and collection managers. It is required that theywill hold undergraduate and, increasingly, gradu-ate academic degrees in any discipline, as well asthe Master’s degree in either Library Science orInformation Science. In research settings theDoctoral degree may be required as well. Theseprofessionals are largely concerned with con-structing the definitions and determining formatsof relevant and useful information; selecting newinformation and assuring its place in the collec-tion; assisting its applications and uses within thecommunity at hand; and evaluating the scopeand depth of the collection, regarded as a wholeover time. Among the critical values driving theseresponsibilities are currency, coherence, efficiencyand relevance.In practice, these responsibilities are under-

taken as direct extensions of the informationneeds of a particular community of users, whosedependence on the collection and its services maybe essential to their success. Citizens, scholars,researchers and policy-makers require current,deep and useful reservoirs of accurate informa-tion. Consequently, a grounded knowledge of acommunity, developed in consultation with itsmembers, is required for appropriately responsivedeterminations of policy and strategic plan-ning in library and information services. Deci-sions regarding the housing, distribution andcirculation of the collection will also fall to theseprofessionals, but these tasks may be widelyshared with peers and non-professionals asneeded.Information professionals also design systems

and practices for purchasing, organizing, preser-ving, storing and delivering information. Amongthose who perform this aspect of professionalresponsibility are acquisitions librarians, catalo-guers and serials librarians. Their primary con-cerns are likely to include considerations oflanguage, taxonomies and structures; accuratedescriptions and details in representing andcataloguing the content of information; and theassurance of efficient purchasing paths and tech-nical processes. Thinking among these informa-tion professionals will show a particularemphasis on solving the problems of acquiringinformation, establishing and maintaining stan-dard descriptive practices, and observing consis-tency among technical service policies. Thepublic service realm and the technical servicerealm are interdependent; neither works well

286 INFORMATION PROFESSIONS

without communication and collaboration withthe other.At the most advanced levels, in the most

complex information collections, informationprofessionals will also take primary responsibilityfor the gathering, management and movement ofinformation, the consideration of innovationsand expanding resources, and the developmentof systematic, co-operative relationships amongdistant collections. Such managers typically oc-cupy higher offices of library administration,with titles such as library director, head ofcollection development, head of public servicesand head of technical services. In corporations,such primary information professionals may betitled chief information officer, or director ofinformation technology. At the upper levels ofresponsibility in large or small information col-lections, professionals are charged with mana-ging the information infrastructure, thedeployment of human resources, organiza-tional information policies and monitoringthe rise and fall of an institution’s budgetary andeconomic fortunes.The most visible information professionals,

however, are those whose daily work places themin contact with the users of information – youth,citizens, students, educators, business people,researchers, legislators – the human beings whocreate the community and the economy served bythe collection. These information professionalsare typically reference librarians, media specia-lists (chiefly in school library collections), specia-lists in bibliographic instruction (typically inacademic collections) and circulation librarianswho manage access to collected materials.Amid this diverse array of titles and functions

there are ancillary professions closely alignedwith aspects of the information professions;extended definitions may include them in thesituations suggested above. However, in commondiscourse it is unusual to consider members ofthe publishing industry, computer scientists, Webdesigners, booksellers or journalists to be mem-bers of the information professions, though eachmay work with information professionally. Andwhile, to some extent, arrays of real objects maybe found among information collections – typi-cally in a section of the library identified asspecial collections – the primary designation ofprofessionals who work exclusively with objectsis likely to be curator, and their places of work

are likely to be museums or other culturalcollections.In these ancillary professions, the primary

obligation of the practitioner is to serve otheraspects of knowledge and technology than thedesign, management and delivery of informationcollections and services. It is impossible in anycase to take a narrow view when defining theinformation professions; the field tends to ex-pand as it is stimulated by technologies, applica-tions and critical needs for human mediationbetween users and the array of informing possi-bilities at hand. Increasingly, traditional informa-tion resource centres now require extensiveknowledge of computers, databases, documentdelivery systems and bibliographic instruc-tion. Larger institutions may employ webmas-ters or other specialists to create and monitor apresence on the world wide web. Consequently,the realm of the information professional is bestunderstood as a fluid domain where skills,practices and functions are increasingly dynamicand inclusive. Formal definitions of roles andtitles – driven by the rapid evolutions of aninformation society – become increasinglyprovisional and tentative.Fluidity and inclusiveness are characteristics

of what Peter Drucker describes as ‘the nextsociety’, which will be ‘a knowledge society’(Drucker 2001: 2), where knowledge flowsfreely, is available to everyone through accessto education and provides all informed peoplewith an even chance in a competitive world.The instant, global transfer of informationallows the institutions of education, government,business and health to have an extraordinaryreach to distant centres of knowledge, whilemaintaining services to a local community. In asociety of this kind, there are multiple opportu-nities for professional work with informationand its technologies, based on advanced knowl-edge of theory and practice, most of which mustbe acquired through a grounded – but extremelyeclectic and combinatory – professional educa-tion.However provisional it may be, a brief glos-

sary of professional areas in contemporary in-formation work will be useful. No fewer than sixterms, here briefly described, are pertinent.

LIBRARIANSHIP

The area of practice, centred in libraries, devotedto the collection, organization and provision of


information directly to a community, or multiplecommunities, of users.

INFORMATION SCIENCE

The scholarly area of study, research and theorydevoted to evaluating the characteristics andprocesses of information systems, informa-tion retrieval, information-seeking beha-viour and human–computer interaction.

INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

The area of practice, centred in organizations,devoted to systematic organization of informa-tion and data for storage, retrieval and transferto users.

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

The area of practice, centred in organizations,devoted to facilitating information-based colla-borations among units, based on the inter-relatednature of their needs, goals and processes.

RECORDS MANAGEMENT

The area of practice, centred in organizationsand institutions, devoted to assembling, main-taining and retrieving files of corporate transac-tions and activities over time.

ARCHIVES

A collection of permanent, preserved, original,historical records organized with pertinence to aninstitution’s identity and growth, or field ofresearch and activity over time.Among these provisional definitions, we may

see certain continuities. Each professional area isconcerned with the collection, organization, re-trieval and application of information. The col-lections typical of each professional area areassembled on the assumption of potential valueto users. Each information professional workswith files, catalogues or other records, irrespec-tive of their content. Each area has evolved intorelatively high dependence on information tech-nology and digitization for control and access toinformation; and yet significant collected infor-mation is gathered, or originates, on paper and isgiven in face-to-face interactions.Finally, we might say that most information

professionals typically serve within the context ofa larger institution or environment, embedded ina setting where communication and structure arecomplex and challenging to control. These rolesmay be further distinguished between the divi-

sions among academic, commercial or publicinstitutions. Regardless of these differences, it isuseful to note that all professionals in these areasare educated by significant exposures to similarthemes in academic curricula.

Education for information professions

To understand the tasks of a contemporaryinformation professional, and to grasp whatinformation professionals think about in thecourse of their work, it is useful to examine theintentions of information education, and ele-ments in typical graduate studies of library andinformation science at the beginning of themillennium.Among the aims of such curricula, selected

from the programme of one US university, theseselected ‘general educational objectives’ may beconsidered exemplary intentions for an educationin professional information work:

[To] Balance and integrate human and techni-cal aspects of information systems, ser-vices and products

[To] Exhibit a strong client orientation indelivering information systems, services,and products, including an understandingof the implications of a culturally diversesociety

[To] Analyze people’s information require-ments and match them with availabletechnologies

[To] Analyze the flow, structure, and use ofinformation among people and withinorganizations

(Drexel University 2000: 169)

Other objectives in similar institutions will in-clude among their intentions such goals asinstitutional and disciplinary leadership; innova-tion in technology and its applications; informa-tion education for users; research anddevelopment devoted to information servicesand design; information architecture; and theorydevelopment. It is universal among contemporaryinstitutions to assume great familiarity withcomputing, software and the transfer and pre-sentation of information electronically; everycurriculum addresses this need.In information studies at the Master’s degree

level, typical curricula will emphasize compe-tency in various combinations of the followingareas:


. History and origins of knowledge; sociology ofknowledge; organization of knowledge;information society.

. Information and its role in education, civic lifeand commerce; user education; informa-tion literacy.

. communication; media; school libraries;storytelling; literacy; children’s literature;popular culture.

. classification; abstracting and indexing;structures of information; metadata.

. Collection development and evaluation; com-munity analysis.

. library automation; technical services andcomputer systems.

. Paper and electronic information tools;search engines; general and special referencesources and services.

. government publishing; business infor-mation services, health science libraries;legal information; arts libraries.

. Development, management and evaluation ofinformation systems and services; marketingof libraries.

. Information support for academic, public andspecial collection users.

. special collections; archives; preserva-tion; manuscripts; records management.

. cognitive science; human–computer in-teraction; artificial intelligence.

. networks.

. multimedia.

. Collaboration.

. information retrieval; information design;information theory; information policy.

. Digital libraries (see digital library); digiti-zation and preservation.

. Design, use and management of databases.

. Language processing.

. Software engineering; programming languages.

. censorship; freedom of information; in-formation ethics; information law.

. Information security.

. research in library and informationscience.

This broad list is inevitably incomplete, depend-ing on the interpretation of professional roles andresponsibilities surrounding information in so-ciety and the educational mission of particularinstitutions. Curricular and professional practicesrelated to information may be specifically classi-

fied by services for age groups (children andyouth, young adults, adults); by disciplines andpractices (law, medicine, business); by the rarityor historic importance of information (specialcollections, incunabula); and by institutionswhere information is used (schools, public li-braries, museums, prisons, hospitals); some prac-tices may be directed to specific formats and theorigins of information itself (multimedia, soundand video recordings; government publications).The incomplete list of disciplinary subject

matters – and its implied array of permutations– must also remind the reader that there aremany kinds of professional work involved withinformation, many kinds of knowledge at ornear the centre of the profession and severalcritical challenges for the field to meet, each indifferent domains of contemporary experience.Government, education and commerce are alldominated by questions of information and itscontrol. Individual lives are at times over-whelmed by the tsunami of linked, telecommu-nicated, broadcasted and printed information athand on any given day. Only the spoken word,perhaps because of its contemporary rarity,seems manageable in comparison to the over-whelming wave of mediated messages we re-ceive, often unbidden.Contemporary professional information edu-

cation and practice inevitably must acknowledgean environment of change in tools and expecta-tions. Information itself can be characterized byits great density, or by its challenging thinnessand obscurity. The fluid and rapid nature ofchange in cultures, economies and governmentsmeans that much of what professionals knowabout information must be regarded as tentativeand in need of confirmation. Further, it isincreasingly difficult to assume narrow bound-aries in information practice: interdisciplinaryknowledge, and shared questions across subjectmatters, mean that a preparation for informationwork must overcome the classical limits ofdisciplines and knowledge.Consequently, the information professional is

required to understand more than informationand its diversity. It is now necessary for theinformation professional to grasp the concept ofa nearly infinite array of contexts, both organiza-tional and personal. Further, in order to under-stand the formative concepts of informationwork, the professional must approach the hu-man, interactive information search process with


few assumptions, but rapidly make judgements ofrelevance and value in order to be helpful. Aprofessional approach to the increasing complex-ity of human behaviours in relation to informa-tion problems must remain flexible, anddynamically open to change. Learning styles,research processes and information literacy arepart of every engagement with information. It isfair to say that the information professionsconstantly require an attuned sensitivity to hu-man cognition, an ability to map the logics ofinquiry and authentic comfort in the intellectualpractices of asking questions and pursuing re-sponses to them.If this diverse preparation for the field is

necessary – and if its diversity means that noindividual is likely to grasp or practice it fully,even in a lifetime – what is the meaning of‘mastery’ in the information professions? Howare we able to recognize professionalism inpractice as a quality of mind and attitude? Aprofessional approach to information attends tocontexts as well as content, to processes as wellas outcomes. As in all professions, a willingnessto ask questions, contemplate an array of possi-bilities and become engaged in the problem-solving process offers an important model forpractice. Finally, the professional is aware ofconstraints, and addresses the need of the infor-mation user for a response that satisfies. And yetit is also clear that, in a world of multiple andinterconnected paths, there are no terminal con-texts of inquiry. All professional informationwork remains dynamically open, and responsiveto change.

Challenges of practice and promise forinformation professions

Describing the ‘critical characteristics of the newinformation professional’, José-Marie Griffiths(1998: 8) cites abilities required for professionalsuccess in a transformed information environ-ment. Among them are collaboration; ‘agility andflexibility’ amid changing circumstances; centringon an institution’s tasks, capabilities and humanenergies. First in her list is the ability to ‘guide inthe face of an uncertain future’ – that is, to workwillingly at an edge of knowledge and technologythat may change underfoot. The metaphor, to bea guide, accepts that we work in a forestedenvironment, where no path is worthy of long-term trust, and some paths must be created by

hand. As ever on a frontier, only the human mind– agile, flexible, collaborative – retains itsauthenticity and promise.The information professional stands at the

edge of the unknown every day: a new queryarrives; a new program is written; a transformingcapability becomes commonplace. And so it isuseful to ask: How is a professional to sustain amindful and responsible course? As always, it isimportant to understand the challenges of thatcourse; several follow.(1) A competitive information environment, in

which knowledge has economic value and infor-mation makes critical differences to success andfailure, carries certain risks. Increasingly, suchenvironments can be found in every part of aninformation economy, corporate or academic. Itis a commonplace to say that information is anindustrial, economic and academic artefact, asource of social and personal power. Informationprofessionals, whose responsibilities increasinglyresemble those of medical or legal professionals,are accountable for the future robustness of suchan environment, and for the well-being andsecurity of persons who live inside it.The pervasive nature of information, its fluid-

ity and transformability, its extraordinary depthand completeness, does not come easily or fairlyto all people. Our culture’s dependence onelectronic files makes the professional extraordi-narily powerful, but also dependent and vulner-able. Issues of universal access, privacy andsecurity, reasonable cost, fair policies for ownersand users, and the overarching need to balanceworldwide information inequities must drive athoughtful profession in the twenty-first century.In developing countries, it is useful to recall, theessential technology is still the book, and, in suchplaces, literacy is the essential skill.(2) The contemporary information profes-

sional is also charged with understanding theinformation user, whose state of knowledgedrives needs and defines literacy levels. Theability of a privileged public to interact directlywith information, in libraries, homes, schools,automobiles, street corners and workplaces, in-spires an obligation to advocate for informationliteracy and access to information tools as anissue indicative of the quality of life. All citizensdeserve opportunities to learn the values andprocesses of access to information, and thepotential effects of information skills on employ-ment, health and independent learning. Genera-


tional disparities in information literacy, whilelikely to lessen over time, may always requireattention. Disparities caused by economic andeducational inequities may create intractableboundaries, however, and a responsive nationalinformation policy may be needed to adjustimbalances. An information professional mustbe a responsible advocate for such policies.(3) The role of the information professional as

a simple receiver, collector, mediator or processorof information is disappearing. Information pro-fessionals can anticipate new expansions of theirwork, including innovative activism as authors,synthesizers and designers of information. It isnow difficult to stand outside an informationproblem and contribute usefully to its solution.A projection of librarian’s roles conducted in

autumn 2001 (Braun 2002: 48) anticipates in-creases in the information specialist’s roles in thecreation of electronic resources and digital ar-chiving, and slight decreases in such essentialtasks as instruction, direction and evaluation ofcollections – still seen as the most significantthings librarians do. It is likely that advances ofthis kind, again moved to the fore by the criticalpresence of technology and specialization, willrequire partnerships, interdependence and colla-boration with such skilled partners as Web andgraphic designers, information architects andcontent specialists.Consequently, the study of communication

and its effects on information environments,information transfer, resource development andproblem solving cannot be overestimated. Withsuch new emphases, it is likely that communica-tion itself will become more challenging, andmore likely to induce the tensions that accom-pany different priorities and preparations. Thehealth of a communication environment mustalso be seen as a challenge to leadership.(4) In the final decades of the twentieth

century, the information professions entered, andendured, a cascade of technical, social, political,educational and economic changes, and thisevolution has carried over into the twenty-first-century. Jobs and the definition of work remainin transition. Families and their access to infor-mation remain in transition. Communities andtheir centres of information remain in transition.The nature and permanence of emerging mediaare sharply divergent from the past. Languagesspoken in any major shopping district may

become too numerous to count. Communicationis everywhere.These are only some of the places, situations

and tools influencing how people live with andencounter each other, how they teach themselvesand explore their culture, and how, in everymessage, they express and communicate theirvalues. Increasingly, information provision willbe challenged to respond to alterations in thelandscapes of civic life caused by shifting popula-tions, changes in global economies and increas-ingly incomplete public educations.Libraries and information centres, however,

have always observed steady continuities amidchange. People continue to ask questions. Theknowledge they seek must be encountered with afull awareness of its contexts. All users are likelyto require some guiding advice. And humanbeings continue to value literacy, and they con-tinue to seek and read books.Collections must be assembled, and attention

must be paid to human beings. It is a professionalchallenge to provide assistance with a lastingsense of continuity, integrity and clarity, anadherence to ethical standards and authenticrespect for others, and a desire to inspire peopleto overcome the challenges of their own lives. Atits heart, the information profession is about thestrength and courage to embrace informedchange; and it is a critical characteristic of theinformation professions to uphold ‘a commitmentto the success of others’ (Griffiths 1998: 10).(5) Technology evolves rapidly, and competi-

tively, leading to a diversity of tools, hardware,software, formats, platforms, applications andprotocols. The information professional is re-quired to sustain continuously expansive compe-tencies, and to remain steadily aware of how toevaluate new technologies as they are invented.Part of a professional vigilance, however, requiresthe professional to ensure that technology doesnot drive human inquiry, or that the inadequaciesof tools do not compromise the independence ofthe scholar. Moreover, this rapid evolution oftechnology means the constant adaptation ofrecords, or the maintenance of antiquated devicesfor unlocking special formats. Information pro-fessionals, aware of the speed of technicalchange, must be prepared to rescue informationfrom the grip of expiring platforms.(6) A culture of information needs to be a

vigilant culture of inquiry as well. Informationprofessionals are challenged to participate – at


their workplaces, among their colleagues and atconferences – in rigorous, systemic, critical think-ing about the critical issues of assistance, con-fidentiality and privacy, the interfaces betweenhumans and computers, and the design ofservices that retain the human touch. Suchvigilance is enhanced by Donald Schön’s essentialconcept of ‘reflective practice’ (Schön 1983),where professional behaviours are regarded asexperimental steps or ‘moves’, and fundamentalprofessional acts are part of a ‘conversation withthe situation’. Such strategies are useful in anenvironment of information, where flashy imme-diacy tends to veil the long-term impacts ofchange. Information decisions are always deci-sions with resonant but distant consequences,and it is rare that easy or simple solutions aresufficient over time.(7) Increasingly, it is useful to see the informa-

tion professional as the singular model ofthought and action for the information society,examining questions, unknowns and intentionswith an eye to combining the contextual infor-mation at hand, and the new information re-quired, in order to achieve an objective. Just as aphysician or an engineer will address physicalproblems through a heuristic process of diagnosisand experiment, the information professionalstudies the given unknown, and acts with tenta-tive steps to reduce it. The information profes-sional is an agent of inquiry, and an instrumentof change. Connections to information move asituation forward and bring its complexitiesunder control. In an environment where specificcontent or knowledge must be discovered andbrought to a user in order for a problem to beaddressed, the information professional performsthe invisible acts of process – searching, query-ing, communicating, connecting – that expandthe possibilities of completion.(8) Technological fluency does not always

translate into educative fluency; consequently,the information professions must assure thedevelopment of a strong teaching function, whichis likely to reflect the steady learning required bythe evolution of tools. This link to educative actsand educative partnerships needs to be under-stood and supported among a wide array ofpotential partners.(9) As societies and cultures become increas-

ingly dependent on information technology andimmediate access to a limitless well of knowl-edge, the technocracy of the computer may grow

increasingly challenging to the human being.Problem solving in the domain of the informa-tion professional will continue to require asustained human presence, an instrumental per-son, able to assist decisions and provide controlover information tools and the interpretation ofdata. The information professions will be in-creasingly challenged to avoid reification andreduction in the face of complexity and cost.One way to remain attentive is to monitor eventsand issues in adjacent areas of knowledge,particularly communication, computer science,cognitive psychology and education.(10) A lasting challenge for the information

professional is to master the ambiguity of dis-covering an identity through service to others, ina way that also serves the sense of a professionalself. Each assemblage of tools and resourcesbrought into existence is constructed in expecta-tion of its use, and in anticipation of a questionthat has not yet been asked. When the question isasked, and the assemblage of tools is put toconstructive use, the information gathered dis-appears with the user. Consequently, an informa-tion professional must often find an identity inevanescent acts, however unclear, uncertain orunresolved they may be.

What is mastery?

The information professional knows how tointerpret needs for information, how to moveuseful information into place and how to assurethe authority and currency of the informationgiven. As politics, economics, law and socialpolicy initiatives increasingly address informa-tion, intellectual property, ownership andcopyright, the voice of the deeply informedprofessional will continue to be a vital one; it isnot a thing a professional avoids. The informa-tion professional continuously thinks about col-lections, processes, languages, access to and useof information as evolving problems, never fullyresolved, to be addressed steadily and thought-fully over time. Such thinking at its best willalways occur in a situation where empiricalinquiry, ethical integrity and fair assessments ofperformance are the permanent values of infor-mation practice.

References

Braun, L.W. (2002) ‘New roles: A librarian by anyname’, Library Journal 127: 46–9.


Drexel University (2000) Drexel University GraduateStudies Catalog 2000–2001, Philadelphia, Pennsylva-nia: Drexel University.

Drucker, P. (2001) ‘The next society: A survey of thenear future’, The Economist 361(8,246): 2.

Griffiths, J.-M. (1998) ‘The new information profes-sional’, Bulletin of the American Society for Infor-mation Science 24(3).

Schön, D.A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: HowProfessionals Think in Action, Basic Books.

Further reading

Advances in Librarianship (Annual) Academic Press.Annual Review of Information Science and Technology(Annual).

Bowker Annual of Library and Book Trade Informa-tion, Reed Elsevier.

Criddle, S., Dempsey, L. and Heseltine, R. (eds) (1999)Information Landscapes for a Learning Society,Library Association.

Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science(1968–) Marcel Dekker.

Library and Information Science Annual, LibrariesUnlimited.

Wilson, T.D. and Allen, D.K. (eds) (1999) Exploringthe Contexts of Information Behaviour, Taylor Gra-ham.

SEE ALSO: information science; informationtechnology; libraries; organization of knowledge;philosophy of librarianship; professionalism;quality in library and information services;research in library and information science

DAVID CARR

INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

Origins and history

The early roots of information retrieval (IR)research are in the research on classificationand indexing. The origins of modern IR re-search can be traced back to the early 1950swhen Mortimer taube’s Uniterm indexing systemwas compared in two experiments to moreconventional classification and indexing systems.One of the experiments was the ASTIA–Unitermexperiment in the USA comparing uniterms andsubject headings, and the other the Cranfield–Uniterm test in the United Kingdom comparinguniterms and universal decimal classifica-tion (UDC). These efforts continued in the late1950s and early 1960s in the paradigmaticCranfield experiments I and II, which laid thefoundation of the laboratory approach to IRresearch (see below). The statistical approach to

IR also began in the late 1950s, when Hans Peterluhn discovered the relationship of documentword distributions to document content descrip-tion: mid-frequency words are good statisticalcontent descriptors.The development of information and com-

munication technology has been the majordriving force affecting research and developmentin IR from 1960 to date, from early small batch-mode IR systems to today’s large Web-basedsystems.

IR process and systems

The IR process may be seen as a special case ofinformation-seeking behaviour where com-puters are used to search, retrieve and accessdesired information. Within the process, a personhaving an information need, based on his/herwork task or other activities, uses an IR systemeither directly as an end-user via the system’s userinterface, or indirectly through an intermediary,e.g. a librarian. The information need (request)is thence represented in the IR system’s querylanguage. In order to be able to supply thedesired information, the IR system has to collectand represent such information, and store therepresentations – full documents, their biblio-graphic descriptions or other metadata – in adatabase. In addition, the IR system has toimplement an algorithm – a matching techni-que – for comparing the information need anddocument representations. The result of thiscomparison is a set of documents logicallymatching the query, or a ranked list of bestmatching documents.IR systems are based on various retrieval

models. A retrieval model determines the princi-ples used in document and request representa-tion, and their matching.Based on their focus on the IR process and

assumed retrieval models, the main approachesin IR research from the 1960s to the 2000s maybe discussed under the headings of online biblio-graphic IR, best-match IR, user-oriented IR andcognitive IR.

Online bibliographic IR

Online bibliographic IR systems developed in theearly 1970s. Originally they provided access tobibliographic records through a query languagebased on boolean logic. It was frequentlypossible to retrieve the records through fields for

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intellectual indexing as well as free-textsearching in titles and abstracts. Search strate-gies to suit various IR situations developed. Thefocus was on online access, full-text indexing,and request representation and matching withinBoolean logic. In the 1980s the online databaseindustry expanded, many full-text databases indiverse subject areas emerged and in the 1990sthe WWW became the common platform foronline access.

Best-match IR

Best-match IR research also focused on documentand request representation and matching, butdeveloped, in contrast to Boolean logic, retrievalmodels that allowed for ranking the matchingdocuments in a decreasing order of expectedrelevance to the request. Major best-match models(with representative systems) include the vectorspace model (SMART), probabilistic models(Okapi) and inference network models (InQuery).Originally best-match IR research was strictly

laboratory bound, using small test collections,but by the 1990s information technology allowedlarge-scale applications. Major WWW searchengines employ best-match retrieval models.Much of best-match IR research is based on thelaboratory approach where a test collectionconsisting of a document database, a test requestset, and a set of relevance assessments is used.The relevance assessments identify, for eachrequest, the set of relevant documents that is ofinterest in retrieval. In IR experiments, thecapability of IR systems or methods in retrievingthe relevant documents while retaining the irrele-vant documents is assessed. Major performancemeasures are recall and precision:

Typically, evaluation results are expressed asaverage precision over standard recall points,e.g. at recall points 0.0, 0.1, 0.2,. . ., 1.0, and asprecision-recall graphs. Alternatively, recall andprecision may be considered at standard docu-ment cut-off values, e.g. after retrieval 5, 10, 20,30,. . ., 200 documents. To compare systems, theresults are averaged across requests.

A major innovation within the best-matchretrieval models was relevance feedback wherebya query may automatically be reformulated afterthe user’s assessment of initial query results.Within the general approach of best-match IRresearch, methods for automatic document clus-tering, categorization, filtering and routingwere also explored.

User-oriented IR

User-oriented IR research developed in the1970s as a response to the previous approaches’focus on the system components. This researchfocused on persons’ information needs, theirexpression as search tasks and the interactionbetween the persons and the interfaces orintermediaries of IR systems. The research drewinfluences from user studies and informa-tion-seeking research, often using socialscience research methods. The IR system settingwas mainly assumed to be the Boolean online IRenvironment.

Cognitive IR

IR research based on the cognitive approachbegan to emerge in the late 1970s. Its aim is toencompass the whole IR process from documentindexing to matching techniques, and from worktasks to information needs, query formulation andinteraction, and to analyse these at the cognitivelevel as interaction of cognitive structures. Cogni-tive IR research was able to bridge the gapbetween user-oriented IR and best-match ap-proaches, and resulted in the development ofintelligent intermediary systems for IR, based onexpert systems and knowledge-based systemstechnology.

Current trends

IR lacks a coherent body of knowledge; it israther a collection of diverse approaches. Acoherent IR theory would require models,concepts and tools for the analysis of humandiscourse and communication, language, anddocuments and collections, people, tasksand needs, IR models and techniques. Thefindings of such diverse areas should be synthe-sized together. This requirement is not met bytoday’s approaches; it is a task of tall orderindeed.

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At the beginning of the third millennium, IRresearch explores diverse areas including:

. Retrieval models and methods such as logicaland probabilistic models, language models,learning techniques and linguistics applied toIR.

. Text retrieval, including scalability issues, andmono- and multilingual IR in collections.

. multimedia IR – image, video, speech andmusic IR, and IR in the WWW or hypermediaenvironments.

. Information extraction, question answeringand summarization.

. Categorization, filtering and routing.

. News topic detection and tracking.

. IR interfaces, structured documents and novelways of presenting search results instead ofplain document listings.

. Task-based and user-oriented IR, and IR learn-ing environments.

The concept of relevance has regained its posi-tion in IR discourse and this has led to rethinkingabout IR evaluation measures and methods. Thedenominating measures of recall and precisionhave been challenged for their sufficiency wheninteractive and/or multimedia IR systems areevaluated, when multiple types and/or levels ofrelevance are considered, or when performingtask and/or user-oriented evaluation.

Further reading

Ellis, D. (1996) Progress and Problems in InformationRetrieval, London: Library Association Publishing, p.220.

Ingwersen, P. (1992) Information Retrieval Interaction,London, Taylor Graham, p. 246.

Sparck Jones, K. and Willett, P. (eds) Key Papers inInformation Retrieval, ACM Digital Library(www.acm.org/dl/).

SEE ALSO: artificial intelligence; categorization;classification; cognitive science; computer;computer science; data compression; database;DIALOG; document clustering; free-textsearching; Human–Computer Interaction;hypermedia; indexing; informatics; informationsystems; mark-up languages; neural network;organization of knowledge; text retrieval;thesaurus; virtual library

KALERVO JÄRVELIN

INFORMATION SCIENCE

A discipline that investigates the characteristicsof information and the nature of the informationtransfer process, whilst not losing sight of thepractical aspects of collecting, collating andevaluating information and organizing its disse-mination through appropriate intellectual appa-ratus and technology.

Background

Information science is probably unique in beingdefined in terms of what its practitioners do,rather than vice versa. Around 1910–20 scientistswere having problems finding information andother scientists started to specialize in helpingthem. The term ‘literature chemist’ and otherscame into use to describe them and by the 1940sthe generic term ‘information scientist’ was beingused. What they did was first described as‘information science’ by Chris Hanson of ASLIBin 1956. Their attitudes, methods and back-grounds were quite different from those of thetraditional custodians of information, the librar-ians. By 1958 a sufficient number of suchindividuals felt it necessary to join together andfound the institute of information scien-tists so that specialist education and standardscould be promoted.An information scientist is anyone handling

information on behalf of another and who willoften have sufficient subject knowledge to evalu-ate much of the information passed to clients.(Normally this excludes recreational matter andinformation associated with formal education.)Information is transferable knowledge. It neednot be alphanumeric: for example, a collection ofexploded boilers and pipes could be an importantinformation resource for a safety consultant.Having defined an information scientist andinformation, we can now define informationscience, as above. Numerous other definitionsexist. Wellisch (1972) collected thirty-nine. It isalso effectively defined by the Institute of Infor-mation Scientists’ (IIS) Criteria for InformationScience, which lay down guidelines for IISapproved information science courses. A newversion is to be developed by cilip.Documentation is now almost a passé term in

English, but was once a common near-synonym,as is informatics, a more recent term ofRussian origin. Care should be taken in translat-ing the French and Spanish phrases – sciences de

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l’information and ciencias de la información – asthese have the meaning ‘mass communication’and/or ‘media studies’.The dominance of scientific information in the

development of information science was a de-mand-led phenomenon, determined by econom-ics. Although hypothetically a literature graduatecould be an information scientist in, say, aShakespearean Research Institute, there has al-ways been far more money available to payscience graduates to do information work in thepharmaceutical and other science-based indus-tries. Since the mid-1980s business informa-tion and legal information have becomeincreasingly important.Despite its origins, information science is a

social science because it deals with an artefact ofman: information. Wersig (1993) calls it a ‘post-modern science’ because (like, for example,ecology) it is driven by the need to developstrategies to solve the problems caused by theclassical sciences and technologies. Wersig distin-guishes the classical sciences as those driven by aneed to understand how the world works. In-formation science certainly lacks a unified theo-retical structure such as one finds in the naturalsciences. We are still awaiting our Linnaeus, ourMendeleyev or even our Keynes.Initially research in information science could

be regarded as at the apex of a pyramidalstructure. Manufacturing industry and commercewas the base for a smaller research function. Thisin turn supported information departments,which, size permitting, had some capacity forR&D. Additionally a small amount of govern-ment-funded research took place in academicinstitutions. Since the 1970s there has been agrowing contribution to R&D from the burgeon-ing information industry.

History

The initial dominance of scientific information,referred to above, has meant that the RoyalSociety’s Scientific Information Conference in1948 and its published Proceedings are oftentaken as the benchmark. The existence of aninformation problem in science was recognizedmuch earlier, as is evidenced by the introductionof review journals (Berlinisches Jahrbuch für diePharmacie, 1795) and abstracts journals (Phar-maceutisches Central-Blatt, 1830). In 1851 Jo-seph Henry, in his Annual Report as Secretary of

the Smithsonian Institution, drew attention to themounting tide of new knowledge and prophesiedthat it ‘will begin to totter under its own weight’unless ‘well digested indexes. . .to memoirs, pa-pers and parts of scientific transactions andsystematic works’ were produced.Information science has a history of taking

techniques from the past and adapting them topresent needs. Shephard’s Citations (1871) wasthe ancestor of the Science Citation Index bornin the 1960s. Jacquard’s loom control cards(1801) were the forebears of punched cards –which have themselves now passed into informa-tion science history. The seminal event consider-ably predated Gutenberg. This was theproduction by Cardinal Hugo, aided by 500monks, of his Concordance to the Vulgateversion of the Bible. Then, as today, informationscience was virtually at the centre of contempor-ary intellectual and socio-economic activity!Some 700 years later, in 1958, aided by an IBMmainframe computer, Peter luhn produced con-cordance-like indexing. The first educationalprogramme covering all aspects of informationscience was run by Jason farradane in 1961 atCity University, London.

Literature of information science

Probably the first distinct information scienceliterature type was the literature guide. An earlyexample was W. Ostwald’s Die chemische Litera-tur und die Organisation der Wissenschaft (Leip-zig, 1919). Because of the lack of a distinctboundary between library and informationscience, it is not practicable to differentiate be-tween the two in bibliometric and other studies.Such studies show the dominance of the single-author paper (characteristic of social scienceliterature), and of English-language papers (Bottleand Efthimiades 1984). Several authors havecommented on the poor quality of LIS literature;perhaps that is why it has a short half-life, ofaround two years (calculated from interlendingdata fromMontanelli andMak 1988). Although itis doubling in size about every fourteen years, as isthat of chemistry, the total size of the LISliterature is only about 500,000 documents, com-pared with about twenty times as many inchemistry (Bottle and Efthimiades 1984).

References

Bottle, R.T. and Efthimiades, E.N. (1984) ‘Library and

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information science literature: Authorship andgrowth patterns’, Journal of Information Science 9:107–16.

Montanelli, D.S. and Mak, C. (1988) ‘Library practi-tioners’ use of library literature’, Library Trends 36:765–83.

Wellisch, H. (1972) ‘From information science toinformatics: A terminological investigation’, Journalof Librarianship 4: 157–87.

Wersig, G. (1993) ‘Information science: The study ofpostmodern knowledge usage’, Information Proces-sing and Management 29: 229–39.

Further reading

Bottle, R.T. (1993) ‘Information, communication andlibraries’, in R.T. Bottle and J.F.B. Rowland (eds)Information Sources in Chemistry, 4th edn, BowkerSaur, pp. 3–10 [a brief introduction to informationproblems in science].

Price, D.J. de Solla (1963) Little Science, Big Science,Columbia University Press [the right book at theright time; it alerted scientists to the informationgrowth problem in science – and is still well worthreading].

Vickery, B. (1999) ‘A century of scientific and technicalinformation’, Journal of Documentation 55: 476–527.

SEE ALSO: bibliometrics; citation analysis;informatics; information professions; informationscience education; information theory;organization of knowledge; sociology ofknowledge

R.T. BOTTLE

INFORMATION SCIENCEEDUCATION

Programmes of study designed to develop theknowledge and skills required for the provisionand management of information in a complexglobal information and communication environ-ment.Programmes are of three different kinds:

1 Programmes offered either at graduate orundergraduate level. Sometimes availablein modular form, they typically preparegraduates for entry to information practiceand are accredited or recognized by profes-sional associations in the information sec-tor.

2 Graduate research programmes at Master’sand Doctoral levels that normally preparegraduates for an academic career and in-creasingly for a practice career since the

development of professional Doctorate pro-grammes.

3 continuing professional developmentprogrammes or short courses. Delivered asseminars, workshops or conferences, theseprogrammes are tailored to the needs ofinformation practitioners and focus on abroad range of current concerns from Webdesign to the management and marketingof information services, and from copyrightand regulation through to dublin core andmetadata.

Programmes in information science

CURRICULUM

The core elements of the curriculum in informa-tion science are shaped by the body of knowl-edge on which information practice is based andthe skills and attitudes required to use thatknowledge effectively. The body of knowledge isinformed by both information science and infor-mation practice, and is broader in scope thantraditional areas of librarianship (Callison andTilley 2001).The philosophy of information science and its

history demonstrate its interdisciplinary nature(Saracevic 1992). Some theories and concepts,such as information need, classification, in-formation retrieval, precision, information-seeking behaviour, information utilization andinformation resources, are unique to informationprovision. Other theories and concepts fromcognate disciplines such as psychology, commu-nication, cognitive science, computerscience, sociology, education, philosophy andmanagement are relevant to information provi-sion. Examples include cognition, interpersonalcommunication, human information processing,human–computer interaction, electroniccommunications, instructional design, episte-mology and organizational behaviour.The field of information practice continues to

diversify with a broad range of job titles forinformation work as new labour markets emergein response to global, political and economicinfluences, particularly in the business and high-technology sectors (Kirk and Sellers 1999; Calli-son and Tilley 2001). These can include informa-tion officer, knowledge manager, curator,multimedia designer, librarian and competitiveintelligence or information manager. Underlying

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these varied titles is a core of information skillsfocusing on the creation, dissemination andutilization of information (Bruce 1999).Considering the scope of information science

as a discipline and the breadth of informationpractice, it is to be expected that the curriculumwill be characterized by diversity in the knowl-edge base on which it rests. This multidiscipli-narity is also reflected in programmes beingoffered by departments based in very differentintellectual areas including business and manage-ment, computing or communication (Feather1997; Rochester 1997; Sutton 2001).Funding, economic and business imperatives

mean courses of study may be tailored toparticular markets and learning outcomes (Ro-chester 1997; Callison and Tilley 2001). Informa-tion and communication skills continue to benecessary in all types of information-dependentwork but entrepreneurship is beginning to besought by employers (Johnson 2000; Curry2000). The knowledge management area thathas emerged in business and organizationaldevelopment has generated specialised pro-grammes (Todd and Southon 2000; Aiyepeku2001). Interest in informatics and its possibi-lities for illuminating the social and culturalimpact of technologies has increased as a con-sequence of exponential growth in informationand communication technology (Warner2001). This is reflected in programme develop-ment (White 2001) and especially so in infor-matics. Examples of programme areas includeVeterinary Informatics offered at the Universityof Strathclyde, Scotland; Informatics and Systemsoffered at Loughborough University; and Health-care Information offered at the University ofSheffield. The University of Washington andRutgers University in the USA both specialize inInformatics, and the University of New SouthWales in Australia offers a programme in HealthInformatics. There are also some active researchgroups such as the Social Informatics group atIndiana University and a similar group at theManchester Metropolitan University.Lifelong learning capabilities are increasingly

important educational goals and they are essen-tial for graduates competing in dynamic globaljob markets (Stoker 2000). information lit-eracy plays a crucial role in both lifespanlearning and employability in societies whereinformation and communication technology usehas expanded exponentially and the numbers of

students in post-secondary education have in-creased (Rochester 1997). Information profes-sionals play a key role in developing complexinformation skills in all learning and teaching,workplace and community situations (Bruce andCandy 2000; Peacock 2001). Flexible learning,alternative approaches to learning design and thegrowing importance of the social contexts ofinformation encourage students from disciplinesother than information science to develop theirinformation handling skills to a deeper level thanis possible in the end-user-oriented short coursesdelivered by libraries (Feather 1997; Hornby andAndretta 2001).In addition to developing students’ knowledge,

courses in information science are designed todevelop students’ skills, attitudes and profes-sional ethics (Kirk and Sellers 1999). This devel-opment is supported by teaching and learningstrategies used in implementing the curriculum.Among these strategies are tutorials, seminars,lectures, learning contracts, computer laboratorysessions, computer-assisted learning, online dis-cussions, group collaboration, oral and writtenpresentations, case studies and fieldwork. Practi-cal work is a feature of the information sciencecurriculum as an introduction to informationpractice, an illustration of the application oftheoretical principles and an opportunity forcareer exploration and portfolio development(Yerbury and Kirk 1991).Technological developments and widespread

interest have led to the electronic delivery ofsome programme components to support theflexibility expected by local and internationalstudents and the business, information andknowledge management markets (Feather 1997;Alderman and Milne 2000; Tyler 2001).

ROLE OF PRACTITIONERS AND PROFESSIONALASSOCIATIONS

Most information science programmes rely onthe involvement of practitioners to ensure coursesremain relevant to information practice. Curricu-lum development teams frequently consist offaculty, students and practitioners. As teachers,practitioners may have roles as panellists, guestlecturers and sessional teaching staff or mentorsfor students.A number of professional associations act as

accreditation bodies (see accreditation of lisschools), recognizing qualifications as appro-priate for admission to professional membership

298 INFORMATION SCIENCE EDUCATION

and supporting information science education byhighlighting the achievements of leading educa-tors and students, and by organizing regularconferences as forums for the consideration ofeducational issues. These associations include theinstitute of information scientists (nowpart of CILIP); the Australian Library andInformation Association; the american societyfor information science and technology;and the association for library and infor-mation science education.

INTERNATIONAL CO-OPERATION

As communication technologies reduce the im-pact of distance and global changes influenceinformation development, co-operative endea-vours in information science continue to beimportant. Universities have contributed to in-novative education internationally by providingcurriculum advice, programmes onshore and off-shore, through the exchange of teaching andlearning materials, courseware, staff exchangesand sponsorship schemes for students. Whilstdeveloping regions vary significantly, recognitionof the environmental changes Western informa-tion science education has had to embrace, andthe edge information technology can offer, meansthat sustainable innovation and development isprogressing despite resource constraints (Ocholla2000; Rehman 2000; Aiyepeku 2001).

References

Aiyepeku, W.O. (2001) ‘Grafting marketable KM skillsinto education for information in Africa’, Educationfor Information 19: 19–33.

Alderman, B. and Milne, T. (2000) ’Designing a Web-based distance education course within a constructi-vist learning environment’, Education for Libraryand Information Services: Australia 17: 51–61.

Bruce, C. and Candy, P. (2000) ‘Information literacyprograms: People, politics and potential’, in C. Bruceand P. Candy (eds.) Information Literacy around theWorld: Advances in Programs and Research, Centrefor Information Studies, Charles Sturt University.

Bruce, H. (1999) ‘A new perspective on informationeducation from Australia’, Education for Informa-tion 17: 187–98.

Callison, D. and Tilley, C.L. (2001) ‘Descriptive im-pressions of the library and information educationevolution of 1988–1998 as reflected in job an-nouncements, ALISE descriptors, and new coursetitles’, Journal of Education for Library and Infor-mation Science 42: 181–99.

Curry, A. (2000) ‘Canadian LIS education: Trends andissues’, Education for Information 18: 325–37.

Feather, J. (1997) ‘The future of professional educationin library and information studies’, in J. Elkin and T.

Wilson (eds.) The Education of Library and Infor-mation Professionals in the United Kingdom, Man-sell Publishing Limited.

Hornby, S. and Andretta, S. (2001) ‘The Janus-face ofinformation professionals’, Education for Informa-tion 19: 35–45.

Johnson, I.M. (2000) ‘Catching the tide: Environmentalpressures for an emphasis on management in thelibrary and information science curriculum’, Educa-tion for Library and Information Services: Australia17: 29–49.

Kirk, J. and Sellers, S. (1999) ‘Education and training’,in M. Line (ed.) Librarianship and InformationWork Worldwide 1999, Bowker Saur.

Ocholla, D.N. (2000) ‘Training for library and infor-mation studies: A comparative overview of LISeducation in Africa’, Education for Information 18:33–52.

Peacock, J. (2001) ‘Teaching skills for teaching librar-ians: Postcards from the edge’, Australian Academicand Research Libraries 32: 26–42.

Rehman, S. (2000) Preparing the Information Profes-sional: An Agenda for the future, Contributions inLibrarianship and Information Science Number 93,Greenwood Press.

Rochester, M.K. (1997) Education for Librarianship inAustralia, Mansell Publishing Limited.

Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA (www.sclis.-rutgers.edu/iti/).

Saracevic, T. (1992) ‘Information science: Origin, evo-lution and relations’, in P. Vakkari and B. Cronin(eds) Conceptions of Library and InformationScience: Historical, Empirical and Theoretical Per-spectives, Taylor Graham.

Stoker, D. (2000) ‘Persistence and change: Issues forLIS educators in the first decade of the twenty firstcentury’, Education for Information 18: 115–22.

Sutton, S.A. (2001) ‘Trends, trend projections andcrystal ball gazing’, Journal of Education for Libraryand Information Science 42: 241–7.

Todd, R.J. and Southon, G. (2000) ‘Knowledge man-agement: Education for information professionals inthe age of the mind’, ASIS Proceedings 37: 503–17.

Tyler, A. (2001) ‘A survey of distance learning libraryand information science courses delivered via theInternet’, Education for Information 19: 47–59.

Warner, J. (2001) ‘W(h)ither information science?/!’,The Library Quarterly 71: 231–42.

White, H.D. (2001) ‘ Computing a curriculum: De-scriptor-based domain analysis for educators’, Infor-mation Processing and Management 37: 91–117.

Yerbury, H. and Kirk, J. (1991) ‘Career planning ininformation science education’, in J. Rowley (ed.)Information 90, ASLIB.

Further reading

Indiana University, Bloomington (www.slis.indiana.edu/SI/index.html).

Loughborough University (www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dils/pgprogs/pgis/pgisph.html).

Manchester Metropolitan University (www.mmu.ac.uk/h-ss/dic/research/sigroup.htm).

University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

INFORMATION SCIENCE EDUCATION 299

(www.nsw.edu.au/programmes/completepgptog.htm).

University of Sheffield (www.shef.ac.uk/is/courses/modules/infpgt.html#INF6370).

University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, United Kingdom(www.dis.strath.ac.uk/research/informan/).

University of Washington, Seattle, USA (www.ischool.washington.edu/informatics/).

SEE ALSO: information literacy; informationmanagement; information professions;information skills; knowledge; libraryassociations; library education

NICOLA PARKER AND JOYCE KIRK

INFORMATION-SEEKINGBEHAVIOUR

The complex patterns of actions and interactionsthat people engage in when seeking informationof whatever kind and for whatever purpose. Likeits companion expression ‘information needs’, itsutility is more in its denotive than its connotivepower – to denote the presence of such activitiesor patterns rather than to provide any descriptivecontent. The expression is used in a wide-rangingway to refer to any context where information issought, and it encompasses all forms of informa-tion seeking. In these respects, too, the expres-sion is similar to ‘information need’, in that itprobably does little harm – and serves a certainconvenience – if it is used as a shorthand to referto activities that are then described or explainedin detail, but like the notion of ‘informationneed’ the danger is that the expression is used asa substitute for such description or explanation.

The concept has its home in the field of userstudies (Wilson 1994) and as such its historymay be considered to date back to the firststudies of scientific communication and informa-tion use (Royal Society 1948). Its use has alsochanged in line with developments in that field.Early references to information-seeking beha-viour would be referring to scientists’ use offormal and informal communication channelsand of a predominantly quantitative flavour.Unpacked, the expression ‘information-seekingbehaviour of scientists’ would, typically, be refer-ring to the different proportion of scientistsconsulting with colleagues, using journals orbooks, employing abstracting and indexingservices, receiving preprints or reprints, attend-

ing conferences and their associated preferencesin terms of channel.

Over time there has been a shift towards moretheoretically grounded studies and to the applica-tion of qualitative, hybrid or methodologicallypluralist techniques. The denotation and limitedconnotation of the expression has evolved in linewith these developments. In this respect thenature and quality of what lies behind theexpression is totally dependent on the quality ofthe studies themselves. The expression has asshallow or deep a conceptualization as thestudies in which it is rooted or the actions towhich it refers. In this respect, too, it is impos-sible clearly to separate any historical analysis ofthe use of the expression from consideration ofthe associated terms ‘information needs’ and‘information uses’.

Nevertheless, the expression does have someinteresting internal characteristics worth noting.The ‘information-seeking’ component of the ex-pression might be thought to promise more thanit delivers in implying a level of positive activitythat might not be borne out by studies of theindividual or group, where passive ‘informationgathering’ might be a more accurate descriptionthan ‘information seeking’. The ‘behaviour’ com-ponent of the expression might also be seen asoperating a little ambiguously in having connota-tions of ‘behaviourism’. In this respect expres-sions such as ‘information-seeking activities’ or‘information-seeking patterns’ distance the no-tion from that of ‘behaviourism’ and also link thenotion philosophically closer to its true family ofconcepts connected with reasons and actions, andfurther from concepts of the stimulus and re-sponse group. But, again, like the notion of‘information need’ the notion of ‘information-seeking behaviour’ is such a useful catch-all thatthese philosophical caveats are unlikely to see itgoing out of fashion.

References

Royal Society (1948) Report on the Royal SocietyScientific Information Conference, Royal Society.

Wilson, T.D. (1994) ‘Information needs and uses: Fiftyyears of progress’, in B.C. Vickery (ed.) Fifty Years ofInformation Progress, ASLIB, pp. 15–51.

Further reading

Annual Review of Information Science and Technology,vols. 1–7 (1966–72), 9 (1974), 13 (1978), 21 (1986)

300 INFORMATION-SEEKING BEHAVIOUR

and 25 (1990) [contain review chapters on informa-tion needs and uses].

Bradley, J. and Sutton, B. (eds) (1993) ‘Symposium onqualitative research: Theory methods and applica-tions’, Library Quarterly 63: 405–527 [special issuedevoted to papers describing qualitative and metho-dologically pluralist approaches].

Hounsell, D. and Winn, V. (eds) (1981) ‘Symposiumissue on qualitative approaches to the study ofinformation problems’, Social Science InformationStudies 1: 203–56 [special issue on the potential ofqualitative techniques in information studies].

SEE ALSO: information retrieval; information-seeking research

DAVID ELLIS

INFORMATION-SEEKINGRESEARCH

Research on information-seeking behaviourand processes belongs to the general study ofinformation behaviour as an important field ofinformation science. Historically, the researchon information seeking can be divided into threeperiods: 1960–85, 1986–1995, and 1996–. Dur-ing the first period the research expanded andcan be loosely divided into four categories ofstudy: user studies, use studies, informationbehaviour studies and studies of informationdissemination. The focus was on informationservice provision and quality. Often users wereseen as scientists seeking scholarly information.Accordingly, the first proposed models of infor-mation seeking regard the user as a researcheraffected by a variety of systems (Paisley 1968)later simplified by Allen (1969). Allen’s modelhas been cited as the first theoretical foundationin later studies of information seeking. Allen, andin particular T.D. Wilson (1981), moves theresearch into the professional and informationmanagement domains – away from the librarysphere. Wilson proposed a general model ofinformation-seeking behaviour consisting of threebasic components: the user domain, i.e. the user’sexperiences, including his or her tasks and socialreference group; the information systems domainconsisting of intermediaries and IT; and theinformation unit domain, containing units ofinformation of human or documentary nature.In relation to the latter domain we observe theimportant distinction between seeking informa-tion from human resources, e.g. colleagues, andsearching documentary systems, i.e. informa-

tion retrieval (IR) systems. Wilson emphasisesthe crucial step away from merely descriptivestudies, that is, of asking why individual users actas they act. This leads to the investigations ofinformation needs and user-intermediary interac-tion, already analytically initiated by R.S. Taylor(1968).Information need formation and development,

including search interviewing, were empiricallystudied and modelled in an information-seekingand public library context by Ingwersen (1982)and in terms of the famous anomalous stateof knowledge (ASK) concept developed byBelkin, Brooks and Oddy (1982). The centralpoint of ASK is that a problem situation per-ceived by the user acts as the trigger for therecognition of the ASK by the user, leading to aninformation need that is variable over timeaccording to the influence of the encounteredknowledge sources (human or documentary) onthe current state of knowledge.The second period is rich in empirical studies

and activity models of seeking processes. Theperiod first saw the appearance of the famousDervin and Nilan (1986) sense-making approachto information-seeking research, including thenotion of a knowledge gap, and the informa-tion required to bridge that gap between infor-mation situation and solution. Their approach isfounded in human communication theory andhas led to a vast number of empirical studies ofuser-centred information behaviour and seekingsituations. A second important approach is theempirically based phenomenological six-phasemodel proposed by Kuhlthau (1991). Her phasesrelate explicitly to persons in working environ-ments with perceived tasks and problems thatrequire information in order to be solved: initia-tion, selection, exploration, formulation, collec-tion and presentation. She also operates withlevels of uncertainty found in the task solutionprocess. Also during this period Ellis produced anempirically based stage-like model, consisting ofeight consecutive and interacting ‘features’ (Ellis1989). The work task and its complexity fordecision-making becomes associated with theinformation-seeking process, e.g. by Järvelin(1986) and Byström and Järvelin (1995).The third period is characterized by attempts

to design comprehensive models or frameworksintegrating information seeking and IR research,or to merge existing information-seekingmodels. We also observe the appearance of

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longitudinal studies of information seeking, e.g.by Wang and White (1999) and Vakkari (2001)– in both cases investigating the academicproject environments. Belkin et al. (1995) sug-gest a four-dimensional ‘episode’ frameworkwith the focus on sixteen information-seekingstrategies that include IR interaction processes.In Ingwersen’s cognitive model of IR interaction,the user’s work task perception plays a centralrole by connecting seeking processes in thesocial or organizational environment to theretrieval processes. Work task or interest percep-tion by the user is regarded as the trigger forthe problem situation, a state of uncertainty,and Belkin’s ASK, leading to various types ofinformation needs (Ingwersen 1996). Increas-ingly, work task-based information seeking andIR are viewed in integration for the purpose ofimproving IR systems design and performance,also in relation to the world wide web (Fidel etal. 1999). In a critical review Wilson analyses thecentral information-seeking research and theassociated models, and demonstrates how someof the earlier stage-based models may be success-fully combined (1999).

The research methods used during the firstperiod are heavily dependent on quantitativedescriptive surveys by means of questionnairesand interviews, despite their known drawbacks.Later, during the first and second periods,observation, diaries, critical incident and talkingor thinking aloud methods, including protocolanalysis, become the preferred data collectionand analysis methods, attempting to explainseeking activities. Discourse analysis as wellas grounded theory adds to the investigativemethods in the 1990s. During this decade thecentral conference on information seeking incontext (ISIC) was initiated and firmly estab-lished.

References

Allen, T.J. (1969). ‘Information needs and uses’, in C.A.Cuadra (ed.) Annual Review of Information Scienceand Technology, vol. 4, Chicago, IL: William Bentonpp. 1–29.

Belkin, N.J., Brooks, H.M. and Oddy, R.N. (1982)‘Ask for information retrieval’, Journal of Documen-tation 38(2): 61–71.

Belkin, N.J., Cool, C., Stein, A. and Thiel, U. (1995)‘Cases, scripts, and information seeking strategies:On the design of interactive information retrieval

systems’, Expert Systems with Applications 9(3):379–95.

Byström, K. and Järvelin, K. (1995) ‘Task complexityaffects information seeking and use’, InformationProcessing and Management 31(2): 191–214.

Dervin, B. and Nilan, M. (1986) ‘Information needsand uses’, in M.E. Williams (ed.) Annual Review ofInformation Science and Technology, vol. 21, WhitePlains, NY: Knowledge Industry Publications, pp. 3–33.

Ellis, D. (1989) ‘A behavioral model to informationretrieval system design’, Journal of InformationScience 15: 171–212.

Fidel, R., Davies, R.K., Douglass, M.H., Holder, J.K.,Hopkins, C.J., Kushner, E.J., Miyagishima, B.K. andToney, C.D. (1999) ‘A visit to the information mall:Web searching behaviour of high school students’,Journal of the American Society for InformationScience 50(1): 24–37.

Ingwersen, P. (1996) ‘Cognitive perspectives of infor-mation retrieval interaction: Elements of a cognitiveIR theory’, Journal of Documentation 52(1): 3–50.

—— (1982) ‘Search procedures in the library analysedfrom the cognitive point of view’, Journal of Doc-umentation 38(3): 165–91.

Järvelin, K. (1986) ‘On information, information tech-nology and the development of society: An informa-tion science perspective’, in P. Ingwersen, L. Kajbergand A.M. Pejtersen (eds) Information Technologyand Information Use: Towards a Unified View ofInformation and Information Technology, London:Taylor Graham, pp. 35–55.

Kuhlthau, C.C. (1991) ‘Inside the search process:Information seeking from the user’s perspective’,Journal of the American Society for InformationScience 42: 361–71.

Paisley, W. (1968) ‘Information needs and uses’, in C.A.Cuadra (ed.) Annual Review of Information Scienceand Technology, vol. 3, Chicago, IL: William Benton,pp. 1–30.

Taylor, R.S. (1968) ‘Question negotiation and informa-tion seeking in libraries’, College and ResearchLibraries 29: 178–94.

Vakkari, P. (2001) ‘A theory of the task-based informa-tion retrieval process: A summary and generalizationof a longitudinal study’, Journal of Documentation57(1): 44–60.

Wang, P. and White, M.D. (1999) ‘A cognitive model ofdocument use during a research project: Study II:Decisions at the reading and citing stages’, Journal ofthe American Society for Information Science 50(2):98–114.

Wilson, T. (1999) ‘Models in information behaviourresearch’, Journal of Documentation 55(3): 249–70.

—— (1981) ‘On user studies and information needs’,Journal of Documentation 37(1): 3–15.

Further reading

Kuhlthau, C.C. (1993) Seeking Meaning: A ProcessApproach to Library and Information Services, Nor-wood, NJ: Ablex.

302 INFORMATION-SEEKING RESEARCH

SEE ALSO: empiricism and positivism; researchin library and information science

PETER INGWERSEN

INFORMATION SKILLS

Skills used in the location and interpretation ofinformation, such as using the index of a book,locating material on library shelves, conductingan online search. user education within LISinstitutions seeks to develop these skills in theirusers, so as to enable them to function moreindependently and effectively.

SEE ALSO: information literacy

INFORMATION SOCIETY

A term that is frequently used, but usually onlyvaguely defined. In general it refers to a societyin which information, rather than materialgoods, has become the chief economic, socialand cultural motor. The implication is that it isthe world’s richer economies, principally inNorth America, Europe, Japan and Australasia,who are making or have already made thistransition. Daniel Bell (1976) uses the term‘post-industrial’ to describe the informationsociety. This captures well the feeling that theincreasing importance of the processing ofintangible information, coupled with the declineof traditional industries such as mining andmanufacturing, is a historical inevitability – thenext stage in the evolution of human civiliza-tion, after the industrial age.Although observers tend to agree about gen-

eral characteristics (see the list below), difficultiesarise around measuring the transition to aninformation society. What particular informationis important? How can we judge its importance,quality, validity or morality (Roszak 1986: 11–15)? These questions have not been resolved, anddoubtless will not be for some time (see Webster1995: ch. 2 for an overview). Nevertheless, wecan distinguish certain significant causes andsymptoms of the transition to an informationsociety. These include:

. The development of new information andcommunication technology, such as theinternet, mobile telephones, satellite commu-nication and so on. Through vastly increasingthe speed and quantity of information trans-

mission, these have helped spawn a globalinformation network.

. Large and continuing reductions in the priceand availability of computers (whether in theirown right, or as components in consumergoods such as cars and toys), giving indivi-duals the ability to easily access this globalnetwork.

. The convergence of information and com-munications media such as telecommunica-tions, broadcasting, computing and print.

. Because of this convergence, the increasingimportance and wealth of informational indus-tries (such as advertising, mass media, theinformation and communications technologysector, and education) over agriculture andprimary industries such as mining and manu-facturing.

. The emergence of new cultural icons andpractices, for instance: the ubiquity of adver-tising; the fetishization of the mobile phone;the ‘dot.com bubble’; global sporting events;junk mail – to name but a few symptoms ofthe huge increase in the importance andvisibility in our everyday lives of informationand communication.

Following in the tradition of Marshall mclu-han (1964), certain authors hold a relativelyoptimistic view of the consequences of thistransition, particularly around the use of theInternet as a communications tool. Negroponte(1995), for instance, suggests that as the informa-tion society continues to develop, the consumerwill become increasingly powerful. The enor-mously increased quantities of information areprovoking the development of technologiesthrough which individual consumers can filterthis information, to enhance the quality andrelevance of the information they pull towardsthem, and achieve their own personalized infor-mational environment. Negroponte believes thatthis will make corporations more responsive toconsumer concerns, emphasizing quality of ser-vice and advertising, rather than pure quantityand visibility. Rheingold (1993) foresees a revita-lized sense of community in the informationsociety, as physical location no longer limitssocial interaction. In cyberspace, new commu-nities can flourish, and potentially result in ademocratization and decentralization of societyas a whole.

INFORMATION SOCIETY 303

It is true that certain historical events anddevelopments appear to have been positivelyinfluenced by the transition to an informationsociety. Communism’s rapid collapse in the late1980s and an increased awareness of globalenvironmental problems like rainforest destruc-tion could both be said to have been stimulatedby the ability of populations in one country orregion to view events in another, as they occur –and conversely, the increasing difficulty oppres-sive regimes face in preventing their citizensaccessing such information. New forms of orga-nization, social interaction, politics and even sexhave developed using the Internet and othertechnological developments, many of which areenthusiastically defended by their converts (e.g.Rheingold 1993; Turkle 1995).However, these authors and their kin tend to

focus on discontinuities between the new infor-mation society and the earlier industrial society.It is as if the latter has gone forever, with thechange to moving megabytes around the globerather than minerals having been total andirrevocable (see for instance Negroponte 1995:4). Yet the information society is not developingfrom a clean slate. Rather, it is unavoidablyshaped by existing social, economic and politicalstructures, as well as the channels for commu-nication and information dissemination that havedeveloped under their influence.The use of intangible, informational resources

as an alternative to tangible resources such as oil,gold and grain is nothing new, even if the relativeimportance of the two is shifting over time.Neither resource type can become significantwithout the other. There are also parallels be-tween them. Just as energy, in the form of windand water and so on, flows through the physicalenvironment, information flows through socialnetworks, within which there are particularroutes and channels along which it can flowmore freely. Wind and water do not uniformlydiffuse through the physical space available tothem, and nor does information. It gathers incertain places. Sometimes its flow gets acciden-tally or deliberately blocked. When physicalresources are concentrated and therefore con-trolled from one place – an oil-rich region,expensive jewellery, a Swiss bank account – wecall this wealth. Such wealth also tends to equateto political power. The same processes occur withinformation, and there seems no reason tobelieve that the information society will be

intrinsically more equal, and its resources moreuniformly distributed. Where information is con-centrated, one can deny competitors or thegeneral public access, or control its flow, inter-pretation and even content. Such a gatekeeperrole has become an indicator of power andwealth in the information society. Though tradi-tional sources of power and wealth have in noway disappeared, they have become rivalled bythe influence of information industry mogulssuch as Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch.In the information society we must also face

other old issues surrounding access and use ofresources, such as pollution, conservation, effi-ciency and deprivation. The vast amount ofinformation now available has given rise to aform of pollution (Gore 2000: 197–204) as, withso much redundant information out there, muchof it is wasted. That which does exist is now farless likely to be conserved for posterity; it isharder to envisage the writers, thinkers andartists of the early twenty-first century havingcollections of their e-mails published after theirdeaths, in the way that those of a hundred yearsearlier have had letters and diaries revealed. Thisis only one example of the concern that, para-doxically, the information society may becomenotable for a greater loss of information thanever before. Nor have we much sense of informa-tion efficiency – computer memory capacityincreases exponentially but this merely en-courages developers to write bigger and biggerapplications, and games and Web designers toproduce more and more complex pages. Thosewho must make do with older equipment ornone at all, such as the poor in both the richglobal North and the poorer South, are leftbehind in the rush to exploit this new capacity.Information deprivation is therefore emerging,just as there is material deprivation. Indeed, asthe transition to the information society gatherspace, these two kinds of poverty will becomeinterchangeable.Even when information is freely accessible,

this is no guarantee that it will be desirable.Those who wish to access information such aschild pornography, incitement to racial hatredand so on now find this task relatively easy onthe Internet. Nor will information always be usedproductively. In contrast to the optimistic por-trayals of the information society remarked uponearlier, other commentators have focused moreupon the negative consequences of this transition.

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With people retreating into online personae,knowing people across the world better thantheir next-door neighbours, the information so-ciety seems dislocating and fragmented. Ratherthan global understanding and solidarity, it dis-plays confusion, a multiplicity of signs andmetaphors in which we can no longer discernthe real from the unreal (or hyper-real: Baudril-lard 1983). Blinded by the cult of information(Roszak 1986) we are far from becoming moreactive, aware and discerning consumers. In factthe opposite is happening, as TV channels multi-ply, fads and celebrities come and go withincreasing rapidity, and McLuhan’s putative glo-bal village becomes dominated by its shoppingmalls. As we negotiate this consumer-oriented,ephemeral world, business and governmentswatch our every step. Our privacy as individualsis eroded by the use of computer technology tostore and process personal data about our shop-ping habits, movements, cultural preferences: inshort, our lives. Employers assert their right toview the private correspondence of employees, ifthat correspondence passed through a work e-mail account. From this perspective, the informa-tion society is far from a desirable phase in theevolution of human society.Any synthesis between this pessimism and

more positive accounts can only be achieved if itis remembered that the information society willcontain both continuities and discontinuitiesfrom earlier times. In his definitive discussion ofthe social and political theories that can underpinideas about the information society, Webster(1995) places the term ‘information society’ inquotes throughout to demonstrate its elusivenature. He acknowledges that the term is oftenused unproblematically in both public and aca-demic discourse, but when doing so there is littleappreciation of underlying considerations thatwill shape the transition to an informationsociety. To say that information exists regardlessof its social and political context (see Webster1995: 27) may, at times, be an accurate observa-tion. But pure information can never act uponthe world without being mediated through in-dividual minds, organizations and socio-economic structures that may be influenced bythe information, but which essentially predate it.Therefore, the information society does not existindependently: it is still society, and though theflow of resources around it has become morerapid, flexible and location independent, society

possesses many of the same structures andproblems that it always has.There have been radical breakthroughs in the

technical realm of information and communica-tion technologies, and the economic importanceof information processing has increased to suchan extent that it appears justified to state that aninformation society of some sort is emerging.However, to fully understand this transitionrequires more than just describing consequences.The information society has been developing forsome decades now – perhaps even centuries –and though new technologies have accelerated itsevolution, the process is far from complete,particularly when considered globally (rememberthat over a billion people alive today have nevermade a telephone call). The information society’sfuture will be shaped by technological andeconomic influences, but also by social, politicaland cultural factors that are rather less easy topredict or direct.

References

Baudrillard, J. (1983) Simulations, New York: Semio-texte.

Bell, D. (1976) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society:A Venture in Social Forecasting, Harmondsworth:Penguin.

Gore, A. (2000) Earth in the Balance; Forging a NewCommon Purpose, London: Earthscan [Chapter 11 isparticularly relevant].

McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Ex-tensions of Man, New York: McGraw Hill.

Negroponte, N. (1995) Being Digital, New York:Knopf.

Rheingold, H. (1993) The Virtual Community: Home-steading on the Electronic Frontier, Reading, MA:Addison Wesley.

Roszak, T. (1986) The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High Tech, Artificial Intelligenceand the True Art of Thinking, Cambridge: Lutter-worth.

Turkle, S. (1995) Life on the Screen, New York: Simon& Schuster.

Webster, F. (1995) Theories of the Information Society,London: Routledge [the best summary of theoreticalconsiderations of the issue; a revised edition isexpected late in 2002].

SEE ALSO: broadcasting; censorship;communication; e-commerce; e-government;economics of information; Internet; Machlup,Fritz; mobile communications; paperless society;Porat, Marc Uri; preservation; sociology ofknowledge

ANDREW WHITWORTH

INFORMATION SOCIETY 305

INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Domain and definition

There is no agreed definition of informationsystems (IS) in the literature but we define it as‘the effective analysis, design, delivery and use ofinformation for organizations and society usinginformation technology’. Although there are in-formation systems without computer systems (forexample, the ‘grapevine’), its subject matterconcerns mainly the interaction of technologywith organizations, individuals and society as awhole. The scope of information systems is notoriented to the technology per se but to theimpact of its use; indeed Lee (1991) argues thatthe domain ‘begins where computer scienceends’. Attempts to place rigid boundaries on IShave been argued to reduce the discipline’srichness and value but whatever definition isused the domain clearly has a major focus onthe organizational and social context surround-ing the use of information technology.

Information systems as an academicdiscipline

IS is a fairly new discipline, with academicdepartments being mainly found first in the UKat the ex-polytechnics in the 1970s. However,most universities and colleges now have someform of IS programme. There are about ninetyuniversity departments teaching IS in the UKwith specialist undergraduate and postgraduateprogrammes in information systems usually beingfound in Computer Science or Managementdepartments, along with those provided by spe-cialist departments of Information Systems. Someprogrammes aim to produce ‘hybrid’ students ormanagers that have IT and IS, as well as generalmanagement, skills.Again, there is no agreed content for a

programme in information systems. The mainareas of difference between programmes concernthe emphasis placed on technological aspects onthe one hand and the organizational and socialissues on the other. Hence IS academics who donot belong to an IS department are fairly equallysplit between Computer Science departments andmanagement schools. In the USA, more ISacademics are based in business schools. SomeIS academics are fairly isolated or belong to verysmall groups.

Themes

IS is a rich multidisciplinary domain, wherehuman and organizational factors are as impor-tant as technological factors. The latter includehardware, software, data and networks. Hu-man and organizational factors include strategy,business processes, economic, managerial anduser aspects. Computer science, engineering,mathematics and other sciences are relevant tothe technological elements, whereas applied psy-chology, anthropology, philosophy, sociology,economics, linguistics, politics, semiotics andethics are relevant to the more social andmanagement-oriented aspects. Over time, therehas been a slow movement away from technolo-gical factors (sometimes referred to as the harderaspects) to the organizational and social themes(the softer aspects). However the interaction ofthe two provides a rich and exciting domain. Thesocio-technical school (see, for example, Mum-ford 1996) places emphasis on ensuring that theimpact of technology on people is positive.

Possible programme content

Although some programmes aim to addressparticular IT skills to meet the skills shortage inpublic and private organizations, the multidisci-plinary aspect of information systems discussedearlier is also reflected in most academic pro-grammes. Such a general programme in informa-tion systems might include the following aspects:

. Theoretical underpinnings of IS: informationsystems draws on systems theory, informa-tion theory and philosophy from otherdisciplines (see Themes above).

. Data, information and knowledge manage-ment: this relates to how raw data is con-verted into information (data processed for aparticular purpose) through to knowledge(the ability to use the information most effec-tively) including various forms of modelling,file and database organization, data mining,data warehousing (see data warehouse) andsupport tools.

. Information in organizational decision-mak-ing: this looks at the nature, use and signifi-cance of information systems in organizations,and the way information provided needs to beaccurate, appropriate, concise, secure, timelyand relevant for the decision-maker, alongwith specific applications such as enterprise

306 INFORMATION SYSTEMS

resource planning systems, decision sup-port systems, group decision support systemsand executive IS.

. IS/IT strategy and its alignment with organiza-tional strategy: this discusses the relationshipsbetween the strategy for IS in organizationsand how it is aligned with business strategy,information strategy, IT strategy and relatedpersonnel and management strategy. In parti-cular, it focuses on how IS/IT may enable newways of doing business, new organizationalforms and new strategies, for example, elec-tronic commerce.

. Information systems design and development:this looks at the ways in which informationsystems are analysed, designed, developed andimplemented in organizations, including themethodologies, tools and techniques support-ing that development.

. information and communication tech-nology: this aspect includes hardware andsoftware both within and outside the organi-zation, interfaces and media. Thus it willencompass, for example, hardware devices,systems and application software, systemsarchitectures, networks and communicationssoftware.

. Management of information systems and ser-vices: this will include a discussion of the rolesand activities of personnel, specialists andusers and their relationships, and the skills,education and training required to carry outthese roles effectively. It will also usuallyexamine the organization of the IT roles andfunctions, including whether IS/IT might becentralized, decentralized, federal or out-sourced.

. Organizational, social and cultural impact ofIS: this looks specifically at the social, culturaland ethical issues including impacts on theindividual, the home, the workplace, the en-vironment and society of IS and IT. Thisincludes organizations in both the public andprivate sectors, legal issues such as privacyand data protection, employment issues,globalization and so on. A particular focus ison change management and achieving thebenefits but mitigating the worst of the pro-blems associated with IS/IT-induced change.

. Economic aspects of IS: this looks at theevaluation of IS that should take place before(referred to as a feasibility study), during andafter (post-implementation review) an infor-

mation system has been implemented. Evalua-tion may be broad-based, to take on boardwider cultural and social issues along with amore conventional cost–benefit approach.

Other modules might be added to the abovelist as options, for example:

. Information security and privacy.

. medical informatics (or another speciality).

. e-commerce and multimedia.

. Project management.

. Software engineering.

. Database management.

. artificial intelligence and expert systems.

. Marketing and other business courses.

. IS practice and consultancy.

Some programmes demand prerequisite coursesand/or experience such as two years’ computingexperience or a degree in Computer Science.Programmes vary in regards to the proportion ofpractical ‘hands-on’ computing, group and indi-vidual projects, amount of case study work andso on.

Information systems in practice

IS concerns practice: it is about how informationtechnology is used in organizations. Typically, thefirst activities in organizations that were compu-terized were applications at the operations levelof the firm, such as payroll, invoicing, sales orderprocessing and stock control, most of themaccounting-related. The word ‘computerized’ isused advisedly here, for they tended to automateclerical systems. Much of this represented anattempt to reduce costs and speed up dataprocessing, but did not change the nature ofbusiness. Earlier applications were usually devel-oped in isolation, but there has been a morerecent interest in integrating these legacy systems,possible using large database systems, and seenmost recently with the movement towards En-terprise Resource Planning systems, such as SAP.Business process re-engineering, although notnecessarily driven by IT and IS, has almostinvariably been supported by them both.IS success and failure is an enduring theme,

though the public remembers the failures, forexample, of the London Ambulance system andTaurus for the London Stock Exchange, but ismuch less aware of the successful systems that

INFORMATION SYSTEMS 307

have replaced them. Indeed the newer LondonAmbulance System won the BCS InformationSystems Management Award for 1997 and canbe considered a ‘significant success’ (Fitzgerald2000).Later applications have also concerned im-

proving the effectiveness of management, andthis has seen the development of managementinformation systems, decision support systems,group decision support systems and executivesupport systems as this role continues to developand evolve. Some are meant to support manage-ment decision-making by providing information,others attempt to automate decision-making,some aim at naı̈ve users and yet others atexperienced users. The latter may well developtheir own applications, a process known as end-user development. An alternative approach is tobuy or rent an application package and adapt itwhere necessary. Some organizations have out-sourced most of their IT applications develop-ment, and IT and IS generally.There has always been a concern about the

process of developing computer applicationseffectively using IS development methodologies,but most recently there has been a movementaway from formal approaches to enable rapidapplication development. Software productivitytools, known variously as workbenches, compu-ter-aided systems engineering and developertools, have attempted to support this process.With Web applications, this change in emphasisis particularly pronounced as companies rush toachieve a Web presence, although more complexbusiness-to-business (b2b) Web applications re-quire thorough development approaches and canbe supported by very large databases. Somebusinesses see information systems as a way togain competitive advantage (Porter and Millar1985) or provide co-operative support, as in b2belectronic commerce. Database management ap-plications have developed into knowledge man-agement ones, and organizations are now gainingcompetitive advantage through their knowledgeabout how information can be used more effec-tively.Before the development of microcomputers,

now more usually called personal computers(PCs) or workstations (if part of a network), ITwas usually associated with large mainframecomputers. We now emphasize PC and distribu-ted computing at least as much, and officeapplications (in particular word processing, orga-

nizers, spreadsheet and file and database man-agement), along with the use of the Internet andmobile computing, have impacted greatly onorganizations. PCs have also enabled Internetuse and other computer applications in the homeand perhaps this experience can lead to morepleasurable as well as effective use of IT –computing need not be dehumanizing.

INFORMATION SYSTEMS RESEARCH

IS research is very varied. Topics include mana-ging organizational change, economic aspects,productivity tools, information systems develop-ment, database modelling (and modelling ingeneral), personal computing, office technology,competitive implications, expert systems and theimpact of IT on the nature of work. Traditionallymuch IS research that has been published wasbased on the interpretation of questionnaire/surveys. This approach is often used in thesciences and can rely on statistical techniques,but the results are usually interesting and rele-vant only when the writer begins to interpret theinformation through subjective means. Somejournals now publish papers with alternativeapproaches to IS research, including case studies,action research, hermeneutics, ethnography,critical thinking, agency theory, speech act the-ory, structuration theory, post-modernist theory,grounded theory, feminist theory, personal con-struct theory and phenomenological research.The multidisciplinary nature of IS suggests thata plethora of relevant research approaches isrelevant. Myers (www2.auckland.ac.nz/msis/isworld/index.html) provides an excellent over-view of qualitative research in IS.

JOURNALS

The change in emphasis to both qualitative andquantitative research from a concentration on thelatter is perhaps best reflected in the change ofpolicy of the leading journal of IS:MIS Quarterly(MISQ). In September 1989 it suggested that apaper:

[I]n the Research and Theory categoryshould. . .be based on a set of well-definedhypotheses, unbiased and reproducible. . .often[involving] the collection of considerablequantitative data through such means as la-boratory experiments or survey instruments.The data are then subjected to statisticalanalysis.

308 INFORMATION SYSTEMS

In the March 1993 issue of MISQ there was abroadening of this stance as they welcomed‘research based on positivist, interpretive, orintegrated approaches [though] we remain strongin our commitment to hypothesis testing andquantitative data analysis’. The present editor,Allen Lee, has bravely further expanded themethods of acceptable research (but not withoutopposition). Although the MISQ is generallyrecognized as the leading research journal, Com-munications of the ACM probably has the mostimpact, having a large circulation list (83,000),the majority being practitioners.Other journals with an IS emphasis include (in

alphabetical order) Accounting, Managementand Information Technologies; The Database forAdvances in Information Systems; Decision Sup-port Systems; European Journal of InformationSystems; Information Systems Journal; Informa-tion Systems Research; Information Technologyand People; Journal of Information Technology;Journal of Management Information Systems;Journal of Strategic Information Systems; Man-agement Science; and the Scandinavian Journalof Information Systems. There are also a numberof online journals, such as those of the Associa-tion of Information Systems (AIS; see www.aisnet.org).

EMPLOYMENT AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS GRADUATES

IS graduates are employed in many work situa-tions. They may perform a non-IS role in anorganization that in addition requires some IS/ITknowledge and experience. On the other hand,they may be employed as the ‘e-commerceexpert’, Webmaster, IS developer and so on.Their employment potential has been consistentlyhigh and few are tempted to start a PhD. Indeed,a particular problem regarding PhD students inIS is that they also tend to choose a non-academic life and there has always been aproblem of filling academic posts at all levels.


The AIS is an international association for ISacademics that supports conferences, PhD con-sortia and other activities (see ISWorld atwww.aisnet.org). This is joined by nationalgroups, such as the UK Academy for InformationSystems (UKAIS). Their suggested IS syllabushelped in drawing up our section on possiblecourse content. The UKAIS also supports confer-

ences, PhD consortia, regional meetings andpublishes a quarterly newsletter (www.cs.york.ac.uk/cgi-bin/ukais). Another important interna-tional group is the International Federation ofInformation Processing (IFIP). Its Technical Com-mittee 8 includes information systems and this issplit into several working groups (WGs). Forexample, WG8.1 considers information systemsdevelopment methodologies; WG8.2 the impactof IS on organizations and society; WG8.3decision-support systems; and WG8.4 e-com-merce. A particularly useful site is that of IS-World at www.isworld.org.

Conferences

Relevant conferences, such as the InternationalConference for Information Systems (ICIS), Eur-opean Conference of Information Systems(ECIS), Business Information Technology World(BIT World), the UKAIS conference, AustralasianConference in IS and regional or specialist oneshave been very successful. It is generally felt thatcomputer societies (such as the British ComputerSociety) emphasize the technological aspects of ISbut do not focus sufficiently on the other aspectsof IS relevant to IS practitioners, researchers andteachers. For this reason more specialist ISorganizations, like those mentioned above, havebeen formed.

Books and book series

McGraw-Hill and Wiley both have internationalseries of texts in information systems. There area number of general texts on informationsystems: those by Laudon and Laudon (2002)and Kendall and Kendall (2001) are US textsthat are popular, and Curtis (1995) is a UK-based text. Davis and Olsen (1985) was veryinfluential but unfortunately is now somewhatout-of-date. References on particular topics in-clude Banville and Landry (1989); Boland andHirschheim (1987); Currie and Galliers (1999)and Mingers and Stowell (1997) on the domainof IS; Myers and Avison (2002) on qualitativeresearch in IS; Connoly et al. (1998) on databasesystems; Hammer and Champy (1993) on busi-ness process re-engineering; Callon (1996) onbusiness strategies for IT; Avison and Fitzgerald(2002) on IS development; Willcocks (1997) onevaluation; Sauer (1993) on success and failure;Zuboff (1988) on the introduction of IT; Frenzel

INFORMATION SYSTEMS 309

(1999) on IT management; and Kakakota andRobinson (1999) on e-business.

References

Avison, D.E. and Fitzgerald, G. (2002) InformationSystems Methodologies, Techniques and Tools, 3rd

edn, McGraw-Hill.Fitzgerald, G. (2000) IT at the Heart of Business: AStrategic Approach to Information Technology, BCS.

Lee (1991) ‘Architecture as a reference discipline forMIS’, in H.-E. Nissen, R. Hirschheim and H.K. Klein(1991) Information Systems Research: Contempor-ary Approaches and Emergent Traditions, Elsevier.

Mumford, E. (1996) Systems Design: Ethical Tools forEthical Change, Macmillan.

Porter, M.E. and Millar, V.E. (1985) ‘How informationgives you competitive advantage’, Harvard BusinessReview July–August.

Further reading

Banville, C. and Landry, M. (1989) ‘Can the field ofMIS be disciplined?’, Communications of the ACM32: 48–60.

Boland, R.J. and Hirschheim, R.A. (eds) (1987) CriticalIssues in Information Systems Research, Wiley.

Callon, J.D. (1996) Competitive Advantage throughInformation Technology, McGraw-Hill.

Connoly, T., Begg, C. and Strachan, A. (1998) Data-base Systems, Addison-Wesley.

Currie, W. and Galliers, R. (eds) (1999) RethinkingManagement Information Systems: An Interdisciplin-ary Perspective, OUP.

Curtis, G. (1995) Business Information Systems: Ana-lysis, Design and Practice, Addison-Wesley.

Davis, G.B. and Olsen, M.H. (1985) ManagementInformation Systems: Conceptual Foundations,Structure and Development, McGraw-Hill.

Frenzel, C.W. (1999) Management of InformationTechnology, Course Technology.

Hammer, M. and Champy, J. (1993) Reengineering theCorporation, Harper Business.

Kakakota, R. and Robinson, M. (1999) E-business:Roadmap for Success, Addison-Wesley.

Kendall, K. and Kendall, J. (2001) Systems Analysisand Design, Prentice-Hall.

Laudon, K.C. and Laudon, J.P. (2002) ManagementInformation Systems: Organization and Technology,Prentice Hall.

Mingers, J. and Stowell, F. (eds) (1997) InformationSystems: An Emerging Discipline?, McGraw-Hill.

Myers, M. and Avison, D.E. (2002) Qualitative Re-search in Information Systems: A Reader, Sage.

Sauer, C. (1993)Why Information Systems Fail: A CaseStudy Approach, Alfred Waller.

Truex, D. and Baskerville, R. (1998) ‘Deep structure oremergence theory: Contrasting theoretical founda-tions for information systems development’, Infor-mation Systems Journal 8: 2.

Willcocks, L. (ed.) (1997) Evaluating IT Investments,Chapman & Hall.

Zuboff, S. (1988) In the Age of the Smart Machine,Basic Books.

SEE ALSO: informatics; information ethics;operations research; organizational informationpolicies

DAVID AVISON AND GUY FITZGERALD

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Electronic technologies for collecting, storing,processing and communicating information.There are two main categories: those that processinformation, such as computer systems; andthose that disseminate information, such astelecommunications systems. The term cangenerally be understood to describe systems thatcombine both, but nowadays the more accurateinformation and communication technol-ogy (ICT) is more commonly used. Whilstinformation technology has been the acceptedterm in the UK, it is not the universal term:telematics is widely used in France, and infor-matics is also used elsewhere in this sense.

SEE ALSO: communication; informationmanagement; information policy

INFORMATION THEORY

The strict and narrow definition is theory con-cerning the measurement of the quantity andquality of information.

The Shannon viewpoint

There is perhaps no other term that has becomemore ambiguous during the last forty years thanthe term ‘information’. Due to the ambiguityof the term there are hundreds or thousands ofpapers dealing with attempts to describe aspects,facets and components of ‘information’ on a levelof abstraction that could be related to someunderstanding of ‘theory’. Fairthorne (1965)therefore recommended not using this term anymore. Nevertheless, ‘information’ still is a phe-nomenon that fascinates people over all thedisciplines.It perhaps all started with Claude shannon in

1948 when he published his Mathematical The-ory of Communication, which included not amathematical definition of ‘information’ but ameasurement for the entropy of a message. Hisapproach was inspired by the idea of optimizingthe transport of signals on a communicationchannel between a source and a receiver. Since

310 INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

such channels require the coding of messages thatthe source intends to send, optimizing the num-ber of signals representing a specific message sentthrough the channel means optimizing the codingof the representation of the message. Since themost simple and general way of achieving this isby binary code, a mathematical theory could bedeveloped based on the binary principle thatcould be used in any case in which the messagecould be represented by discrete signs and thewhole set of different discrete signs (or symbolsor characters) is known. Coding could be opti-mized further if the discrete signs have a differentfrequency of occurrence or, looked at fromanother angle (which already goes beyond Shan-non), a different probability from that in whichthe receiver could ‘expect’ a signal. Frequentsigns could be coded with fewer signals; raresigns could be coded with more signals. Thus thenumber of signs used for the transfer of messagesthrough channels could be optimized.The amount of information specified by Shan-

non relates to the probability of signs within arestricted set of signs with known probabilities ofoccurrence: more frequent signs have a higherprobability and therefore contain less informa-tion, while less frequent signs have a lowerprobability and therefore contain more informa-tion. If we look at the theory from the viewpointof the receiver, a sign with a high probability ismore likely than one with a low probability andtherefore the uncertainty about the next incom-ing sign will be reduced less by a sign with highprobability than by a sign with low probability.Shannon formalized this relation on the basis ofbinary coding, thus leading to his famous for-mula. That theory was very soon used as in-formation theory, mainly due to its lessmathematical explanation by Weaver (Shannonand Weaver 1949).This concept was influential as an ‘informa-

tion theory’ for several reasons:

. At the same time the concept of informationwas identified as one that could seriouslychange our view of the world. It was Norbertwiener who discovered that our natural worldconsists not only of matter and energy (thephysicist’s view of the world) but also thatinformation could be a third basic componentif we adopt a new, post-classical view ofsystems and processes of control that he calledcybernetics (Wiener 1948). Cybernetics and

systems theory were the basis of a newgeneration of thinking, related to informationas a means of control. Shannon contributed amathematical interpretation of information,something that is always sought by scientistsand engineers.

. The mathematical theory of communicationwas one of the basic theories underlying thefurther development of data processing. Theenormous impact of computers of coursesupported the distribution of the underlyingtheories.

. A major trend in the sciences after the SecondWorld War was that they tended to adopt thecognitive model of (natural) sciences; sincethey had been so successful, positivism, for-malization, mathematization, measurementand experimentation spread through most ofthe soft sciences like social sciences, the artsand humanities. Since most of the soft scien-tists had problems understanding the ‘hard’theories of the natural world, the new con-cepts of systems, control and information wereof enormous fascination. These theories usedterms that seemed to be well known to them,the theoretical constructs looked to be rathersimple and even the mathematics related tothese concepts was not very difficult. So nearlyeverybody who wanted to be known as in-novative started to play around with theseconcepts.

. The basic structure of Shannon’s theory washis approach to communication and this hadan enormous impact in itself. It provided amodel of communication that related to recenttheories of human communication, although itwas not intended to. The classical formula ofLasswell (1948) – ‘Who says what to whomon which channel with what effects’ – was tosome extent formalized by Shannon and Wea-ver, and thus a field of communication studiescould emerge that in social and engineeringcontexts could use the same terminology andtherefore could at least think that both fieldsmeant the same phenomena. This was outlinedwonderfully by Cherry (1957).

During the 1950s and 1960s the concept of‘information’ and related concepts spreadthrough different fields of scientific activity, likepsychology, physiology, linguistics, biology andsociology (Dahling 1962). Unavoidably, the con-

INFORMATION THEORY 311

cepts did not remain what they had originallybeen. The more they were transplanted to otherdisciplines and contexts, the more they changed,were defined in other ways and related to othercontexts and concepts. Two different develop-ments played an important role in the process ofgrowing confusion:

. Electronic data processing people alwaystended to promise more than they coulddeliver. So, even at a time when their machineswere not able to process more than holes inpaper, they started to call it informationprocessing, which led to the establishment ofthe discipline that was later called infor-matics (especially in Europe). This createdsome problems, because the capacities of theirmachines grew considerably but they stillcalled everything information processing.Thus, the engineering interpretation of ‘infor-mation’ changed with the changing capabilitiesof computers.

. The field of documentation was concernedwith the establishment of stores of documentsto be organized in such a way that someonecould select something according to specificrequirements. As the new technologies becameavailable they promised to be an importanttool. At the same time it became obvious thatthe documentation business was becomingincreasingly more sophisticated. The informa-tion flood increased, the users of the storesbecame more specific in their needs and thenew technologies required new ways of think-ing. Documentation as a field of practicalknowledge tended to become a field of scien-tific study and called itself informationscience (Borko 1968). Underlying this processwas a somewhat different paradigm: it was notthe paradigm of something called informationbeing processed, but that of something calledinformation being sought for specific reasons.

In Shannon’s theory these interpretations werenot incompatible: due to the known probabilitiesof the signs and the assumption that source andreceiver used the same system of signs, theamount of information in the sign and theimpacted information were more or less thesame. This was not so in human contexts, whereneither the assumption of coherent sets of signsnor the assumption of the identity of the originalmessage, signs and reconstructed message were

applicable. The very notion of semiotics, whichin fact became one of the most importantcritiques of too simple an application of informa-tion theory to human communication, led to theinsight that Shannon’s mathematical theory wasonly a theory on the syntactical level (relation ofsigns to signs), but with no reference to thesemantic (relation of signs to meanings) andpragmatic (relation of signs to humans) levels. Inconsequence, some attempts were made to de-velop out of Shannon’s theory a semantic (e.g.Bar-Hillel and Carnap 1953) or pragmatic (e.g.Yovits 1975) information theory, but these re-mained in the literature with no great success.

The diversification of viewpoints

At the beginning of the 1970s, when informationscience started to establish itself, it was facedwith the problem that while nearly everybodyused the term information, nearly everybodymeant something different by it. The problemwas complicated by the fact that most of theusers of the term thought that everybody elsewould understand and therefore they very oftendid not define which kind of meaning they had inmind.A study of the different types of meaning of

information in 1971 (in detail Wersig 1971; inbrief Wersig and Neveling 1975) disclosed sixdifferent types:

1 The structure approach states that the struc-tures of the world – whether perceived byman or not – are information. There weresome variants on this approach, such as:

. Information as the static relationship be-tween atoms and molecules.

. Information as the relationship that maybecome perceptible if changes in the statesof the physical objects occur.

. Information as all characteristics of physicalobjects.

This approach was mainly used by philosophers(e.g. Polushkin 1963).

2 The knowledge approach states thatknowledge developed on the basis of percep-tion is information. Variants were:

. Knowledge is objectively given, whetheractualized by an individual or not.

. Knowledge has to be acquired by at least

312 INFORMATION THEORY

one subject.. Knowledge serves a specific purpose (mostimportant were the definitions of the form‘Information is of value in decision-making’;Yovits 1961).

. Information is communicated knowledge.

This approach was spread widely across disci-plines but was most important in connectionwith decision theory.

3 The message approach continues the tradi-tion of Shannon and Weaver: information isthe message itself. Variants were:

. Information is the physical substance that isused for transmission (e.g. Graziano 1968).

. Information is the symbols produced forcommunication.

. Information is the unit of a physical carrierand its semantic elements (e.g. Völz 1991).

This approach was mainly used by those asso-ciated with mathematical communication theory.

4 The meaning approach states that the mean-ing assigned to signs or data is the informa-tion, usually connected to the conventionsused in the decoding of the sign. Thisapproach was dominant in computer scienceand its applications (e.g. ANSI 1966).

5 The effect approach states that informationis a specific effect of a specific process,usually on the part of the recipients in acommunication process. Variants were:

. Information is data produced as a result ofprocessing data (e.g. Hayes 1969).

. Information is a change of knowledge (e.g.Kunz and Rittel 1972).

. Information is the reduction of uncertainty(e.g. Wersig 1971).

The last two variants were used mostly bybehavioural scientists.

6 The process approach states that informa-tion is neither objective nor subjective, but aprocess. Variants were:

. Information is a process within the humanmind when a problem and data are broughttogether (e.g. Hoshovsky and Massey 1968)

. Information is a set of actions by which

something is purposively transferred (e.g.Koblitz 1968).

This view was often adopted by informationpractitioners.

The cognitive viewpoint

Although information science never reached acommon understanding of itself and therefore thedifferent types of use of ‘information’ remainedunder discussion, the theoretical discussion in thediscipline during the 1970s concentrated on the‘cognitive approach’ (DeMey 1977; Belkin1990), which was more or less a continuation ofthe ‘effect approach’ and continued in the 1980sand 1990s as the ‘subjective approach’ (Cole1994). Some main variants that received majorattention were (Ingwersen 1992):

. Information as the reduction of uncertainty asa result of communication. The uncertainty isdue to a problematic situation (Wersig 1979)in which the actor has to act but does nothave enough knowledge available to actrationally.

. Information as the resolution of an anomalousstate of knowledge (Belkin 1975, 1977, 1978).

. Information as that which modifies subjectiveknowledge structure (Brookes 1975, 1980).

. Information as a meaningful message from aninformant that may influence the recipient inconsiderations, decisions and actions(Machlup 1983).

Sometimes this led to a dual understanding thatinformation within information science is both‘the result of a transformation of generator’sknowledge structures’ and ‘something (a struc-ture) that when perceived may affect and trans-form the recipient’s state of knowledge’(Ingwersen 1992: 125). A similar duality isimplicit in Buckland (1991), with his distinctionbetween ‘information-as-thing’ and ‘information-as-knowledge’.One could call the developmental stage from

1948 to the 1970s the ‘Shannon and Weaverphase’, because most of the discussions andattempts to structure the concept of informationrelied on the reception of Shannon via Weaver.Although nothing remarkable happened, we seemto have entered during the 1980s a new phase ofdiscussion of information theoretically, which


can perhaps be related to several general devel-opments:

. Information science has not reached a stage ofdevelopment where it relies on a sufficientlysound theoretical and methodological base tobe accepted at least as an important field ofstudy. It is still looking for its identity (Vakkariand Cronin 1992) and one of the reasons isthat its representatives have never been able todemonstrate that they are pursuing somethingreally different from computer science, due tothe strong retrieval component, which remainsone of the main features of recent informationscience.

. The cognitive viewpoint on information,although discussed in information science, hasnot been developed further on a theoreticalbasis within the discipline. It has been adoptedto some extent by computer science under theterms knowledge processing and knowledge-based systems, thus replicating the reductionof information in its cognitive facets to itsautomatic processing aspect with the conceptof knowledge. Knowledge becomes in thiscontext not the knowledge of the individualto which information could be set into rela-tion, but machine-processable knowledge-re-presentation.

. The cognitive viewpoint itself has been colo-nized by cognitive science, which does not tryto understand cognition as it appears withinhumans but is concerned with cognition bymeans of reproducing cognition-like featureson computers.

. From the other side, the cognitive viewpoint isto some extent attacked by radical constructi-vism, which states that knowledge is nothingmore than a subjective construct; informationin this context becomes unmeasurable becausethere are no longer any direct connectionsbetween reality, signs and knowledge (e.g.Glasersfeld 1985).

Information science, perhaps, has waited toolong to establish a sound theoretical basis for acognitive-oriented information theory; now thisis adapted from communications theory (Mertenet al. 1994; ‘The future of the field I’ 1993) andcognitive science (Gardner 1985), which more orless work on the cognitive paradigm but drop theconcept of information as central.Under these conditions several options for a

theoretical foundation of information are consid-ered. All of them have in common that they donot insist on only one meaning of information.There exists a position that is concerned with thesituation of knowledge in our times, and thataction is necessary that relates to ‘information’(Wersig 1993a). The position is that somethingthat reflects the knowledge of humans about theirworld exists in individuals, in human products, inorganizations and in stores of different kinds. Ifsome people call this information, they may doso. This knowledge is used – by individuals,organizations and society – but is often notavailable when needed. Specific kinds of activitiesare necessary to ensure that the knowledge that isused will be available when it is needed and in aform in which it may be used. Again people maycall such activities information. Problems of thiskind may be solved by different approaches:libraries, retrieval systems, multimedia systems,etc. If the problem-solving is successful, some-thing happens with the individuals, organizationsand societies that means that, if they requireknowledge and they get it, they might changeduring this process. Again, this could be calledinformation. In fact, this means that informationtheory changes from the definition of informationto the definition of situations in which somethinglike information is central.

The development of new theoreticaldirections

These situations relate to so many differentobjects – humans, documents, knowledge, com-puters, networks – that it is doubtful whether acommon theory could be developed. Thereforethe current trend in information theory is to tryto make use of a broad range of theoriesdeveloped for situations. The following ap-proaches may have a future role:

. Constructivism.

. Systems theory.

. Action theory.

. Modernization theory.

CONSTRUCTIVISM

The constructivist model (e.g. Maturana andVarela 1987) may be briefly described thus:humans perceive the world through their sensesand compute sensorial data by their complexneural network, thus creating their own percep-


tive image of the world and their self. Theseimages guide perceptions, and thus the humannotion of reality is always a subjective image. Inradical constructivism, everything is regarded asbeing a subjective construction or reconstructionor re-reconstruction; moderate constructivismwould permit some similarities between the sub-jective constructions and between constructionsand reality. The theoretical basis for moderateconstructivism is that not everything in percep-tion is subjective because the perceptive apparatusdeveloped by evolution is in principle workingalong the same lines for all individuals; perceptivemachines have been developed about which wecan come to similar or even the same conclusionsunder specific conditions. According to OswaldWiener (1996) we all are capable of using similarrational machines in our cognitive systems. Allknowledge is subjective and so is information,which could be looked at either as that whichchanges knowledge (or knowledge structures) orthat which is changed in knowledge (or knowl-edge structures) (Cole 1994). This distinction isperhaps theoretically interesting, but is in fact notvery important: the question of whether informa-tion exists in any case needs the observation to bemade that knowledge has changed and that thereis something causing this change. Both compo-nents belong together and therefore either or bothcould be called information.It is worthwhile to note that this view is not a

very new one; it has always been included incognitive approaches. But these views needed thesupport of constructivism to overcome the dom-inance of ‘information as a thing of its own’, aview that is still alive (Buckland 1991). Theevolution of the constructivist approach seemsto broaden the scope and to accept differentforms of constructed worlds in which, under thespecific conditions, changes may occur that arecaused by something, e.g. data banks, knowl-edge-based systems, human brains, organiza-tional memories or virtual realities. ‘Informationas the change in world representations’ may bethe common denominator for further constructi-vist approaches to information theory.

SYSTEMS THEORY

Systems theory has undergone dramatic changessince the mid-1980s. Until the birth of cyber-netics, systems theory was based on the approach‘the whole is more than the sum of its parts’.With general systems theory (von Bertalanffy

1950) and cybernetics, it entered a stage in whichthe difference between system and environmentbecame of vital interest, and where the connec-tions between system and environment played animportant role in the background of some of thecognitive approaches, for example those formu-lated by Stachowiak (1965). Since the 1960s(Foerster and Zopf 1962) systems theory hasbeen dominated by the idea of the antipoeticsystem that is closed against its environment, asystem that is self-creating, self-reproducing, self-referencing and self-organizing, a view shared byradical constructivism.In Luhmann’s theory of social systems (Luh-

mann 1988) the system is a correlated set ofactions in time. The system survives by generat-ing actions that continue the system. Every timethe system has different options for actions thatperpetuate it, there has to be a choice. An eventthat chooses states of the system is called byLuhmann information – a difference that makessense (going back to Bateson 1979). This, ofcourse, is a broadening of Shannon and Weaver’sdefinition: roughly in their sense, informationcould be considered to be a choice in favour ofone sign and against all the others. If weabandon the premise of a known set of elements(signs), and replace it with an unlimited space ofevents that could at least be identified andisolated, we will approach Luhmann, when weretain the idea of choice. Luhmann’s theory is notthe only system theory and his approach cannotbe used in very many real circumstances. Never-theless his idea is generalizable: ‘information as achoice for something and thus against everythingelse that competes’.

ACTION THEORY

The theoretical background of great influenceduring the 1980s, particularly in Europe, wasaction theory (Habermas 1981), which had beendeveloped in sociology and which partly formsthe background for Luhmann. Discussion in theinformation field perhaps started with the ap-proach of an ‘information man’ (Roberts 1982).In the use of knowledge, man should act as in theeconomy: ideal-rational. This opened a discus-sion on the relationship between action andinformation. Wersig and collaborators (Wersigand Windel 1985) introduced the idea of ageneral relationship: every action – individual ororganizational – may require knowledge that isnot available in the actor. In this case a specific


type of action is required, called an informationaction. This is the reverse of Belkin’s approach: ifknowledge lacks for action this is not an anom-alous state of knowledge but a normal situationfor every actor. The lag between them has to beclosed, to rationalize actions (Wersig 1985). Thishas been developed by Kuhlen and collaborators(Kuhlen 1990) with the establishment of theformula ‘information is knowledge in action’.This means that every actor not only needsspecific knowledge for a specific action, but alsoneeds it in a specific way, which on the one handrelates to the existing state of knowledge of theactor, and on the other hand fits the requirementsof the situation of the action (e.g. in space, time,the economy, etc.). They then pick up theeconomic context by stating that informationwork takes existing knowledge and transforms itin such a way that it may more easily becomeinformation in specific actions. Information worktherefore adds value to existing knowledge inorder to facilitate its transformation into infor-mation (Rauch et al. 1994). The general ideabehind this action theory of information could becalled ‘information as the value of knowledge inaction’.

MODERNIZATION THEORY

The present development of industrialized Wes-tern countries is argued to be in a period oftransition, either from modernism into post-modernism or from one stage of modernism intoanother stage of modernism. In either case moreor less the same features play an important role:pluralism, increasing complexity, competition,fragmentation (Lyotard 1979; Wersig 1993b).Knowledge is no longer a closed set of imagesabout reality, but dissolves into different realities:virtual realities, the virtuality of time, space andsocial structures. Knowledge is needed not onlyfor action but also for orientation, the establish-ment of patterns, navigation through contingen-cies and virtualities. The universe of knowledge issplit up into numerous knowledge islands, archi-pelagos, fragments, layers, comets, meteorites,with numerous small bridges, connections andtraffic lines between them. Information in thisuniverse would become that which providesorder, orientation and navigational aid. A com-prehensive theory has not yet been developedbecause it needs the framework of a post-modernunderstanding of science (Wersig 1993a, 1993b).A brief formula could be ‘information as the

development of ordering structures within theambiguous’. This view is underlined by post-modern sociologists like Zygmunt Bauman whoidentified uncertainty to be one of the mostimportant features of our times (Bauman 1992).

Information and complexity

There seems to be considerable diversity intheory development, but on the other hand somekind of coherence can be seen. Behind thedifferent approaches, a concept appears that isperhaps not one single ambiguous concept but agroup of compatible concepts with a commoncore and fuzzy features around it. The commoncore is complexity:

. Constructivism is an answer to the explorationof growing complexity. We realize that weourselves are complex and the world is becom-ing increasingly complex. We cannot know thecomplexity as such, but can only use our owncomplexity to reduce the complexity of theworld by construction (Wersig 1996).

. Systems theory is a different but similaranswer. A self-referencing system can concen-trate on its own complexity and shield itselfagainst the complexity of the world. Thismeans using self-complexity as a means ofreducing external complexity.

. Action theory draws attention to the fact thatcomplexity does not only require cognitivereduction of action. Action requires informa-tion, but this information becomes a means ofcomplexity reduction as a purpose of actionunder recent conditions. The rationalization ofaction is itself an important factor in complex-ity reduction.

. Modernization theory tries to explain whycomplexity is becoming increasingly importantfor the understanding of our present situation.Life increasingly becomes a fight within thejungle of the world’s complexity and the helpthat is needed is reduction of this complexityby ordering patterns like individual lifestyles,patchworking or revitalising concepts of com-munity (Sennett 1998) and embedding (Gid-dens 1990).

The integrated theory of information could in thenear future be described as a theory of complex-ity reduction. This would be on the one hand aconsequence of scientific and real-world develop-ments: complexity is increasing and more and


more scientific theories include the problem ofcomplexity and its reduction, e.g. chaos theory(Briggs and Peat 1989). On the other hand thiswould be a further development away fromShannon and Weaver; the recent notion of com-plexity does not presuppose a known subset ofelements and their probabilities, conditions underwhich uncertainty means uncertainty within aknown framework. Complexity is something weknow about, but which is not definable inrestricted sets of elements and structures, becauseit is caused by unrestrictedness, unorientednessand unforeseeableness.The reduction of this kind of disorientation

would be the future of the understanding of theconcept of information: ‘information as theamount of complexity to be reduced or that hasbeen reduced’. Then information will changeevery time it is used, not because it is a subjectiveconcept but because it relates to the very specificunderstanding of complexity, the approach tocomplexity reduction and the kind of measure-ment. If complexity is defined in the Shannonway, as probability, then the measurement couldbe used as a specific case of complexity reduc-tion. If there are other notions of complexity andcomplexity reduction other notions of informa-tion will appear.An information theory as complexity reduc-

tion – if it is considered to be a broadening ofShannon – may require the theoretical develop-ment of some key elements:

. The base of the sender–channel-receiver com-munication model has to be broadened to anactor-centred communication theory as it isimplied in constructivism or the model ofautistic communication (Wersig 1993b).

. The discrete character-orientation of the the-ory has to be broadened in the direction ofnon-discrete, analogous and unique messages.Pictures, images and stagings as messagesreducing complexities may become a coreelement (see Schuck-Wersig 1993). Shannonto some extent tried to deal with this problemunder the heading of the continuous channel.But now we know that we have to find othersolutions.

. The notion of probabilities is related to aknown universe. Complexities of interest tothis kind of information theory very oftenrelate to completely or partly unknownworlds. The broadening of the concept of

probability to these worlds would either meanintroducing a measurement of subjective prob-ability (or other dimensions of subjectiveestimation) or giving up the idea of absolutemeasurements in favour of relative measure-ments. In other words, there is perhaps noabsolute measurement of complexity (whichwould allow us to measure objectively itsincrease or reduction) but only a relative one.A relative theory of information as less ormore complexity as a result of somethingcould be the future direction of theoreticalwork.

But the more we think about complexity in theinformation age (Wersig 1996), in which theindustrial society changes slowly into some kindof ‘knowledge society’ (Stehr 1994), the more weare forced to develop a deeper understanding ofhow complexity relates to knowledge structures.Knowledge structures are created from individualstructures over organizational environments(‘knowledge management’) to societally tested,accepted and organized (by ‘notification’, Bühl1984) knowledge landscapes (Spinner 1994).New knowledge increases the complexity of

knowledge structures, particularly in all the casesin which the new knowledge expands the knowl-edge landscape into the (so far) unknown. Com-plexity reduction of still expanding bodies ofknowledge could be interpreted as processes of:

. Re- and metastructuring of knowledge in orderto ease processes of allocating single items ofknowledge (formerly known as ‘classifica-tion’; nowadays often called ‘ontology’).

. Establishing mechanisms to adapt knowledgestructures to different perspectives, approachesand levels with which the knowledge land-scapes will be explored (‘navigation’).

. Focusing the knowledge landscape to connectsimply into the need structures of actors in reallife (‘connectivity’).

Chaos research (e.g. Briggs and Peat 1989) maybe a direction where complexity reduction ofknowledge structures and their connectivity intoaction could meet – if we could identify ‘knowl-edge attractors’, information as ‘complexity re-duction of knowledge structures’ could beunderstood in terms of gravitational fields ofsuch attractors. Respective theories are not avail-able yet.


References

ANSI (1966) USA Standard Vocabulary for Informa-tion Processing, USASX3 12.1966.

Bar-Hillel, Y. and Carnap, R. (1953) ‘Semantic infor-mation’, British Journal of Science 4: 147–57.

Bateson, N. (1979) Mind and Nature, Dutton.Bauman, Z. (1992) Intimations of Postmodernity,Routledge.

Belkin, N. (1990) ‘The cognitive viewpoint in informa-tion science’, Journal of Information Science 16: 11–15.

—— (1978) ‘Information concepts for informationscience’, Journal of Documentation 34: 55–85.

—— (1977) ‘A concept of information for informationscience’, Doctoral thesis, University of London.

—— (1975) ‘The concept of information in infor-matics’, in International Federation for Documenta-tion Theoretical Problems of Informatics (FID 530),pp. 74–89.

Bertalanffy, L. von (1950) ‘An outline of general systemtheory’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science1: 134–65.

Borko, H. (1968) ‘Information science: What is it?’,American Documentalist 13: 3–5.

Briggs, J. and Peat, F.D. (1989) Turbulent Mirror,Harper & Row.

Brookes, B. (1980) ‘The foundations of informationscience. Part 1: Philosophical aspects’, Journal ofInformation Science 2: 125–33.

—— (1975) ‘The fundamental equation of informationscience’, in International Federation for Documenta-tion Theoretical Problems of Informatics (FID 530),pp. 115–30.

Buckland, M. (1991) Information and InformationSystems, Praeger.

Bühl, W.L. (1984) Die Ordnung des Wissens, Duncker& Humblot.

Cherry, C. (1957) On Human Communication, MIT.Cole, C. (1994) ‘Operationalizing the notion of infor-mation as a subjective construct’, Journal of theAmerican Society for Information Science 45: 465–76.

Dahling, R.C. (1962) ‘Shannon’s information theory.The spread of an idea’, in Studies of Innovation andCommunication to the Public. Studies in the Utiliza-tion of Behavioral Science, vol. 11.

DeMey, M. (1977) ‘The cognitive viewpoint: Its devel-opment and its scope’, CC77: International Work-shop on the Cognitive Viewpoint, Ghent University,pp. xvi–xxxvi.

Fairthorne, R.A. (1965) ‘‘‘Use’’ and ‘‘mention’’ in theinformation sciences’, in L.B. Heilprin, B.A. Marku-son and L. Goodman (eds) Proceedings of theSymposium for Information Science, Warrenton,Va., Sept. 7–10, 1965, pp. 9–12.

Foerster, H. v. and Zopf, G.W. (eds) (1962) Principlesof Self-organization, US Office of Naval Research.

‘The future of the field I’ (1993) Journal of Commu-nication 43(3).

Gardner, H. (1985) The Mind’s New Science, BasicBooks.

Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity,Polity Press.

Glasersfeld, E. v. (1985) ‘Reconstructing the concept ofknowledge’, Archives de Psychologie 3: 91–101.

Graziano, E.E. (1968) ‘On a theory of documentation’,American Documentalist 19: 85–9.

Habermas, J. (1981) Theorie des kommunikativenHandelns, 2 vols, Suhrkamp.

Hayes, R.M. (1969) ‘Education in information science’,American Documentalist 20: 362–5.

Hoshovsky, A.G. and Massey, R.J. (1968) ‘Informationscience: Its end, means and operations’, in Informa-tion Transfer, Proc. ASIS vol. 5, pp. 47–55.

Ingwersen, P. (1992) ‘Information and informationscience in context’, Libri 42: 99–135.

Koblitz, J. (1968) ‘Information und Dokumentation alsTeilgebiet der wissenschaftlichen Information’, ZIID-Zeitschrift 16(1): 36–43.

Kuhlen, R. (1990) ‘Zum Stand pragmatischer For-schung in der Informationswissenschaft’, in J. Hergetand R. Kuhlen (eds) Pragmatische Aspekte beimEntwurf und Betrieb von Informationssystemen,Konstanz Universitätsverlag, pp. 13–18.

Kunz, W. and Rittel, H. (1972) Die Informations-wissenschaften, Oldenbourg.

Lasswell, H.D. (1948) ‘The structure and function ofcommunication in society’, in L. Bryson (ed.) TheCommunication of Ideas, pp. 37–52.

Luhmann, N. (1988) Soziale Systeme, 2nd edn, Suhr-kamp.

Lyotard, J.-F. (1979) La Condition postmoderne, Édi-tions de Minuit.

Machlup, F. (1983) ‘Semantic queries in studies ofinformation’, in F. Machlup and U. Mansfield (eds)The Study of Information, Wiley, pp. 641–72.

Maturana, H. and Varela, F. (1987) The Tree ofKnowledge, Shambala.

Merten, K., Schmidt, S.J. and Weischenberg, S. (eds)(1994) Die Wirklichkeit der Medien, WestdeutscherVerlag.

Polushkin, V.A. (1963) ‘On the determination of theconcept ‘‘information’’’, Naucno-Technixiskayah In-formacija 9: 6–8.

Rauch, W., Strohmeier, F., Hiller, H. and Schlögl, C.(eds) (1994) Mehrwert von Information – Professio-nalisierung der Informationsarbeit, Konstanz Univer-sitätsverlag.

Roberts, N. (1982) ‘A search for information man’,Social Science Information Studies 2: 93–104.

Schuck-Wersig, P. (1993) Expeditionen zum Bild. Beit-räge zur Analyse des kulturellen Stellenwerts vonBildern, Peter Lang.

Sennett, R. (1998) The Corrosion of Character, W.W.Norton.

Shannon, C.E. (1948) ‘A mathematical theory of com-munication’, Bell Systems Technical Journal 27: 379–423, 623–58.

Shannon, C.E. and Weaver, W. (1949) The Mathema-tical Theory of Communication, University of IllinoisPress.

Spinner, H.F. (1994) Die Wissensordnung, Leske &Budrich,

Stachowiak, H. (1965) Denken und Erkennen imkybernetischen Modell, Springer.

Stehr, N. (1994) Knowledge Societies, Sage.


Vakkari, P. and Cronin, B. (eds) (1992) Conceptions ofLibrary and Information Science, Taylor Graham.

Völz, H. (1991) Grundlagen der Information, Akade-mie-Verlag.

Wersig, G. (1996) Die Komplexität der Informations-gesellschaft, Universitätsverlag Konstanz.

—— (1993a) ‘Information science: The study of post-modern knowledge usage’, Information Processingand Management 29: 229–40.

—— (1993b) Fokus Mensch. Bezugspunkte postmoder-ner Wissenschaft: Wissen, Kommunikation, Kultur,Peter Lang.

—— (1985) Die kommunikative Revolution, West-deutscher Verlag.

—— (1979) ‘The problematic situation as a basicconcept of information science in the framework ofsocial sciences: A reply to N. Belkin’, in InternationalFederation for Documentation Theoretical Problemsof Informatics (FID 568), pp. 48–57.

—— (1971) Information Kommunikation Dokumenta-tion, Saur.

Wersig, G. and Neveling, U. (1975) ‘The phenomena ofinterest to information science’, Information Scientist9: 127–40.

Wersig, G. and Windel, G. (1985) ‘Information scienceneeds a theory of ‘‘information actions’’’, SocialScience Information Studies 5: 11–23.

Wiener, N. (1948) Cybernetics, Herrmann.Wiener, O. (1996) Schriften zur Erkenntnistheorie,Springer

Yovits, M.C. (1975) ‘A theoretical framework for thedevelopment of information science’, in InternationalFederation for Documentation Theoretical Problemsof Informatics (FID 530), pp. 90–114.

—— (1961) ‘Information science: Toward the develop-ment of a true scientific discipline’, American Doc-umentalist 12: 191–7.

Further reading

Milestones in the history: Shannon and Weaver 1949;Cherry 1957; Wersig 1971; Belkin 1977.

Overviews of developments: Belkin 1990; Vakkari andCronin 1992; Wersig and Neveling 1975.

Recent developments: Luhmann 1988 (system theory);Habermas 1981 (action theory); Lyotard 1979 (mod-ernization theory); Wersig 1993b.

SEE ALSO: cognitive science; communication;computer science; information science;information society; research in library andinformation science

GERNOT WERSIG

INFORMETRICS

Informetrics is an emerging subfield in informa-tion science, based on the combination ofquantitative studies of information flows, ad-vanced information retrieval and text, anddata mining. It has a broader scope than

bibliometrics, because it also covers non-scho-larly communities in which information is pro-duced, communicated and used. Informetricstudies signifies the new approach to the scien-tific study of information flows: the improvedbibliometric methods are applied not only toscientometric studies and research evaluations ofscience and technology (S&T), but also to theanalysis of their mutual, societal, industrial andother specific relations. While bibliometrics istraditionally associated with the quantitativemeasurement of documentary materials, infor-metrics aims also to study other types of infor-mation materials, such as websites, Internet links,voice, sounds, art works, etc. Methods from thesocial sciences and humanities as well as experi-mental research in the natural sciences sense arenormally applied in various contexts, serving as abase for careful validation and ensuring thescientific value of the analyses.Informetrics is one of the rare truly interdisci-

plinary research fields, and the range of theore-tical and methodological approaches is rich –which is the strength of the discipline.The individual identities of bibliometrics, in-

formetrics, scientometrics and technometrics areunfortunately not very clear, and there is acertain ambiguity in the terminology. At the1987 international bibliometric conference somethought was given to changing the name of thediscipline to ‘informetrics’ and since the end ofthe 1980s there is some evidence in favour of theuse of this term (Egghe and Rousseau 1990). Thefield is becoming a scientific discipline thatincludes: all the statistical and mathematicalanalyses related to the study of informationflows; evaluation of science and technology;library collection development; and docu-mentation and information problems with stronglinks to the theoretical and methodologicalaspects of information retrieval.Since the use of quantitative methodologies is

an under-explored area of current LIS research,some information scientists have been workingon the reinforcement of the link between biblio-metrics and information retrieval, exploring thebasic problems of online bibliometric datacollection and analysis (Ingwersen and Hjort-gaard Christensen 1997). In the 1990s severalcase studies were carried out combining onlinebibliometric methodologies and the use of large-scale databases in analytical works. The utiliza-tion of online bibliometric methods for trend

INFORMETRICS 319

analysis, issue management, knowledge mappingand generating business and social intelligenceis a trend that extends the boundaries of the fieldand signifies its multidisciplinary character (Wor-mell 1998, 2000). These investigations exemplifythe benefits of interdisciplinary research ap-proaches, where bibliometrics, IR and manage-ment methodologies interact in a fruitful way.Informetrics today offers many new possibili-

ties for LIS professionals. For those who want toexplore databases not only as a store of in-formation, but also as an analytical tool, it is away to learn how to explore online databases notonly for accessing documents or finding facts,but also to trace the trends and developments insociety, scientific disciplines or production andconsumption. This type of information in data-bases is, however, visible only to the intelligentsearcher and to those who have learned how toread between the lines of electronic information.Modern information technology provides awhole range of possibilities to add new value tothe results of online searches, and is offeringgreat potentialities for those who want to de-velop their own niches and service specialities.Another dimension in the development of the

field is the application of informetric methods tothe world wide web. This new emerging area ofWebometrics elaborates on the idea of carryingout the same types of informetric analyses on theWeb as are possible via a citation database. It isobvious that informetric methods using wordcounts can be applied here. What is new is toregard the Web as a dynamic citation networkwhere the traditional information entities andcitations are replaced by Web pages, with hyper-links acting rather like citations (Almind andIngwersen 1997; Ingwersen 1998; Björnebornand Ingwersen 2001). Obviously, the link struc-tures have other functions here than those ofscientific citations and references, therefore thisnew area needs to study such functionalities, e.g.general navigation behaviour in the electronicinformation environment.Cybermetrics is an electronic journal that

disseminates results from quantitative analysis ofthe internet. Its full title is ‘InternationalJournal of Scientometrics, Informetrics and Bib-liometrics’ and it is published in Spain: www.cin-doc.csic.es/cybermetrics. The core scientificjournal of the field is Scientometrics, which wasstarted in 1977 in Hungary. The InternationalSociety for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI)

was established in 1993 and its biannual confer-ences are one of the main platforms for thepresentation of progress and developments inthe field.

References

Almind, T. and Ingwersen P. (1997) ‘Informetric ana-lyses on the World Wide Web: Methodologicalapproaches to ‘‘Webometrics’’’, Journal of Documen-tation 53: 404–26.

Björneborn, L. and Ingwersen, P. (2001) ‘Perspectivesof Webometrics’, Scientometrics 50: 65–82.

Egghe, L. and Rousseau, R. (1990) Introduction toInformetrics. Quantitative Methods in Library, Doc-umentation and Information Science, Amsterdam:Elsevier.

Ingwersen, P. (1998) ‘The calculation of Web impactfactors. Research note’, Journal of Documentation54: 1–5.

Ingwersen, P. and Hjortgaard Christensen, F. (1997)‘Data set isolation for bibliometric online analyses ofresearch publications: Fundamental methodologicalissues’, JASIS 48: 205–17.

Wormell, I. (2000) ‘Critical aspects of the DanishWelfare State – as revealed by issue tracking’,Scientometrics 43: 237–50.

—— (1998) ‘Informetric analysis of the internationalimpact of scientific journals: How ‘‘international’’are the international scientific journals?’, Journal ofDocumentation 54: 584–605.

Further reading

Garfield, E. (1998) ‘From citation indexes to infor-metrics: Is the tail now wagging the dog?’, Libri 48:67–80.

Lancaster, F.W. and Lee, Ja-Lih (1985) ‘Bibliometrictechniques applied to issue management: A casestudy’, JASIS 36: 389–97.

Wormell, I. (2001) ‘Informetrics and Webometrics formeasuring impact, visibility, and connectivity inscience, politics, and business’, Competitive Intelli-gence Review 12: 12–23.

—— (2000) ‘Informetrics – a new area of quantitativestudies’, Education for Information 18: 131–8.

IRENE WORMELL

INSTITUTE FOR SCIENTIFICINFORMATION

The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) is aninfluential multinational profit-making organiza-tion that is concerned with the production,distribution and development of secondary bib-liographic and related data together with docu-ment delivery services in a wide range of subjectdisciplines. Its most noteworthy and enduringoutput is its citation indexes covering the dis-

320 INSTITUTE FOR SCIENTIFIC INFORMATION

ciplines of arts and humanities, social sciencesand science.The ISI was founded in 1958 by Eugene

garfield – a man of great insight and innovativeskills – as a development of his earlier informa-tion consultancy organization. Over forty yearslater it has grown into an organization with amultimillion-dollar turnover, employing severalhundred people worldwide and offering an ex-tensive range of publications in a variety offormats. In April 1992 ISI became part ofThomson Business Information. The history anddevelopment of ISI is, to a large extent, mirroredin the history and biography of Garfield. His firstventure into the commercial publishing of biblio-graphic information involved the creation anddistribution of a regular information sheet, listingjournal current contents in management.Garfield’s early experiences in investigating

automated information retrieval methods atJohns Hopkins University led him to consideralternatives to the conventional human indexingof research papers. He came to the conclusionthat using citations as a basis for indexingoffered not only an acceptable mechanism forretrieval but also in some circumstances onesuperior to ‘conventional’ indexing techniques,especially in multidisciplinary areas. Though hisenthusiasm for the method was not shared byeveryone, he persevered and developed the nowfamiliar citation index.Basically, Garfield recognized and exploited

the connection between citing and cited materialin scholarly publishing. A paper written on aspecific topic, through its list of references, leadsto related items. Thus, without the interventionand interpretation of a human indexer, a systemof subject indexing ‘keyed’ to the subject matterof the citing papers can be constructed. Whatremains is a mechanical process of listing andcross-indexing cited and citing papers that doesnot depend upon but is greatly facilitated bycomputer manipulation. From these basic proper-ties of citing and cited material, further, moresophisticated and informative patterns of rela-tionships can be derived to analyse the dynamicsof scholarly communication. Garfield haspioneered work in this area too.The array of products and publications avail-

able from the ISI in both printed and variouselectronic formats has become extensive. Theyinclude a range of discipline-specific ‘currentcontents’ services covering topics from arts and

humanities to clinical medicine and from socialand behavioural sciences to engineering andtechnology. There is also a series of indexes formonograph, conference and review publications.The familiar citation indexes are produced in

print and a variety of electronic formats, andcover arts and humanities, social sciences and thesciences. The valuable results of bibliometricanalyses conducted by the ISI are collated andpublished in Journal Citation Reports, one cover-ing the social science journals and one coveringscience journals.A comprehensive document delivery service

was developed by the ISI with several order anddelivery options. Central to the ISI’s operation isthe formidable database maintained by theorganization. This is described as the largest,most substantial multidisciplinary scientific data-base in the world and consists of more than 40million source records and indexing details ofaround 7,000 journal titles and 6,000 books andconference proceedings. ISI adapted rapidly tochanges in the 1990s, launching its Web ofScience portal, and making its current contentsservice Web-deliverable in 1997. It has started aqualitative index of websites (Current Web Con-tents) as an addition to its long-establishedCurrent Contents service, which had its originsin ISI’s first publication in 1958. Further detailsof activities and services will be found at www.i-sinet.com.The contribution of the ISI to improving

access to scholarly publications and to informa-tion science knowledge generally is considerableand it has had a profound influence on thethinking and behaviour of users and managersof information.

Further reading

Garfield, E. (1971) Citation Indexing – Its Theory andApplication in Science, Technology and Humanities,John Wiley.

SEE ALSO: citation analysis; current contents list;organization of knowledge

J.E. DAVIES, REVISED BY THE EDITORS

INSTITUTE OF INFORMATIONSCIENTISTS

A professional body for practitioners and theore-ticians of information science, founded in the UK

INSTITUTE OF INFORMATION SCIENTISTS 321

in 1958 and dissolved through merger with thelibrary association, as cilip, in 2002.The Institute’s foundation was a result of the

initiative of a group of special librarians whowere concerned that neither the Library Associa-tion nor ASLIB were willing to take a lead indeveloping training courses to equip speciallibrarians to tackle the emerging problems ofhandling the rapid growth in scientific andtechnical information (Farradane 1970). Thisgroup, led by Jason farradane, Chris Hansonand Gordon Foster, devised a constitution for theIIS that remained largely unchanged throughoutits existence.Based in London, at its peak it had over 2,600

individual information scientists, informationmanagers and other information specialists asmembers. It pursued three main roles. The firstwas to advance the profession of informationscience through the validation of graduate andpostgraduate educational courses. The secondwas to provide training and professional supportfor members through courses, conferences andpublications. The third was to ensure that publicand private organizations and government de-partments were aware of the benefits of effectiveinformation management and of the employ-ment of information scientists, and of the im-plications of legislation (such as that oncopyright) on the access to and utilization ofinformation.Despite the fact that its membership remained

small, its influence on the world of informationwork was disproportionately large and it enteredinto negotiations with the much larger (more than25,000 members) Library Association that re-sulted in merger as a respected equal. CILIP, theinheritor body, arguably shows many character-istics of the Institute, although numerically domi-nated by former Library Association members.

References

Farradane, J.E.L. (1970) ‘The Institute: The first twelveyears’, Information Scientist 4(4): 143–52.

SEE ALSO: information professions; informationscience education

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Products of the human intellect considered aspersonal property, especially works protectedunder the law of copyright and inventions

protected by patents. Other subjects includeutility models, industrial designs, confidentialinformation and trade marks.

The concept of intellectual property

Personal property may be divided into physical,tangible things and intangible, incorporeal prop-erty. Intellectual property falls into the lattercategory, with such things as stocks and sharesor business goodwill, but it differs from otherproperty in that rights are mostly limited in time,usually twenty years for patents and a fixedperiod after the author’s death for copyright.Medieval authors wrote to spread their ideas ortheir reputation, not with any thought that theywere creating property that could be defendedagainst others. When a property right in awritten work first came to be recognized, owner-ship by the printer-publisher was important, notthat of the author. Patents originated as mono-polies granted by royal letters patent, not onlyfor inventions but also for other valuable itemsof commerce: the patentee’s intellectual inputwas usually irrelevant. Eventually the creator ofintellectual property was recognized as the firstowner, the main exception being work producedfor an employer.

What is intellectual property?

The two most important forms of intellectualproperty are copyright and patents. They are alsothe ones in which the creator’s intellectual inputis most obvious. Several other kinds of intangibleproperty are usually included. Industrial innova-tions not satisfying the stringent tests for patent-ability are protected in some countries as utilitymodels. The industrial designer’s creativity meritsdesign protection. Trade secrets are linked withother areas of confidential information. Trademarks are also considered as intellectual prop-erty. Performers’ rights in their performancesmay be protected. In countries where copyrightis narrowly defined as the author’s right only,rights related to copyright, for example of a filmproducer or broadcasting organization, areknown as neighbouring rights.

Intellectual property as economicproperty

Intellectual property generally has a monetaryvalue. This can be very considerable, for a patent

322 INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

on a successful drug, for example, or the copy-right of a best-selling novel. Creators of intellec-tual property are often dependent on earningsfrom inventions, writings or artistic work as theirsole or principal means of livelihood. A publisheror film producer may own little property exceptcopyrights. All these can be sold, or temporarilyassigned, transferred as a gift or bequeathed in awill.

Intellectual property as moral property

Property can have a value beyond its pecuniaryworth. The act of creativity that produces a workof intellectual property makes a special linkbetween the creator and his or her work,especially in literary or artistic creations. Theclassic statement is in the famous words introdu-cing the first French law on author’s right in1791, ‘la plus sacrée, la plus personnelle detoutes les propriétés est l’ouvrage, fruit de lapensée d’un écrivain’. France has always empha-sized protection for the author’s ‘moral rights’,particularly the rights to be recognized as theauthor and to object to derogatory treatment ofthe work. Britain saw copyright simply as eco-nomic property until moral rights were intro-duced in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act1988. In other areas of intellectual property theeconomic aspect is usually paramount but pe-cuniary loss is not always a prerequisite for legalredress.

Legal protection of intellectual property

In the United Kingdom the Patents Act 1977,Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 andTrade Marks Act 1994 are the principal statutesprotecting intellectual property. An owner maybring a civil action to stop infringement of acopyright, a patent, a trade mark or otherintellectual property. The usual remedies are aninjunction to stop illicit use and compensatorydamages. Criminal sanctions are available, inparticular, for illicit commercial exploitation ofcopyright material and fraudulent use of a trademark. Nearly every country protects intellectualproperty by its law (though enforcement is some-times poor). International conventions bind sig-natory states to provide minimum standards ofprotection and to protect the rights of eachother’s nationals. The most important are theberne convention, for copyright, and the ParisConvention, for patents.

Intellectual property and the publicinterest

Some people see the protection of intellectualproperty as a social contract under which societyprotects the owners’ rights in return for theirmaking their intellectual product available to thepublic (for suitable remuneration, of course).Others, however, see the restrictions imposed bylaw on the free utilization of intellectual propertyas undesirable, discounting the labour involved inits creation. This view is found in some countrieswhere piracy is openly justified or covertlycondoned, often with arguments that povertyprevents their paying high prices for importedmaterials, or even that it represents redress forsupposed colonial ‘exploitation’ in the past.Widespread use of English means that authorsand publishers in Britain and the USA areparticular victims of copyright piracy.

The future

Modern technology has facilitated counterfeiting.The revolution in electronic storage and dissemi-nation has meant that the old certainties ofcopyright in fixed paper-based works have givenway before the infinite mutability of digital data.It is an open question whether the law ofintellectual property will be able to cope. How-ever, there is growing understanding worldwideof the property aspects of intellectual creations,with governments more active in enforcingrights.

Further reading

Marett, P. (1996) Intellectual Property Law, Sweet &Maxwell.

SEE ALSO: information policy; knowledgeindustries

PAUL MARETT

INTELLIGENCE

In common parlance, the capacity for under-standing or the ability to perceive and compre-hend meaning.It also describes military intelligence and

other information about the affairs of a state orother corporate body, such as a commercialenterprise (business intelligence), or, indeed, anindividual person, obtained to provide an advan-

INTELLIGENCE 323

tage. Intelligence is frequently gathered clandesti-nely, by espionage, as by national intelligenceservices.


INTERFACE

The hardware and software through which a usercommunicates with a computer system. The hu-man–computer interface has progressed from theoriginal hardware interfaces (rewiring the com-puter to make it perform a specific program),through batch processing (programs prepared aspunch cards and processed in batches), to thecommand-line interface (the ‘C-prompt’ of DOS),to the current generation of graphic userinterfaces, menu-driven or with window/icondrivers.

SEE ALSO: Human–Computer Interaction;information and communication technology

INTERLIBRARY LENDING

The resources of a single library are only rarelysufficient to meet the needs of all its users.Interlibrary lending (ILL) is therefore a vital, ifoften small, part of most libraries’ services,allowing users access to material that would nototherwise be available to them. At its basic level,ILL involves the short-term lending of an item byone library to another, generally for use by anindividual user. In the 1990s, interlending beganto be conflated with document delivery. Thiscan, in part, be seen as a move by interlendinglibrarians to seek to raise the profile of interlend-ing within libraries, though it should be notedthat many library users regard the two activitiesas equivalent since both allow access to materialnot held in the user’s own library, and both areuser-initiated. Nevertheless, interlending (thelending of an item) is not the same as documentdelivery (the purchase of material).Interlending arrangements vary in type and

practice. They include direct transactions be-tween two libraries; loans organized betweenmembers of a co-operating group of libraries;and nationally-organized interlending, operatedeither on a centralized (with material mainlybeing supplied from a single repository) ordecentralized basis. National practices also vary.In the United Kingdom, moves towards co-

operative provision began in the early twentiethcentury and by the 1930s Regional LibrarySystems (RLSs) had been formed, supplementedby what at that time was called the NationalCentral Library (later becoming the britishlibrary Document Supply Centre (BLDSC)) andco-ordinated by a National Committee for Re-gional Library Co-operation. This developmentwas based on the principle that members of RLSswould borrow and lend within their own region,extending their search (via Regional LibraryBureaux) outside the region only if an item werenot available within it. In 1957 the NationalLending Library for Science and Technology(NLLST) was formed to meet the needs ofscientists and engineers for rapid access to thewidest possible range of serials. This proved theadvantages of providing a large centralized stockarranged specifically for rapid retrieval of indivi-dual items. NLLST was incorporated into theBritish Library on the latter’s formation in 1973and eventually became known as the BLDSC. Anexample of such a co-operative venture in theUSA is the Research Libraries Group (RLG), anon-profit organization existing to improve ac-cess to information in support of the researchand learning of its member libraries’ users. RLGis now an international membership alliance thatincludes universities and colleges, national andpublic libraries. Through its Shared Resources(SHARES) programme, RLG operates an effec-tive international co-operative partnership thatemphasizes generous lending and speed of supplyat minimal cost.The availability of library catalogues remotely

(accelerated with the increased use of the WorldWide Web in the 1990s) has prompted a steadyincrease in the availability of information aboutlibraries’ stock holdings worldwide, while unioncatalogues such as COPAC (the merged cata-logue of the Consortium of University ResearchLibraries (CURL)), and RLG’s Union Cataloghave greatly facilitated such searching. Althoughunion catalogues recording the holdings of co-operating libraries are useful for identifying andlocating items, they have sometimes proveddifficult to keep sufficiently up to date for themto be accurate tools for ILL. The ability toproduce electronic databases out of groups ofindividual library catalogues and union catalo-gues transformed the interlending scene, provid-ing searchers with millions of references availableonline. Large database systems exist in most

324 INTERFACE

industrialized countries: OCLC and CARL in theUSA, Unity and the BL catalogue along with thedatabases of co-operatives in the UK, SDB/SUNIST in France and PICA in Holland areexamples. Open systems interconnection (OSI) isthe technology by means of which databasescreated on different computer systems may inter-act and be interrogated from within any indivi-dual system. In the USA the massive databases ofOCLC and RLG, originally created for co-opera-tive cataloguing purposes, have been put to usefor interlending by libraries both inside andoutside the USA. In Britain, Unity has a Webinterface and utilizes Z39.50 interoperabilityprotocols.A direct effect of remote access to library

catalogues has been to increase the number oflibraries now able to make ILL requests direct toforeign institutions. From the 1990s, the iflaOffice for International Lending responded tothis trend with a number of initiatives aimed atenabling international interlending to thrive.These included a twinning database so thatlibraries around the world could exchange in-formation and materials; a new type of interlend-ing payment voucher to enable international ILLto be undertaken with a minimum of adminis-trative work; new guidelines on sending ILLrequests by e-mail; a recommended list of stan-dard response codes to ILL requests designed toovercome language barriers; and the revision ofits guidelines for international interlending. Theimportance of international interlending withinthe ILL environment is now firmly recognized.The vast growth in information about material

and its location led to increased use of interlend-ing in the mid- to late 1990s. However, digitiza-tion and other forms of electronic provision ofmaterial (whether provided free, on subscriptionor for a one-off payment) have increased access toa wide range of material, and in early 2001showed signs of leading to a decrease in inter-lending activity. This can be viewed in variousways, but in general terms may be regarded asresulting in interlending professionals returning tothe fundamentals of their profession: using theirexperience and expertise to locate and obtain fortheir users material otherwise not available.

Further reading

Brown, D.J. (2000) A Review of Future Developmentsin Inter-Library Loan and Document Delivery, SouthBank University.

Cornish, G. (1987) Model Handbook for Interlendingand Copying, IFLA Office for International Inter-lending/UNESCO.

International Federation of Library Associations andInstitutions (2001) International Lending and Docu-ment Delivery: Principles and Guidelines for Proce-dure (www.ifla.org/VI/2/p3/ildd.htm).

Interlending and Document Supply, MCB UniversityPress [journal].

Jackson, M. (1993) ‘Library to library: Interlibraryloan, document delivery and resources sharing’,Wilson Library Bulletin (November): 66–8.

Pedersen, W. and Gregory, D. (1994) ‘Interlibrary loanand commercial document supply: Finding the rightfit’, Journal of Academic Librarianship 20: 263–72.

DAVID ORMAN AND PENELOPE STREET

INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL ONARCHIVES

History and objectives

The international non-governmental organizationconcerned with the management of records andarchives in all media and formats throughouttheir life cycle, founded in 1948. Initially itsmembership was drawn almost exclusively fromthe national archives of Europe and NorthAmerica, but over the years it has become a trulyinternational organization with members drawnfrom about 150 countries and including not onlynational archives but also many other archivalinstitutions and individual archivists.Its objectives are to encourage and support the

development of archives worldwide, so as topreserve the archival heritage of mankind; topromote, organize and co-ordinate internationalactivities in the fields of records managementand archive administration; to establish, main-tain and strengthen relations between archivistsand between institutions, professional bodies andother organizations concerned with the adminis-tration or preservation of records and archivesor with the professional training of archivists;and to facilitate the interpretation and use ofarchival documents by making their contentsmore widely known and by encouraging greaterease of access.

Professional and technical development

ICA’s work for the advancement of professionaltheory and practice is achieved through itssections and committees.

INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL ON ARCHIVES 325

SECTIONS

Sections, which are self-governing groupings ofarchival institutions and archivists with a com-mon interest, provide an opportunity for archivalinstitutions and archivists outside national ar-chives to play an active role in ICA and tocontribute to professional and technical develop-ments in their own special fields. They includesections for archival associations, archivists ofinternational organizations, municipal archives,those involved in archival education and training,business and labour archives, archives of parlia-ments and political parties and university ar-chives.

COMMITTEES

A number of expert committees undertake studyand research, and disseminate their findings tothe international archival community. They coversuch subjects as electronic archives, archivalautomation, archival description, legal mat-ters, oral history, preservation, disaster prepa-redness planning, archival buildings andequipment, image technology, current records,archival terminology and climate history.

CONGRESSES AND CONFERENCES

Broader issues of professional concern are dis-cussed every four years at the InternationalCongresses on Archives, which incorporate openmeetings of ICA sections and committees as wellas plenary sessions and business meetings. Be-tween Congresses the International Conference ofthe Round Table on Archives (CITRA), com-posed of the heads of national archives and ofnational archival associations, meets annually todiscuss a topic of general interest.

PUBLICATIONS

ICA promotes professional and technical goodpractice through its publications. In Archivum,published annually, appear the proceedings of theInternational Congresses and volumes devoted todirectories of archives, bibliographies, archivallegislation and other scholarly and professionaltopics. Janus appears twice a year to disseminatethe products of the work of the sections andcommittees. The proceedings of CITRA arepublished in a series of their own. In additionICA publishes Handbooks and shorter Studies.The biannual ICA Bulletin includes reports of themeetings of ICA bodies and other news ofinterest to archivists. All members of ICA receive

Archivum, Janus, the ICA Bulletin and newStudies.To facilitate access to archives, ICA has

supported the preparation of three series ofGuides to the Sources of the History of Nations,covering Latin America, Africa south of theSahara, and North Africa, Asia and Oceaniarespectively. These mainly describe sources forthe history of those regions in archives in Europeand North America, but some deal with sourcesin one developing country that relate also toothers.

International development

REGIONAL BRANCHES

To encourage the establishment, extension andmodernization of records and archival systemsand services throughout the world, ICA hasformed ten regional branches covering the non-European regions. Each regional branch controlsits own affairs, organizes conferences, seminarsand other regional projects, and publishes aregional journal. The chairpersons of thebranches meet annually as ICA’s Commission onArchival Development (CAD).

INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVAL DEVELOPMENT FUND

A proportion of the dues of the national archivesof industrialized countries is transferred to theInternational Archival Development Fund (FIDA)and the sum so raised is supplemented byvoluntary contributions. FIDA provides aid toarchives in developing countries, usually to helpfinance the travel of experts from outside theregion to lead or speak at workshops andseminars or as consultants, or to support theparticipation of archivists from the poorest coun-tries in regional activities. In addition ICA isoften able to assist regional branches and archi-val institutions in developing countries by puttingthem in touch with other sources of internationalor regional aid, using FIDA to top up that aidwhen necessary and appropriate.

RECONSTITUTION OF ARCHIVAL HERITAGES

One of the concerns of developing countries towhich ICA is committed is the reconstitution oftheir archival heritage through the provision ofmicroform (see microforms) copies of series ofarchives relating to them held in archival institu-tions both in the former metropolitan countriesand in other developing countries. The vehicle

326 INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL ON ARCHIVES

for this is the International Microfilming Pro-gramme for Developing Countries, which ICAhas set up in collaboration with unesco.

Co-operation with UNESCO

In pursuit of its professional and internationaldevelopment activities, ICA works closely withthe General Information Programme (PGI) ofUNESCO, which, in addition to collaborating inthe International Microfilming Programme forDeveloping Countries, has supported the estab-lishment and activities of ICA’s regional structureand other ICA projects. Perhaps the best-knownfruit of this collaboration is UNESCO’s Recordsand Archives Management Programme (RAMP),which includes the series of RAMP studies,covering virtually every aspect of records andarchives work, and a number of preservation andconservation initiatives in which ifla also hasbeen a partner.

Further reading

Franz, E.G. (1984) ‘Le Conseil international desarchives, ses réalisations et son avenir’, Archives etbibliothèques de Belgique/Archief- en Bibliotheekwe-zen in België 55: 3–27.

—— (1982) ‘Der internationale Archivrat: Vergangen-heit, Gegenwart, Zukunft’, Archivum 29: 155–73.

MICHAEL ROPER

INTERNATIONAL STANDARDBOOK NUMBER

An International Standard Book Number (ISBN)is a ten-digit number assigned as a uniqueidentifier to a book or other monographic pub-lication before publication.

Background

The first Standard Book Numbering System wasdevised in the United Kingdom in 1967 and abrief history of its subsequent development isgiven in the introduction to ISBN: InternationalStandard Book Numbering (1993). The descrip-tion of the ISBN given here is based on theinformation presented in that guide, which ispublished by the Standard Book NumberingAgency Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of J.Whitaker & Sons Ltd. A current Users’ Manualis available at www.isbn-international.org/html/userman.htm.

Function

The ISBN system was recommended for interna-tional use by the International Organization forStandardization (ISO) in October 1969 and ISORecommendation 2108 was circulated to all itsmembers in 1970. The purpose of this Interna-tional Standard is to co-ordinate and standardizethe use of identifying numbers so that each ISBNis unique to a title or edition of a book, or othermonographic publication, published or producedby a specific publisher or producer. Other mono-graphic publications include media such asaudio, video, microfiche and software; however,serial publications, music sound recordings andprinted music are specifically excluded as theyare covered by other identification systems.

Structure

An ISBN is always ten digits in length and alwaysdivided into four parts. When printed, each partshould be separated by a space or hyphen. Thefunction of each part is as follows:

1 Group identifier: one to five digits in length.This identifies the national, language, geo-graphic or other area in which the bookconcerned is published.

2 Publisher prefix: one to seven digits inlength. Prefixes are allocated to publishers,principally according to their current rate oftitle output and/or the size of their backlist(i.e. past publications). A prefix uniquelyidentifies a publisher and will not be allo-cated to any other person or organizationinvolved in the creation, production ordistribution of a book.

3 Title number: can consist of six digits to onedigit. Its length is governed by the numberof digits in the publisher prefix that precedesit.

4 Check digit: one digit in length. The checkdigit is used to guard against a computeraccepting a wrong number.

The ten digits used are the Arabic numerals 0–9;in the case of the check digit only, an X maysometimes be used.

Printing ISBNs on publications

ISO 1086: 1991, Information and documenta-tion – Title leaves of books, specifies the loca-tions for printing of an ISBN. In the case of

INTERNATIONAL STANDARD BOOK NUMBER 327

printed material this shall be on the verso of thetitle leaf, or, if this is not possible, at the foot ofthe title page itself. Additional locations are atthe foot of the outside back cover, if practicable,and at the foot of the back of the jacket if thebook has one. Appropriate locations are alsospecified for monographic publications in othermedia.

Assignment

ISBNs are assigned by national standard booknumbering agencies, e.g. the Standard BookNumbering Agency Ltd in the United Kingdom(www.whitaker.co.uk/isbn.htm) and R.R. Bowkerin the USA (www.isbn.org). The agencies promoteand supervise the use of the ISBN system in theirown countries. They maintain master files ofpublisher prefix allocations and publish details ofthese. For a complete list of national agencies, seewww.isbn-international.org/html/adgroup.htm.

Overall administration internationally

The overall administration of the internationalsystem is undertaken by the International ISBNAgency, at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Pre-ubischer Kulturbesitz), Germany (www.isbn-international.org). The Agency has the followingfunctions:

. To ensure the definition of groups.

. To allocate identifiers to groups.

. To advise groups on the setting up andfunctioning of group agencies.

. To advise group agencies on the allocation ofpublisher identifiers.

. To promote worldwide use of the system.

. To supervise correct use of the system.

References

ISBN: International Standard Book Numbering: Incor-porating Guidelines for Numbering Software In-tended for Sale by Retailers (1993) 7th revised edn,Standard Book Numbering Agency Ltd.

PHILIP BRYANT, REVISED BY THE EDITORS

INTERNET

The Internet is a metanetwork, or network ofnetworks, which links up a global agglomerationof computer resources for public access. It beganas an academic and research network, financially

supported by the US government, but its phe-nomenal growth has brought in private andbusiness users in great numbers.In technical terms the Internet is distinguished

by its use of particular networking protocols.When a message is sent over the Internet, it isbroken into small pieces, called packets, whichtravel over many different routes between thesender’s computer and the recipient’s computer.The networking protocol used to route thepackets across the Internet is TCP/IP (Transmis-sion Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). Use ofthis standard protocol enables computers usingdifferent operating systems to communicate witheach other.Interactions between computers on the Inter-

net typically use the client/server model. Theserver is the computer system that containsinformation or resources such as Web, electro-nic mail, databases, software files, chat chan-nels, etc. Users access those resources via clientsoftware that uses TCP/IP to deliver the item orservice required. Internet technical standards aredeveloped by the Internet Engineering Task Force(IETF) and promulgated by the Internet Societyas international standards.The number of Internet users was estimated at

195 million in September 1999, with predictionsof over 300 million by 2005. These users accessthe Internet via commercial internet serviceproviders (ISPs). ISPs appeared in the early1990s in the UK (e.g. Demon, CIX) and origin-ally offered access for a fixed fee on top ofmetered telephone charges. Freeserve in 1997pioneered ‘free’ access in the UK, by removingthe fixed fee and gaining revenue from a provi-der’s fee for 0845 dial-in numbers. In the USANetzero tried completely free access, with rev-enue coming solely from advertising, but this didnot prove viable. In 2000 pressure from OFTEL,the telecommunications industry regulator, led tounmetered access flat-rate charges becomingavailable in the UK, having been the norm in theUSA. As well, alternatives to modem access,which has reached a ceiling in terms of accessspeed, have appeared – namely ISDN, ADSL,cable modems and satellite. Known collectivelyas ‘broadband’ these technologies offer not onlyfaster access but ‘always on’ connections. Out-side the home or office, cybercafés offer accessfor those without their own computers whileInternet access is now also available via mobilephones and via televisions. In theory these

328 INTERNET

changes should lead to ever more people spend-ing longer and longer online, and having moreattractive services (e.g. films on demand). Inpractice there have been problems in implement-ing the UK government’s vision of ‘BroadbandBritain’, some technical (immature technology),some commercial (market inertia) and someinfrastructural (e.g. geographic limitations ofcable and ADSL availability).There is no central authority or organization

that polices the Internet. Possibly because of itsorigins in US academic and research circles, theInternet has developed into a very open, demo-cratic system in which free speech is respected(though not protected by international law); intheory at least, every user has an equal opportu-nity to be heard. The Internet has spawned aculture of co-operation and low-cost exchange ofideas, data and software hitherto unknown onsuch a scale. Not everything about Internetculture is worthwhile however.Various legislative attempts to control and

censor certain material on the Internet have beenmade, with varying degrees of success. Viruses(e.g. Sircam) have found Internet e-mail to be afruitful dissemination mechanism. A recent devel-opment, peer-to-peer systems, in which onepiece of software acts as both a file server anda retrieval tool, has caused concern. Napster wasa peer to peer package for sharing MP3 (digitizedmusic) files. Napster became so successful that atits height millions of users were sharing millionsof music files. The problem was that many ofthese files contained copyright music and even-tually Napster was shut down by legal actioninstigated by the RIAA (Recording IndustriesAssociation of America). Hackers – individualswho exploit faults or weaknesses in Internetservices and protocols usually for financial extor-tion – have regularly made headlines, some eventaking sides in the first Internet ‘infowar’, foughtonline during the Kosovo crisis. Even well-inten-tioned efforts to extend the range of domain(names for computers; see domain name) on theInternet by ICANN (Internet Corporation forAssigned Names and Numbers) have founderedon unscrupulous business practices and litigationover name ownership.The Internet has assumed a role as the latest in

a line of mass media, stretching back to books,newspapers, radio and television. Like these massmedia, it encompasses aspects of those that comebefore and adds a unique feature. The Internet

gives interactivity and is the first mass mediumthat allows the individual to interact with themass.

Further reading

Poulter, A., Hiom D. and Tseng, G. (2000) TheInformation and Library Professional’s Guide to theInternet, 3rd edn, Library Association Publishing.

SEE ALSO: economics of information;information and communication technology;information technology; networks; pushtechnology; recommender systems; searchengines; World Wide Web

ALAN POULTER

INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER

Usually referred simply as an ISP and sometimesjust Service Provider. However, ISP can alsosometimes mean Independent Service Provider,which distinguishes a specialist service providerfrom a general telecommunications company.IAP (Internet Access Provider) is also used asa direct equivalent of ISP. It is not to beconfused with providers of public access toInternet facilities such as libraries and informa-tion centres.ISPs are companies that provide individuals

and other companies with access to the inter-net. An ISP needs telecommunications lineaccess and this will often take the form of high-speed leased lines giving more independencefrom the telecommunication providers. In ex-change for a payment, usually calculated on amonthly basis, the ISP provides a softwarepackage and username, and an access phonenumber that will allow the user to connect tothe Internet and make use of its facilities. It wasthe appearance of ISPs that made the Internet amedium available to anyone with a computer, atelephone line and the ability to pay a regularcharge.

INTRANET

The internal network of an organization, usingthe TCP/IP protocols. To provide an Intranet, acompany must have its own local- (LAN) orwide-area network (WAN), a Web server andbrowsing software for users.

INTRANET 329

INVISIBLE COLLEGE

An information-sharing group such as those thathave existed for many areas in science, and inother disciplines. Membership of such groups islargely dependent on personal communicationsand often initiated by meetings at researchcentres or conferences. scholarly communica-tion is often facilitated by someone within thegroup assembling a mailing list, which can thenbe used to distribute a newsletter or otherinformal mailings. The group may then take onthe status of a society, with all the apparatus ofconstitution and formal publications etc., bywhich stage its invisible college status has ended.The early stages of the development of newdisciplines and subdisciplines are frequently iden-tifiable by the existence of an invisible college.The internet has greatly expanded the size andnumber of invisible colleges, and also theirvisibility, since many now take the form ofmailing lists and newsgroups and other commu-nities of interest.

Further reading

Noma, E. (1984) ‘Co-citation and the invisible college’,Journal of the American Society of InformationScientists 35: 29–33.


ISLAMIC LIBRARIES

Introduction

Islam has a distinct and highly significant placein the history of ideas, but September 2001created a need, both in the East and the West,for a fresh understanding of Islam and itsintellectual approaches. Responses in the Westcan be judged from the State of Wisconsin’slibrary initiative (2001), and American Libraries’results surveying the perspectives of Muslim-American librarians today (Chepesiuk 2002).Islam as an intellectual movement and the

emergence of its libraries as an area of studyhave already been mapped in the religiousgeography of the world. To understand thishistory, two questions must be answered: the firstconcerns the relationship between Islam andlibraries, and the second is about the specificallyIslamic elements in this. This article deals only

with the first question: the second is discussedelsewhere (Taher 1997).What then is an ‘Islamic library’? It is a library

that focuses on Islamic – or Muslim – sources ofinformation, irrespective of geographic concen-tration (Muslim majority/minority country), lan-guage focus or discipline orientation. Suchlibraries by their very nature were, from the verybeginning, more public than private and, indeed,freely open to the public. This is, in effect, theuntold story of the first free libraries of theworld. There is an extensive literature on thishistory, both primary and secondary, so thepresent article merely highlights salient aspects.The history of Islamic libraries has three

phases, as follows:

. ad 610–1258, from the first revelation ofQuran, to the destruction of Baghdad (alsocalled the classical period).

. ad 1258–1924, from the relocation of the seatof the Caliph to other countries, to the end ofthe Islamic Caliphate, then seated in Turkey.

. ad 1924 onwards, a continuing evolution ofthis movement.

The first phase: AD 610–1258

In Islam, dissemination of knowledge is consid-ered as worship. Based on the Prophet’s emphasison seeking knowledge, even from such distantlands as China, and in fulfilment of the religiouscommandment to spread knowledge, literacy,education and research gained real momentum.This process also gained impetus from externalfactors, such as classical literary influences fromRome, Byzantium and Persia; paper from China;and binding, calligraphy and illuminationadapted by Muslims from other sources. Thesehelped in beautifying an evolving knowledgebase. The results were obvious in many ways,but more specifically in three different dimen-sions: first in the transmission of knowledge(Wheeler 1999); second in the development ofan Islamic worldview (Sardar 1991); and third inheralding an age of scientific awakening. Theseprocesses directly inspired the Europeans’ emer-gence from the Dark Ages. ‘It was through[Islamic scholars’] work that Christian Europereceived the inspiration for the Renaissance’(Lerner 1998: 69).It became an accepted pattern for libraries to

330 INVISIBLE COLLEGE

be attached to mosques everywhere. This wasbecause in addition to the mosque’s primaryreligious focus as a place of worship it was thefocal point of educational, political and socialcommunication. It should be noted, however,that not every mosque had a library. It wasmainly in the large mosques that books otherthan the Quran were also deposited. However,some mosques had several, often large, bookcollections (Sibai 1984: 408).The literary and educational developments

also created a felt need to have libraries in otherinstitutions. Hence, we find libraries attached toa madrasa (school or college), dargah (or qan-qah, shrine), palace, research academy, univer-sity, etc.It is pertinent to identify the terms that are

used in this context. While the term kitabin Arabic refers to book, the place housingbooks was designated by its location as: bait(room), khizana (closet), dar (house), or inrelation to activity, as hikma (wisdom),ilm (knowledge), etc. These terms are usedinterchangeably. Literally, the term library inArabic is maktabah; in Persian/Urdu it is kutubkhana, and in Turkish kütüphane. The Arabicterm maktabah does not occur in the Quran;however, being a derivative of k-t-b, it doesindirectly find a place in the Quran in connot-ing related concepts such as writing, pen, ink,papyrus, parchment, book, information, knowl-edge, learning, training, etc. Historians of thebook have shown that papyrus was in use inseventh-century Arabia, and the papyrus codexthat evolved in the same century facilitatedpreservation (Cook 2000: 52).In this period Islamic libraries had royal

patronage as well as scholarly involvement. Itwas a period that facilitated the development ofindustries relating to paper, ink, and later toprinting, publishing, etc. It is important to askhow the infrastructure and infostructure reacheda point of convergence in this culture. It can beviewed from a narrative of what the Islamiclibrary looked like and what constituted a libraryin this age. The Muslim historian, al-Mukaddasi(tenth century) describes a library in Shiraz, Iran,thus:

The library constituted a gallery by itself; therewas a superintendent, a librarian, and aninspector chosen from the most trustworthypeople of the country. There is no book

written up to this time in whatever branch ofscience but the prince has acquired a copy ofit. The library consists of one long vaultedroom, annex to which are storerooms. Theprince had made along the long room and thestore chambers scaffoldings about the heightof a man, three yards wide, of decoratedwood, which have shelves from top to bottom;the books are arranged on the shelves and forevery branch of learning there are separatescaffolds. There are also catalogs in which allthe titles of the books are entered. Onlypersons of standing are admitted to thislibrary. I myself inspected this library, down-stairs and upstairs, when all was still in order.I observed in each room carpets and curtains, Ialso saw the ventilation chamber to which thewater is carried by pipes which surrounded itevery side in circulation.

(Lerner 1998: 75–6)

The royal patronage evident there was also tobe found in many other sources. A masterphysician, Ibn Sina, reports on the focus of thecollection. And as the following descriptionshows, there is much scope for a detailed analysisof patterns of acquisition, preservation, storageand use of resources. According to Ibn AbiUsaybiya, famous biographer, it was in responseto a summons from Sultan Nuh Ibn Mansur(976–97) that Ibn Sina visited the Samanids’capital, Bukhara. He reports thus:

Having requested and obtained permission(from Sultan Nuh) to visit the library, I wentthere where I found many rooms filled withbooks which were packed up in cases (ortrunks) row upon row. One room was allottedto works on poetry and Arabic philology;another to jurisprudence, and so forth, thebooks on each discipline being kept in aseparate room. I then read the catalog ofancient authors and requested the books Ineeded. I saw (in this collection) books thevery titles of which were unknown to mostpeople, and which I myself have never seeneither before or since.

(Sibai 1984: 197)

There is evidence in abundance of the originalresearch done by Islamic scholars. A number ofdocuments survive to establish their creativityand its lasting results (UNESCO exhibition 1999;

ISLAMIC LIBRARIES 331

Roper 1994). One example held by the NationalLibrary of Medicine, Bethesda, USA can be cited:

On the 30th of November 1094 AD, a scribein Baghdad completed a copy of an Arabictreatise by one of the most important medievalphysicians and clinicians – Abu Bakr Muham-mad ibn Zakariya’ al-Razi, who worked inBaghdad in the previous century and was laterknown to Europe as Rhazes. This manuscriptis the oldest volume in the National Library ofMedicine and the third oldest Arabic manu-script on any medical topic known to bepreserved today.(Islamic Culture and the Medical Arts 1999: 1)

In addition to libraries that were attached to amosque, or madrasa, there were significant onesin research academies. Among the oldest surviv-ing centers of learning, the best example is theJamia Al-Azhar Library, Cairo. It started as alearning house in a mosque in ad 969, and hadits first collection of reading materials within acouple of years. This is obvious from the factthat, besides being a mosque, it became – in lessthen a decade – a leading learning centre forreligious, Arabic and metaphysical sciences. Allsciences were taught at Al-Azhar in the oldentimes, and women attended tuition circles at themosque.Among the research centres and academies

was Dar al-Hikma. It was founded in Cairo bythe Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim (996–1021). TheEgyptian historian Maqrizi in his Khitat states:

On Saturday, the tenth day of Jumai II of theyear 395 (1004 AD), the building called Daral-Hikma was opened in Cairo. Seekers ofknowledge took up their assets. Books werebrought from the book-chests of the palaces(residences of the Fatimid Caliphs), and thepublic was permitted to enter. Anyone was atliberty to copy the book he wished, andwhoever wanted to read a certain book foundin the library could do so. Men of learningstudied the Quran, astronomy, grammar, lex-icography and medicine. More over, the build-ing was adorned by carpets and all doors andhallways had curtains. Managers, servants,porters, and other menials were appointed tomaintain the building. From the library of theCaliph al-Hakim, books which he had do-nated, were brought (to Dar al-Hikma). (Theywere) in all sciences and literatures and of

superb calligraphy such as no other potentatehad ever been able to collect. Al- Hakimpermitted admittance to everyone, withoutdistinction of rank, who wished to read orconsult any of the books.

(Sibai: 1984: 187)

So influential was Islam that, in less than threecenturies, libraries in urban areas facilitated freeinformation access to all. Dr Ziauddin Sardarsummarizes this remarkable process as follows:

In one respect it is quite astonishing that infewer than one hundred years after the hijra ofthe Prophet from Makkah to Medinah, thebook had established itself as an easily acces-sible and basic tool for the dissemination ofknowledge and information. However, whenviewed from the perspectives of ilm (knowl-edge), waqf (pious endowment) and ibadah(worship), which the early Muslims put intooperation at the level of individual, society,and civilization, the phenomenal spread ofbooks and bookmen in early Islam does notlook all that astonishing. Indeed when actua-lized at all levels of society, the conceptualmatrix of Islam would work to produce theinfrastructure for the dissemination of infor-mation in any society, even if it had seriousflaws. The eternal concepts of Islam are for thereal world: they do not operate in or havemuch significance for an idealized society.

(Sardar 1991)

In short, this period of Islam, first, saved ancientlearning from extinction, and, second, dissemi-nated the knowledge in an enlarged and enrichedform.

The second phase: AD 1258–1924

The destruction that brought the end of aglorious phase did not destroy the spirit. Wefind that libraries were still patronized andcontinued to be open to all. Many aristocratsand nobles competed with each other in build-ing libraries. Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan, themilitary general of Akbar the great (1542–1605), is said to have read books while travel-ling and in the toilet. He was reportedly fond oftracing paper, and invented a tracing paper ofseven colours. He was the inventor of variegatedpaper also. He had his own library, with ninety-five people employed for different library andscholarly pursuits. His biographer, Maasir-i-

332 ISLAMIC LIBRARIES

Rahimi, reports that scholars used this libraryfor ‘study and self-improvement’. This librarywas a public institution set up for the dissemi-nation of knowledge and, as with other publiclibraries, some of its books disappeared. Someare preserved today at the Raza Library, Ram-pur, India, and at the Khuda Bhaksh OrientalPublic Library, Patna, India (Taher 1997: 55).Some went abroad. In fact the British Library’sOriental Collections have their origin in theoriental-language manuscripts and printedbooks, and constitute probably the most com-prehensive accumulation of oriental material inthe world.collection development was never limited

just to Islamic theology/philosophy, and scholarscontinued to work in the same holistic manner asbefore. Muslim historians, for instance, did notsimply write court chronicles or political history.A comparison of five contemporary sources thatcorroborate a factual report on an earthquakeshows the intensity of scholarly interest that itaroused (Amateur Scientific Centre 2002).Book hunting by individual scholars was

common. The historian al-Biruni (seventeenthcentury) – who mastered Sanskrit, as well asPersian and Arabic – spent forty years searchingfor a copy of Mani’s Sifr as-Asrar. Ibn Rushd(Averroes) (twelfth century) wanted to consult amonograph dealing with the Mutazilah philoso-phy, but had no access to it. Firishta (seven-teenth century), another historian, visited theroyal library of the Faruqi Sultans at Khandesh,India, in 1604 and from one of the books inthis library he at last found the history of theFaruqi.To get an impression of the book publishing

industry, it is worth considering the state ofprinting. In the Ottoman Empire it was not wellestablished:

Constantinople got its first printing press in1726, and over the course of the eighteenthcentury the number of titles published in this,Islam’s premier city, was only 63. Since it wasclosed down from 1730 to 1780 and againafter 1800 it was really active for only 24years, meaning that it turned out less thanthree new titles a year. It also meant that notonly was the Turkish literacy rate much lower(5% as opposed to 50% in Europe), but thatthe Turks did not even see much need for apress. The point to be made is that Guten-

berg’s invention was not only made in Europe;it succeeded there.

(Kimball 2000)

This sample, however, needs to be comparedwith the history of printing in the Islamic worldgenerally (Cook 2000: 26; Taher 1997: 55).In this age very few people set out to become

librarians and bibliographers. The title for aperson who managed a library was never consis-tent, but generally speaking in Arabic it is warraq,ameen ul-maktabah, qayyim al-maktaba; in Per-sian kitabdars; in Turkish kütüphaneci; and inUrdu mushaf bardar. Most of the librarians/bibliographers – e.g. the physician Avicenna orIbn Sena (tenth century), the poet laureate AmirKhusro (fourteenth century), etc. were designatedonly because of their scholarship. They wereconversant with both religious and secularsciences, and that brought them the status ofinformation managers. For instance, Ibn al-Na-dim, who is the first Islamic bibliographer, authorof Kitab al-Fihrist (tenth century), could not haveeven imagined the value of this source. Theprinciple duties of librarians included acquisitionand preservation of resources, facilitating suppliesfor scholars, supervising the collation and correc-tion of books in the collection, and co-ordinatingwith the library’s endowment or management inadministrative matters. Their contributions – asscholarly librarians – are evident in acquisition,preservation and dissemination of the Islamicliterary heritage, and related scholarship.With regard to the disappearance of libraries

in this age, one point is worth mentioning.Despite the high level of bibliophilism, and thepatronage that libraries enjoyed in the classicalperiod, book burning did occur in the Muslimworld. But if we trace the reasons for the loss ofthe great Islamic libraries, our attention is drawnby the tragic incidences of destruction of librariesby Christian crusaders, Muslim sectarianism andMongol hordes (Lerner 1998: 78).

The third phase: AD 1924 onwards

In the third period there emerged a totallydifferent type of library environment. Theselibraries not only have all the essential tools ofthe trade, but also are better placed to fulfilprofessional duties. While many Islamic librariesstill exist in a less developed stage, there are afew that have developed using technologicalinterfaces. An instance of such an advanced

ISLAMIC LIBRARIES 333

library is the Faisal Foundation’s King FaisalCentre for Research and Islamic Studies, Riyadh,Saudi Arabia.Interestingly, Islamic libraries are gaining im-

portance in the professional sphere. A websiteprovides, for the first time, some guidelines forplanning and developing Islamic libraries – and,in addition to references to print resources, italso provides Web-based links (Ali 2002). Thenumber of publications that have emerged in thelast three decades in the area of Islamic librariesshows that there is a growing will among profes-sionals to systematize the issues that relate toinformation access and control.The mechanisms of cataloguing and indexing

Islamic resources continue to grow – marc 21and dublin core metatags are two tools that areavailable. It is worth mentioning that ArabicMARC is still being awaited. Library automationand virtual libraries facilitate easy access toIslamic resources. With one click, from a remotecomputer, it is possible to browse a Z39.50gateway catalogue and find the required – audio,video, textual – Islamic resource including Li-brary of Congress, Washington; British Libraryand School of Oriental and African Studies,London; and Chicago University Library’s con-sortium holdings that provide access to a vastvariety of resources.Today Islamic librarians are following their

predecessors in acquisition, preservation anddissemination. But today there is no synthesis ofthe roles of scholars and librarians: they exist aspoles apart! In this frame of reference comes amessage. It is from the staff of BibliothecaAlexandria, Egypt, a replica of the ancientAlexandrian Library (historians agree that Mus-lims did not destroy it!): ‘The library staff admitthat they have no idea how to marry the library’spublic access mandate to its goal of becoming acenter of excellence for scholars’ (Veash 2002:A15). Maybe the combination of scholarshipwith knowledge management skills can makethem scholarly librarians again.

References

Ali, S.A. (2002) ‘Planning and managing special andIslamic libraries’ (www.geocities.com/Athens/Rhodes/9485/)[10April].

Amateur Scientific Centre, Pune (2002) ‘Earth quake inAgra-Gwalior Region, North India, MMI 12 6thJuly 1505’ (www.asc-india.org/gq/agra.htm).

Chepesiuk. R. (2002) ‘Special news report: September11 and its aftermath: Muslim-American librariansreflect’, American Libraries (January): 40–3.

Cook, M. (2000) The Koran: A Very Short Introduc-tion, Oxford.

Islamic Culture and the Medical Arts (1999)(www.nlm.nih.gov /exhibition / islamic_medical /islamic_01.html).

Kimball, C. (2000) ‘Statistics on population and reli-gion for the early eighteenth century’ (http://xenohis-torian.faithweb.com/europe/eu11b.html).

Lerner, F. (1998) ‘Libraries of the Islamic world’, in TheStory of Libraries: From the Invention of Writing tothe Computer Age, New York: Continuum.

Roper, G. (ed.) (1994) World Survey of Islamic Manu-scripts, 4 vols, Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Founda-tion.

Sardar, Z. (1991) ‘The Civilization of the Book’, in Z.Sardar (ed.) How We Know: Ilm and the Revival ofKnowledge, Grey Seal.

Sibai, M.M. (1984) ‘An historical investigation ofmosque libraries in Islamic life and culture’, PhDthesis, Indiana University.

Taher, M. (1997) Islamic Librarianship (Studies inLibrarianship Series, Vol. 1). New Delhi, Anmol.

UNESCO (1999) International Exhibition On IslamicScience And Technology (http://www.unesco.org/pao/exhib/islam3.htm).

Veash, N. (2002) ‘Egyptian library struggles to reviveancient glory’, National Post (Toronto) (12 April):A15, library website (www.unesco.org/webworld/alexandria_new/vrml_virtual_visit.html).

Wheeler, B.M. (1999) ‘Transmission of Muslim knowl-edge: Past traditions and new technologies’, Sympo-sium Research Papers, Islamic Information Sources,Riyadh.

Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (2001)‘Libraries respond to national disaster’ (www.dpi.s-tate.wi.us/dpi/edforum/ef0507_3.html).

Further reading

Elayyan, R.M. (1990) ‘The history of the Arabic-Islamic libraries: 7th to 14th centuries’, InternationalLibrary Review 22: 119–35.

Haider, S.I. (1979) ‘Bibliographical heritage of Mus-lims’, International Library Review 29: 207–18.

Inayatullah, S. (1938) ‘Bibliophilism in medieval Islam’,Islamic Culture 12: 154–69.

Meho, L.I. and Nsouli, M.A. (1999) Libraries andInformation in the Arab World: An AnnotatedBibliography, Greenwood Press.

Pedersen, J. (1984) The Arabic Book, Princeton Uni-versity Press.

Taher, M. (2000) ‘The book in Islamic civilization’, MyIslamicity (http://islamicity.cjb.net).

Wilkins, L. (1994) ‘Islamic libraries to 1920’, inEncyclopedia of Library History, Garland, pp. 296–306.

SEE ALSO: history of libraries

MOHAMED TAHER

334 ISLAMIC LIBRARIES

J

JANET

Abbreviation of Joint Academic NETwork, thenetwork linking UK universities, colleges, re-search councils and the British Library. It is theirlink to the internet. Member institutions pay tobelong, but ensure that access is free to userswithin the institution. JANET began in 1984,and was subject to a number of upgrades, whichled to the creation of SuperJANET in 1992. Thisprovided broadband access through fibre-opticnetworks (see fibre-optics). Improvements con-tinue, and the proposed SuperJANET4 will offerfurther enhancement. It is used extensively for e-mail, to log on to remote databases, accesslibrary catalogues and send data files. Indeed ithas become an indispensable component of aca-demic life in the UK.

Further reading

www.superjanet4.net.

JENKINSON, SIR HILARY (1882–1961)

Founder of the modern archive profession inBritain.Born in London and educated at Dulwich and

Cambridge, he entered the civil service and wassent to the public record office (PRO). Therehe learnt the archivist’s craft with medievalrecords, developing the principles that he waslater to set out for the administration of both oldand modern records. He worked in most depart-ments of the PRO, and, amongst other achieve-ments, helped to develop the physical care ofrecords as a craft and science. During the Second

World War he devised and directed a programmeof air-raid precautions and of the temporarydispersal of records and staff to repositoriesoutside London. He was also responsible for thedevelopment of the Records Administration Divi-sion, the PRO’s most significant post-war devel-opment.In addition to his practical work as an

archivist, he taught as Maitland Lecturer inPalaeography at Cambridge (1911–35 and1938–49), and Lecturer (from 1920) and Reader(1925–47) in Diplomatic and English Archives inthe University of London. He was a founder ofthe British Records Association in 1932, and ledthe campaigns that, among other achievements,established the National Register of Archives, anationwide network of local record offices, andalso preserved many important archive accumu-lations from destruction. As the author of theManual of Archive Administration, first pub-lished in 1922, he was a major influence on theeducation and training of all subsequent Britisharchivists and fellow professionals in many othercountries. He held many offices and receivedhonours including a knighthood.

SEE ALSO: archives

JEWISH LIBRARIES

These also are proverbs of Solomon which themen of Hezekiah King of Judah copied out.

(Proverbs XXV, 1)

The library is at the heart of Jewish study andlearning, and books are the lifeblood of theculture. The gloss on Proverbs XXV, 1 is thatthe archive commands a dynamic, texts held are

for reproduction and dissemination, and are notjust for lodgement. Two scrolls of the Law willserve to establish a Jewish congregation butpossession of many denotes continuance andvenerability – additions by gift or the support ofcharitable individuals commissioning a newscroll to celebrate some event or person – andoffers exuberance of adornments and repletion.The Pentateuch as part of the Hebrew Bible (theTaNaKH: Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim ¼ Torah,Prophets and Writings, comprising twenty-fourbooks in total in the Hebrew canon) is readformally from the manuscript; also read from ascroll is the Book of Esther; otherwise, theprophetical readings, Ruth and the other ‘scrolls’,the Passover Hagaddah and psalters, siddurim(prayer books), zemirot (song-books) and ‘bench-ers’ (benedictions) are customarily read fromprinted editions.Of the making of books there is no end as

Ecclesiastes has it. The Jewish library starts withPentateuch and TaNaKH, and burgeons throughrabbinical commentary of Mishnah, Gemara andTalmud, Sifra, codification and Responsa, gram-mar and philology for super-commentary andtranslation (at different times into Aramaic,Yiddish, Ladino and the vernaculars of Europe,Persia and North Africa); it is compounded bythe apparatus of worship and practice requiringprayer books and liturgy, benedictions and thePassover Haggadah, recensions for children and,in the past (and in Yiddish or the vernacular),recensions for women. All of these comprising‘holy writ’ require care in the handling and thedisposal such that faulty and damaged texts arerequired to be buried at the cemetery. In the past,settled communities had a ‘genizah’ loft orcabinet for this purpose in the synagogue andthe greatest surviving of these, the Cairo Genizahbrought to Cambridge University Library in1898, is researched and treasured anew amidstits own demands on modern library resourcesand technologies for preservation and analysis.To the corpus of Bible, Talmud, Rashi (com-

mentary), Psalms and Liturgy should be addedlegends of the Jews (through midrash, aggada,tosephta and other encapsulations of commen-tary), Kabbalah, Zohar and mystical writings,through to folktales and texts derived for edifica-tion, rounded off by poetry from Spanish Jewishpoets for the sophisticated. If Chaucer’s Clerk ofOxford could have had a Jewish counterpart his‘little shelf of a twenty books in black and red’

would easily be imagined from the above butwhat would have been characteristic of theJewish scholar would have been the fact that hewould also have carried duplicates, even tripli-cates of some cherished texts (accumulated by hisfather) in part to have something to offer by wayof exchange.The culture comes, in other words, as a library

in itself and scholars have been famed for theirlibraries. The centres of Jewish teaching inBaghdad, in Spain and in Italy were where thecongregational centres were naturally endowedwith libraries so the great holocausts of Jewishliterature such as the burning of Talmuds infourteenth-century Spain and sixteenth-centuryItaly, and the like were the easier to enact becauseof the congestion of scholars’ libraries that wereavailable to be ransacked for the purpose.From antiquity, the treasures of the scriptor-

ium at Qumran reflect the devotion to theproduction of literary works inherent in theJewish tradition, and in the Cairo Genizah,unique in its scope, can be seen the retentiveinstinct of the religious culture that sustained it.It took new strength from the invention ofprinting in Europe, and Hebrew printing was anearly development of the new technology (requir-ing type cut in different standard and rabbinicalphabets), such that in Lisbon, Constantinopleand elsewhere. Hebrew books were oftenamongst the first products of the new presses intheir geographic march (so even Yiddish pre-ceded English in the print culture of parts ofwestern Canada in the nineteenth century). Print-ing brought a fruition of Hebrew book-makingand empowered scholars with libraries of greatstrengths. To the Hebraists of the Reformation,from the Complutensian to Kennicott, the Britishand Foreign Bible Society (who had Hebrewtypes cast in India in 1817; Ricci’s PlantinPolyglot brought Hebrew and Greek to China asearly as 1604) and the Jewish enlightenment ofthe Haskalah period, the Biblical and rabbinicalcanon remained critical for the production ofHebrew books and the collections devoted tostudying the language and the religion fromwhatever polemical standpoint.The translation and printing of the Bible

promoted intensively by the Reformation, andthe debate over language throughout the seven-teenth century, ensured the dissemination ofHebrew texts in manuscript and printed form.The great collections that remain at the univer-

336 JEWISH LIBRARIES

sities and which came together in the BritishMuseum from personal and official collections(Archbishop Laud, Lord Lumley and others)bespeak the intense interest in Hebraica (bothamong the linguists and the Christian-Platonistsseeking among the mystical literature of theJews), and also Judaica (counting the immenseamount of millenialist literature of the period ingeneral, translation of Josephus in particular,reprinted so often through the sixteenth to eight-eenth centuries, and such draughts as the pamph-lets accompanying the ‘Jew-Bill’ of 1753 inEngland) that inevitably went into the formationof the collections making up these libraries. Afurther strand, as much in evidence in Jewish asin gentile holdings, are texts of controversybetween Rabbanite and Karaite Jews (a specialfeature of such libraries in the Russian spheretoday).This survey of the literature that makes up the

religious and intellectual corpus of Jewish cul-ture, and the basis of Jewish libraries, definesalso the project of both Christian Hebraists andthe philosemites and conversionists (not to speakof the defamers and antagonists) in their interestin Judaism and the Hebrew language. In theMiddle Ages and at the Renaissance, Jewishlibraries where they existed in any large scalewere at the communal and congregational cen-tres, as in Italy in particular. In the eighteenthcentury and under the development of the Has-kalah, in Germany and France, collections devel-oped taking in Jewish responses to theEnlightenment and the spread of the commonhumanist culture available to a people becomingfree of old social and political constraints.Modern Hebrew, like Esperanto, a language ofthe nationalist era, inspired new matter for theZionist era. The emergence of Yiddish from itsplace as a demotic and folk language in the era ofmigration brought about, in Whitechapel as onthe Lower East Side and in Warsaw, the assimila-tion of Jewish and European literary culture witha profound discourse of translation – literary,political, philosophic, polemic and theatricalworks bringing the wider culture to the Yiddishreadership. The collections of, for example, theWhitechapel Public Library remained in use fromthe 1890s until the 1950s, an inspiration forYiddish printing and reading over several genera-tions. The academic collections of the Wis-senschaft der Judentums in Germany, at Jews’College in London and the seminaries of New

York and Cincinnati bear witness to the aca-demic flowering of Jewish culture.The early libraries in Jerusalem as the Yishuv

developed prior to the formulations of Zionismand the inspiration for the Hebrew University,which predated the Balfour Declaration (1917),form the basis now of the Jewish National andUniversity Library (JNUL) at the Hebrew Uni-versity in Jerusalem.Just as the geographico-historical progress of

(Hebrew) printing marked the spread of scholar-ship, reading and libraries throughout Europe,the destruction of Jewry and Jewish learning inthe wake of the Nazi holocaust and Soviet anti-Semitism has distorted the survival of the Eur-opean-Jewish culture and its libraries.The great repositories remain in Rome, the

Escurial and Madrid, Paris and St Petersburg; inLondon, Oxford, Cambridge, John Rylands Uni-versity Library of Manchester (JRULM) andother libraries in the UK with Middle Easterninterests; in New York and elsewhere in the USA;and in Israel where the Jewish National andUniversity Library (JNUL) asserts for itself thefunction of a national and international havenfor the historic collections of world Jewry. Theendeavour that drove the Leo Baeck Institutefrom Germany to Britain and the USA andpockets in such places as Copenhagen (theSimonseniana at the Royal Library), Amsterdam(the Rosenthaliana) marks the survivors. TheMocatta Library at University College London(1905) was bombed in 1941 but has beenreconstituted in part (by virtue of BM duplicatesand Hebraica from the Guildhall); the JewishTheological Seminary in New York was likewisereconstituted following a disastrous fire.The great sales of collections that in earlier

years saw the shift of bibliothecal gravity fromItaly to England (when the Oppenheim collectionwas acquired by the Bodleian and the AlmanziMSS by the British Museum) continues today.Sales from the Sassoon collections, that of A.L.Shane and, most recently, the Beth Din Library ofthe United Synagogue in London have broughtinto temporary circulation (and the ‘danger’ ofretention by private collectors) famous texts thatmay not find a home in a public library foranother generation. Growth of collections iscurrently slow; there is small-scale purchasing ofmodern Hebraica at Oxbridge, JRULM andother libraries but little growth elsewhere (atLeeds, Jews’ College, London, UCL for instance)

JEWISH LIBRARIES 337

and the British Library confines itself to editionsof manuscripts as a core requirement only. Boththe British Library and JNUL, however, opt todiversify by including glamorous texts as part oftheir digitization of treasures fit for tourist andjuvenile educational tours (the ‘Golden Hagga-dah’ and Maimonides MSS at the British Library,a treasury of Ketubot, marriage contracts, at theJNUL).The residuum of this historico-geographic

survey resolves in terms of library collectionsand heritage in the following:

Libraries in the British Isles

THE HISTORIC NATIONAL COLLECTIONS

. Bodleian, Cambridge, british library,JRULM.

. University College London (UCL) (the Mo-catta Library of the JHSE, based upon thecollections of Lucien Wolf, Asher Myers,Hermann Gollancz, Moses Gaster and others,refurbished in part after war damage andlosses, from BM duplicates held at the Guild-hall), the Mishcon and Margulies collections;recent deposit of Rothschild material (belatedtransfers in the wake of the Sassoon sales).

. Cambridge with the Cairo Genizah and Ox-ford as a centre for Qumran Studies areassured of stronger prospects;

. Such places as the School of Oriental andAfrican Studies (University of London): Israelimaterial, historic Judaica, Jewish music (trans-ferred from the Guildhall School of Music andCity University); Trinity College Dublin (TCD)with a token historic collection.

. The Porton Library, Leeds Public Library is thelast such local studies collection of Jewishinterest intact (but not kept up); the Manche-ster collection has been dispersed within theCentral Library’s general holdings (but the oldsubject card catalogue is retained); Whitecha-pel’s Yiddish collections have been dispersed(to SOAS, UCL, Oxford).

. Modern collections of appeal to a Jewishreadership are maintained at Westminster,Stoke Newington/Hackney, Barnet and Red-bridge Public Library holdings, reflecting localconcentrations of London’s Jewish population;

COLLECTIONS BASED AT JEWISH INSTITUTIONS

. Jews’ College (LSJS), Leo Baeck College; theWiener Library; Oxford Centre for Jewish and

Hebrew Studies at Yarnton; the SephardiCentre at the Spanish and Portuguese Jews’Congregation, Maida Vale.

. There are also Jewish schools with appropri-ate libraries, synagogues and communal li-braries on a small scale (nothing approachingthe intensive provision of their US counter-parts); also, the Scottish Jewish Archives inGlasgow and the Manchester Jewish Mu-seum. Study centres for adult educationusually muster small collections without muchpurpose; there is great enthusiasm for theprogrammes of such centres but little senseof the need to maintain libraries as part oftheir dynamic; despite the consolidation ofefforts to sustain Jewish students at large thedispersal some years ago of the notablelibrary at the Hillel House, London (theJewish ‘fraternity’ house centre), is of a piecewith the strategy of the United Synagogue inits disposal of books.

JUDAICA/HEBRAICA COMPONENTS

. Centres for German–Jewish Studies (Sussex),Leeds, Manchester, Holocaust (Imperial WarMuseum, Leicester University); Christian–Jewish Studies at Cambridge.

. Cambridge Colleges (W.H. Low collection atTrinity, Israel Abraham’s collections atQueen’s and the Oriental Faculty, RaphaelLoewe’s library destined for St John’s), Lam-beth Palace, Wellcome Institute, Durham andExeter Middle East Studies; in Marsh’s Libraryand at Trinity College Dublin; Hebrew edi-tions are naturally a strong component in theBible Society collections now at Cambridge.

JUDAICA

. The Parkes Library and the Anglo-JewishArchive under the aegis of the Hartley Libraryat Southampton University.

. Anglo-Jewish archival material at Metropoli-tan Records, Glasgow, Liverpool and othercentres; Messrs N.M. Rothschild’s businessarchive.

. More tenuous, some Hebraica at the LiverpoolAthenaeum and like establishments datingfrom the nineteenth century when local Jewishcitizens took their places among the cityworthies as professional men making gifts anddeposits.

338 JEWISH LIBRARIES

PRIVATE LIBRARIES

. Valmadonna, heir now to the Sassoon andSchocken collections and the like, strong inhistoric editions and manuscripts.

. A Zangwill collection, now deposited atSouthampton.

Anglo-Jewry, however, at large is not a people ofbooks. The failure of the Jewish institutions torecruit librarians at the commensurate level andto fund development of proper communal li-braries exposes the strength of purpose of theUnited Synagogue in its recourse to its recentsales of its prime collections. This sale wasgrounded upon the profoundly philistine spiritof the Anglo-Jewish community. The scene con-trasts with that of the USA where the majorintellectual Jewish institutions of New York andNew England have recently come together in amajor consortium, the Centre for Jewish History,where the Association of Jewish Libraries, inparallel with the American Library Association,maintains committees and programmes at alllevels of library interest, and is influential along-side the (American) Jewish Book Council inpromoting books and libraries. Its Anglo-Jewishcounterparts are but shadows by comparison.The wider dereliction is reflected in the failure

of a proposal to the British Library for themounting of a major exhibition on Maimonidesfor his 800th anniversary in 2004; the proposaldid not even reach the last six in considerationfor that year. The Library does, however, pro-mote Maimonides on a website and has digitizedfamous texts as public attractions. Many feel,however, that it is losing touch with scholarshipand reducing acquisitions drastically.The Mocatta Library at UCL, now absorbed

into the general college Judaica holdings and theaegis of the Institute of Jewish Studies, augmen-ted recently by Yiddish deposits, makes arespectable modern collection but is not dy-namic in the field. Likewise, SOAS too. Recentacademic funding through Higher EducationFunding Councils’ Research Support LibrariesProgramme projects for retrospective conversionhas ensured that, across the board, Hebrew,along with other script materials, has finallybeen brought into the modern purview oflibrary systems. But progress is still hamperedby the failure to promote the development of

a solution to the problem of non-romancharacter-sets in automated catalogues. SOAShas long been at fault across all its collections,lacking not only the resources but also the willto secure the necessary support to promotedevelopment in an area of what in effect is itsrationale.

Further reading

Beit-Arié, M. (2000) ‘The individualistic nature of theHebrew medieval book production and consump-tion’, in Zion, Jerusalem, pp. 441–51 [texts recreatedfor personal use; reflects the extent of literacy inJewish society, furnishing of texts].

Encyclopaedia Judaica (1971) Jerusalem: Keter Publish-ing House. [The substantive article on Jewish li-braries appears in: Vol. 11, cols 190–8, and includesan entry for the Jewish National and UniversityLibrary at the Hebrew University.]

Friedman, P. (1980) ‘The fate of the Jewish book duringthe Nazi era’, in Roads to Extinction: Essays on theHolocaust, ed. A.J. Friedman, New York: Confer-ence on Jewish Social Studies and the Jewish Pub-lication Society of America.

Goldstein, D. (1985) Hebrew Incunables in the BritishIsles: Preliminary Census, London: British Library.

Massil, S.W. (1999) ‘The books of Anglo-Jewry’, inJewish Year Book 1999, Valentine Mitchell, pp.xxxii–xli.

Reif, Stefan C. (1997) Hebrew Manuscripts at Cam-bridge University Library: A Description and Intro-duction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press(University of Cambridge Oriental publications 52)[assisted by S. Reif and incorporating earlier work byS.M. Schiller-Szinessy, H.M.J. Loewe and J. Leveen,and including palaeographical advice from E. Engel].

Roth, C. (ed.) (1937) Magna Bibliotheca Anglo-Judaica: A Bibliographical Guide to Anglo-JewishHistory, rev. and enl. edn, London: The JewishHistorical Society of England, University College [arevised edition of Bibliotheca Anglo-Judaica, com-piled by J. Jacobs and L. Wolf (1888), and acatalogue of the material bearing on the study ofAnglo-Jewish history that is to be found in theMocatta Library and the allied collections housed inUniversity College, London].

Rowland Smith, D. and Shmuel Salinger, P. (eds) (1991)Hebrew Studies: Papers Presented at a Colloquiumon Resources for Hebraica in Europe, Held at theSchool of Oriental and African Studies, University ofLondon, 11–13 September 1989/11–13 Elul 5749,London: The British Library (British Library occa-sional papers 13).

Sabar, S. (1990) Ketubbah: Jewish Marriage Contractsin the Hebrew Union College Skirball Museum andKlau Library, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication So-ciety of America.

Shavit, P. (1997) Hunger for words: books and librariesin the Jewish ghettos of Nazi-occupied Europe,Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.

JEWISH LIBRARIES 339

Steinschneider, M. (1852) Catalogus Librorum Heb-raeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana/Digessit et NotisInstruxit M. Steinschneider, 2 vols, Berolini: A.Friedlaender.

STEPHEN MASSIL

JOINT USE LIBRARIES

A single facility, usually an actual library build-ing, which has been jointly created by two ormore organizations to serve the combined libraryneeds of their users. Joint school and publiclibraries are perhaps the most common occur-rence of this type of arrangement.

Further reading

Call, I.S.B. (1993) ‘Joint use libraries, just how goodare they?’, College and Research Libraries News54(10): 551–6.

SEE ALSO: school libraries

JOURNAL

A periodical publication, particularly one issuedby a society or institution and containing pro-ceedings, transactions, reports, substantial arti-cles and reviews of publications in a particularscholarly or scientific field. The connotation isone of quality and reliability, and the termlearned journal is often used. The term hasalmost entirely lost its literal meaning, derivedfrom the French, of ‘daily newspaper’.

SEE ALSO: economics of information

JOURNALISM

Writing for a newspaper or magazine, but, byextension, the profession of compiling, writingfor and editing newspapers and other periodicals.Sometimes used derogatively to indicate ephem-eral and tendentious writing.

SEE ALSO: mass media

340 JOINT USE LIBRARIES

K

KEYWORD

A word that succinctly and accurately describesthe subject, or an aspect of the subject, discussedin a document. In a permuted title index, theword from the title of a document considered tobe most indicative of the subject matter, i.e. thekeyword, can be used as an indexing term,permuted by one of a number of methods: KWIC(KeyWord in Context), KWAC (KeyWord andContext) or KWOC (KeyWord out of Context).


KILGOUR, FREDERICK GRIDLEY(1914–)

Librarian and founder of Ohio College LibraryCenter (oclc).

Kilgour was born in Springfield, Massachu-setts, and studied at Harvard. He entered theWidener Library whilst still a student as aCirculation Assistant, and studied librarianshipat Columbia University. His war service, from1942 to 1945, was as Executive Secretary of theInterdepartmental Committee for the Acquisitionof Foreign Publications, and after the war he wasDeputy Director of the Office of IntelligenceCollection and Dissemination in the Departmentof State. From 1948 to 1965 he was Librarian ofYale University School of Medicine. During thistime he was deeply involved in one of the majorearly library automation efforts, the Columbia–Harvard–Yale Medical Libraries Computeriza-tion Project. Then, as Yale’s first AssociateUniversity Librarian for Research and Develop-ment, between 1965 and 1967, he oversaw the

University Library’s first experiment in automa-tion.In 1967, as Director of the OCLC, he was able

to build on his experience in automation at Yale.By 1971 OCLC’s shared cataloguing system wasavailable online in Ohio. Within two years itcould be used elsewhere through other academiclibrary consortia across the USA, and by 1978 itwas reorganized as a national service. Thisbreakthrough in shared cataloguing has subse-quently transformed the work of academic andother libraries worldwide.

SEE ALSO: espionage; library automation

KILOBYTE

One thousand bytes of digital data; usuallywritten Kb.

SEE ALSO: informatics; information andcommunication technology

KNOWLEDGE

Knowledge is information evaluated and orga-nized in the human mind so that it can be usedpurposefully. In this sense, the term can beequated with understanding.However, it is generally used in an imprecise

way to describe phenomena to which the term‘information’ is otherwise often attached. Theterms knowledge industries, knowledge workand knowledge worker have been used since the1960s, since they were introduced by Fritzmachlup and others to identify the componentsof what was described as a knowledge economyor knowledge society. At much the same time the

same phenomena were described by porat as aninformation society. In a knowledge society,employment in the older forms of productivity,agriculture and industry, is replaced by knowl-edge-based work, which requires workers withhigher levels of schooling and post-school quali-fications, and in which companies may have fewassets other than the knowledge resources oftheir workforce. Whilst the term knowledgeindustries has sometimes been replaced by therelated, but not identical, term cultural indus-tries, the descriptor ‘knowledge’ remains signifi-cant.

KNOWLEDGE-BASED COMPANIES

Commentators identify a new type of company,built upon knowledge: typically in telecommu-nications, electronics, software or biotechnol-ogy, but also offering high-technology services tomore traditional industry. Their need to bringtechnology-based products and services to mar-ket fast puts the premium on research, and theyare therefore heavily dependent on an infrastruc-ture of high-quality education. They also rely onthe ready availability of venture capital andpublic start-up funding for innovation. They arealso referred to as knowledge-intensive compa-nies or learning companies.

KNOWLEDGE INDUSTRIES

The whole range of commercial and industrialactivities that underlie and facilitate the compila-tion, distribution and sale of such products asbooks, databases and broadcasts. All organiza-tions, media and formats that are capable ofperforming all or part of these functions arecovered by this definition. They include, but arenot confined to, publishing, television and radioprogramme origination, and the creation andhosting of databases.

Concepts: producers, products andformats

The primary producers of knowledge are in-dividuals who generate it through intellectualcreativity based on experimentation, empiricalresearch, observation, experience, reading orimagination. Traditional knowledge structures,such as that suggested by machlup (1962),classify knowledge by a combination of the

process of creation and the typology of theknowledge itself; the latter includes, for example,scientific, social and artistic knowledge. Theseintellectual constructs are valuable in enabling usto understand the nature of knowledge itself andits relation to information; indeed, they form theconceptual basis of information science as adiscipline. In practice, however, all forms ofknowledge can be articulated only through asystem of communication; such systems rangefrom human speech and gesture to sophisticateddigital technologies. Whenever the communica-tion of knowledge goes beyond simple interper-sonal communications in real time (such as aconversation) or interpersonal communicationover distance (via postal services, for instance),it can be achieved only by using the infrastruc-ture of support that the knowledge industrieshave developed.The knowledge industries, therefore, although

they are only secondary producers, are never-theless the only channel through which knowl-edge can be communicated by the creator to theconsumer. The longest established and still thelargest group of such secondary producers arepublishers. The role of the publisher is essen-tially that of capitalist and organizer of thecommunication of information and knowledge.The practice of book publishing is over 500years old; it can be taken as typifying many ofthe practices of the knowledge industries as awhole, and has been used as a paradigm ofthem, a practice which is discussed below under‘Functions and operations’. In brief, the businessof the publisher is to provide a means by whichauthors can reach their audience. This involvesaccepting unsolicited work or commissioningwork for publication; the satisfactory comple-tion of the work by the primary producer isfollowed by a process of editing, production (inthe form of print on paper), marketing, salesand distribution. A vast international industryhas grown up around these apparently simpleprocesses.It is convenient to distinguish between publish-

ers and media companies, although this is atechnical rather than a strictly commercial dis-tinction. The media organizations of greatestrelevance here are those involved in the produc-tion of radio and television, although the filmand music industries impinge on them at variouspoints. Such organizations have historically beentypically larger than publishing houses, partly

342 KNOWLEDGE-BASED COMPANIES

because of the very high capital costs of produc-tion. Moreover, even in countries with liberalpolitical traditions such as freedom of the pressthere has typically been greater state involve-ment, especially in broadcasting, than wouldnormally be considered acceptable in print-on-paper publishing. Media organizations thereforeoperate under legal and regulatory regimes thatare in some respects fundamentally differentfrom those familiar to publishers. The finalproducer group that ought to be distinguished isindeed the Internet Service Providers and thehosts that provide access to databases. Suchhosts are not normally the primary producers ofthe databases to which they sell access; in manyways, however, their function is analogous to, orat least comparable with, that of the secondaryproducers exemplified by publishers. They pro-vide the essential channel of communicationthrough which primary producer and end-userare brought together.The distinctions, and the relationships, be-

tween different categories of secondary producersin the knowledge industries are undergoing pro-found change. This change is technologicallydriven, and is increasingly being formulated as aconvergence of formerly separate technologiesand media. Perhaps the most obvious examplelies in the development (which is rapid in somecountries) of television programmes delivered tothe home by cable rather than by broadcastsignals; at the same time, telecommunications,traditionally delivered by cable, are increasinglyavailable through wireless systems, not least inmushrooming networks of mobile communica-tions systems. The two technologies – broad-casting and telecommunications – are thusbrought together, opening up a wide range ofcommercial and social possibilities for producersand customers alike. Similarly, traditional bound-aries between products and formats are erodingor being reconfigured. In the 1990s, there was aconvergence not only of the technologies ofknowledge production and distribution, but alsoof the companies that were involved in it. Thewhole business is now dominated by a smallnumber of global corporations that are involvedin book, magazine and newspaper publishing, infilm and video production and distribution, andin terrestrial, cable and satellite broadcasting, aswell as being, in some cases, major providers ofcontent to the internet, and Internet ServiceProviders themselves. This conglomeration of

interests is typified in such companies as NewsCorporation and AOL Time Warner.Typical products of the knowledge industries

include books, magazines, newspapers, televisionand radio programmes, and databases. It isdifficult, but important, to make a clear distinc-tion between products – such as these – andformats; for the purposes of this article, formatsare understood to be merely the means by whichthe product is packaged and presented to theend-user.Formats are many and various, and they are

continually increasing in number as a result oftechnological developments. Print probably re-mains the most common format for the com-munication of information throughout theworld, although it has been displaced for manypurposes. It is used for books, magazines (of allkinds) and newspapers, all of which are pro-ducts created by publishers. It should be noted,however, that many newspapers and some ma-gazines would position themselves with themass media rather than with the more tradi-tional products of publishing. This crossover,particularly apparent with the popular press andinternational mass-circulation magazines, will beexplored further under ‘Practice’ below. Manyother products that were traditionally printed arenow also, or in some cases only, available asdigital objects, whether as CDs or databasesaccessible online, often through websites. Thisincludes such familiar products as referencebooks, many abstracting and indexing ser-vices, business information services andother information for the financial services sec-tor, and reference materials in specialized areassuch as legal information and medical in-formatics. Indeed, the long-term future ofprinted reference materials must now be calledinto question.Print stands clearly and separately as a long-

established and widely understood medium. In-deed, the ability to read, which is fundamental tothe use of printed media (with rare exceptions),has long been regarded in Western culture as themost fundamental educational attainment; itsacquisition is regarded as a major indicator ofboth personal and national development. Theother formats under consideration all differ fromprint, but are like each other in one fundamentalrespect: all require some form of apparatus togive access to them. Much of this apparatus,most obviously the television set, is so familiar as

KNOWLEDGE INDUSTRIES 343

to be almost unnoticed in daily use. Its familiar-ity, however, should not be allowed to concealthe complexity that lies behind it in providingsystems through which programmes and otherinformation are delivered to the end-user.The oldest form of television and radio pro-

duct is the terrestrial broadcast, but in televisionthis is being challenged and to some extentreplaced by other formats. These are cable andsatellite, sometimes in combination. cable tele-vision is widespread in the USA and becomingmore common elsewhere in the world. Cablecompanies provide a wide range of choice ofviewing, often highly specialized (such as news,sports and movie channels), far more economic-ally than traditional terrestrial broadcasters cando. Satellite broadcasting, based on the bouncingof signals to and from geo-stationary satellites, isincreasingly common in Europe and Asia, and iscomparable to cable in its ability to offer multi-ple channels of programming for a wide range ofspecialist and generalist tastes. The two can becombined: the satellite signal can be rediffusedthrough a cable system to the end-user. Thecommercial element in all three television systemsis paramount; until recently, television wasfunded through a combination of advertisingand sponsorship. Some countries favoured asystem of total or partial state funding; othermethods include fees charged to users (such asthe Television Receiving Licence in the UK) orsupporter contributions (such as those for publicservice channels in the USA). Both satellite andcable tend towards payment by subscription; thismay take the form of an annual fee to coverunlimited viewing, or a ‘pay-as-you-view’ systemmonitored by the device that decodes the signalwhen it is received through the cable, receivingdish or aerial.Television was traditionally associated with

mass broadcasting of programmes with widepopular appeal, but multichannel provisionthrough cable and satellite systems has madespecialized channels a reality. They include min-ority language channels, as well as channels forminority interests, and programming with afairly limited appeal. At one end of the spectrum,this takes in ‘art’ movies; at the other, it includesshopping channels, home improvement channelsand the like.Television, however, can be used for other

formats than broadcast programmes. Teletextand videotex systems have been in use for over

twenty years by the terrestrial broadcasters.There are now interactive digital systems, usingboth broadband cables and digital terrestrial andsatellite broadcasting systems, to make the do-mestic television set the gateway to informationservices and databases, and to electronic mailand other network facilities. This has begun totake television into an area traditionally domi-nated by hosts rather than media organizations,providing another, and potentially the most sig-nificant, example of convergence between infor-mation and communications technologies.

Functions and operations

The knowledge industries are capital-intensive,although for the primary producers the capital isintellectual rather than financial. At the second-ary level, with which this article is principallyconcerned, there are clear differences in capitalrequirements, operational arrangements and or-ganizational structures between the variousmedia and formats. The classic model is that ofbook publishing, and some of its terminology hasbeen adopted in other areas. Although bookpublishing can form the basis of an analysis, itcannot stand alone or be regarded as an arche-type. The paradigm is no longer applicable; in itsplace, a number of models must be exploredunder each of four key topics:

. Capital costs.

. Organization of production.

. Research and development.

. Marketing and sales.

CAPITAL COSTS

Although the knowledge industry engages in aform of mass production (of copies of books, forexample), only in some very specialized applica-tions (such as the newspaper industry) does itachieve a scale of output that allows the fullcost–benefits of mass production to be obtained.More typically, there is very heavy front-endinvestment in a product, on which the returnsare slow and fragmented. This is particularly truein book publishing, where all but a fraction ofthe publisher’s costs are incurred before anyincome can be generated. A typical book, printedin 5,000 copies, must be edited, produced andmarketed as a single operation; no copies can besold until all the copies have been produced,since it is grossly uneconomic to keep the

344 KNOWLEDGE INDUSTRIES

‘production line’ (that is, the printing press)running on a continuing basis. Hence there canbe no cost recovery, and certainly no profit, untilalmost all of the capital cost has been expended.Since time that elapses between the receipt of themanuscript from the author and the first sales ofthe book is typically of the order of nine monthsto one year, and the total selling time for ageneral trade book is about eighteen months totwo years, the publisher’s capital investment inany given title can be tied up for at least threeyears before achieving the returns on which thecosting and pricing of the book was predicated.There is therefore an incentive to sell as manycopies as possible as quickly as possible afterpublication and to have a continuous flow ofmany titles so that current sales can in effectprovide the capital for future titles.Book publishing is not the only manifestation

of the knowledge industries in which the front-loading of capital costs is so conspicuous. Thesame is true in the production of televisionprogrammes and (although on a lesser scale) ofradio programmes. Programme origination forboth radio and television normally follows one oftwo routes: it is developed by an organizationthat combines the functions of production andbroadcasting, or by a company that engages onlyin production and then sells or leases its productto a broadcaster. Historically, the former modelhas predominated, but independent productioncompanies have become increasingly importantin the industrialized countries since the early1980s, and in both the United Kingdom and theUSA now take a significant and growing share ofthe total market. In commercial terms, thefundamental difference between independentproduction companies and the broadcasting or-ganizations is that the former retrieve theirinvestments and make their profits by sellingtheir products to the latter. The broadcastingorganizations themselves, on the other hand, cangenerate revenue only by selling advertising andsponsorship time, and perhaps subsidiary rightsto some programmes, as well as, in somecountries and in some broadcasting organiza-tions, through an additional fiscal input fromsubscriptions or taxation. Ultimately, however,all genuinely commercial broadcasting is depen-dent on its ability to appeal to an audience thatwill attract advertisers, and the organizationsmust produce or purchase programmes that willachieve that overriding objective.

Whatever the organization of production, thecosts are high. Despite recent technological de-velopments, discussed under ‘Research and devel-opment’ below, both equipment and facilities areexpensive. A fully equipped studio is a multi-million-pound investment, and even the mostmodest programme costs many tens of thousandsof pounds to make. When professional actors orpresenters are used, costs increase rapidly. Thetechnical and artistic skills needed for productionare in short supply, and also consequently ex-pensive. Independent production companies (andindeed broadcasting organizations) often drawon the large number of freelancers or smallcompanies in the field, but, while that reducesthe administrative overheads of production, ithas less effect on the cost of the production itself.In the third key area of the knowledge

industries – database production and sale – theposition is somewhat different from that inpublishing and broadcasting, although it includessome elements that are comparable to both. Theearliest commercial databases grew out of tradi-tional publishing activities such as the productionof reference books, bibliographies, indexes andabstracts. Indeed, there are significant overlapsbetween ownership in publishing, the mass mediaand the database sector. The capital investmentin databases, however, is typically lower thanthat in conventional print-on-paper publishing ofthe type that it is now displacing. The costs ofknowledge generation – the processes of abstract-ing or compiling bibliographic records, for ex-ample – remain essentially the same inintellectual terms regardless of the format of theoutput, but the transfer of the generated knowl-edge into its permanent format is significantlycheaper for database producers than it is forbook publishers. No physical product is neededbeyond the digitized record, which is typicallygenerated by the primary producer, who in thiscase may be, for example, an abstracter or acataloguer. Cost recovery can begin at the mo-ment of creation if charges are directly related touse, as is typically the case with online databases,and updating of the accessible file is in real time,which is somewhat less usual. The generation ofincome, like the enhancement of the databaseitself, is in any case a more or less continuousprocess, with none of the waiting time thatcharacterizes traditional publishing.The production of off-line media for access to

databases (typically a CD-ROM) inevitably


involves somewhat higher costs, but, despite thegreater similarities, the underlying considerationsare still fundamentally different from thosewhich apply to books. The difference partlygrows out of the differences between the technol-ogies involved. Printing is a process that can beefficiently applied only to the production of largenumbers of identical copies as a single operation.The copying of digitized files, however, can takeplace almost instantaneously, with little advan-tage to be gained from continuous production ofmultiple copies. In effect, CD-ROMs (and indeedother media such as microforms) can be pro-duced on an on-demand basis without anysignificant delay, and without incurring dispro-portionately larger costs than those of producingconsecutive multiple copies on a continuousbasis. The expenditure and the income-genera-tion of the producers are thus brought morenearly into chronological line with each other.Moreover, updated versions analogous to therevised edition of the printed book can beproduced with as little difficulty as the first‘edition’ and at substantially lower costs, sincethe process of revision is not merely continuous,but the very essence of the enhancement andgrowth of the database itself.

ORGANIZATION OF PRODUCTION

A key element in any analysis of the organizationof the knowledge industries lies in an under-standing of their intermediary role betweenprimary producer and ultimate consumer. Therelationships thus created are primarily eco-nomic, although they are regulated within a legalframework that protects the intellectual prop-erty rights of the knowledge creator or primaryproducer and, subsequently, the capital invest-ment of the legitimate secondary producer, suchas a publisher.The book publishing model is simple and

familiar. An author writes a book, which haseither been commissioned by a publisher or issubmitted to a publisher for consideration. Ineither case, the agreement to publish ultimatelytakes a contractual form, in which the twoparties agree on such matters as subject, length,delivery date, format and size of edition, andmethod of payment. For the author, the latter istypically a royalty calculated as a percentage ofthe publisher’s income from the book, althoughadvances against expected earnings (usually mod-est but occasionally, in fiction publishing, extre-

mely large) are also normally offered for titleswith any realistic commercial prospects. Thepublishing house itself is then organized in away that facilitates the efficient and cost-effectiveproduction of the book. Traditionally this in-volved a substantial number of employees en-gaged in such tasks as commissioning, copy-editing, design, production management, market-ing, publicity and sales. In both the UnitedKingdom and the USA, however, the patternchanged significantly during the 1980s. Much ofthe work is now done by freelancers, to theextent that in some publishing houses only thecore functions of commissioning, productionmanagement and marketing are undertaken onan in-house basis.Newspapers and magazines are produced on a

different basis, with an editor responsible for thecontents of each issue. Staff writers are respon-sible for much of what appears and are retainedon a salaried basis. Newspapers, however, alsoemploy correspondents, both on a geographicaland a topical basis (‘our Scottish correspondent’or ‘our football correspondent’), not all of whomare full-time or exclusive employees of a particu-lar newspaper. Freelance writers are also impor-tant, especially for the magazines; they are paidfor each article accepted, usually on the basis ofthe number of words printed. In the newspaperand magazine industry, unlike book publishing,intellectual property rights are normally assignedoutright to the publisher, even when they are notgenerated by contracted employees.Radio and television production have moved,

in an organizational sense, in the same generaldirection as book publishing, with a markedincrease (required or facilitated by governmentsin some countries, including the United King-dom) in the number and importance of produc-tion companies that are independent of thebroadcasting networks. Any production organi-zation, however, regardless of its relationship tothe broadcaster, needs access to a wide range ofskills, including those of writers, designers anddirectors, as well as the technical skills of soundengineers, camera operators and so on. Much ofthis can now be supplied on a freelance basis orby small companies that specialize in, for exam-ple, sound or lighting. Even producers anddirectors are often employed on a freelancecontract to produce a particular programme orseries. Broadcasting production is a highly com-plex task – intensive of skilled labour, in which


there is a very competitive market. Managementskills of a high order are needed to achieveprofitable outcomes, but increasingly these skillsare applied to bringing together a large numberof individuals and small companies in a particu-lar enterprise. Mass-media production, ironically,is beginning to take on some of the character-istics of a pre-industrial cottage industry.Again, the database industry falls somewhere

between book publishing and the broadcastmedia. Much work is done on a freelance basis,a trend that is being reiterated by the massiveexpansion of public-access networks that facil-itate telecommuting by freelancers, who mayeven be on a different continent from some oftheir clients. Only the hosts and producers have aformal existence as a business organization ana-logous to a publishing house. They function aspublishing houses, commissioning, organizing,funding and distributing the databases. Whenthe product is material as well as electronic (suchas a CD-ROM), the analogy is even closer.

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

Relentless and continuous technical innovationhas characterized all the communications indus-tries since the mid-1960s, although the speed andapplication of the results of that innovation havevaried greatly between sectors and indeed be-tween countries. In newspaper publishing, forexample, the use of computers as direct-inputdevices by journalists was delayed in the UnitedKingdom for a decade after it was commonplacein the USA; conversely, letterpress printing hadalmost vanished in the United Kingdom severalyears before offset lithography (its successor)made any serious inroads into the book printingindustry in the USA.In general, the knowledge industries have been

beneficiaries rather than originators of technolo-gical innovation. All sectors of the industry havenevertheless been profoundly changed, directly orindirectly, especially by the last twenty years ofdevelopment in computing. The database sectorin its present form is the most obvious product ofthe computer age, even though it has developedout of traditional academic, technical and refer-ence book publishing. Broadcasting production,especially for television, has also been at theforefront of the use of innovative technology. Theinitially electromagnetic and subsequently digitaltechnologies of video recording have almostentirely displaced photographic media for the

creation of broadcast images. Among the con-sequences have been a decrease in the cost ofproduction as well as greater flexibility in thelocation of programme-making. Drama of allkinds, news gathering and documentary pro-grammes have perhaps been the major benefici-aries of the greater flexibility offered by videoover film, but no field has been left untouched.The book publishing industry, throughout the

world, has always been notoriously conservative,but much of this traditional conservatism hasbeen overcome in recent years in the industria-lized countries. Authors themselves partly led thechange by their insistent use of word proces-sing and their consequent ability to submit workin electronic formats. In turn, this shifted some ofthe burden of editorial work from the publisherto the author, and can even be argued to havechanged the publisher’s traditional role as qualitycontroller. Small-scale publishing has particularlybenefited from the increased sophistication anddecreased real costs of computing. desktoppublishing has made little impact on the coresectors of the industry, but has greatly facilitatedthe publication of commercially peripheral mate-rial that might not otherwise have found anoutlet. The cultural and literary benefits of thismight sometimes be questioned, but there can beno doubt that the process of print-on-paperpublishing has been opened up – arguably evendemocratized – by technological change.

MARKETING AND SALES

It is the sale of its products that ultimatelydetermines the fate of the knowledge industries,like any other commercial activity in a capitalistsystem. Here there is little homogeneity betweenthe three sectors with which we are principallyconcerned.The consumer book market still operates

primarily through retail bookshops, although e-commerce is of increasing importance. Both realand virtual bookshops are normally independentof the publishing houses, although in some lessdeveloped countries it is not unusual for the samecompany to be involved in both publishing andbookselling, and indeed sometimes in printing aswell. In more complex book trades, however,separation of functions is almost invariable. Lessuniform are the trade relationships between thepublishers and the booksellers. In the UnitedKingdom, wholesalers are virtually unknown inhardback trade, although common for paper-


backs, while in the USA wholesalers (known asbook jobbers) are almost universal, as they arein Germany. In some countries, of which the USAand Australia are important examples, book salesby mail order represent a significant marketsector, while in others, including the UnitedKingdom, France and Germany, the stock-hold-ing bookshop still remains at the centre of thetrade. The development of online bookshops,such as Amazon, and of online facilities byestablished booksellers is however making sig-nificant, and perhaps fundamental, changes inthis pattern of trade.In all the industrialized countries, mail-order

book clubs have also become a significantsector. The arrangement is that the publisher sellsto the book club either the right to reprint thebook for its members or a large number of copiesfor sale to members at less than the typical retailprice. In the institutional sector (which representsabout one-third of the total market in the UnitedKingdom, and rather less than that elsewhere inthe developed world) specialist library suppli-ers are the intermediaries between book andjournal publishers on the one hand and librarieson the other. All of these channels of supply are,however, variations on a common theme: thepublisher does not normally deal directly withthe consumer, but works through one or moreintermediaries in the wholesale or retail booktrade.Whatever the outlets, it is always the wish of

the publisher to sell as many copies as possible ofeach title at the time of (or better still in advanceof) publication, in order to recoup costs andmove rapidly into profit. Book clubs, wholesalersand library suppliers and contractors are there-fore particularly attractive customers for publish-ers, since, despite the better discounts that theycan demand, they represent mass sales at mini-mum cost. Publishers have the advantage ofdealing almost entirely with their fellow profes-sionals in the book world: booksellers, jobbers,wholesalers and library suppliers. Their market-ing and sales operations can therefore be veryprecisely directed at a well-defined market.The magazine and newspaper industries are

larger and more diverse than book publishing.Newspapers tend to rely on brand loyalty toretain their readership, although they also reg-ularly engage in service enhancements (such asexclusive stories, special offers of products andservices, and so on) to maintain and to boost

their circulations, as well as trying to alignthemselves with the social and political views oftheir target audience. An essentially ephemeralproduct, newspapers are sold through millions ofoutlets around the world in a consumer marketin which impulse buying and irregular buyingcan both have profound effects on sales. Maga-zines are more reliant on regular subscriptions,but the mass-circulation magazines are soldthrough the same retail outlets as newspapersand are similarly vulnerable to shifts in publictaste and perceptions. Both newspapers andmagazines do advertise themselves (particularlyon television), but usually only in special circum-stances. Promotion through shop displays, espe-cially using eye-catching headlines or designs, isprobably more important. Wholesalers play a keyrole in the magazine industry throughout theworld. Indeed, the mass marketing of magazinesis almost entirely dependent on their ability topersuade tens of thousands of small outlets(many of which are very informal sales pointsrather than well-established shops) to take copiesand – crucially – to display them prominently topotential customers. Newspapers are also distrib-uted through wholesalers, although in somecountries (including the USA) newspapers aretypically a regional or even local phenomenonrather than being sold in a wide geographicalarea. Some newspapers, and many magazines,command a global market.For the producers of material for broadcasting

the market is far more limited, for it is domi-nated by a small number of companies andpublic corporations. Even where a wholly com-mercial system operates (most notably the USA)there is not, in the strictest sense, a free market.Licences to broadcast are jealously guarded andsparingly issued by governments, who are tryingsimultaneously (in most cases) to generate diver-sity and to restrict competition; the partly incon-sistent intentions of such policies are to satisfythe interests of a large cross-section of thepotential audience while protecting the invest-ments of the broadcasting and production orga-nizations in their expensive networks andproducts. The result, however, has been thatindependent producers still find themselves be-holden to the very small numbers of nationalbroadcasters (three networks in the USA, fivenational channels in the United Kingdom, forexample) and a slightly larger number of lesspowerful regional broadcasters. The development


of cable and satellite systems has made someinroads into the power of the networks over thewhole broadcasting industry both nationally andglobally. The satellite broadcasters in particularpresent serious challenges (political as well ascultural) to state monopoly broadcasters in Southand Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Theglobal market for programmes (especially thosein English) creates outlets beyond the country oforigin for many programmes, although the ma-jority of these are US and are indeed produced bythe major networks in that country. Indeed, thereis a real fear of cultural homogenization (often aeuphemism for Americanisation) of much of theworld, which is reflected in attempts to sustainbroadcasting in languages other than English andfor minority audiences; this is particularly true inEurope where a number of aspects of europeanunion information policies are directed toprecisely this end.The market for the broadcasters themselves is

the target audience that they must reach in orderto satisfy sponsors and advertisers. This is trueeven of non-commercial broadcasters dependenton public revenue, for they too must satisfy theirultimate paymasters (governments and thus tax-payers) in order to maintain their position.Regulatory regimes partly determine the natureof the commercial relationship between broad-caster and recipient, although they are also moreconcerned with maintaining allegedly desirablestandards of public morality, and in some coun-tries controlling the social and political contentof programmes; quality of output is a factor insome regulatory regimes, but it is, at best,difficult to enforce.In the database industry, marketing and sales

are far more specialized, as might be expectedfrom the nature of the product itself. Typically,the hosts and producers are marketing theirservices to fellow professionals in the library andinformation world with which this sector isindissolubly linked. Despite its massive growth,the sector is probably still producer-led ratherthan market-driven, for there is little real compe-tition in the sense of competing databases thatcan offer the same information to potentialcustomers.

Practice: industry structures

The convergence of information and communica-tions technologies, and the development of new

media and new formats, has inevitably createdoverlap between the infrastructures of superfi-cially distinct parts of the knowledge industries.Moreover, the industries operate globally, and thevery systems that have transformed them arethemselves the principal mechanisms of instanta-neous global communication. It is hardly surpris-ing that the structural evolution in the industryhas been as great as the technical revolution,especially when seen against a background ofWestern governments with an ideological com-mitment to free markets and the collapse ofmany regimes that sought to restrict the flow ofinformation, and the creation of large free-tradeareas between groups of formerly wholly distinctnation states.The essentially international nature of the

knowledge industries is neither new nor, in itself,particularly startling. The printing industry beganits life with the use of an international language –Latin – and aimed its earliest products at aninternational learned elite for whom Latin wasthe common language of scholarly and theologi-cal discourse. The modern equivalent is English,the predominant language of commercial pub-lishing, of television broadcasting and of popularmusic and cinema, and virtually the only lan-guage of computing and telecommunicationssystems. In such a climate, multinational owner-ship of corporations in the industry was perhapsan inevitable development, as was the dominanceof individuals and corporations from the English-speaking countries.Publishing houses have had an international

presence throughout the twentieth century, to goback no further. The major British educationalpublishers established branches throughout thethen British Empire before the First World War.Some of these eventually became independentpublishing houses in their own right, retainingonly the name and the implicit goodwill of theirBritish parent. From 1960 onwards, some of theremaining subsidiaries and branches in Africaand Southeast Asia were indigenized in manage-ment, ownership and operation by the newlyindependent countries in which they were lo-cated. As a result, although some of the famousnames of British publishing remain scatteredthroughout the Commonwealth, there is oftenlittle more than a nominal connection with thefounding firm in Britain.There have always been strong links between

British and US publishing, for obvious linguistic


and cultural reasons, even when relations be-tween the two were not particularly friendly.Since the beginning of the twentieth century therewas a steady influx of US capital into Britishpublishing. At first this was slight and almostcovert, but since about 1970 it has been exten-sive and very explicit. Of four of the mostpowerful corporations in British book publishing(Random House, Hodder Headline, News Cor-poration and Pearson), two are US-dominatedAnglo-American companies, one is of Australianorigin but is run by a man with US citizenshipand is predominantly US in style and presence,and the fourth has substantial US interests. Thesearrangements have significance far beyond theNorth Atlantic. Because English is the predomi-nant language of world publishing, especially insuch key areas as science, technology, medicine,computing and business, the multinational pub-lishers based in London and New York have aglobal dominance of some of the most economic-ally, politically and socially significant, and at thesame time some of the most profitable, areas ofcontemporary book publishing. Constructed onthe firm foundation of US technological andeconomic strength, together with the use of aworld language, Anglo-American publishing in-terests, whether by accident or design, are in-hibiting the development of high-level publishingin much of the rest of the world.This dominance has been sustained by com-

mercial rather than overtly political factors,although it has certainly had, and continues tohave, political consequences. On the whole,however, few attempts have been made either inthe United Kingdom or in the USA to prevent thedevelopment of the multinational publishingcompanies. A more contentious area, which isstill a matter of political debate, is that of cross-ownership between media. News Corporation isthe archetype of the cross-media company. Inaddition to its international publishing interests,News International also owns satellite televisionchannels, television and film production compa-nies and important databases. Its control ofcontent even extends to massive influence on thenature, location and timing of sporting events forwhich it holds global broadcasting rights. Itexemplifies the multinational and internationalnature of the knowledge industries at the begin-ning of the twenty-first century. Some countrieshave made an attempt to legislate in this field. Insome cases, as in the United Kingdom, there has

been an apparently genuine attempt to preventundesirable monopolies being allowed to de-velop; in others, as in France, the equally genuineobjective has been to prevent damage beinginflicted on national traditions by the predomi-nance of the English language and US culture. Inboth cases, success has proven elusive. Thetechnologies have defeated the regulators.It is the convergence of technologies that has

ultimately driven the convergence of ownership.Terrestrial and satellite broadcasting and cabletelevision services are competing for essentiallythe same audience. The concept of the Informa-tion Superhighway is essentially that all thevarious media of communication and informa-tion will be brought together on a single commoncarrier, commercially owned and regulated onlyas a commercial activity. Monopolies will inevi-tably develop, as they are already developing inthe newspaper and television industries, if gov-ernments do not have the desire and the politicalwill to intervene. The monopoly, however, is thatof the common carrier rather than that of theprovider. The network owner (especially ofbroadband networks) who leases ‘time’ and‘space’ to individuals and corporations is thecontroller of the Information Superhighway,which will come to dominate the knowledgeindustries. Delivery of telephone, fax, video,videotex and electronic mail can share the samenetwork with interactive devices for domesticand corporate transactions such as shopping,banking and share-dealing. In all of this, thetransmission of knowledge and understanding isperhaps in danger of being submerged in amorass of undigested information and carefullycontrolled communications. The traditional sec-ondary producers of the knowledge industries,who have been the main focus of this article,already find themselves challenged by a system ofcommunication which facilitates direct contactbetween primary producers – knowledge creators– and consumers – the end-users of knowledge, aform of communication whose most familiarexpression is the world wide web.In this global communications system some of

the traditional providers in the knowledge indus-tries will seem to be very small indeed; this isparticularly true of the book publishers, withwhom it all began. Although there is an impor-tant continuing role for the printed word in theforeseeable future, it will never again be thepredominant form for the mass communication


of ideas. At the same time, there will be indivi-duals, sectors of society and even whole nationswhom the knowledge industry will no longer beable to serve, or whom it will only serve asdistant peripherals of its core market. Those withlimited knowledge of the English language arealready marginalized in business and in science,to name only two areas, and are severely re-stricted in their access to some of the predomi-nant modes of popular entertainment, such as thecinema and popular music. Those with no accessto information technology or with limited skillsin its use are rapidly being deprived of theadvantages of the information revolution. Theknowledge industries are driving the develop-ment of the information society, and are inturn being driven by it, in a vast cycle of changeand development, but they are also becomingmore elitist and more exclusive as their need forhuman and financial capital becomes ever moreinsatiable. These are the challenges that theknowledge industries will face, and may address,in the new millennium.

References

Machlup, F. (1962) The Production and Distribution ofKnowledge, Princeton University Press.

Further reading

Altbach, P.G. (1992) Publishing and Development inthe Third World, Hans Zell.

—— (1987) The Knowledge Context: ComparativePerspectives on the Distribution of Knowledge, StateUniversity Press of New York.

Cronin, B. and Tudor-Silovic, N. (1990) The Knowl-edge Industries: Levers of Economic and SocialDevelopment in the 1990s, ASLIB.

Dyson, K. and Humphreys, P. (1988) Broadcasting andNew Media Policies in Western Europe,

European Commission (1994) Mergers & Acquisitionsin the Electronic Information Industry, Luxembourg(IMO Working Paper, 94/2).

Hartley, J., Noonan, A. and Metcalfe, S. (1987) NewElectronic Information Services: An Overview of theUK Database Industry in an International Context,Gower.

Katz, R.L. (1988) The Information Society: An Inter-national Perspective, Praeger.

Luther, S.F. (1988) The United States and DirectBroadcast Satellite: The Politics of InternationalBroadcasting in Space, Oxford University Press.

—— (1978) Information through the Printed Word, 3vols, Praeger.

Meadows, A.J. (ed.) (1991) Knowledge and Commu-nication. Essays on the Information Chain, LibraryAssociation Publishing.

Negrine, R. and Papathanassopoulos, S. (1990) TheInternationalisation of Television, Pinter.

Rubin, R., Huber, M.T. and Taylor, E.L. (1986) TheKnowledge Industry in the United States: 1960–1980, Princeton University Press.

SEE ALSO: communication; informationprofessions; literacy

JOHN FEATHER

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Basic definition

Knowledge management (KM), simply put, is therecognition that arose in the business communityin the 1990s that knowledge is an importantorganizational asset, a ‘factor of production’ aseconomists would phrase it, in the same categorywith land, labour, capital and energy (Stewart1994; Talero and Gaudette 1995) and by nomeans least important among them. And further,that the effective deployment of that knowledgeis a key factor, perhaps the key factor in the post-industrial economy, in an organization’s effec-tiveness and success (Davis and Botkin 1994).There are scores of definitions of KM. Three

classic ones are presented here. The first byDavenport (1994: 95) that ‘knowledge manage-ment is the process of capturing, distributing,and effectively using knowledge’ is one ofthe earliest and one of the simplest and moststark. The second by the Gartner Group (Duhon1998: 9), that KM is ‘a discipline that promotesan integrated approach to identifying, capturing,evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all ofan enterprise’s information assets. These assetsmay include databases, documents, policies,procedures, and previously uncaptured expertiseand experience in individual workers’ is illumi-nating because it makes very implicit the aspectof KM of including not just conventionalinformation and knowledge units, but also‘tacit knowledge’, that which is known butnot captured in any formal or explicit fashion.The third definition by Ruggles (1998: 80) isthat:

[K]nowledge management is a newly emer-ging, interdisciplinary business model dealingwith all aspects of knowledge within thecontext of the firm, including knowledge crea-tion, codification, sharing, learning, and inno-

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT 351

vation. Some aspects of this process arefacilitated with information technologies, butknowledge management is to a greater degree,about organizational culture and practices.

This is illuminating because it emphasizes an-other very important dimension to KM, theemphasis upon the culture of the organization.

The development of KM

Tracing the evolution of KM is perhaps the moststraightforward mechanism for delineating itscomponents. The use of the term ‘knowledgemanagement’ is a surprisingly recent phenom-enon, developing only in the mid-1990s. It is thecase however that the term appears to have beenused first in the context of library and informa-tion work. Marchand (1985), then Dean of theSchool of Information Studies at Syracuse Uni-versity, coined it in the 1980s as a descriptor forthe final level in his stage hypothesis of infor-mation systems development (Koenig 1992).However, the term as presently used appears tohave been re-coined more or less anonymouslysomewhere in the then big six accountancy andconsulting firms.In somewhat metaphorical and equestrian

terms KM may be described as the intranet outof intellectual capital (Koenig 2001), intellectualcapital representing the awareness that as PeterDrucker put it:

We now know that the source of wealth issomething, specifically human knowledge. Ifwe apply knowledge to tasks that we ob-viously know how to do, we call it productiv-ity. If we apply knowledge to tasks that arenew and different, we call it innovation. Onlyknowledge allows us to achieve those twogoals.

(Hibbard 1997: 46)

The first blush of enthusiasm for intellectualcapital centred on quantifying and measuring it.(Edvinsson 1995, 1997). Surely if it was soimportant, it needed to be measured. As thedifficulty of measuring such an amorphous com-modity as information, much less knowledge,became apparent to the business community theenthusiasm for, or at least the publication ofarticles about intellectual capital, subsided. Thencame the emergence of the internet. The busi-ness world realized that the Internet could beused to link an organization together. This was

the take-off point for KM (Koenig 1996, 1998).KM was first defined as having two components(see Figure 14).

Figure 14 The two components of KM

Information and knowledge capital was ofcourse the organization’s information and knowl-edge, but included the informal and unstructuredas well as the formal.The structural capital was of course the

mechanisms in place to take advantage of theinformation and knowledge capital, the mechan-isms to capture, store, retrieve and communicatethat information and knowledge.Applications of Internet technology were soon

extended beyond intranets – the use of theInternet within an organization – to extranetsthat would still be private, but were used toconnect an organization with its suppliers andcustomers. The consequence of this developmentwas an expanded definition of KM to include thecustomer’s knowledge and input, customer capi-tal (see Figure 15).

Figure 15 Expanded definition of KM

The inclusion of customer capital was also notunrelated to the popularity of TQM, or TotalQuality Management, in which responding tocustomer need and demand was a key element.Concurrent with intellectual capital, and very

much reinforcing it, was the notion of the‘balanced score card’ (Kaplan and Norton1992). The idea here was that traditional finan-

352 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

cial reporting was too narrow in its outlook, andthat in particular it focused only on the presentand the past, with no thought to the future. Itwas argued that there should be instead a‘balanced score card’ that included the traditionalfinancial measures, but which also measuredother things such as comparative product quality,customer satisfaction and turnover, things thatwere more indicative of current performance andbetter indicators of likely future performance. Bytraditional financial indicators, if the currentbalance sheet looks good, but for examplecustomers have begun to defect to the competi-tion, there is nothing to reveal that the situationis in fact not healthy. The idea of the balancedscore card is intended to resolve that anomaly.Intellectual capital is of course one of the obviousitems that should be included in the balancedscorecard.

Another version of the KM trinity is fromIBM (Prusak 1998). It is very similar to thegraphic shown in Figure 16, with the ‘customercapital’ component replaced by ‘social capital’.It is now assumed that customer capital isincluded in all of the above, the infrastructureextended to include the customer, the knowledgeresources including the customer, and the socialcapital embracing the relationships not justwithin the organization, but also with thecustomer (and the supplier to whom one is acustomer) as well.

The concept of knowledge management con-tinued to expand, most particularly by incorpor-ating the notion of ‘the learning organization’.Senge’s The Fifth Discipline, the Art and Practiceof the Learning Organizationin appeared in1990 and had established something of a cultfollowing, but had not made a major impactin the business world. However, it meshedperfectly with knowledge management. The the-

sis of the learning organization is that whatultimately creates and distinguishes a successfulorganization is its success in creating and sharinginformation and knowledge, in short its successat learning. The obvious corollary is that tobe successful, an organization must create aculture that fosters learning. One can say,to summarize perhaps too briefly, that the con-cept of the learning organization focuses onthe creation of knowledge, while knowledgemanagement, as it was originally construed,focuses on the acquisition, structuring, retentionand dissemination of that knowledge. What thenhappened to KM is that the term was expandedto include the concept of the learning organiza-tion.Most recently (Fishkin 2001) KM is described

as a structure supported now by five columns,i.e. with five major constituents (see Figure 17).We can reflect briefly for a moment on

whether the Parthenon-like image of the struc-ture is an unintended homage to KM as the latesttemple to which the consultants lead the faithful.

KM themes and applications

Having sketched the definition and the evolutionof KM, the domain can be fleshed out and to adegree mapped by briefly discussing some of themajor themes running through what the businesscommunity understands as KM, and the applica-tions that derive from those themes.

COMMUNITIES AND COLLABORATION

‘Silo’ is perhaps the most common buzzword inKM, as in ‘How do you integrate the silos?’ Silohere is a metaphor for the unit, which is too self-contained, into which stuff gets dumped andtaken out of, but which has little or no commu-nication with the other silos (products, regions,divisions, units, etc.) that constitute the organiza-

Figure 16 Another version of KM


tion. The solution to the silo problem is to createcommunities, the common generic phrase being‘community of learning’. The most obviousreason of course is to foster collaboration andincrease efficiency. Jerry Jenkins, the formerpresident of Texas Instruments, famously re-marked, ‘if Texas Instruments knew what TexasInstruments knew, we would be twice as produc-tive’ (O’Dell and Grayson 2000: 1). In part theemphasis on silos is a reaction against theexcesses of business process re-engineering. Thesilos are, if you will, what was left after businessprocess re-engineering removed much of middlemanagement and flattened the organization. Thatmiddle-management component had providedmuch of the connective tissue of the organiza-tion, providing the communication channels thatkept the units from becoming silos. KM is nowseen as the repair mechanism for the tears in theorganization’s communications fabric induced bybusiness process re-engineering.

Most of the concrete applications of KMdescribed to date consist of creating and support-ing communities of shared subject interest andinformation need. These communities might bethe sales representatives of a pharmaceuticalcompany, or those persons at the World Bankand among their clients, who are interested inroad transport and logistics. In some cases, as inthe former, the community already to a degreeexists formally and hierarchically or, as in thelatter, it exists informally and horizontally. At theWorld Bank, for example, there are now someseventy ‘knowledge areas’ grouped into fifteenlarge sectors; at IBM there are more than 100‘competency networks’. The best-known exampleof such community creation is probably BritishPetroleum’s response teams, whereby expertsfrom around the world can be ‘virtually as-sembled to address a problem’ (Prokesch 1997:152).

Figure 17 Five major constituents of KM


TACIT KNOWLEDGE

Tacit knowledge is now the KM term typicallyused to describe the knowledge that is in people’sheads or in their own files, as distinguished fromexplicit knowledge that exists in documents ordatabases. Current KM thinking is focused onestablishing the structure and climate to enableand encourage those who have knowledge toshare it. There is close to no mention of captur-ing that knowledge, particularly in the nowrather tarnished sense of artificial intelli-gence (AI) and the ‘knowledge engineer’.From this there have emerged two principal

application areas. The first, and simplest, is thecreation of organization-wide ‘who knows what’directions, referred to in the KM field as ‘yellowpages’. The second is the creation of ‘bestpractices’ or in the newer and more politic phrase‘lessons learned’ databases. The intent is toestablish systems that enable and encourageemployees to submit a ‘best practices’ or ‘lessonslearned’ description of how they accomplishsomething so that others can use it. The informa-tion may be screened and edited before it goes onthe systems (particularly, for example, in phar-maceutical companies that are subject to Foodand Drug Administration approval concerningwhat they may say about a therapeutic agent),but the knowledge typically is input by the user.A recent phenomenon however is the creation

of ‘after-action teams’ to interview operationalpersonnel and capture their knowledge and in-sights for input into a lessons learned system.This is done not to write knowledge algorithmsas in AI systems, but simply to make it easy forthe user to contribute. Writing a ‘lesson learned’is difficult and much too easy and tempting topush down on the priority list, while beinginterviewed is both enjoyable and difficult todefer.One frustrating problem is that while KM puts

great emphasis upon tacit knowledge (Hibbard1997; Kleiner and Ruth 1997; Liedtka et al.1997; Davenport 1998; Duhon 1998), there isvery little reported upon in the literature that isconcrete. A good system to capture and exploittacit knowledge is inevitably rather specific to theculture and context of that organization and it isalso a significant competitive advantage, notsomething that the organization wishes to bemade public. The two most useful discussionsare by Davenport (1998), who focuses on custo-mers’ knowledge, and by Kleiner and Ruth

(1997), who describe a process they call alearning history, a form of after-action reportingto capture important project-related tacit knowl-edge within the organization. Despite the paucityof concrete reports, tacit knowledge is heavilyemphasized in the KM literature. Paying insuffi-cient attention to tacit knowledge is (see below)Fahey and Prusak’s (1998) deadly sin numberfive.

INCENTIVES AND REWARDS

Effective knowledge sharing requires rewardingthose who input information into the system andcontribute something useful. Otherwise, whatmotivation do employees have to contributeinformation that will, for example, improve theperformance of other sales representatives rela-tive to their own, thereby decreasing their ownyear-end bonus? Changing compensation andincentive systems however is not something thatorganizations do readily, or lightly; it is anundertaking fraught with peril and with unin-tended and often unfortunate consequences. Afrequent complaint among knowledge manage-ment system implementers is how slow anddifficult it is to get top management to makesuch changes. One aphorism heard in KM circlesis that you know you really have a KM culturewhen the organization’s compensation schemehas been changed to reflect KM.

CUSTOMER KNOWLEDGE

A pervasive theme in business discussion of KMis the importance of including the customer inthe scope of KM systems so as to incorporate andleverage this expertise. This is considered key fora number of reasons:

. Customer commitment and loyalty.

. Early warning and competitive intelligence.

. Better and more timely design of new productsand services.

. The synergy of collaboration.

The emphasis here is upon the exchange ofknowledge, ideas and opinions, for example, notmerely the transaction data currently exchangedwith just-in-time inventory or supply chain man-agement systems.

Another dimension is the use of informationabout customers for CRM, or Customer Rela-tionship Management. How do you acquire and


use information about your customers to estab-lish a long-lasting and profitable relationship?

Top management support and agents ofchange

Another major theme is that KM is about awhole new way of operating, indeed the trans-formation of the organization. As such, it re-quires knowledge management professionals tobe change agents, which in turn requires topmanagement support. Better yet is the directinvolvement of top management if the effort isto be successful.Knowledge sharing is of the essence in KM,

but knowledge sharing is to a large degree not anatural act. The encouragement of knowledgesharing requires reward, ideally both monetaryand psychic, trust and a supportive corporateculture. This in turn requires examining thatcorporate culture and changing it where neces-sary. An excellent discussion is contained inDavenport and Prusak’s book Working Knowl-edge (1998).

Formulae for failure and success

One of the best techniques to get a feel for thenature of KM is to examine the ‘perils andpitfalls’ and ‘golden rules’ class of articles thatcaution the practitioner about what not to doand what to be sure to do. KM already hasseveral excellent articles in this genre. Fahey andPrusak delineate the eleven deadliest sins ofknowledge management:

. Not developing a working definition of knowl-edge.

. Emphasizing knowledge stock to the detrimentof knowledge flow.

. Viewing knowledge as existing predominantlyoutside the heads of individuals.

. Not understanding that a fundamental inter-mediate purpose of management knowledge isto create shared context.

. Paying little heed to the role and importanceof tacit knowledge.

. Disentangling knowledge for its uses.

. Downplaying thinking and reasoning.

. Focusing on the past and the present and notthe future.

. Failing to recognize the importance of experi-mentation.

. Substituting technological contact for human

interface.. Seeking to develop direct measures of knowl-edge.

Davenport (1997) similarly lists seven ‘knownevils’:

. If we build it. . ..

. Let’s put the personnel manual online!

. None dare call it knowledge.

. Every man a knowledge manager.

. Justification by faith.

. Restricted access.

. Bottoms up!

In a later and influential article, Davenport et al.(1998) examine successful knowledge manage-ment projects and argue that they tend to haveeight factors in common:

. Link to economic performance or industryvalue.

. Technical and organization infrastructure.

. Standard flexible knowledge structure.

. Knowledge-friendly culture.

. Clear purpose and language.

. Change in motivational practices.

. Multiple channels for knowledge transfer.

. Senior management support.

Careful perusal of these three articles is stronglyrecommended for anyone interested in KM. Thenames of the errors and success factors above areoften cryptic and somewhat metaphoric, andreading them in context is essential.

KM versus traditional informationmanagement

Another useful way to define KM is to compareit with traditional library and information work.The view is often expressed in traditional libraryand information science circles that KM is justold wine in new bottles, just the new name forinformation resources management, which inturn was just a new name for documentation,which in turn was just a new name for librar-ianship. There are however some real differencesin emphasis, and those key differences are laidout in Table 16.Two important pieces about KM written from

the perspective of the traditional informationcommunity are Srikantaiah and Koenig’s bookKnowledge Management for the Information


Professional (2000) and Broadbent’s article ‘Thephenomenon of knowledge management: Whatdoes it mean to the library profession?’ (1998).

A map of the domain of KM

Another approach to defining KM is to attemptto map it. Figure 18 is a somewhat expandedgraphic used by IBM in their KM consultancy tohelp explain to potential clients what KM is andwhat the consultancy has to offer.A final way to view KM is to observe that KM

is the movement to replicate the informationenvironment known to be conducive to successfulR&D – rich, deep and open communication andinformation access – and deploy it broadly acrossthe firm.Given that in this post-industrial or informa-

tion age, an increasingly larger proportion ofthe population consists of information workers,and that researchers are the quintessential in-formation workers, and that the community hasbeen studied in depth (Goldhar et al. 1976;Allen 1977; Orpen 1985; Koenig 1990, 1992,2001; Mondschein 1990) with a substantialaccumulation of knowledge about what charac-terizes the environment conducive to successfulresearch, this is a very logical development. The

great irony is that there is little evidence thatthis body of knowledge had any direct impacton the development of KM, a classic example ofthe silo phenomenon. KM appears to havedeveloped in the business community quiteindependently of any knowledge of the body ofresearch about research effectiveness. Nonethe-less, this definition of KM may ultimately proveto be the most straightforward and the mostilluminating.

References

Allen, T. (1977) Managing the Flow of Technology:Technology Transfer and the Dissemination of Tech-nological Information within the R&D Organiza-tion, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Broadbent, M. (1998) ‘The phenomenon of knowledgemanagement: What does it mean to the libraryprofession?’, Information Outlook 2(5): 23–36.

Davenport, T.H. (1998) ‘Managing customer knowl-edge’, CIO 11(15): 32–4.

—— (1997) ‘Known evils: Seven fallacies that canhamper development of knowledge management ina company’, CIO 10(17): 34–6.

—— (1994) ‘Coming soon: The CKO’, InformationWeek 491: 95.

Davenport, T.H. and Prusak, L. (1998) WorkingKnowledge: How Organizations Manage WhatThey Know, Woborn, MA: Harvard Business SchoolPress.

Knowledge management Traditional library and information work

. The addition of and in many cases anemphasis on unstructured and informalinformation/knowledge

. Emphasis upon (indeed a limitation to)structured and formal information/knowledge

. Emphasis on internal information and, now,increasingly external information, but oftenexternal information that resides with supplierand customers, not in the open literature

. Emphasis on information, external to theorganization, the ‘literature’

. An active role in corporate culturetransformation and change agentry

. Neutrality within the organization

. Information and knowledge sharing, in thecontext of a dense web structure

. Information and knowledge delivery, as a hub(library) and spoke structure

. A loose unformed poorly developed apprecia-tion for information/knowledge structuring

. Syndetic structures, information structuring,taxonomies, cataloguing, classification,. . .

. Knowledge of the context, organization,sectoral (industry) supplier, customer

. Growing contextual knowledge, but not wellrecognized within the organization

. An awareness of knowledge as text, butcoming from a background in non-textualinformation

. Information primarily as text, secondarily asnumerical or graphic

. Linking knowledge-sharing withcompensation policy

. Has never been involved with compensationpolicy

Table 16 Differences in emphasis between KM and traditional library and information work


Davenport, T.H. et al. (1998) ‘Successful knowledgemanagement projects’, Sloan Management Review39(1): 43–57.

Davis, S. and Botkin, J. (1994) ‘The coming of knowl-edge-based business’, Harvard Business Review 72(5)(September/October): 165–70.

Duhon, B. (1998) ‘It’s all in our heads’, Inform 12(8):9–13.

Edvinsson, L. (1997) ‘Developing intellectual capital atSkandia’, Long Range Planning 30(3): 366–73.

—— (1995) ‘Visualizing intellectual capital in Skandia’,in Skandia’s 1994 Annual Report, Stockholm: Skan-dia AFS.

Fahey, L. and Prusak, L. (1998) ‘The eleven deadliestsins of knowledge management’, California Manage-ment Review 40(3): 265–76.

Fishkin, J. (2001) ‘KM and OL from an IT perspective’,a presentation to the 2001 Conference Boardconference: The 2001 Knowledge Management/Organizational Learning Conference: Convergence,

Application, and Infrastructure, 3–4 May, New YorkCity.

Goldhar, J.D. et al. (1976) ‘Information flows, manage-ment styles and technical innovation’, IEEE Transac-tions on Engineering Management (February) EM-23(1): 51–61.

Hibbard, J. (1997) ‘Knowing what we know’, Informa-tion Week (20 October): 46–64.

Kaplan, R.S. and Norton, D.P. (1992) ‘The balancedscorecard – Measures that drive performance’, Har-vard Business Review 70(1): 71–91.

Kleiner, A. and R.G. (1997) ‘How to make experienceyour company’s best teacher’, Harvard Business Re-view 75(5): 172–7.

Koenig, M.E.D. (2001) ‘Lessons from the study ofscholarly communications for the new informationera’, Scientometrics 51(3): 511–28.

—— (2000) ‘The evolution of knowledge management’(Chapter 3), in T.K. Srikantaiah and M.E.D. Koenig,Knowledge Management for the Information Profes-

Figure 18 Domains of knowledge management strategyNote: The dashed lines are intended to indicate that the boundaries are porous and overlapping


sional, Medford, NJ: Information Today for theAmerican Society for Information Science, pp. 23–36.

—— (1998) ‘From intellectual capital to knowledgemanagement: What are they talking about?’, IN-SPEL 32(4): 222–33.

—— (1996) ‘Intellectual capital and knowledge man-agement’, IFLA Journal 22(4): 299–301.

—— (1992) ‘The information environment and theproductivity of research’, in H. Collier (ed.) RecentAdvances in Chemical Information, London: RoyalSociety of Chemistry, pp. 133–43, reprinted in‘Information culture and business performance’, In-formation Strategy Report 2, prepared for the BritishLibrary by Hertis Information And Research, 1995.

—— (1990) ‘Information services and downstreamproductivity’, in M.E. Williams (ed.) Annual Reviewof Information Science and Technology 25, NewYork: Elsevier Science Publishers, for the AmericanSociety for Information Science, pp. 55–86.

Liedtka, J.M. et al. (1997) ‘The generative cycle:Linking knowledge and relationships’, Sloan Man-agement Review 39(1): 47–59.

Marchand, D.A. (1985) ‘Information management:Strategies and tools in transition’, Information Man-agement Review 1(1): 27–37.

Mondschein, L.G. (1990) ‘SDI use and productivity inthe corporate research environment’, Special Li-braries 81(4) (fall): 265–79.

O’Dell, C. and Grayson, C.J. (2000) ‘If only we knewwhat we know: The transfer of internal knowledgeand best practice’, Houston, TX: American Produc-tivity and Quality Center.

Orpen, C. (1985) ‘The effect of managerial distributionor scientific and technical information on companyperformance’, R&D Management 15(4) (October):305–8.

Prokesch, S.E. (1997) ‘Unleashing the power of learn-ing: An interview with British Petroleum’s JohnBrowne’, Harvard Business Review (September–October): 146–8.

Prusak, L. (1998) ‘Managing Principal, IBM GlobalServices, Consulting Group presentation to the Con-ference Board’, paper presented at the 1998 Con-ference on Knowledge Management andOrganizational Learning, Chicago, 16 April.

Ruggles, R. (1998) ‘The state of the nation: Knowledgemanagement in practice’, California ManagementReview 40 (spring): 80–9.

Senge, P.M. (1990) The Fifth Discipline: The Art andPractice of the Learning Organization, New York:Doubleday/Currency.

Srikantaiah, T.K. and Koenig, M.E.D. (eds) (2000)Knowledge Management for the Information Profes-sional, Medford, NJ: Information Today for theAmerican Society for Information Science.

Stewart, T. (1994) ‘Your company’s most valuableasset: Intellectual capital’, Fortune (3 October): 68–74.

Talero, E. and Gaudette, P. (1995) Harnessing Infor-mation for Development: World Bank GroupVision and Strategy, Washington, DC: World Bank.

Further reading

Koenig, M.E.D. (1992) ‘Entering stage III – Theconvergence of the stage hypotheses’, Journal of theAmerican Society for Information Science 43(3):204–7.

Marchand, L.A. (1983) ‘Strategies and tools in transi-tion’, Business and Economic Review 29(5) (June):4–8.

Prusak, L. (1999) ‘Where did knowledge managementcome from?’, Knowledge Management 1(1) (fall):90–6.

SEE ALSO: information management;information professions; information society;organizational information policies

MICHAEL R. KOENIG

KUHN, THOMAS S. (1922–96)

Originator of a theory of scientific change thatconflicted directly with the accepted view thatscientists built on the discoveries of their pre-decessors in a rational sequence of development.Kuhn’s perception, that change came from scien-tific revolutions in which ‘normal science’ wassubverted by a new paradigm, permitted acritical view of scholarly communicationthat naturally influenced information theory.Born in Cincinnati, USA, he graduated in

physics from Harvard in 1943 and, after warservice in a civilian capacity, went on to obtain hisMaster’s and Doctoral degrees in physics, alsofrom Harvard. He taught at Harvard (1948–56),followed by the University of California at Berke-ley, where he became Professor of the History ofScience in 1961. He subsequently taught atPrinceton and MIT, and received the GeorgeSarton Medal in the History of Science in 1982.The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, origin-

ally published as a contribution to an encyclope-dia before it appeared as a monograph in 1962,was a scientific bestseller that was widely influ-ential in changing the popular view of science. Init Kuhn argued that scientists generally pursuedfundamentally conservative research programmesin the context of some governing paradigm suchas Newtonian physics, the phlogiston theory ofgases or creationist views of the origins of lifeforms. Change only comes when the governingparadigm can no longer satisfactorily account fornew research, but the process of change meetswith determined resistance that is only over-turned by a revolution led by someone equivalentto Einstein, Lavoisier or Darwin. In the process,

KUHN, THOMAS S. 359

views on the validity of swathes of the literature,the reputations of individuals and institutions,and the philosophical orientation of whole dis-ciplines require reassessment.

Further reading

Sardar, Z. (2000) Thomas Kuhn and the Science Wars,Totem Books.

360 KUHN, THOMAS S.

L

LANCASTER, F. WILFRID (1933–)

Library educator and specialist in informationsystems and the evaluation of library serviceswhose name is inextricably associated with theconcept of the paperless society.Born in Durham, England, he studied at

Newcastle School of Librarianship from 1950to 1954 and began his professional career inNewcastle Public Libraries. His later career wasin the USA, from 1970 on the faculty of theUniversity of Illinois Graduate School of LibraryScience.His major contributions have been principally

concerned with the underlying intellectual pro-blems and conceptual frameworks of informationretrieval systems. He has worked on vocabularycontrol, interaction between system and user,evaluation of systems effectiveness and, in hislater work, the implications of advanced infor-mation systems for the future of libraries insociety. He is probably best known through thetitle of his 1978 book Towards a PaperlessInformation Society but his bibliography is ex-tensive. He has also made a major contributionto the development of criteria and procedures forthe evaluation of systems performance, mainlythrough the extension, refinement and applica-tion of concepts pioneered by the CranfieldStudies carried out in the late 1950s under thedirection of C.W. Cleverdon at the College ofAeronautics, Cranfield, UK.


LAW LIBRARIES

A law library may be an autonomous library

building housing a distinctive collection of legalinformation, or a department within a largerlibrary. In size and scope, law libraries varyfrom a short run of shelves in a small law firm toan important historic collection in a nationallibrary (see national libraries) or a universitylibrary (see university libraries). The users oflaw libraries include law students, legal aca-demics, practising lawyers, the judiciary and thegeneral public. Access to many law libraries isrestricted to members of the institution or firm,but public libraries usually offer a goodcollection of legal materials in the central libraryfor the region.

Types of law library

The scope of the law collection and the servicesoffered by the law library depend very much onthe aims of the host organization. Academic lawlibraries exist primarily to support the teachingand research of the university or college. The lawlibrary can be a separate collection in its ownbuilding, or form part of a broader socialsciences collection in the academic library. Typi-cally, academic law libraries hold a comprehen-sive collection of legislation, case law, legaltextbooks and academic law journals, supple-mented by access to electronic legal databases.Law firm libraries vary in size according to thenumber of lawyers in the firm, and will provide acore collection of primary legal materials, currentpractitioners’ manuals and texts, professionaljournals and access to electronic databases,geared to the interests of the firm. The librariesof professional societies such as the Law Societyof England and Wales are only open to members,and are often large historic collections that also

offer a range of information services. Courtlibraries are used by judges and lawyers whoappear in the courts. There are a few lawlibraries in large businesses and industries thatemploy their own legal team. Public libraries inthe United Kingdom usually hold a core collec-tion of legislation, some case law, selected legaltextbooks and a few law journals. In othercountries, there may be dedicated law librariesopen to the public, which provide more extensiveservices. The availability of free legal informationon the Internet is increasing, which is improvingaccess to this type of information for members ofthe public.

Organization

Law libraries tend to be organized rather differ-ently from other libraries because of the cate-gories of specialist information they hold. Somelibraries group all primary and secondary legalmaterials by jurisdiction, while others arrangelegislation, case reports, journals and books inseparate sequences. Law collections within alarger library often use the cataloguing andclassification schemes selected by the parentorganisation, such as the Dewey Decimal orLibrary of Congress Classification schemes, whilesmaller independent libraries may use a home-grown scheme designed for a specific collection.The Moys classification scheme (Moys 2001)was designed specifically for legal materials andis used by a range of law libraries in differentcountries.

Law librarians

Law librarianship is recognized as a specialistbranch of the library and information profession.Training in the professional use of legal materialsis normally introduced as part of a generallibrary and information science course, thoughthere are some specialist courses in law librarian-ship. Most law librarians in the United Kingdomcomplete a general library qualification, and thenreceive specific training in law and legal materi-als in their first posts, although some choose tocomplete a law degree. In other countries such asthe USA a legal qualification is a requirement tobe a professional law librarian. Law librariansare normally responsible for the selection, pur-chasing and management of stock in the lawlibrary, and training users in the use of legalmaterials. One of the most challenging aspects of

the law librarian’s job is developing the ability toanswer enquiries by locating information in avery wide range of information sources, fromcase reports several hundred years’ old, to thenewest information appearing each day as thelaw changes. A general awareness of legal sys-tems and current affairs is essential, and usuallygained through experience on the job. Dependingon the size of the library, law librarians may alsorequire specific training and qualifications inmanagement, finance and information technol-ogy. National associations of law librarians, suchas the British and Irish Association of LawLibrarians (BIALL), run training and develop-ment courses on the use of legal materials andother professional issues, provide a network ofcontacts and can supply information on how tobecome a law librarian.

Law libraries vs information centres

Law libraries, particularly in law firms, haveevolved considerably over the last twenty years.The growth in electronic sources of information,in particular, means that those in charge of legalinformation collections may also be responsiblefor managing aspects of information technologywithin the firm or institution. Many legal infor-mation professionals work as part of a team thatincludes lawyers, IT specialists, marketing profes-sionals and support staff. Some job titles havechanged from law librarian to information man-ager to reflect the change in emphasis. As well astraditional information-handling skills, legal in-formation professionals may require skills inknowledge management, personnel issues,budgeting, strategic planning and negotiation ofcontracts. In recent years there has been a trend,both in law firms and in academic libraries, tomerge the library with the IT service to providean integrated information service. This is inresponse to demands from library users forinformation delivered electronically, direct to thedesktop. While the traditional law library withits imposing ranks of leather-bound volumes andquiet study areas still exists, the modern lawlibrary is likely to offer rapid and regular deliveryof the latest information in a variety of formatstailored to suit the individual needs of the users.

References

Moys, E.M. (2001) Moys Classification and Thesaurusfor Legal Materials, 4th edn, Bowker Saur.

362 LAW LIBRARIES

Further reading

BIALL website (http://www.biall.org.uk).Moys, E.M. (ed.) (1987) Manual of Law Librarianship:The Use and Organization of Legal Literature, 2nd

edn, Gower.

VALERIE STEVENSON

LEGAL DEPOSIT

A system under which certain libraries areentitled by law to receive one or more copies ofevery book or other publication that is printed orpublished in a particular jurisdiction. It is alsocalled copyright deposit, and indeed in somecases copyright is only established when theprocess of deposit is complete. Arrangementsvary from country to country, but typically thenational library (see national libraries) is theprincipal recipient of deposit copies. Many coun-tries, however, have more than one library that isentitled to receive a deposit copy of any or everybook published in the country. In the UnitedKingdom, publishers are obliged to deliver acopy of each book to the british library andalso, if requested, to send a copy to the BodleianLibrary, Oxford; the University Library, Cam-bridge; the National Library of Scotland, Edin-burgh; and the National Library of Wales,Aberystwyth. In the USA, the library of con-gress is entitled to receive two copies of everyitem. In some countries, especially in centraland eastern europe, legal deposit extends to asignificant number of university and public li-braries.

The scope of materials that must be depositedalso varies. It always includes books, periodicalsand newspapers. In some jurisdictions, however,even some ephemera are subject to deposit laws.multimedia formats are more problematic.Audiovisual products, including commercialsound recordings and commercially producedfilm and video are subject to the law, but this iscomparatively unusual. A major current issue isthat of the deposit of digital products, not leastin terms of how such products can be sensiblypreserved and made available to users in thefuture.

Further reading

Jasion, J.T. (1991). The International Guide to LegalDeposit, Ashgate.

Larivière, J. (2000) Guidelines for Legal DepositLegislation, UNESCO.

SEE ALSO: copyright; information law;information policy

LEGAL INFORMATION

Writing about the challenges facing the practiceof law at the end of the twentieth century,Susskind (1996) identified a spectrum of legalinformation with formal sources of law such aslegislation and case law at one end and humanlegal experts dispensing legal advice at the other.

In its broadest sense, legal information com-prises all official statements of law together withinterpretations and commentaries. Formalsources of legal information may be specific to anational jurisdiction, to an international jurisdic-tion or system or to a special non-geographicjurisdiction such as Islamic or Roman law.

Primary and secondary sources

A distinction is drawn between primary andsecondary sources of law. Primary sources(broadly equivalent to formal law) include legis-lation and case law. Legislation includes statutesand enactments of parliamentary, executive andadministrative bodies that confer rights or im-pose binding duties or liabilities. Case lawincludes judgments of courts and decisions oftribunals and other recognised judicial or quasi-judicial bodies. Primary sources of law providethe fundamental material for legal research.Secondary sources include interpretations, com-mentaries, texts, serials and monographs, gui-dance notes and other explanatory material.

Legal systems

The legal system of any jurisdiction is relevantto the sourcing of legal information. There aretwo main types of legal system: the civil lawsystem derived either from Roman law throughthe French Code Napoleon or the GermanBurgelisches Gesetzbuch; and the common lawsystem developed from the common law ofEngland. In general, civil law systems presentprimary law in a consolidated and codifiedmanner. Common law systems are less struc-tured and also depend heavily on judicial inter-pretation of the law.

LEGAL INFORMATION 363

Legislation

Legislation in a given area may be sourced froma number of different levels. For example, sta-tutes and enactments may require or result insecondary measures in the form of further moredetailed technical regulations or rules. These maybe further supplemented by official guidancenotes or statements of practice on the applicationof the relevant law.

Case law

In all legal systems, case law (i.e. decisions ofcourts or tribunals) provides an important sourceof legal information. As well as providing ajudicial or quasi-judicial decision on the facts ofthe case, case law (particularly in common lawjurisdictions) may interpret, clarify or defineaspects of legislation relevant to the case.

Legal texts

Learned and authoritative texts provide detailedcommentary on primary source law and may becited in judicial decisions. In themselves, they arealso vital in providing explanatory overviews andanalysis of particular subject matter, and in cross-referencing further sources of material.

Law reports and digests

Law reports comprise collected and cross-refer-enced sources of case law. They will usuallycontain a head note or summary of the relevantcase or decision, together with citations andreferences to other relevant cases or legislation.Law digests contain summaries of case law on asubject or jurisdictional basis.

Commentaries

Commentaries include official background andbriefing documents (‘grey paper’) together withserials and monographs. Serials in the form ofacademic journals and legal periodicals are asubstantial source of legal current awareness.

International dimension

Primary source materials within an internationaldimension include international treaties andconventions and transnational legislation ofbodies such as the European Union. Case lawof international courts and bodies has had anincreasingly significant impact on the decisions

of courts at national level. In addition, courts ina common law jurisdiction system will considerrelevant decisions from courts in other commonlaw jurisdictions when deciding on casesbrought before them.

Electronic sources

The development of legal information manage-ment as a recognised discipline has both broa-dened and challenged the boundaries oftraditional law librarianship. The growth ofelectronic sources of law has made substantialamounts of primary and secondary source mate-rial more easily available to end-users. The use ofsophisticated search engines enables users tolocate and retrieve legal information from onlineand other electronic sources. This developmentraises various issues about the efficiency ofinformation retrieval, the relevance of retrievedmaterial and the future role of the legal informa-tion professional. Substantial amounts of inter-national and national materials are now freelyavailable online or on a subscription basis from arange of recognized international legal informa-tion providers. The growth in the availability oflegal materials online has led to the developmentof a number of significant legal Web portals (seeportals and gateways).

Legal know-how

Many bodies, particularly in the commercialsector, now invest heavily in the attention andmanagement of legal know-how. Know-howcomprises any materials generated internally thatmay be of subsequent use to the organization.These would include legal commentaries, seminarpapers, correspondence, opinions and other inter-pretations of law. In recent years within the legalsector, there has been a growth in the develop-ment of knowledge management that seeks tostructure and retain both tacit and implicitknowledge held within an organization. Thus,legal information, through knowledge manage-ment, would also include the experience, skillsand retained information at a personal level bymembers of the organization relevant to thepractice and interpretation of law.

References

Susskind, R. (1996) The Future of Law, Oxford:Clarendon Press.

364 LEGAL INFORMATION

Further reading

Campbell, E., York, L.P. and Tooher, J. (eds) (1996)Legal Research: Materials and Methods, 4th edn,Lawbook Co.

Doyle, F.R. (1999) Searching the Law – The States, 3rd

edn, Transnational Publishers Inc.Germain, C. (2000) Germain’s Transnational LawResearch: A Guide for Attorneys, TransnationalPublishers.

Moys, E.M. and Winterton, J. (eds) (1997) InformationSources in Law, 2nd edn, Bowker Saur.

Olson, K. (1998) Legal Information: How to Find Itand How to Use It, Oryx Press.

Twining, W. (1994) Legal Records in the Common-wealth, Dartmouth.

Selected legal Web portals

Australian Legal Information Institute (1995) (http://www.austlii.edu.au).

British and Irish Legal Information Institute (2000)(http://www.bailii.org).

Findlaw (1994) US Materials (http://www.findlaw.-com).

Hieros Gamos Web Portal (1985) International Materi-als (http://www.hg.org).

SEE ALSO: knowledge management; law libraries

JOHN FURLONG

LEIBNIZ, GOTTFRIED WILHELM(1646–1716)

Philosopher and librarian who developed impor-tant ideas and techniques for information scienceand librarianship.Born in Leipzig, Leibniz entered the University

of Leipzig at the age of fifteen. After his studieswere completed he spent four years in Paris,where he was able to learn about the importantlibraries of the city. He then accepted a positionas Counsellor and Librarian at the court ofBrunswick-Luneburg at Hanover and in 1690was also appointed Librarian of the DucalLibrary at Wolfenbuttel. In Hanover and Wolfen-buttel he improved the catalogues, oversaw theconstruction of buildings, designed classificationschemes and promoted the abstracting and in-dexing of scientific literature. He was an advo-cate of the concept of a universal library thatwould contain all the recorded ideas of mankind.In addition to his contributions to librarian-

ship, Leibniz provided important ideas and tech-niques for information science. He developed thebinary arithmetic now generally employed indigital computers. He also provided seminal

ideas for cybernetics. He had plans for con-structing a ‘combining analytical machine’ thatcould also handle logical operations involvingalphabetical symbols.

LENDING LIBRARIES

Libraries that allow users to take books andother materials away, for the purpose of consult-ing and reading them at home or in anotherplace. The concept is a comparatively recent one.Until the latter half of the nineteenth century,books were too scarce and valuable to beallowed out of the environments of libraries.Librarians saw themselves primarily as custo-dians of the collections placed in their charge,and, even when books were made available forloan, borrowers were subject to stringent testsand rigorous supervision. Some monastic li-braries (see monastic library) of the MiddleAges did divide their manuscripts into those thatcould be loaned and those which remained in thelibrary. The Vatican Library invoked the ultimatepenalty of excommunication for the non-returnof books, although there is no evidence to sayhow successful this measure was. Some of theCambridge and Oxford colleges also loanedmanuscripts for ‘home reading’, but again therestrictions were formidable.The caution of these early years is under-

standable given the unique and precious natureof manuscripts, which made every loan a possibleloss to posterity. Even the invention of printingdid not significantly change attitudes, as printruns remained small and laborious. The restric-tions of educational opportunities for most peo-ple also meant that the demand for books wasvery limited.It was only with the increase of education,

coupled with the invention of powered rotarypresses in the nineteenth century, that booksbecame cheap and numerous enough to allowlibraries to relax their restrictions on lending.subscription libraries had existed a centurybefore then but reached their peak at this time.This was mainly a lending service, often throughthe post, for the increasingly wealthy middleclasses, who could afford the subscriptions re-quired.Churches, voluntary societies and trade unions

attempted to cater for the reading needs ofthe skilled working class by establishing small

LENDING LIBRARIES 365

collections of books that were lent out to mem-bers, but it was only with the development ofpublic libraries in the latter half of the centurythat lending libraries reached a mass public. Evenso, the custodial habits of librarians lingered onfor a long time and admission to the lendinglibrary was often a protracted and bureaucraticprocess. closed access to the stock was the rulefor many years, a restriction that lasted, in someplaces, well into the twentieth century.Access to academic libraries remained re-

strictive, although the needs of students of allkinds were recognized in the UK by the founda-tion of the Central Library for Students, later theNational Central Library, which in turn wasabsorbed into the british library. The emergentcounty libraries offered postal loans to studentsand others, often building up special lendingcollections for this purpose. Municipal librariestended to be more traditional and often empha-sized the reference function of their service. Thecriteria for the allocation of material to thereference or the lending department were, asoften as not, based upon the cost of the bookrather than its functional nature.The second half of the twentieth century saw

enormous strides made in the development oflending libraries of all types. public librariesestablished networks of branch libraries whosemain function was to lend books. With the verylarge increase in books, many of them novels,being loaned from publicly funded libraries, therewere moves, some successful, to charge for theborrowing of books. Developments in educa-tional institutions of all kinds resulted in agrowth of lending libraries in universities, col-leges and schools. Traditionally, national li-braries in all countries saw themselves as thelibrary of last resort and ultimate protectors oftheir countries’ literary heritage. However, thepart that national libraries could play in thelending of materials was exemplified in the UKby the establishment of the National LendingLibrary (direct ancestor of the British LibraryDocument Supply Centre), which, with the mini-mum of restrictions, quickly became the largestlending library in the world. This was somethingof a cultural shock to many librarians, who failedto see that the dissemination of literature wasjust as important as its acquisition and storage.There was also a reluctance among some

librarians to embrace the new formats of com-munication, such as videos, records, tapes and

microforms, which became increasingly avail-able. Countries such as France, not having atradition of public lending libraries, tended toadapt more quickly to these changes than the UKor the USA. Most public libraries took advantageof legal loopholes to subject these new materialsto direct financial charges, raising again thewhole question of charges for lending services.At the beginning of the twenty-first century,

the whole concept of lending libraries is beingcalled into question. We are now in the middle ofanother leap forward comparable to the inven-tion of printing in the fifteenth century, and themass production of books in the nineteenthcentury. Technology now makes it possible formuch of the material that in the past was loanedfrom libraries to be transmitted direct fromsuppliers to people’s homes. The internet isnow the preferred mode of access to informationin industrialized countries, but the social formsthat have led to the creation of libraries are stillpowerful and the book has survived many fore-casts of its death. Great changes are in process,but libraries, including a lending element, arelikely to survive into the foreseeable future.

Further reading

Betts, D.A. (1987) Borrowing and the Fiction Reader,Library Association, Branch and Mobile LibrariesGroup

Crawford, W. and Gorman, M. (1995) Future Li-braries: Dreams, Madness and Reality, AmericanLibrary Association.

Kelly, T. (1977) A History of Public Libraries in GreatBritain, 2nd edn, Library Association

TOM FEATHERSTONE

LESBIGAY LIBRARIANS

‘Lesbigay’, a post-modernist portmanteau word,succinctly labels lesbians, bisexuals and gays. Theterm is also sometimes employed to encompasstranssexuals and others outside the heterosexualmainstream. Sexuality, which in previous erasconstituted only biological assignment, now em-braces identity and orientation. Usually, there-fore, the term ‘lesbigay’ applies to self-identifiedlesbians, bisexuals and gays.Homosexuality has been variously tolerated

and persecuted by all cultures throughout history.Thus, Weimar Germany in the 1920s fostered arich underground night-club culture amicable tohomosexual expression, yet Heinrich Himmler

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made the sacking of the Magnus HirshfeldArchives in Berlin (then a unique centre for gayresearch) his first official act under Hitler in1933. In Great Britain, some writers, painters,dramatists, actors and musicians, many of whomwere gay or lesbian, defied heterosexual conven-tions and legal strictures in the 1920s and 1930s.Sir Angus Wilson (1913–91), who served on thestaff of the Department of Printed Books in theBritish Museum reading room for many years,satirized the hypocrisy of British attitudes to-wards homosexuals in Hemlock and After (1950)and subsequent novels well before Great Britaindecriminalized homosexual acts between con-senting adults in 1967.Homosexuals in European countries have had

recourse to the European Convention on HumanRights in Strasbourg since 1981, but, in the USA,only thirty-four out of fifty states had repealedantiquated sodomy laws as of 2001. The politicsof consensus in the USA have necessarily givenrise to legal battles that have added urgency tolesbigay activism there. US librarians, whoformed the first lesbigay professional group inthe world in 1970 (the Gay Task Force of theAmerican Library Association (ALA), now calledthe Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and TransgenderedRound Table – GLBTRT), have focused theirenergies on the promotion and promulgation oflesbigay literature, the establishment of lesbigayresearch centres and archives, and the revision ofantiquated, pejorative classification terminologyand obscurantist archival practices. In 1974, theALA adopted inclusive language for sexual or-ientation in its non-discrimination clauses ofemployment.Since 1970, when GLBTRT awarded the first

Gay Book Award, gay publishing in the USA hasbecome a mainstream commercial concern.Whereas, between 1886 and 1969, only approxi-mately thirty titles about homosexuality werepublished outside the underground lesbigaypress, as of 2001, approximately 1,500 titles peryear are being published for all age levels and inall genres.The activism of the ALA GLBTRT has re-

sulted in a greater international awareness of theimportance of lesbigay publishing, libraries, ar-chives and information services, especially sincethe advent of the AIDS crisis in 1981, and theproliferation of Internet sites dedicated to lesbi-gay concerns. There are now lesbigay archivesand/or libraries in every part of the world, each

with a character reflective of the local conditionsthat prevail. The Lesbian and Gay ArchivesResearch Centre (NZ), for example, was uniquein its incorporation into New Zealand’s NationalArchives in 1992; it is financed by the state andoccupies a government building, but retains itsseparate corporate identity.With the backlash from the religious right

beginning in the late 1970s, US lesbigay librar-ians began taking a more active role in scholar-ship and publication. Members of GLBTRTdevised alternative classification schemes suita-ble for gay materials, authored essays onservices to gays and lesbians, compiled biblio-graphies of AIDS materials relevant to publiclibrary concerns in mainstream journals andassailed in journal literature the difficult subjectof lesbigay materials for youth. In 1992, apicture of lesbigay librarians marching in a GayDay parade on the cover of American Librariessparked a heated debate among some ALAmembers on the appropriateness of social acti-vism among librarians, and even more contro-versy ensued when ALA upheld the decision tocancel a 1996 conference in Cincinnati, Ohio,after citizens there reinstated an ordinance pre-judicial to lesbigay interests. Librarians alsoparticipated in the vociferous debate surroundingtwo of the most challenged titles of the 1990s,Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy’s Room-mate, children’s books about gay and lesbianparenting.National surveys have also been conducted on

the gay male stereotype and the place of social-responsibility concerns in library school curricula(Carmichael and Shontz 1996; Carmichael 1992)Further research in the late 1990s on the holdingsof gay materials in major urban libraries foundthat public library collection management in thearea had been sporadic and random (Loverichand Degnan 1999). It seems fair to surmise thatwhile user and publishing concerns are a morecomfortable subject of research than the statusand condition of lesbigay librarians, researchpriorities among younger lesbigay librarians inthe USA will continue to shift towards theprofessional status of lesbigay librarians. AnAnglo-American conference in Liverpool in 2000on ‘Gendering Library History’, which included alesbigay essay, suggests that comparative studiesmay yield results fruitful to both Women’sStudies and Queer Studies.

LESBIGAY LIBRARIANS 367

References

Carmichael, J. (1992) ‘The male librarian and thefeminine image: A survey of stereotype, status, andgender perceptions’, Library and Information ScienceResearch 14: 411–46.

Carmichael, J. and Shontz, M. (1996) ‘The last sociallyacceptable prejudice: Lesbian and gay issues, socialresponsibilities and coverage of the issues in MLS/MLIS curricula, Library Quarterly 66: 21–58.

Loverich, P. and Degnan, D. (1999) ‘Out on theshelves? Not really’, Library Journal 124: 55.

Further reading

Carmichael, J. (ed.) (1998) Daring to Find Our Names:The Search for Lesbigay Library History, Green-wood. [Gay historiography and stories by GLBTRTpioneers.]

Gough, C. and Greenblatt, E. (eds) (1990) Gay andLesbian Library Service, McFarland.

Kester, N. (ed.) (1997) Liberating Minds: The Storiesand Professional Lives of Gay Lesbian and BisexualLibrarians and Their Advocates, McFarland. [Perso-nal recollections and three essays.]

Rolph, A. (2000) ‘The life and times of LiL: Lesbians inthe Library’, in E. Kerslake and N. Moody (eds)Gendering Library History, John Moore University,pp. 196–208.

Thistlethwaite, P. (1994) ‘Gays and lesbians in libraryhistory’, in W. Wiegand and D. Davis (eds) Encyclo-pedia of Library History, Garland, pp. 223–7.

SEE ALSO: censorship; code of professionalconduct; information professions; women inlibrarianship

JAMES V. CARMICHAEL, JNR

LIABILITY FOR INFORMATIONPROVISION

A difficult concept to define in the area ofinformation provision, mainly because thereare so many factors that will give rise to it. Atthe simplest level, it is the consequence of afailure to do some act that one was bound to do;or the doing of some act that one was prohibitedfrom doing; or the doing of some lawful act insuch a manner as to render it unlawful (forexample, negligently or maliciously). The legalconsequences that may flow from any of theseacts or omissions may be the result of the normalapplication of the law, in other words occurringindependently of the intention of the wrongdoer.They may also flow from an agreement toprovide information, made between the wrong-doer and another to provide information of acertain type, for a certain purpose, for use by the

client, in a particular way. This includes anexpectation as to the level of distribution of theinformation. The liability outcomes relating toinformation can be more easily seen in twocategories: first, liability for the information itselfand, second, liability following a contract toprovide information.

Information

At the outset one must appreciate the nature ofthe ‘product’ with which one is dealing whenproviding information. Information is not prop-erty in its own right but it can be given some ofthe attributes of property in a variety of ways,each of which may potentially create a liability inrelation to it.

CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION

Information is confidential if either it has beencommunicated in circumstances that a reasonableperson would understand to be circumstances ofconfidence (this would tend to be a ‘one-off’ typeof situation, such as a business proposition) or itis the subject and substance of a confidentialitycontract (probably more of an ongoing obliga-tion, such as the information communicated to aconsultant). The use of information in breach ofthis confidence is actionable both in its ownright, as a tort, or, if a confidentiality contracthas been entered into, as a breach of contract.

COPYRIGHT

It is not the information that is the problem here– in the sense of content, as would be the case forconfidential information; instead it is the forminto which the information is reduced for perma-nent record. ‘Permanent form’, as it is called bythe current copyright legislation, can includetext, images or any other form of notation, codeor language; thus, copying computer programs ormaterials from cd-rom without an express li-cence (see licences) to do so is, subject to somelimitations relating to different types of copy-right, an infringement. If, therefore, in providinginformation to a client one makes use of docu-ments, for example by photocopying them, towhich one does not personally own copyright(and this would include letters of which one isthe addressee), then one is incurring liability byinfringing another’s copyright. Equally, if oneemploys individuals who one knows do this, thenone is liable for authorizing an infringement.

368 LIABILITY FOR INFORMATION PROVISION

PERSONAL DATA, WITHIN THE MEANING OF THE DATAPROTECTION ACTS

The data protection legislation imposes obli-gations on those who use or hold personal datato comply with a series of obligations relating tothat data, including control of the means ofobtaining data, security of storage (includingnetwork transmission) and control of those towhom the data is disclosed (including the pur-poses of that disclosure). Whilst a breach of thedata protection rules is not in itself an offence,any serious breach, and particularly persistentbreach, may result in criminal liability.

DEFAMATION

Defamation occurs where an article is publishedthat lowers a person’s reputation to the extentthat the victim is exposed to ‘hatred, ridicule orcontempt’ or is likely to be ‘shunned or avoided’by right-thinking people. The definition includesall of the types of statement that one can imagineif one reads the newspapers. Perhaps of moreimportance in a normal business environment isa recognition that false financial data can cause aperson to be shunned or avoided. There aredefences: for example, a reporting of currentevents, qualified privilege, as well as justificationand a host of others. What will destroy many ofthe more likely defences for an informationprofessional is the presence of malice.

The contract to provide

As well as liability relating purely to the informa-tion itself, there are other types of liability thatattach to the process of providing that informa-tion to a client. In this sphere there are two maintypes of liability.

CONTRACTUAL

The contract to provide information places anobligation on the provider to ensure that infor-mation of the type requested by the client isactually provided, in return for a fee. There is noparticular format for the contract; it can beverbal or written, the only difference being thatthe latter provides a means of proof of the termsof the agreement. A failure to perform thecontract will result in liability. Contractual liabi-lity is ‘strict’, which means that the providercannot escape responsibility by a claim that itwas not his/her fault; all that is required is anobjective failure to meet the contract require-

ments. This creates a real need to ensure that allcontracts are written and contain details of theinformation to be provided, the purpose forwhich it is required, the fee and of course thenames of the parties. There is no need for aformal document in every instance; a standardform letter referring to a properly drawn agree-ment is sufficient and will act as a confirmatoryletter for instructions received by telephone.

TORTIOUS

A provider of information owes a duty of care tothe client, as well as to others who might reason-ably be expected to act on the information. It is aduty to act reasonably (this does not meanperfectly but in a reasonably competent profes-sional manner in line with professional ‘bestpractice’) and not to be negligent. It meansproviding correct and full information for theclient’s purposes. It is a duty that makes thecontract crucial, as a means of recording detailsof the client’s requirements in a binding agree-ment, the reason being that a client who wantsfinancial background on a company may requireit for the purposes of a takeover bid or simply toproduce an article for an ‘in-house’ magazine. Theresponsibility of the provider would vary enor-mously depending on which was the case. Thecontract may also help limit those others to whomliability might be owed, if one suspects the clientmight pass the information on, by circumscribingthe client’s ability to disseminate the information.Also, where confidential or copyright materialsare included in the information provided, thisallows a forum to place notices prohibiting certainclient actions, thereby potentially avoiding a claimagainst the provider for breach of confidence orauthorizing an infringement of copyright.

Further reading

Bainbridge, D. (1994) Intellectual Property, Pitman.Slee, D. (1991) ‘Legal aspects of information provi-sion’, in The Information Business, Issue for the1990s, IIS and Hertis Information and Research.

SEE ALSO: contracts for information provision;information law

DAVID SLEE

LIBER

Acronym of Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennesde Recherche (League of European Research

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Libraries), founded in March 1971 to bring thelarger libraries in Europe together in co-opera-tion, with the intention of improving the qualityof the services they provide. It actively promotesresearch in librarianship, seeks to facilitate inter-national loans and exchange of publications, andpublishes the biannual LIBER Bulletin, variousmonographs and a directory of bibliographicnetworks.

Further reading

http://www.kb.dk/liber.

SEE ALSO: research libraries

LIBRARIAN

Traditionally, and still in popular consciousness,the curator of collections of books and otherinformation materials, administering conditionaluser access to these collections. In current prac-tice, the manager and mediator of access toinformation for user groups of various descrip-tions, still initially through collections of infor-mation materials under their immediateadministration, but also through the global rangeof available sources.The term will be found applied to a chief

librarian, often called simply the librarian; toprofessional librarians of different grades, distin-guished by the possession of a recognized aca-demic or professional qualification and theholding of a post with higher-level tasks andresponsibilities; but also to anyone employed, oracting as a volunteer, in library work – usuallymore correctly referred to by some term such asparaprofessional, library assistant, libraryclerk or library messenger. Assistant librarian (asdistinct from library assistant) usually refers to aprofessional librarian.People who have had the care of libraries (as

distinct from archives) can be identified as earlyas the Greek and Roman eras (notably Callima-chus, c. 300–240 bc, at Alexandria), in a numberof other civilizations (those of the East, particu-larly China) and in the liberal tradition of Islamiclibraries (the libraries of Baghdad in particular).Their resources may not always have beenidentifiable by a distinct building or room (thoseof the Medieval monastic libraries were not), buttheir curatorial role is usually quite distinct. Inmany cases, indeed, the role of those responsible

for libraries may have been so minimal (unlock-ing and locking the door to permit user accessand preserve security, for instance) as almost toremove them from any useful definition of theword.Manuals of a distinct librarian’s occupation

are first really apparent in the seventeenthcentury with Gabriel Naudé’s (founder of theBibliothèque Mazarine, Paris) Advis pour dresserune bibliothèque (1627) and John Durie’s TheReformed Librarie-Keeper (1650). Librarianswith a full range of professional responsibilitiescan be identified from about the same period –for example Thomas James, Thomas bodley’slibrarian at Oxford University, appointed in1601. James undertook collection building andimproved intellectual access through catalogueinnovations, as well as creating better physicalaccess to the collections.The librarian’s profession arguably reached a

mature form in 1876 with a number of signifi-cant developments in the USA. The americanlibrary association, the first of its kind andstill the world’s leading professional associationfor librarians, was founded at a meeting inPhiladelphia. The monumental Report on PublicLibraries in the United States of America, pro-viding a baseline of data on libraries, waspublished, and attached to it was Charles Ammicutter’s Rules for a Dictionary Catalog. Melvildewey’s Decimal Classification was published,and Dewey founded a company, the LibraryBureau, to provide products and services forlibraries. The Library Journal also began pub-lication in that year, thus completing a remark-able upgrading of professional activity andpublishing.In the twentieth century the professionalism of

the librarian has continuously been expandedand enhanced, even though public abandonmentof an older image has been much slower (O’Brienand Raish 1993). Twentieth-century librariansare innovative in the whole range of professionalactivities, and the centre of gravity in their workhas shifted away from simple care of collections(except, perhaps, in archival libraries (see archi-val library)) towards a preoccupation with theuser and the user’s needs. Management oflibraries, with a strategic view firmly taken, haslargely replaced mere administration. Librarianshave also accepted new technology for circula-tion systems, catalogues and access to remote

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bibliographical and other resources, if not withopen arms, with steady consistency.Such development has probably been stimu-

lated by the creation of a rival professionalidentity in mid-century, that of the informationscientist (see information science), representedin the USA by the american society forinformation science and technology.Although information scientists took on a rolethat encompassed an even higher level of proac-tivity on behalf of the end-user than librariansgenerally felt their profession demanded, librar-ians have not accepted the curtailment that theexistence of another profession might have im-plied. Today it is arguable that there is little, ifany, difference between information science andmany sectors of librarianship, and the term‘Library and Information Science’, abbreviatedas LIS or ILS, is very widely used as a conse-quence of this convergence. In Britain since thelate 1980s the library association and theinstitute of information scientists havediscussed merger and this was achieved in 2002through the founding of cilip. A new profes-sional identity is sought through the new associa-tion, but the sense of many members that theyare actually librarians is likely to persist.

References

O’Brien, A. and Raish, M. (1993) ‘The image of thelibrarian in commercial motion pictures: An anno-tated filmography’, Collection Management 17: 61–84.

Further reading

Gurnsey, J. (1985) The Information Professions in theElectronic Age, Clive Bingley.


PAUL STURGES

LIBRARIANSHIP

The profession practised by those who work inlibraries. The principal focus of the work of thelibrarian is on services to library users, but thismanifests itself in many ways. It includes theselection, cataloguing and arrangement of booksand other documents and information resourcesin all media and format; the provision of servicesto answer the queries of users, including givingaccess to information resources that are not held

in the library; and the management and adminis-tration of these processes and of the library itself.In a one-person library these tasks are, exhypothesi, undertaken by a single person. Inlarger organisations, there is a division by task,and perhaps also by location and hierarchy.

SEE ALSO: information professions; libraries;philosophy of librarianship

LIBRARIES

In the strict sense of the term a ‘library’ is a‘collection of materials organized for use’. Theword derives from the Latin word ‘liber’, a book.The latinized Greek word ‘bibliotheca’ is theorigin of the word for ‘library’ in the Greek,Russian and Romance languages. There is goodreason to believe that the root concept of‘library’ is deeply embedded in our ways ofthinking about the world and coping with itsproblems. In its primary role as guardian of thesocial memory, there are many parallels with theways in which the human memory orders, storesand retrieves the information necessary for survi-val. The study of library history (see history oflibraries) and its related disciplines bears wit-ness that the instinct to preserve, the passion tocollect and the desire to control have beendominant influences in the genesis and growthof the library idea in the history of civilization.From the archives room at Nineveh to the

public record office at Kew, Surrey; from theAlexandrian Library to the library of con-gress in Washington, DC, these uniquely humanattributes have been constantly at work.The momentous advances in information

and communication technology (ICT) havenot made the term redundant. ‘Library’ ininformation technology is used as a generic termfor an ordered set of related items yielding suchextended uses of the term in ‘data library’,‘programme library’, ‘routine library’ and otherkindred concepts. The current bibliography oflibrarianship contains many references to digi-tal library, hybrid library (see hybrid li-braries), virtual library and other electronicextensions of the physical library, the imagewhich usually arises in our minds when the termis loosely used. Although we may visualize a‘library’ as a physical plant dedicated to storagepurposes, the generic term denotes what somelogicians call an ‘empty category’ or, as Vakkari

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(1994) puts it, ‘a linguistic expression that doesnot have content’. If I say that I work in a libraryI convey very little information to the reader orlistener unless I supply the missing context wheremy skills of librarianship are being used. Arandom assemblage of books is not a library;order of a recognizable kind is the essence of theconcept.Returning to our basic definition of ‘library’,

we note that the components – collection, mate-rials, organization, use – describe interconnectedand interacting parts of an operational system.Furthermore, when we analyse these componentswe find that they yield most of the core subjectsand practical problems in the systematic study oflibrary and information science. The initial act ofcollecting implies a sense of purpose and anintended or imagined user even if the user is theperson who does the collecting. This kind of self-indulgence or self-glorification has resulted inmany of the world’s finest private librariesand research libraries.The ‘how’, ‘why’ and ‘for whom’ questions

entailed in this set of operations go to form theintellectual staple of the study of collectionmanagement. A library derives its individualityfrom the types of materials it is designed tocollect. Thus we have art libraries, multimedialibraries (see multimedia librarianship), maplibraries (see map library), picture libraries,toy libraries and similar collections specializingin audiovisual materials. Advances in ICThave frequently meant changes in the physicalmedia of communication stored by libraries.Each change in the design and shape of thesemedia has challenged the library to rethink itsdesign and layout, and posed problems for thestudents of library buildings. Clay tablets andpapyrus rolls needed different forms of storageand retrieval. In the monastic libraries, the longrooms of benches and stands gave way to wallshelving when printed books began to be pub-lished in smaller sizes. As each mass mediumbecame popular it was seen as a potential threatto the normative book library; yet, each develop-ment in the mass media has led to a new type oflibrary – for example, film libraries, newspaperlibraries, television libraries and multimedia li-brarianship.The operations of collecting and organizing

may be analysed further into the professionaltechniques of selection, classification, catalo-guing, information management and infor-

mation retrieval. Just as in humancommunication we design our message accordingto our image of the receiver, so also the libraryadjusts its purpose, content and design to itsimage of the user. A library intended to serve pre-school children will differ in its user approachfrom one designed for cosmic physicists. aca-demic libraries reflect the philosophy of theinstitutions of which they are a part; they designtheir collections and services to meet the educa-tional aims and instructional objectives of theinstitutions they serve.When we move outwards from the specific

types of library to the wider social setting we cansee how the content and purpose of the libraryare shaped and directed by a diversity of socialconcepts. A society is composed of groups ofpeople working together to achieve commonaims and satisfy basic needs. Culture is the bodyof knowledge, beliefs, values and skills that bothinitiates and results from these activities. Cultureis interpreted, transmitted and disseminated bysocial institutions. Among these institutions areeducation, health, religion, law, democracy andsimilarly structured ways of doing social tasks.Just as human beings need information formaking decisions, so also do the social agenciesthat implement the aims and objectives of theseinstitutions. They need libraries for information,for recording decisions and solving problems.Education is represented in national informa-tion systems by school, college and universitylibraries; health science libraries; the Christianreligion by cathedral libraries, theological collec-tions and other ecclesiastical libraries, andcomparable institutions in other religions, such asjewish libraries and islamic libraries; lawby law libraries; and the legislative process byparliamentary libraries. Elementary socialanalysis will multiply examples. However, this isnot a static situation: these institutions changeover time. For a period of time one maypredominate over the others and then slide to alower place in the social hierarchy, thus reducingthe allocation of resources to its library system.Religion was once dominant in Western Europe;then came the rise of the sciences and technolo-gies in Europe and the USA. They produced theneed for information and a consequent diffusionof science libraries, business libraries, engineeringlibraries and like services. The growth of institu-tional democracy in Britain in the nineteenthcentury stimulated the growth of the public

372 LIBRARIES

library and literacy as well as governmentlibraries.A fruitful method of studying the cultural role

of the library is to analyse the gradual growth inaccess to books and materials for all people,without distinctions of any kind. It is an impor-tant maxim in democratic philosophy that thehuman being develops and functions best as aresponsible ‘rights and duties’-bearing person;this means informed access to recorded culture.The ancient temple libraries and the medievalmonastic libraries were for the select few. pri-vate libraries, family libraries and subscrip-tion libraries restrict access to theircollections. Not infrequently, the librarian’s rolewas exclusively as a conservator and librarianswere consequently seen as a barrier to the use ofthe collection. This image is dramatically de-scribed by Eco (1983), and the legacy of thisimage in fiction by Taylor (1993). British publiclibraries began to give open access to theirshelves in the latter part of the nineteenthcentury, more or less at the same time that publicaccess to ‘elementary’ education was first pro-vided by the state. One may usefully distinguish‘passive’ access, where people may physicallyaccess the stock as borrowers and avail them-selves of whatever is available regardless of need.‘Mediated’ access, which provides entry to theintellectual content of the library, entails atrained staff and a suitable technology to matchneeds with materials and information. Thesedevelopments may be observed in academiclibraries as they become learning resource cen-tres.The decade from the mid-1980s to the mid-

1990s saw the growth of what might be called‘transitive’ access, in that it governs directlyspecific objectives. This professional philosophyis reflected in mobile libraries (see mobilelibrary), bookmobiles, services to the house-bound and other outreach activities. More re-cently it is embodied in special collections forsocially and economically disadvantaged minori-ties.Problems in assigning priorities are worsened

by financial pressures. Economic recessions andpolitical policies in the USA and Western Europein the 1980s led to reduced spending on libraryservices and pressure to justify the existence oflibraries in cost-cutting organizations. The costof information and the pressure to participate inthe market economy has led to widespread

charging for services in academic and publiclibraries. Like any other social agency, the libraryis vulnerable to conflicting political philosophies.These have led to opposing positions in publiclibrary provision. One strongly held view is totarget scarce resources on the less privileged inthe community; the other is to emphasize valuefor money and competitiveness as increasingchoice and therefore increasing freedom. Whenpolicies changed, and economies improved, theattempt to revive the fortunes of libraries wasclosely associated with a re-emphasis of theirsocial role. Libraries are seen as safe and friendlyplaces. They are embedded in communities andare easily accessible by all. They have thereforebeen used increasingly as the location for publicprovision of internet access and other electro-nic public-information services. The resultof this has been a growing tension between thetraditional perception of the library (especially ofthe public library) and the reality of currentprovision. It is far from clear that libraries do(or perhaps even can) attract the socially andeconomically disadvantaged to benefit from thenew services that they now provide. Indeed, thereis evidence that both direct Internet access fromthe home and provision through agencies such asInternet cafés are far more successful in givingwider network access.Like ‘the death of the book’ theme with which

it is so closely associated, the ‘end of the library’theme has been periodically discussed in libraryliterature. The library, in its primary sense, hashabitually been identified with imaginative litera-ture and the arts; information, in its technicalsense, tends to be associated with the sciencesand technologies. Although the library has tradi-tionally been regarded as the laboratory of thehumanist, library research always took placebefore experimentation in the laboratory. Thehabit of browsing is an inveterate part ofhuman creativity and cognition. We enjoy itespecially if it takes place in a well-guided librarywhere the serendipity factor plays a rewardingpart in human learning; better still if this learningtakes place in a structured, secure and aestheti-cally pleasing environment. New technologies,however, and particularly the development ofthe world wide web, have driven what iscoming to seem to be a fundamental change inthe processes of communication and research.The printed documents (and particularly jour-nals), which are essential to research in all

LIBRARIES 373

disciplines, are being gradually superseded bytheir electronic equivalents. As electronic-journal archives, e-print archives and the likebecome firmly established across the wholespectrum of scholarly and scientific endeavour,academic libraries will increasingly face pressurescomparable to those already confronted by thepublic library system. The book storehouses ofthe past (an unfair description of the sophisti-cated institutions and service providers in almostall universities) will be seen to be increasinglyirrelevant as access to a universal virtual library,symbolized by and currently embodied in theWeb, becomes a reality.Even this, however, need not presage the

‘death of the library’. As a concept – an orga-nized and accessible collection of informationresources – it remains central to human activity.Developments of any kind often result in para-doxical human responses. The rapid consolida-tion of a global culture in a post-modern worldcan lead to the resurgence of local identities andconcern for the continuity of local cultures. Thedisappearance of the built environment, historiclandmarks and ancient national cultures threa-tens a loss of roots and identity. The heritageconcept, with its emphasis on local studies, hasplaced the traditional public library within amosaic of services that include museums, touristcentres, theme parks and centres for industrialarchaeology. Indeed, the cultural industriesin general, and perhaps the heritage sector inparticular, may in future come to be the naturalhome for many services that libraries havetraditionally provided. As the concept of anorganized knowledge store in cyberspace be-comes more pervasive (and more real), its mani-festations will take a multitude of forms. Thefuture practitioners of the information profes-sions will include librarians and archivists, butalso many others with related – but different –skills in the collection, management and provi-sion of knowledge and information.The ‘library’ as a formal concept remains a

constant; in its actuality it is protean: ever-changing, versatile, regularly taking on newforms in response to ever-changing needs. How-ever, no matter how flexible and adaptive it maybe, ‘the library’ only exists as a library in thefullest sense when it is being used in accordancewith its primary purpose and the capability thatsociety designs into it.

References

Eco, U. (1983) The Name of the Rose, London: Secker& Warburg.

Taylor, A. (ed.) (1993) Long Overdue: A LibraryReader, London: Library Association; Edinburgh:Mainstream Publishing.

Vakkari, P. (1994) ‘Library and information science: itscontent and scope’, in I.P. Godden (ed.) Advances inLibrarianship, vol. 19, London/New York: AcademicPress, pp. 1–51.

Further reading

Rawski, K.H. (ed.) (1973) The Shera Festschrift:Towards a Theory of Librarianship: Papers inHonour of Jesse Hauk Shera, Metuchen, NJ: Scare-crow Press.

Saunders, L.M. (1993) The Virtual Library: Visions andRealities, Westport/London: Meckler.

Williams, P. (1989) Public Libraries and the Problemsof Purpose, Greenwood Press.

SEE ALSO: communication; library services andinstitutions; philosophy of librarianship; socialexclusion and libraries

KEVIN MCGARRY, REVISED BY THE EDITORS

LIBRARY ASSOCIATION

The most prominent and longest lasting profes-sional association of librarians in the UnitedKingdom, founded in 1877. In 1898 the Associa-tion (LAUK) was granted a Royal Charter andincorporated not as LAUK but as the LibraryAssociation (LA) (Munford 1976). In 1986 theAssociation, usually referred to as the LA, wasgranted a supplemental Royal Charter. In 2002the Association was effectively dissolved and anew organization, cilip, created through mergerwith the institute of information scientists.This article will therefore discuss the LA chieflyin terms of what the new association inheritsfrom it.At the time of the merger, the LA had more

than 25,000 members, of whom approximately5.5 per cent were overseas members. All mem-bers were obliged to comply with the provisionsof the Charter and Bylaws, and with the provi-sions of the code of professional conduct(Library Association 1985). The management ofthe LA was the overall responsibility of a ChiefExecutive, who managed a staff of seventyoperating from the headquarters building incentral London. The new association inherited anumber of income-generating activities from the

374 LIBRARY ASSOCIATION

LA, including Library Association PublishingLimited (now Facet Publishing), the Record(now Update) and the Vacancies Supplement,Infomatch (a professional recruitment agency)and conferences and special events.At the time of merger, the LA’s library service

was no longer in its own hands, having beentaken over by the British Library InformationScience Service (BLISS) in 1974. BLISS housesone of the most comprehensive library andinformation science collections worldwide andmembers could exploit its resources for referenceor borrowing purposes directly or by means of apostal loans service.Among the key roles that the LA had per-

formed for the profession were assessing andvalidating courses in library and informationscience, providing members with career guidanceand its continuing professional development pro-gramme, which included the provision of aroundfifty short courses each year. In 1992 the LApublished The Framework for Continuing Pro-fessional Development (CPD) to enable its mem-bers ‘to keep pace with the rapid changes in theenvironment in which they work’ (Library Asso-ciation 1992).The LA had a strong presence in international

library organizations, in particular the Interna-tional Federation of Library Associations (ifla)and the European Bureau of Library, Informationand Documentation Associations (EBLIDA), andit established a number of bilateral schemes ofco-operation with a range of library associations.The LA’s Mission Statement asserted that

‘libraries are fundamental to the maintenance ofa democratic society, culture and civilisation’ andtherefore it was ‘committed to enabling itsmembers to achieve and maintain the highestprofessional standards, and encouraging andsupporting them in the delivery and promotionof high quality library and information servicesresponsive to the needs of users’ (Library Asso-ciation 1993). It is fully expected that CILIP willstand for exactly these values, attached to anexpanded vision of the information profession.

References

Library Association (1993) Revised Recommendationsfor a New Structure of the Library Association,Library Association.

—— (1992) The Framework for Continuing Profes-sional Development: Your Personal Profile, LibraryAssociation.

—— (1985) Code of Professional Conduct and Gui-dance Notes, Library Association.

Munford, W.A. (1976) A History of the LibraryAssociation 1877–1977, Library Association.


RAYMOND G. ASTBURY, REVISED BY THE EDITORS

LIBRARY ASSOCIATIONS

Organizations that protect the standards of libraryand information services provided by members tothe public; establish and maintain the standards ofmembers’ performance; protect the resourcingand quality of the services to the public in whichtheir members work; and provide services tomembers in return for their subscriptions.The first library association to be established

was the american library association (ALA),which was founded in 1876, partly because of anarticle in Academy (18 March 1876) authoredanonymously by an Englishman, Professor MaxMüller (a former Curator of the Bodleian Libraryat Oxford), who proposed an international con-ference of librarians. This was reprinted in theNew York Publisher’s Weekly on 22 April 1876.It is generally accepted that it was this articlethat led to the foundation of the ALA, which wasaccomplished ‘largely through the energy andenthusiasm of Melvil Dewey, Frederick Leypoldt,R.R. Bowker and others’. The US initiativeencouraged similar interest in the United King-dom, where Edward Williams Bynon Nicholson,then librarian of the London Institution, sug-gested in a letter to The Times (16 February1877) that a similar conference be held inLondon. Support was forthcoming and the con-ference was held from 2 to 5 October 1877; 140delegates from nine countries were among the216 who attended and the library associationwas established (Haslam 1974).The next association to be established appears

to have been the Nihon Toshokan Kyokai (JapanLibrary Association), in 1892, followed in 1895by the Swiss Librarians’ Association and in 1896by the Vereinigung Österreichischer Bibliothekare(Association of Austrian Librarians). In 1900 theVerein Deutscher Bibliothekare e.V. (Associationof German Librarians) was established, and in1905 the Danmarks Biblioteksforeng (DanishLibrary Association). The following year theAssociation des Bibliothécaires Français (Associa-tion of French Librarians) was born, followed

LIBRARY ASSOCIATIONS 375

in 1907 by the Archives et Bibliothèques deBelgique (Belgian Association of Archives andLibraries), and in 1908 by the Scottish LibraryAssociation (now part of the Library Association(UK)) and, in the Netherlands, the NederlandsBibliotheek en Lektuur Centrum (Dutch Centrefor Public Libraries and Literature; founded asthe Central Association for Public Libraries). In1910 the New Zealand Library Association andthe Suomen Kirjastosueva – Finlands Biblioteks-fürenung (Finnish Library Association) were es-tablished.Thereafter came the Norsk Bibliotekforening

(Norwegian Library Association), in 1913; theSveriges Allmänna Biblioteks – Pärening (Swed-ish Library Association), in 1915; and the Unionof Polish Librarians and Archivists (now Stuwar-zyszenie Bibliotekarzy Polskich), in 1917. Theyear 1923 saw the establishment of the Philip-pine Library Association, Inc., and in 1928 theCumann Leabharlann na h. Èireann (LibraryAssociation of Ireland) was formed. Libraryassociations followed in Italy (1930), India(1936), Australia (1937), Canada (1946) andSpain (1949) (Fang and Songe 1990). Some ofthe most recent and important changes in libraryassociations have taken place in russia and theformer soviet union and central and east-ern europe. There the library associations thatwere almost organs of the government have beenre-established on democratic lines.The International Federation of Library Asso-

ciations and Institutions (ifla) provided no focusprior to 1980 for those concerned with theoperation and management of library associa-tions. Since then a Round Table for the Manage-ment of Library Associations has beenestablished and has undertaken much work. In1989, under contract to unesco, the RoundTable produced for IFLA a set of Guidelines(Bowden 1989). From the 1986 IFLA Pre-Con-ference Seminar in Japan came a resolutionexpressing concern at the poor image, weakreputation and low status of the library andinformation profession (see information pro-fessions), with a request that IFLA undertakework to improve it. The Round Table commis-sioned research from the Nederlands Bibliotheeken Lektuur Centrum (NBLC). Through a ques-tionnaire and visits to Latin America and theCaribbean and Asia, two social scientists identi-fied some of the obstacles to improving reputa-tion and status. The final report (Prinz and de

Gier 1993) indicates clearly some of the pro-blems that the profession generally and libraryassociations specifically will need to address. Theresearch helped to form the basis for an IFLAPre-Conference Seminar held in Delhi in August1992 and which gathered together representa-tives of library associations from as far apart asVietnam, the Philippines, Namibia, St Martinand Nicaragua. Essentially the seminar agreedthat one of the greatest hurdles to improvedstatus was not only the management of libraryassociations but also the establishment of stan-dards for the quality of services members of thelibrary associations provided in their workplaceto the public using libraries and informationservices. The Proceedings (Bowden and Wijasur-iya 1994) make interesting reading and identifythrough resolutions numerous actions that IFLA,FID and individual library associations need toundertake.The UNESCO Guidelines have been used as a

textbook and the basis for a number of seminarsto improve the organization and efficient man-agement of library associations, both to improvethe standards of provision of services by theirmembers and to improve the services provided bythe associations to their members. In Budapest inMarch 1994 a seminar was held for the newlyestablished democratic library associations inCentral and Eastern Europe, bringing togetherlibrarians from Albania, Bulgaria, Moldova,Hungary, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Be-larus, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Russia. Tofacilitate their future use in seminars the Guide-lines have been translated into French, Russian,Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Latvian, Romanianand Indonesian.From the seminars, from the NBLC research

and from the Delhi Pre-Conference SeminarProceedings it is clear that there is a growingawareness that it is through the effective opera-tion of library associations that the best oppor-tunities exist for the improvement of library andinformation services in a country. The associa-tions unite the profession and thus assist it inrepresenting the interests not only of librariansbut also of libraries and information services. Itis clear that there is a growing awareness of theimportance of establishing library associations bylaw, as has happened in the Philippines, and ofthe need for codes of conduct to indicate tomembers the importance of the provision ofservices of quality. The IFLA Round Table has

376 LIBRARY ASSOCIATIONS

embarked on work to attempt to draft a modelcode of conduct that can be used by associations.Regional associations continue to undertake

useful work through the Association of Carib-bean University and Research Libraries(ACURIL) and, in Southern and Central Africa,the Standing Conference of East and Central andSouth African Librarians (SCECSAL); and parti-cularly useful work has been done in Asiathrough the Conference of Southeast Asian Li-brarians (CONSAL). In 1992 the EuropeanBureau of Library, Information and Documenta-tion Associations (EBLIDA) was established toprovide a focal point for library associations,libraries and librarians in the European Union,and to facilitate input into the deliberations ofthe European Commission and Parliament andthe Council of Europe.

References

Bowden, R. (1989) Guidelines for the Management ofProfessional Associations in the Fields of Archives,Library and Information Work, Unesco (PG1–89/WS/11).

Bowden, R. and Wijasuriya, D. (eds) (1994) The Status,Reputation and Image of the Library and Informa-tion Profession: Proceedings of the IFLA Pre-SessionSeminar, Delhi, 24–28 August 1992, Under theAuspices of the IFLA Round Table for the Manage-ment of Library Associations, IFLA/K.G. Saur.

Fang, J.S. and Songe, A.H. (1990) World Guide toLibrary, Archive and Information Science Associa-tions, IFLA/K.G. Saur.

Haslam, D.D. (1974) ‘A short history of the LibraryAssociation’, Journal of Librarianship 6.

Prinz, H. and de Gier, W. (1993) Status, Image andReputation of Librarianship: A Report of an Empiri-cal Research Undertaken on Behalf of IFLA’s RoundTable for the Management of Library Associations,IFLA/NBLC.


RUSSELL BOWDEN

LIBRARY AUTOMATION

As computer-based systems have become morepervasive in all aspects of library and informa-tion work, the term library automation hasbecome an umbrella term for the many kinds ofapplications that are used within the library. Thevarious applications provide the means to inputinformation into databases that provide orga-nized storage, and thus allow access to informa-tion (information retrieval). Perhaps the

major transformation as heralded in this volu-me’s first edition has been the emergence of thedigital library and the hybrid library (seehybrid libraries), resulting in the blurring ofthe notion of the library collection as seen aslocated in a physical place.

History

Dating from the 1960s the first use of libraryautomation was the use of computers to storebibliographic data and to enable the circulationof stock. The project to place onto computer thestock of the US library of congress resultedultimately in the development of machine-read-able cataloguing (MARC), opening up thepossibility of libraries exchanging bibliographicrecords and encouraging co-operation betweenlibraries. In the 1970s the library managementsystem became the main housekeeping tool inlarge libraries and this trend was continuedthrough the following two decades, leaving veryfew libraries without some form of system. Otherfundamental developments began to bring aboutthe convergence of the hitherto specialized li-brary automation environment with the develop-ments underway in the larger computer industrymarketplace. These were the increasing power inthe performance of the personal computer; theincreasing predominance of non-proprietary soft-ware, encouraging competition but just as im-portantly enabling increasing exchange of dataover networks; and the development of theinternet.

Applications

LIBRARY MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS (LMS)

A certain core functionality can be assumed,namely the provision of systems that automatethe performance of the main library housekeep-ing functions: cataloguing, circulation, acquisi-tions and serials. Although typically an authorityor organization will select a system supplied by acompany some still develop systems in-house.Library suppliers have continued to develop

systems with the aim being to provide a more‘Windows-like’ user interface, and there hasbeen an increase in those using Windows NT asthe operating system. Commonly vendors ofLMS from the late 1980s onwards began to offersystems with the UNIX operating system and,although this is the standard, in an ever-evolvingenvironment it is possible that the future will see

LIBRARY AUTOMATION 377

the adoption of Linux as an alternative operatingsystem platform for the smaller library system.The prevalence of the world wide web (WWW)has led to a number of vendors developingsystems that incorporate interfaces which havemarked similarity with WWW interfaces. Millen-nium marketed by Innovative Inc. is one suchexample. No supplier can ignore the presence ofthe Internet and hence software has had to bedeveloped that allows for the integration of localsystems with the Internet. Just a few of theprotocols that can be expected to be part ofany system are: TCP/IP (the Internet Protocol),Z39.50 (a protocol designed to enable the searchand retrieval of bibliographic records in variousformats), other forms of data exchange includeMARC-formats and for the Web some systemsinclude use of Extensible Mark-up Language(XML) (see mark-up languages).

INTEGRATION

For many years it has been a goal of manysystems developers to provide one single pointof access to a library’s resources, held on differ-ent mediums, for example, on CD-ROMs. As thedevelopment of networked computing continuedthrough the 1980s the vision of the single pointof access was only partly realized. In some casesit was considered better to keep separate theonline searching of remote databases from thelocal access to databases offered by CD-ROMtechnology. In the late 1990s and into thetwenty-first century, with the availability ofdatabases accessed over the Web, both local andremote, the goal is nearer fruition, although themany parties involved in information supply andthe need to safeguard contractual rights hasconstrained its fulfilment.

LIBRARY SYSTEMS IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE

Expectations of library users and staff haveundergone a change in the age of the Internet.Users expect systems to be user-friendlier thanever before. Suppliers have reacted to this bydeveloping ‘mylibrary’ software, in other wordsthe capability for the user to personalize theinterface and search for topics of particularinterest. Two strands of thought have emergedin the design of systems search interfaces: first,the notion that users may start from the premisethat they wish to search everything and every-where all at once; and, second, the more tradi-tional approach that the user starts searching

locally and only broadens the search to externalsources if at first unsuccessful.

Managing library systems

Changing styles of management and the influenceof political and economic agendas have impactedupon the management of library systems so that,whilst the post of systems librarian and asso-ciated systems team is often found in largerlibraries, other means of managing the systemscan also be employed with some organizationschoosing to outsource the task of systems supply.A number of the companies who supply LibraryManagement Systems offer a facilities manage-ment service.

Further reading

Evans, P. (ed.) (2002) Biblio Tech Review (http://www.biblio-tech.com/) [accessed 10 May 2002].

Cohn, M.J., Kelsey, A.L. and Fiels, K.M. (2002)Planning for Integrated Systems and Technologies:A How-to-Do-It Manual for Librarians, 2nd UK edn,rev. and adapted by D. Salter, London: Facet Publish-ing.

Electronic Library, Library Technology Reports, On-line, Program and Vine [journals specializing inlibrary automation].

IAN MURRAY

LIBRARY BUILDINGS

Libraries are housed in a wide variety ofpurpose-built or converted buildings. Soon after1500, book collections in royal palaces, cathe-drals and abbeys began to grow. Accommoda-tion for them was at first found within thosebuildings but later, when national librariesand university libraries had taken root, itbecame evident that the rapidly growing collec-tions required specially designed structures. TheRenaissance gradually brought this about, andgrandiose buildings began to appear. One of theearliest was the Laurentian Library in Florence,designed by Michelangelo and completed in1571. From then on, buildings specifically de-signed for the housing of books began to beerected in other European cities and academiccentres. Michelangelo was one of the first greatarchitects to be linked with library buildings,but he was succeeded through the years bymany others. However, most architects, particu-larly in the nineteenth century and the first halfof the twentieth, concentrated on designing

378 LIBRARY BUILDINGS

monumental buildings and ignored the practicalneeds of the libraries, which were growing morequickly than had been envisaged.

The librarian and the architect

It was not until well after the profession oflibrarianship had evolved and established itselfthat librarians began to influence the design ofbuildings by preparing briefs describing theirtechnical requirements and by insisting, as far aspossible, that those briefs be followed by archi-tects in their design plans.Even so, it has been a slow process, and

instances still occur of buildings that reflect thepersonalities and ideas of their architects morethan the librarians’ practical needs. The twentieth-century renaissance in library architecture beganimmediately after the end of the Second WorldWar in the USA and Scandinavia, especiallySweden and Finland. In the latter country theinternationally celebrated architect Alvar Aaltodesigned several libraries, notably Viipuri in the1930s and Rovaniemi in 1965.In Britain such architects as Basil Spence,

Frederick Gibberd, James Stirling, Richard Ro-gers, Norman Foster and Quinlan Terry havesome notable library buildings to their names.The vast new british library at St Pancras wasdesigned by Colin St John Wilson. Built to houseone of the largest and fastest-growing collectionsof books and other materials in the world, this ismassive but has been planned so as not to beover-powering to the millions of scholars andgeneral readers who will have recourse to it inthe future. In France the new building for thebibliothèque nationale de france in Paris,designed by Dominique Perrault, is also worthyof close study.Though still imperfect, relations between li-

brarians and architects have improved enor-mously. The librarian’s prime task is to look asfar into the future as possible. Having visualizedthe development of the library and havingconsidered the possible growth of population inthe area served, the librarian should prepare thebrief. Discussions with the architect can thentake place and agreement can be reached on afeasible plan.

Importance of the site

All this presupposes that a site has been agreedupon and that the necessary finances have been

approved by the library authority. The site of anynew library building is of paramount importance.It is true that dedicated scholars and users willfind their way to any library if they really needto, but a building aiming to be used to maximumpotential should be located in a position that iscentral and on the everyday axis of those whowill be seeking to use its resources. The siteshould afford adequate car-parking space, andideally it should also be capable of accommodat-ing a future extension to the building.

The design plan

Every library has its own particular needs as faras interior design is concerned. The size andpossible future growth of the collection are vitalfactors to be thought of at the pre-planningstage. However, there are some features commonto the requirements of all libraries. Ease ofsupervision, security considerations, fire precau-tions, good natural lighting, efficient artificiallighting, heating and air-conditioning, facilitiesoutside and inside the building for physicallydisabled users, and transfer facilities for materi-als, users and staff between different floor levelsare just some of the factors needing detailedforethought and attention in the design plan.

Multimedia needs

Libraries once collected only manuscripts andbooks, with periodicals, newspapers and archivesbeing added later. However, for some time nowthe information needs of users have dictated thatmany other media have been added to libraries –first gramophone records, and then audio-cassettes and CDs, slides and videocassettes, aswell as material in microform (see microforms)and records in disk forms.Libraries in existing premises have had to take

these developments in their stride, but designersof future library buildings will have to giveserious thought to the special needs both of thesenewer media and of their users. In fact examplesof buildings of this kind already exist. TheFrench coined the word mediathèque and, afterthe success of Richard Rogers’s Centre Pompidouin Paris, more instance of multimedia centresappeared in France. The arts and media centre atNı̂mes, designed by Norman Foster, is an inter-esting example. In Britain, attention is drawn tothe Queen Mary and Westfield College library inEast London, the work of Colin St John Wilson,

LIBRARY BUILDINGS 379

the architect of the British Library. More recentlyCroydon public library, opened in 1993, paysgreat attention to multimedia needs.The ideal library building, like the ideal house,

does not yet exist, and probably it never will.However, there is every reason why librariansand architects should try to achieve buildingsthat combine all the aesthetic appeal dear to thehearts of architects with the practical require-ments of librarians. Those responsible for plan-ning and designing future libraries must learnfrom the past and not repeat the faults of somany existing structures. There are many lessonsto be learned.

Further reading

Bisbrouck, M.-F. (ed.) (2001) Library Buildings in aChanging Environment, Munich: Saur.

Harrison, D. (1995) Library Buildings, 1990–1994,Library Services Limited.

Harrison, K.C. (ed.) (1990) Library Buildings, 1984–1989, Library Services Limited.

Holt, R.M. (1989) Planning Library Building andFacilities, Scarecrow.

Kaser, D. (1993) ‘Library buildings’, in World Encyclo-pedia of Library and Information Services, 3rd edn,ALA.

Leighton, P.D. and Weber, D.C. (2000) Planning Aca-demic and Research Library Buildings, AmericanLibrary Association.

Thompson, G. (1989) Planning and Design of LibraryBuildings, 3rd edn, Butterworths.

SEE ALSO: university libraries

K.C. HARRISON

LIBRARY CO-OPERATION

Formal or informal arrangements between li-braries through which they can work togetherfor the common benefit of their users. Few, ifany, libraries can regard themselves as islands,endeavouring to keep all, or at least most, ofwhat their users want. Throughout the centuries,communication between scholars has resulted inthe lending of materials to other libraries andaccess being given to special collections. It wasnot, however, until the present century thatformal schemes of library co-operation withunion catalogues, interlibrary lending,centralized storage and subject specializationcame into being.The library of congress National Union

Catalog, which began in 1901, was one of thefirst of its kind, but most countries have devel-

oped some formalized structure for library co-operation and interlibrary loan since that time.Some are centralized systems where all co-opera-tion is focused on one library or one unioncatalogue. These are rare, although they can befound in some small countries. A more commonform of centralized system is the one that dealswith a particular type of material – such asINIST in France, which handles only scientificand technical photocopy requests. Althoughmuch of the material supplied by the britishlibrary Document Supply Centre (BLDSC) is inthe from of photocopies of journal articles, thisorganization has a wider role, inherited from theold National Central Library, of co-ordinatingthe United Kingdom interlending structure.Decentralized schemes of library co-operation

are in fact more common and there is consider-able diversity. A group of specializing librarieshave a mandated responsibility to supply mate-rial in particular subject areas – the CADIST(Centres d’Acquisition et de Diffusion de l’In-formation Scientifique et Technique) in France,for example – or in a specific geographic area,as in the Netherlands. The pattern in thenordic countries is generally to have a seriesof large general libraries that support eitheracademic or public libraries, in the first instance,and then libraries of other types as a secondsource.The wholesale collection and storage of mate-

rials probably reached its zenith in the 1950swith the Farmington Scheme in the USA, whichdivided foreign literature collecting among mem-bers of the Association of Research Libraries(ARL). Weakened budgets and lack of storagespace led to its demise in 1967 and, as this andother comprehensive collection schemes becameincreasingly difficult to maintain, the concept ofUAP, by which each country was to be respon-sible for making available material published inits own country, was developed by ifla. UAP hasan important part to play in international libraryco-operation and it must be emphasized that intheory, if not always in practice, there are nobarriers to knowledge. The IFLA Section onDocument Supply and Interlending is responsible,with the IFLA Office for International Lendingsituated at BLDSC, for the development ofmanuals and directories.As it became more difficult to maintain co-

operative subject specialization collections, ascheme called conspectus, which aimed to

380 LIBRARY CO-OPERATION

improve local and collective planning, was devel-oped in the USA; this has been adopted in somecountries, giving libraries a better understandingof their own and other libraries’ collectionswithout the vast expense of maintaining addi-tional special collections.From the 1960s onwards a new form of

library co-operation began to appear, aimed atthe sharing of cataloguing entries; these includedoclc in the USA, BLCMP and SWALCAP in theUK and Pica in the Netherlands. This develop-ment mirrored the changes that were taking placein the approach to library co-operation. Co-operation was no longer merely an adjunct tolibrary services and a means for remedyingdeficiencies and meeting special needs; it becamea strategy that aimed at planned relationshipsand services to assist a move away from ‘hold-ings’ to ‘access’ within libraries.This strategy was well illustrated in reports

published in the 1970s and 1980s by the Libraryand Information Services Council (England) onthe Future Development of Library and Informa-tion Services and at the White House conferenceon Library and Information Services in 1979.The British Library strategic plan for 1989–94,Gateway to Knowledge, saw as its goal for theyear 2000 ‘an integrated pattern of services basedupon a single British Library collection and arange of co-operative relationships with otherlibraries in the UK, Europe and abroad’.The development in the UK of Library and

Information Plans (LIPs) to co-ordinate on astructured and contractual basis the services of awide range of libraries within a geographical orsectoral area is an indication of this growingawareness of the need for sharing resources. InCanada and the USA there has been a rapidlygrowing phenomenon of provincial and state co-operation to meet resource-sharing objectives.Many of these new developments have beenmade possible by the use of new technology andthe growth of networking. Union catalogues havebeen computerized and networks for interlibraryloan and bibliographical research have beendeveloped. Also, in the UK the catalogues ofmany academic libraries are available for accessvia the internet.The situation is undergoing further change

with the development of worldwide data com-munications infrastructures such as the Internetand the Information Superhighway; it is nowpossible to link networks and thus to access

library catalogues and information systemsthroughout the world from a microcomputer.Full-text systems are also available and materialcan be downloaded, making document deliv-ery rather than interlibrary loan the key to thefuture. Unfortunately, this growth in the abilityto communicate has not been matched by thefreedom or ability to pay for the content of theinformation. It also increases the possibility ofunauthorized use and raises the thorny issues ofintellectual property and payment to producers.Although the interdependence of libraries is

now universally accepted and some believe thatnetworking is the key to open vast resources ofinformation, others are more cautious and stressthe need for standards and for national andinternational infrastructures.

Further reading

Capital Planning Information (1989) The Impact ofLibrary and Information Plans on Local Coopera-tives, British Library Research and DevelopmentDepartment.

Fjallbrandt, N. (ed.) (1980) Library Cooperation:Trends, Possibilities and Conditions, IATUL.

Helal, A.H. and Weiss, J.W. (eds) (1987) Impact ofNew Information Technology on International Li-brary Cooperation: Essen Symposium, Essen Univer-sitätsbibliothek.

McDougall, A.F. and Prytherch, R. (eds) (1991) Hand-book of Library Cooperation, Gower.

JEAN PLAISTER

LIBRARY EDUCATION

Library education has always coped with twosets of problems. One of them is its relationshipto the profession. The other is its relationship tothe academic world. To a certain degree thesetwo types of relationships still play a fundamen-tal role in library education. The history oflibrary education worldwide is diverse, mirroringthe state of the library movement and theeducational systems in various countries.Library education started with a very practical

orientation and it has grown into a recognizedacademic discipline. This process has occurred ata different pace in various countries and in someplaces the education is still outside the universitysystem.Formal library education goes back to the

1880s when the first library school was estab-lished as the Columbia School of Library

LIBRARY EDUCATION 381

Economy. In the following years, further schoolswere established in the USA. The University ofChicago established the first graduate school oflibrarianship in 1926 and from that time theeducation of librarians in USA has been researchbased and at a graduate level. Master’s degreesbecame the recognised route for library educa-tion in the USA. The american library asso-ciation played a major role in the improvementof educational strategies. At the turn of thecentury the library education programmes in theUSA were a source of inspiration especially forEuropean librarians, many of whom travelled tothe USA to obtain an education in librarianship.When the Library Association (LA) was

formed in 1877 in the UK, an effort to establishformal education in librarianship started. Aroundthe turn of the century, formal education startedboth at University College London and at theLondon School of Economics. The LA played asignificant role but there was some controversyabout the content of the syllabus.The educational models of the USA and the

UK had a fundamental influence on educationfor librarianship in many countries. British mod-els were exported to Australia and New Zealandat the beginning of the twentieth century. Theyalso influenced education for librarianship inmany parts of Sub-Saharan africa and southasia. Models from the USA influenced theeducation in Canada and in Latin America andsouth america.In the USA and the UK the library associations

played an active role through their process ofaccreditation of educational programmes. This isnot the case in most of the European andScandinavian countries. Overall, in many Scandi-navian and European countries library educationwas established in close relationship with agovernment department as the governing bodyand the library associations’ influence was moreadvisory. Accreditation of programmes was amatter of educational monopoly. It was normalto establish education in professional schools,often outside the university system.The real growth in library education came

after the Second World War. In the UK severallibrary schools were established at college level.The LA controlled the curriculum and conductedthe examinations. During the coming decades thesyllabus was increased to two years of full-timestudy and the basic admission requirementsbecame the same as for universities. The period

is characterized by arguments between the LAand the schools about the Association’s role inaccreditation and examinations. From the late1960s Bachelor’s and Master’s programmes inlibrarianship started at various institutions andthe role of the LA changed from control overexaminations to accreditation of programmesand the establishment of a professional register.The acceptance and accreditation of programmescame to be based on consultation and educa-tional guidelines.In 1992 the UK polytechnics and a small

number of higher-level colleges became universi-ties and this further changed education forlibrarianship. The change placed educationfirmly in a more research-oriented environmentand the syllabus became to an increasing extentmodular in its structure. At the same time thediversity of the curricula increased. It was aresponse to perceived changes in the require-ments of the labour market and also the devel-opment of institutional profiles for attractingstudents.Traditionally the European educational system

has been two-tiered, with universities and profes-sional schools. The professional schools had aclear orientation towards the profession and theyhad only a limited research obligation. Many ofthe library education programmes were placed inthese institutions, but this situation has changeda lot during the 1990s. In the Nordic countries itis now possible to take a PhD in LIS in aresearch-based environment. We see the sametrend in many European countries. In GermanyMaster’s programmes in librarianship and relatedtopics have been introduced. The same is the casein many countries in central and easterneurope, like Hungary.Even though the USA and UK models have

had a tremendous influence in different parts ofthe world it is important to note that there wereeducational models from the USSR system, andthat these influenced, for example, library educa-tion in countries like China, which like India alsohas had a long history of library education.In 2000 ifla contributed to the development

of library education by approving a set of Guide-lines.Societal changes from the 1980s onward have

had consequences for library schools worldwide.The USA witnessed a closure of some libraryschools. In other countries there were difficultiesattracting the appropriate number of students.

382 LIBRARY EDUCATION

The profession appeared as old fashioned andthis led to a rather radical diversification of thecurriculum in many institutions. This diversifica-tion was a response to newly emerging jobopportunities, especially in the private sector,and in some countries we see large numbers oflibrarians employed in new types of jobs. Thestruggle has been to maintain a balance betweenthe core subjects of library education and attrac-tive new topics.

Further reading

Elkin, J. and Wilson, T. (eds) (1997) The Education ofLibrary and Information Professionals in the UnitedKingdom, Mansell.

Harbo, O. and Pors, N.O. (eds) (1998) Education forLibrarianship in the Nordic Countries, Mansell.

Harris, J. (ed.) (1997) Education for Librarianship inChina, Mansell.

Ronnie, M. (1996) Education for Librarianship in NewZealand and the Pacific Islands, Mansell.

Roy, L. and Sheldon, B.E. (eds) (1998) Library andInformation Studies Education in the United States,Mansell.

SEE ALSO: information professions; informationscience education; South Asia; Southeast Asia

NIELS OLE PORS

LIBRARY LEGISLATION

Laws setting up and regulating individual li-braries, particular categories of library or thewhole library system of a state. Library legisla-tion is also laws that define, support or delimitsome particular activity or activities of libraries.Many countries regard a comprehensive li-

brary law as an essential underpinning for libraryactivity within their boundaries. This was parti-cularly true of the command economies of thesocialist states, particularly russia and theformer soviet union. Lenin, no doubt influ-enced by his librarian wife Nadezhda Krupskaya,‘considered the elevation of library work to beone of the indicators of the cultural level of acountry’ and expressed this straight after theRevolution in his library decrees of 1918 and1920. Subsequent enactments, the last being theRegulation of Library Work, 1984, refined anddeveloped the monolithic Soviet system.A few developing countries have also achieved

a very comprehensively specified legal position,Tanzania being of special interest. Even though asurprising number of former British colonies have

passed library laws quite soon after achievingindependence, Tanzania’s is particularly inclusive.The Tanganyika Library Services Board Act of1963 established a Board with the responsibilityof promoting, establishing, equipping, managing,maintaining and developing libraries in what isnow mainland Tanzania. Furthermore, this Actwas replaced in 1975 by an even more compre-hensive Act inspired by the NATIS concept ofnational information systems. The 1975 Actempowered the Board to co-ordinate library anddocumentation services, library training, literacycampaigns, encouragement of local authorshipand supervision of all types of libraries inTanzania. Unfortunately the existence of the legalenactments has not affected the economic posi-tion of the country or its library service, whichremains sadly underprovided.It is much more common for library work to

be regulated by a group of laws passed atdifferent times for different purposes. One of theearliest modern library laws was the Act for theBetter Preservation of Parochial Libraries in thatpart of Great Britain called England, 1708,which, as the title suggests, was designed merelyto protect existing libraries, particularly those setup by Thomas bray. Perhaps the first nationalsystem of libraries was that of France, set up bythe allocation of the revolutionary confiscationsof ecclesiastical and aristocratic book collectionsto various national and municipal libraries.However, this cannot be attributed to a singlecoherent legislative enactment, though the pro-cess was largely completed by a decree of 1803.The Public Libraries Act of 1850 in Britain,despite its horrible imperfections, is probably thefirst real landmark in library legislation, since itwas consciously designed to permit a nationalsystem of tax-supported public libraries. Subse-quent amending Acts (most recently that of1964) encouraged, and finally compelled, localgovernment authorities to provide libraries givinga comprehensive and efficient service. Britainwas, however, late with its British Library Act,1972, which brought together a number ofexisting national and quasi-national services toform an outstandingly effective new library.Countries as diverse as France (1789), Russia,Brazil and Argentina (all in 1810), Belgium(1837) and Germany (1870) had already ob-tained their national libraries long before.The USA, although for a long time the world’s

leader in library provision, nevertheless did not

LIBRARY LEGISLATION 383

have major library laws until the Library Ser-vices Act 1956 provided federal funds for statepublic library developments, but most statesalready had a long tradition of high-qualitylibrary provision, usually backed by state legis-lation. In 1965 three Acts (the Elementary andSecondary Education Act, the Higher EducationAct and the Medical Library Assistance Act)confirmed the trend of federal intervention. AScandinavian country such as Denmark prob-ably provides the best type of model for legalsupport for libraries. Its 1920 Public LibraryLaw included a means of enforcement through aState Inspectorate for Public Libraries. It alsorequired all primary schools (though, curiously,not secondary schools) to provide libraries forpupils. Denmark had its first modern legaldeposit Act in 1927 (though the practice datedback to 1697) and subsequent library legislationincludes an Act setting up the Danish RoyalLibrary School in 1956.There is, in many countries, a tendency for

important pieces of legislation relating to li-braries to be concealed incidentally within otherenactments. A classic example is the LocalGovernment and Housing Act of 1989 in Britain.This gives the government the right to authorizepublic libraries to charge for certain facilities andservices. The major principle of free publiclibraries is thus legally subverted in one of thecountries in which it was pioneered, by aseemingly irrelevant piece of law. If nothing else,this supports the case for a comprehensivenational library law that can be openly debatedand that, when accepted, will assert clear andmore easily defensible principles than a series ofpartial enactments can hope to do. In the inter-ests of more coherent legislation relating tolibraries, particularly in the emerging democra-cies of Central and Eastern Europe, the Councilof Europe has organized a number of seminarsand published a set of guidelines (Council ofEurope 2000).

References

Council of Europe (2000) Guidelines on LibraryLegislation and Policy in Europe: A User Guide,Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing.

Further reading

Morris, R.J.B. (1977) Parliament and the Public Li-braries, Mansell.


PAUL STURGES

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

The Library of Congress of the USA, regardedtoday as the national library (see nationallibraries) of the USA, occupies a unique placein US civilization. Established in 1800 as alegislative library, it grew into a national institu-tion in the nineteenth century, a product of UScultural nationalism. Since 1950, it has becomean international resource of unparalleled dimen-sion, collecting research materials in most lan-guages and formats. Today, with an annualgovernment appropriation of more than $450million, a staff of 4,600, multimedia collectionstotalling more than 120 million items, six over-seas acquisitions offices and a range of servicesand programmes unmatched by any other library,it is one of the world’s leading research andcultural institutions.Reference and research services to the US

Congress are still the Library’s most importanttask. As part of the legislative branch of govern-ment, it answers directly to the US Congress –even though the Librarian of Congress is ap-pointed by the President of the USA, subject toconfirmation by the US Senate. With Congres-sional approval, the Library of Congress alsoserves members of the executive and judicialbranches of the government, libraries around theworld and individual scholars, researchers, ar-tists, scientists and members of the public.Service is provided in three massive structureson Capitol Hill, the Thomas Jefferson Building(1897), the John Adams Building (1939) and theJames Madison Memorial Building (1980). Sto-rage space for the future is being constructed atFort Meade, Maryland, twenty miles north ofCapitol Hill, and a new Library of CongressAudiovisual Conservation Center is beingplanned in Culpepper, Virginia.Using private funds and congressional appro-

priations, since 1994 the Library has made itsbibliographic records and selected items from itsUS collections available on the internet. Thesubsequent rapid development of its website,through which it now freely shares selectedcollections and exhibitions, bibliographic dataand information about current legislation, copy-right and its collections, services and programmes,

384 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

has made the Library of Congress an increasinglyimportant educational force. Its National DigitalLibrary in co-operation with other institutions hasdigitized more than 5 million items from thehistorical collections of the Library and otherrepositories, and made them available at theLibrary’s American Memory website. In fiscal2000 the Library’s website, one of the mostheavily used in the US government, garnered closeto 1 billion transactions.The diversity of the Library of Congress is

startling. Simultaneously it serves as the principalresearch library (see research libraries) of theUS Congress; the copyright agency of the USA;a centre for scholarship that collects researchmaterials in most subjects and many media, andin more than 450 languages; a public institutionthat is open to everyone over high school age andserves readers in twenty-one reading rooms; agovernment library that is heavily used by theentire US government; the national library for theblind and physically handicapped, with regionalbranches throughout the country; an outstandinglaw library (see law libraries), especially strongin foreign-language materials; one of the world’slargest providers of bibliographic data and pro-ducts; a centre for the commissioning and perfor-mance of chamber music; the home of thenation’s poet laureate; the sponsor of exhibitionsand of musical, literary and cultural programmesthat reach across the nation and the world; aresearch centre for the preservation and con-servation of library materials; the world’s lar-gest repository of maps, atlases, printed andrecorded music, motion pictures and televisionprogrammes; and a national and internationalpromoter of books, reading, literacy and li-braries.Even though it is recognized as the de facto

national library of the USA, the Library ofCongress does not have that official designation.It performs most of the functions performed byother national libraries but does defer to theNational Library of Medicine (1956) and theNational Library of Agriculture (1962), both partof the executive branch of government, forintensive collecting in the fields of clinical medi-cine and technical agriculture, respectively.The growth of the collections of the Library of

Congress is relentless. Materials arrive throughan acquisitions programme that extends through-out the world and includes more than 15,000agreements with foreign governments and re-

search institutions for the exchange of researchmaterials. Other major modes of acquisitionsinclude copyright deposit, gifts, purchases andtransfers from other government agencies. Eachday about 31,000 items arrive at the Library;approximately 10,000 of them will be selectedfor the permanent collections.The collections of the Library of Congress

now include more than 120 million items,including more than 18 million books in theclassified collections, 54 million manuscripts, 13million photographs, 4 million maps, 4 millionpieces of music and more than 0.8 millionmotion pictures. Its collection of more than5,600 incunabula is the largest in the Westernhemisphere. The Library also holds immensecollections of newspapers, technical reports, vi-deotapes and disks, computer programs andother audio, visual and print materials.The Library of Congress has been shaped

primarily by the philosophy and ideals of itsprincipal founder, Thomas Jefferson, who be-lieved that a democratic legislature needed in-formation and ideas in all subjects in order toperform its work. In 1815 Jefferson sold hiswide-ranging personal library, which encom-passed many subjects and languages, to theCongress to ‘recommence’ the small librarydestroyed the previous year when the Britishinvaded Washington and destroyed the Capitol,the Library’s first home. Jefferson felt that therewas ‘no subject’ outside the interests of Membersof Congress, justifying the Congressional pur-chase of his personal library and the Library ofCongress’s future growth. His philosophy wassuccessfully implemented in future years, mostnotably by Librarians of Congress AinsworthRand Spofford (1864–97) and Herbert Putnam(1899–1939), who together used Jefferson’s phi-losophy to create today’s Library of Congress.The present Librarian of Congress, historian

James H. Billington, was nominated by PresidentRonald Reagan and confirmed by the US Senatein 1987. Through his dual emphasis on develop-ing and using new technologies and educationaloutreach to scholars and citizens alike, Billingtonhas guided the Library of Congress through aperiod of steady growth and expansion. With theapproval of Congress, in 1990 he established theJames Madison Council, the Library’s first na-tional private-sector support group. In 1994 heproclaimed a new leadership role for the Libraryof Congress in the electronic age, announcing the

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 385

establishment of a National Digital Library, aprivate and public sector collaborative effort tomake available electronically major segments ofthe Library’s US history collections.Under Billington’s guidance, the Library used

its Bicentennial in the year 2000 to move theinstitution forwards on several important fronts.For example, Congress authorized eighty-fourpositions for the National Digital Library pro-ject, giving it permanent government support,and Madison Council chairman John W. Klugepresented the Library with a gift of $60 millionas part of the Bicentennial Gifts to the Nationprogramme. In his annual report for the year2000, Billington noted that, as the Library ofCongress entered its third century of service toCongress, the nation and the international com-munity, it continued to be guided by the belief ofthe Founding Fathers of the USA that ‘free accessto knowledge is the bulwark of democracy’.

Further reading

Bisbort, A. and Osborne, L.B. (2000) The Nation’sLibrary: The Library of Congress, Washington, DC:Scala Books.

Conaway, James (2000) America’s Library: The Storyof the Library of Congress, Yale University Press.

Library of Congress website (www.loc.gov).

JOHN Y. COLE

LIBRARY OF CONGRESSCLASSIFICATION

The scheme of bibliographic classificationdrawn up by Herbert Putnam in 1897. Althoughbased in some respects on the dewey decimalclassification and cutter’s expansive schemes,it does not conform to theoretical rules forclassification. It was quite explicitly compiled tomeet the needs of the library’s huge collection ofbooks and is too detailed and complex for use insmall libraries. It has, however, been adopted byresearch and university libraries throughout theworld.


LIBRARY OF CONGRESS SUBJECTHEADINGS

Although the subject headings were first de-signed to be used in conjunction with the Library

of Congress catalogue, they are widely usedaround the world as an authoritative list ofsubject headings for the catalogues of manykinds of library.


LIBRARY PUBLISHING

The main aim of library publishing is to make acontribution to the fulfilment of the library’smission. Besides their most central purposes,libraries, among other activities – such as exhibi-tions, presentation of new books, organization ofprofessional and scientific meetings and confer-ences – do publish. Since they are primarycultural and information institutions, librariespublish in order to spread information abouthuman knowledge in the best possible way,regardless of the specific medium chosen.Libraries mainly publish:

1 Information about their activities.2 Works that have their source in the collec-

tions.3 Publications that may not have their source

in the collections, but could strengthen thelibrary’s position in the community.

Most libraries publish information about theiractivities, such as library guides, instructions forthe use of the collections, plans and reports, newsand bulletins for patrons and employees. Somelibraries have been doing this for a long time,and some started recently. Some libraries likeseveral national libraries in Asia and Oceaniajoin their efforts with others to publish news ontheir activities.Publications on library buildings play a very

distinctive role. They are usually meant aspresents for illustrious visitors to the library, andtherefore are lavishly produced, which meansthat they are also very expensive to publish.Most national libraries publish books on theirbuildings, but some university and newly builtpublic libraries do it too.Libraries publish material related to their

collections: catalogues (of the complete collec-tion or parts of it); bibliographies (special biblio-graphies, retrospective bibliographies, etc.; seebibliography); books related to local studiescollections; reprints; book collectors’ editions;periodicals; directories of publishers; posters;

386 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CLASSIFICATION

postcards; exhibition catalogues; bookmarks;compact discs; databases; portals (see portalsand gateways); and so on.Very few, if any, publishing houses could

compare with the digital collections held bylibraries. Even though, in the beginning, thebuilding of digital collections did not appear tohave the potential to be a major publishingactivity – in fact it is. Thus, libraries decide upona topic, select the sources, edit material selectedfrom their collection and other sources, design itand typeset it – and publish it on a compact discor on the Web. In such a way they aim not onlyto publish but also to build up the resources theycan make available too, like the Czech NationalLibrary, which published a Catalogue of Arabicmanuscripts with image samples in a CD-ROMand Internet version.Libraries also publish works that are basically

not different from the output of commercialpublishing houses or other institutions like uni-versities, museums or archives that have publish-ing programmes. They publish to fulfil theircultural, professional or scientific role morecompletely. This is especially so in the case ofperiodical publications concerned with libraryand information science, cultural history, thehistory of the book and library history. Manylibraries publish magazines, historical or otherprofessional textbooks and even fiction. Manyuniversity libraries publish guidelines for writinga Master’s or Doctoral thesis. The NationalLibrary of Holland joined forces with the BritishLibrary to publish the bibliography IncunabulaPrinted in the Low Countries.Libraries also publish catalogues of exhibitions

that were held on library premises, even whenthese were not based upon the library’s collec-tions.What the library is often doing in these kinds

of publishing is to publish works that otherpublishers would not, but in countries with adeveloped book market the sales of those type ofpublications are still capable of significantlyimproving the library’s income.Nevertheless, it is clear that this is also a way

in which the library can strengthen its publicimage, using publishing as part of its marketingplan. A good example is the public library inŠibenik, Croatia, which has established itself asan important publisher of high-quality books onthe cultural history of its region that are impor-tant for Croatian history and culture generally.

An example of a library extending its basicmission in a slightly different way is Opening theBook: Finding a Good Read, published byBradford Libraries in Great Britain, so as toassist its patrons’ reading activities.The type of library (school, public, etc.)

greatly affects the characteristics of its publish-ing, much more that the national and culturalmilieu does. In the spectrum from a little locallibrary that is mainly a cultural focal pointincorporating a local archive and museum,through to a major national library, great differ-ences in approach, content and publishing can beobserved.However, libraries as mediators of cultural

content learn from each other and this has ledto some typical patterns emerging. Some librarypublishing is done according to the provisions ofthe law (e.g. a national bibliography). Otherpublishing is done according to the library’s ownstatutes or other regulations (e.g. a local collec-tion catalogue, acquisitions bulletin), or on thebasis of yearly or long-term planning.Although most libraries that publish have

editorial boards, publishing initiatives are gener-ally taken upon the library director’s proposals.In a number of libraries the director also acts aseditor in chief.The money needed for the expenses of publish-

ing, mainly for printing and binding, is as a ruleinitially provided for in the library budget. Sincea high proportion of libraries are public institu-tions, their annual reports reveal the amountsspent on printing and compact-disk publishing.Most library publishing activities are carried

on separately, but sometimes libraries join forceswith publishing houses for projects like reprintsand marketing publication in the form of calen-dars etc.Library publishing is subject to trends, just like

the publishing world in general. For instance,lately, several national libraries have been collect-ing and printing the works of their nation’s mostfamous musicians. The Finnish national libraryhas published the complete works of Jean Sibe-lius, and the Danish national library started aten-year project to publish the works of CarlNielsen.Libraries also have a long and well-estab-

lished tradition of printing and binding. Manyof them have their own printeries and binderieswith well-qualified personnel. Working withexpert librarians, they can produce high-quality

LIBRARY PUBLISHING 387

publications. Such publications would not bethe type that requires high-quality colour print-ing, and they would usually be short run. But inregard to their content and binding, publicationsthat are completely produced in a library willoften receive more attention than in a publish-ing house, because there are not the same timeand money pressures.

Further reading

Field, R. (1993). ‘Library publications’, in D.W. Brom-ley and A.M. Allott (ed.), British Librarianship andInformation Work 1986–1990, Library Association.

SEE ALSO: cultural industries; knowledgeindustries

SREĆKO JELUŠIĆ

LIBRARY SECURITY SYSTEMS

A system to prevent theft, vandalism or mutila-tion of library collections. The costs of suchsystems, which typically involve electronic tag-ging of every document in the collection and theinstallation of monitoring devices at the exitpoints from the library, are high, but when highloss and damage rates are being sustained theycan easily be demonstrated to present budgetaryand operational savings.

SEE ALSO: crime in libraries

LIBRARY SUPPLIERS

Commercial organizations that supply books,other stock and associated services to libraries.Library suppliers in the UK are a key part of

the book trade supply chain from author toreader and the parallel supply chains for othermedia. Unlike publishers and their distributors,wholesalers and retail booksellers, library suppli-ers provide a range of services to assist librariesin selection, cataloguing and classification, andprocessing. These services aim to provide booksand other materials ‘shelf ready’ so reducing thework of acquisitions services in libraries andtheir operational costs, and reducing the timetaken to make materials available for libraryusers. In other countries wholesalers and bookjobbers provide similar services, some publisherssupply direct to libraries and libraries purchasefrom bookshops.

In the UK the Net Book Agreement and itsassociated Library Licence ensured retail pricemaintenance and regulated the terms of businessbetween libraries and their suppliers until 1995.Competition was through provision of supple-mentary services and the charges made for them.Since then competition has been by price (asdiscount on price, or mark-up on the cost to thesupplier) and the charges made (or hidden in thediscount or mark-up) for the additional services.Restrictions on public expenditure and intensecompetition for the business of libraries of allkinds have reduced the number of library suppli-ers, through mergers and closures. In the Eur-opean Union, allocation of business for publiclyfunded libraries is subject to the requirement forcompetitive tendering and libraries form consor-tia to obtain tenders and to share expertise intheir evaluation.The main UK library suppliers export UK-

published books and provide services to librariesthroughout the world and, with the reduction ofUK spending, this business is of increasingimportance. The return on investment in thelibrary supply industry is markedly lower thanin most other industries and none of the majorsuppliers also operate retail bookselling busi-nesses.Increasingly communication between libraries

and their suppliers uses electronic data inter-change (EDI) services including First Edition,electronic mail, the internet and direct com-puter-to-computer links. These carry biblio-graphic information, orders, progress reports,invoices, information to update stock holdingson library automation systems and payments.Library suppliers aim to assist librarians to

select from the vast range of titles available bypresenting information from publishers and otherproviders in timely and convenient ways. Theinformation may be comprehensive or profiledaccording to the requirements of the library. Thebibliographic information services provided bylibrary suppliers to support book selection andthe selection of other materials are in the form ofonline access to their databases, CD-ROMs,printed lists and slips, materials supplied onapproval and access to showrooms and book-shops.For newly published materials information is

sent prior to their publication date so as tofacilitate ordering, and also at the date ofpublication so that librarians can take account

388 LIBRARY SECURITY SYSTEMS

of reviews. The use of approval services in UKpublic libraries has diminished because of thehigh costs of the service, which are reflected inthe terms of business negotiated in the tenderingprocess.Information on the range of titles already

published is provided to assist librarians in themanagement of their stocks, in meeting newneeds and in selecting replacements for super-seded or worn books. This is done by thepreparation, often in response to the library’sspecification, of annotated lists of available titles,access to the supplier’s database and througharrangements for visits to the showrooms oper-ated by the suppliers, to stockholding booksellersor to wholesalers.Bibliographic data is also provided to add to

library catalogues and to update catalogues. It issupplied to AACR2 and ukmarc or usmarcstandards. Most suppliers outsource the prepara-tion of the data to Bibliographic Data Services, aDumfries-based company that also provides theBritish Library with Cataloguing in Publicationservices. The data includes dewey decimalclassification and categorization or genreinformation. The library suppliers may modifythe data to meet the local requirements ortraditions of the libraries.Since 1997 arrangements by which public

libraries outsource selection of aspects of theirstock to their suppliers have been initiated. Theyrequire the suppliers to bring their knowledge ofpublishing to work in partnership with thelibraries, and to ensure that the aims andobjectives of the libraries are achieved. Thecharges for these additional services offset thesavings in staff time made in the libraries. It ispossible that these arrangements will be extendedto the management and promotion of stock.Library suppliers also provide, in collaboration

with reading development agencies, themed col-lections and display materials to assist librariansin the presentation and promotion of theirstocks. Co-operative promotions are organizedat local, regional and national level in order tosupport individual library services.Libraries of all kinds make use of the services

by which library suppliers provide books andother materials fully processed so that they areready for the shelves. The insertion of date labels,spine labels, barcodes, security tags, processstamps and book cards and pockets, and thefitting of protective sleeves for book jackets and

wallets for paperbacks are charged for but assistthe libraries by reducing their costs. Some sup-pliers also provide specially bound ‘library’ edi-tions of selected titles.Library suppliers provide, to the library’s

specification, regular and reliable delivery ser-vices to the main library or directly to locallibraries, and use specified packaging to assist thelibraries.The major library suppliers offer comprehen-

sive services to all types of library. Othersconcentrate on serving particular types of libraryor on supplying specialist materials. For example,books for children and young people, books andother materials in the languages of minoritygroups, grey literature, maps, music, audiobooks, music recordings on disc or tape, videorecordings on tape or DVD, prints and illustra-tions, and computer software. Government pub-lications from the Stationery Office and large-print books are usually sold direct to libraries.There is a trend for libraries to pay their mainsuppliers to act as their agents in acquiringspecialist materials, an illustration of the closerpartnerships that are developing between librarysuppliers and their customers.

Further reading

Capital Planning Information (1996) The Value toLibraries of Special Services Provided by LibrarySuppliers, BNB Research Fund Report 77, NationalAcquisitions Group.

Lindley, D. (2000) ‘Best value – a supplier’s viewpoint’,Taking Stock 9: 3–8.

National Acquisitions Group (1997) Tendering forLibrary Supply: A Practical Guide, 2nd edn, NationalAcquisitions Group.

Nettlefold, M. (2000) ‘Library supply into the millen-nium’, Taking Stock 8: 20–4.

Smith, G. (1999) Outsourcing Book Selection: SupplierSelection in Public Libraries, BNB Research FundReport 95, Library and Information Commission.

Spiller, D. (2000) Providing Materials for LibraryUsers, Library Association Publishing.

SEE ALSO: acquisitions

GEOFFREY SMITH

LICENCES

Licenses are contractual agreements, and they areused with increasing frequency to apply sets ofspecific terms and conditions to the supply ofinformation products and services. Typically aninformation provider licenses access to intellectual

LICENCES 389

property in digital form (software, databases,electronic books, etc.) and the licence agree-ment specifies not only the required payments,but also matters including number of users,locations at which use is permitted, period ofvalidity of the licence and other restrictions onuse. The right to exploit a patent is alsofrequently licensed out, either exclusively to asingle licensee, to a sole licensee (with thelicensor also retaining the right to exploit thepatent) or non-exclusively to a number of com-petitors in a field.

Sale and licensing

In the intellectual property regimes of thepast and under laws still in force in manycountries, the sale, or assignment, of rights wasthe normal means by which the owners ofintellectual property obtained economic benefitfrom their creations. Thus an author assigned therights of a book to a publisher in return forpayment, usually in the form of royalties, and thepublisher sold copies of the book to purchaserswho then owned their copies outright. This isoften referred to as the ‘first-sale’ concept.Broadly speaking, it means that once an indivi-dual, or an information institution like a library,has purchased a copy of a piece of intellectualproperty, such as a book, that copy can then belent, rented out, sold or given away as its ownerchooses. Copying from the document is per-mitted according to recognized fair use, or fair-dealing, principles. Historically, it has been thepurchase of pieces of intellectual property, so asto make them available to users, that has beenthe foundation of libraries’ activities.

Licences and digital information

Digital forms of intellectual property, because oftheir inherent ability to be copied and trans-mitted at will, are seen by their creators andowners as requiring a different set of arrange-ments. It has become normal to make intellectualproperty available under licensing agreementsrather than under the provisions of copyrightlaw. The rights specified under the terms andconditions of the licence may well be substan-tially different according to circumstances, thenegotiating power of the two parties to theagreement and the perceived value of the pro-duct. When a major institution or consortiumnegotiates with a provider, they may be able to

obtain very favourable deals, but the so-calledshrink-wrap or click-on licence agreements mayoffer the individual no options. When casesrelating to the validity of the shrink-wrap licencehave come to court, there has been a noticeabletendency for their legality to be accepted, despitethe fact that the absence of an opportunity fornegotiation places the purchaser at a disadvan-tage in such agreements.The terms and conditions of licences for the

provision of information have shown a generaltendency to exclude rights and privileges enjoyedby users under the provisions of copyright law.Thus, whilst it is permissible under copyright tophotocopy a proportion of a printed book, thelicence under which an equivalent digital work isobtained may specifically exclude similar use.Other examples include attempts by vendors,including Microsoft, to prevent public criticismof products by purchasers under the conditionsof their licence. Furthermore, the access obtainedvia a licence expires after a pre-determined lengthof time, which will certainly be less than theperiods set out under copyright law. This, inturn, allows for the possibility that materialwhich, in print, would become part of thecultural heritage might at some time be with-drawn on the basis of a commercial calculationby the rights holder. The possible effect of this onthe long-term preservation and archiving ofdigital resources is not clear, but it is reasonableto see it as a threat.

Legislation

Copyright holders generally employ technologi-cal solutions to protect their ability to restrict theuse of digital content to what is provided for inthe terms and conditions of the licences that theyhave granted. Such technological solutions aresupported in the USA by the Digital MillenniumCopyright Act, 1998, which prohibits their cir-cumvention. Dimitri Sklyarov was arrested in2001 under this Act because of his involvementin the development of eBook Processor, a devicedesigned to enable the owners (or, more strictly,licensees) of digital books to transfer them toalternative reading devices. Adobe Systemsclaimed that eBook Processor stripped away thecopy protection system from their digital books,thus enabling users to ignore the conditions ofthe licences in force. It is arguable that what thislaw does is to give legitimacy to the overturning

390 LICENCES

of principles established in copyright law, whichcould otherwise be used to test the provisionsmade in many licence agreements.The European Union’s Directive on the Har-

monization of Certain Aspects of Copyright andRelated Rights in the Information Society, 2001,was introduced explicitly with the intention tofacilitate the market in intellectual property. Itwas seen by libraries as likely to introduce anintellectual property regime that would effec-tively endorse the removal by licensing agree-ments of normal copyright exemptions such asthose covering copying in libraries. In the eventthe Directive allowed member countries consider-able scope in how they applied the law, thuspotentially preserving many of the copyrightexemptions that make it possible for libraries toprovide access to information for their users.Despite this partial victory for organizations likeEBLIDA (the European Bureau of Library, In-formation and Documentation Associations) thatlobbied against the tendency of the Directive, theglobal trend is for the replacement of the specificprovisions of copyright law as the effectivemeans of protecting intellectual property by aregime based on licensing agreements.

Further reading

Bebbington, L.W. (2001) ‘Managing content: Licensing,copyright and privacy issues in managing electronicresources’, Legal Information Management 1: 4–12.

Harris, L.E. (2002) Licensing Digital Content: APractical Guide for Librarians, Chicago: AmericanLibrary Association.

IFLA Licensing Principles (http://www.ifla.org/V/ebpb/copy.htm).

Rifkin, J. (2000) The Age of Access: How the Shiftfrom Ownership to Access is Transforming Capital-ism, Penguin.

Veysey, G. (200I) ‘IT procurement: Key steps toconsider in procuring or licensing IT systems andelectronically delivered content’, Business Informa-tion Review 18: 51–6.

SEE ALSO: digital library; information law

PAUL STURGES

LITERACY

The ability to read and write in the mothertongue.

A person is literate who can with understand-ing both read and write a short simple state-ment on his everyday life.. . .A person is

functionally literate who can engage in all thoseactivities in which literacy is required foreffective functioning in his group and commu-nity and also for enabling him to continue touse reading, writing and calculation for his ownand the community’s development.

(UNESCO 1986)

In more theoretical terms, literacy is the ability ofa person to code and decode, smoothly andeffortlessly, and with understanding, a living andgrowing system of symbolic transformations forreality, including words, numbers, notations,schemata, diagrammatic representations andother marks, inscribed on paper or other two-dimensional surfaces (cloth, celluloid or thescreen of a computer terminal), all of which havebecome part of the visual language of a peopleand thus have come to be collectively anddemocratically shared by both the specialist andthe non-specialist (such ability having becomepart of the current social, economic, political andcultural demand system of a society) (Bhola1984: 260).

Individual constructions and context-specific collective definitions

In the language of the constructivist paradigm,each learner’s literacy is a uniquely individualconstruction. Learners acquire their literacy skillsin historical, cultural and class contexts that areuniquely experienced, using individualized moti-vations, reading different languages and writtentexts, and later make different material andspiritual uses of literacy skills. Again, literacyhas different meanings for members of differentgroups and correspondingly different acquisitionmodes, functions and uses (Street 1984).On the other hand, there are collective con-

structions of literacy. Because of the relativities oflanguages, social context, text, mix of reading,writing and numeracy skills, and levels of profi-ciency expected in each of the three Rs, it isnecessary for practitioners to develop context-specific collective definitions of literacy for im-plementation within the specificities of theirprogrammes. Hence it is preferable to speak ofliteracies, rather than of one single literacy.

Additional multiplicities of literacy

There are multiple literacies in another sense.Terms such as cultural literacy, scientific literacy,

LITERACY 391

economic literacy, media literacy and environ-mental literacy are used to indicate more thanrudimentary knowledge in a particular knowledgedomain on the part of a person. The acceptanceor rejection of the term dominant literacy, auton-omous literacy, empowering literacy, liberationalliteracy or emancipatory literacy is meant toproject a particular ideological position in rela-tion to the objectives, content and process ofliteracy promotion. Pre-literacy, school literacy,adult literacy, family literacy, women’s literacy,prison literacy, farmers’ literacy, functional lit-eracy, workers’ literacy, workplace literacy andscribal literacy each indicate a level of competenceor a focus on a constituency, a functional connec-tion or a context of learning.

The essential nature of literacy

Literacy as process has two layers: surface andcore. At the surface, literacy is the skill ofdecoding and encoding messages in a writtenlanguage. At the core, literacy essentially is theprocess of ‘symbolic transformations of reality’(Langer 1942). More than a million years ago, aspart of the long evolutionary process, humansacquired the capacity to make symbolic transfor-mation of reality and, thereby, to lend signifi-cance to their material, psychological and socialworld. This first culmination of human capacitiesof making symbolic transformations of realitygave us speech. Some 5,000 years ago, humanbeings invented writing systems, and literacycame to be the second culmination of the sameunique human capacity to make symbolic trans-formations (now in writing) of reality alreadysymbolically transformed (in speech). Thus, con-strued as a human fulfilment, literacy should beaccepted as a human right and universal literacyseen as human destiny (Bhola 1987).

Literacy and cognition

If literacy is a second culmination of the humancapacity to make symbolic transformation ofreality, and ontological remaking of the humanindividual, then literacy should have cognitiveconsequences for the new literate in terms ofcognitive capacities, patterns and habits. Goody(1968) suggests as much in his ‘technology ofintellect’ hypothesis, asserting that literacy (parti-cularly writing) enables abstract, context-freethinking and thereby changes in modes of de-scribing, classifying, reasoning, inferring and

memorizing. Scribner and Cole (1981) suggestthat the effect of literacy may not be that broadlygeneralizable but that changes ‘specific to therange of literacy practices in particular contexts’do appear. The argument will remain on theresearch agenda of cognitive science for sometime to come.

Literacy and culture

Literacy affects cognition and thereby culture,since culture-making is an activity of beings withcognition. Sociologists of history have positedconnections between literacy, on the one hand,and history, bureaucracy and empires, on theother. Others have posited relationships betweenprint capitalism and the emergence of imaginedcommunities, ethnic pride and nationalism (An-derson 1991).New literates everywhere in the world describe

their journey from illiteracy in the oral tradition(see oral traditions) to literacy in the printculture in metaphors of power, freedom andlight. In contemporary discourse there is accep-tance of the potential added to the new-literateindividual, enabling more effective transactionswith the environment – social, economic andpolitical. The literate participant is able tochange the quality of relationships within socialorganizations and ethos of cultures. Literacylevels have become indicators of the knowledgecapital of communications and societies, thenecessary condition for innovation and moderni-zation, for equality between genders and amongcastes and classes, and the litmus test of partici-pative democracy.

The future of literacy

In the popularization of radio and television,some have seen the end of literacy and the re-emergence of an oral–electronic culture. How-ever, the future of literacy is secure as literacylives in the very heart of the new mass media.Both radio and television use the grammar ofprint, the media narrate in printspeak and theliterate get more out of media than the non-literate (Bhola 1990). The electronic informationage is anchored in a global culture of print.While there are 1 billion illiterates in this world,there are over 3 billion literates. All institutionsof education, socialization and governance, bothsacred and secular, are based on assumptions ofliteracy and print (Bhola 1984).

392 LITERACY

Literacy and library

The relationship between literacy and libraryremains strong. In a non-literate community apublic library (see public libraries) is incon-ceivable. Without a good library communitiesmay not retain literacy already acquired, may beunable to extend cultural and scientific literaciesand may find it difficult, if not impossible, toengage in processes of lifelong learning. Today’slibrary, in seeking to serve an informationsociety, has changed drastically and yet remainsunchanged in its essential cultural mission – asthe public repository of imaginative and collec-tive constructions of reality and as an agency toserve different publics in the intra-generationaland intergenerational dissemination, utilizationand validation of currently held knowledge.The library, both in its own organization and

in its information organization, uses the logic ofliteracy and print. While it may use new surfaces(celluloid or magnetic fields) to store marks ofvarious kinds and to ‘fetch’ or ‘deliver’ informa-tion, it must yet be anchored in a sizeablecollection in print – material that is readable bythe human eye without mediation by the technol-ogy of processing, magnifying or projecting. Thetechnologization of the library does not necessa-rily lead to lowered expectations of literacy.Indeed, the modern library requires higher levelsof literacy and sophisticated knowledge of theconventions of print materials.

LITERACY AND THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY

The new virtual reality made possible byinformation technology is by no means aworld of sensations to be experienced with themanual control of the joystick. It is a worldwhere print/literacy remain central.The Information Superhighway is indeed a

misnomer, for it does not merely carry anddelivery information, it fetches and reconfiguresinformation on command. The two importantdimensions of this new information technologyare (1) interactivity, and (2) time–space conver-gence and cost–space convergence, throughwhich the time and cost required to traversedistance have become unimportant. The user ininteraction is able to reconfigure communicationsystems by using a dial-up mode for selectiveprogramming, and by choosing perspectives byselecting from among camera angles. The infor-mation environment is a world of instant com-

munication and of virtual reality (Sawhney1994).Of course, only a bare minimum of literacy

skills may be needed for handling the joystick toplay a video game. But for significant interac-tions with the interactive environment one needsto be not just a reader, but also a composer andeditor. The literacy skills of composing andediting are skills of the highest order.

Future challenges

Major challenges loom ahead in the new millen-nium. For educators, both in the developed andthe developing world, the challenge lies in theuniversalization of literacy so that boys and girlsand men and women do not merely buy andbecome addicted to video games but can partakeof the collective inheritance of knowledge storedin libraries and embedded in databases. Theopportunity for lifelong education in the lives ofall the people must not be left unrealized.The prototype of the new Information Super-

highway is the internet, a network of networksfirst developed to connect university computerswith government research laboratories. Thechoice facing modern libraries is obvious. Theyhave to net-in or wither away on the vine ofmarginalization. At the same time, libraries mustreach out to the communities in which they arelocated. Librarians will have to ensure that theunavailability of technology does not result in thesocial exclusion of individuals, schools, commu-nities and societies that cannot afford to buy thenecessary technology, creating yet another socialdivide of information haves and have-nots (seesocial exclusion and libraries).Finally, there are challenges for the managers

of global-scale information environments. First,there is the technological challenge of computerhackers, who have gone beyond the excitementof disrupting computer systems of large organiza-tions and are now engaged in computer crimeinvolving the use of large computer systems forsorting and distributing stolen computer soft-ware, illicit information and pornography. Thereis also an ideological challenge. In building andexpanding these environments, the technologymust be combined with the ideology of a justand moral world order. The new InformationSuperhighway must lead towards a new morejust and more efficient world information andcommunication order with the goals of ‘more

LITERACY 393

justice, more equity, more reciprocity in informa-tion exchange, less dependence in communica-tion flows, less downwards diffusion of messages,more self-reliance and cultural identity, morebenefits for all mankind’ (MacBride et al. 1980:xviii).

References

Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflec-tions on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,revised edn, London/New York: Verso [captures therole of print capitalism, census, map and museum inthe emergence of imagined communities and mani-festations of ethnicity and nationalism].

Bhola, H.S. (1990) ‘Literacy in development commu-nication: A symbiotic model for media’, MediaDevelopment 37: 3–6.

—— (1987) ‘Destined for literacy’, Educational Hor-izons 66: 9–12.

—— (1984) ‘A policy analysis of adult educationpromotion in the Third World: An account ofpromises made and promises fulfilled’, InternationalReview of Education 30: 249–64.

Goody, J. (ed.) (1968) Literacy in Traditional Societies,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Langer, S.K. (1942) Philosophy in a New Key: A Studyin the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art, Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

MacBride, S. et al. (1980) Many Voices, One World:Communication and Society Today and Tomorrow,Report of the International Commission for theStudy of Communication Problems, London: KoganPage; New York: Unipub; Paris: UNESCO.

Sawhney, H.S. (1994) ‘Persisting patterns of infrastruc-ture development’, paper presented at the 19th

International Association for Mass CommunicationResearch Scientific Conference, Seoul, Korea, 3–8July 1994.

Scribner, S. and Cole, M. (1981) The Psychology ofLiteracy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Street, B. (1984) Literary in Theory and Practice,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

UNESCO (1986) ‘Revised recommendations concern-ing the international standardization of educationalstatistics. Adopted by the General Conference at its20th session, Paris, 27 November 1978’, UNESCO’sStandard-Setting Instruments V3, B4, Paris:UNESCO.

Further reading

Center for Civic Networking (1993) A Vision ofChange: Civic Promise of the National InformationInfrastructure, Washington, DC: Center for CivicNetworking.

Karraker, R. (1991) ‘Highways of the mind’, WholeEarth Review 70: 4–11.

Kintgen, E.R., Kroll, B.M. and Rose, M. (1988)Perspectives on Literacy, Carbondale, IL: SouthernIllinois University Press [the perspectives discussedare theoretical, historical, educational and commu-nity; authors represented include Frederick Erickson,

Paulo Freire, Shirley Brice Heath, Jack Goody, EricA. Havelock, Carl F. Kaestle, John U. Ogbu, DavidR. Olson, Walter J. Ong, Daniel P. Resnick, SylviaScribner].

Office of Technology Assessment (1990) Critical Con-nections: Communications for the Future (OTA-CIT-407), Washington, DC: US Government PrintingOffice.

Purves, A.C. (1990) The Scribal Society: An Essay onLiteracy and Schooling in the Information Age, NewYork/London: Longman.

Velis, J.-P. (1990) Through a Glass, Darkly: FunctionalLiteracy in Industrialized Countries, Paris:UNESCO.

Willinsky, J. (1990) The New Library, New York:Routledge.


H.S. BHOLA

LITERATURE SEARCH

A quest for literature to provide information anddata that will answer a query or facilitate furtherresearch. Some librarians limit the definition tothe ‘intermediate stage between reference workand research, and is differentiated from both’(Prytherch 1990; see also Landau 1966). True,one may argue that finding a quick answer to asimple question is no more than ‘ready reference’and does not qualify for the more demandingsearch process. Conversely, research questionsmay require many hours, days and years of work.Taken from a practical, on-the-job point of view,one can never be that certain of categories. Thequestion on the amount of rainfall in New Yorkmay be no more than an opening shot in abroadside of queries that will lead to an extendedsearch of the literature on climatic conditions inNorth America. The person posing a questiondoes not care how it is categorized, only for theanswer – whether it be short or a massivebibliography. This illustrates a major point aboutthe literature search. First, the individual and/orthe librarian must be certain as to (1) thequestion and its scope, and (2) the amount ofmaterial and the amount of time to expend. Thesecond naturally follows the first, although ex-perience indicates that some are inclined to setthe time and the number of articles or books tobe consulted before they undertake the modifica-tion of the original question. The search strategyis tantamount to formulating a hypothesis andtesting its validity through the search itself.Thanks to regional, national and international

394 LITERATURE SEARCH

networks of databases (from RLIN and oclc tothe internet, Nexis and dialog) it is possible tosit down at a computer keyboard, type in therequired subject, author or title(s) and learn whatis available in every medium from books andmagazine articles to dissertations and films.The technological revolution in the literature

search offers four basic improvements over thelaborious book-to-book, index-to-index quest:(1) the search begins with determining whatbooks, if any, have been published on the subject.This may be revealed by searching the cataloguesof the user’s own library and, thanks to OCLC,for example, what is available in all major USand Canadian libraries. Using a good searchengine (see search engines) on the Internet willopen the catalogues of other countries. (2) Oncethis is determined, turning to basic indexes willreveal articles published about the subject. Any-one seeking periodical published informationfrom the early twentieth or nineteenth centuriesmay still have to turn to printed indexes,although an increasing number are being digi-tized and made accessible across the Internet. (3)The ability to do searching at a workstation,instead of wandering from place to place in thelibrary or from library to library, is the thirdtremendous advantage derived from the newtechnology, quite apart from the rapid growth ofthe availability of the full text of the materialelectronically. (4) One may quickly print out thenecessary abstracts and citations, as well asmodify the search process from source to source.Any involved, thorough literature search todayprobably starts with the use of the Internet andthe World Wide Web.So far the assumption has been that the

literature search takes place in a large librarywith access to advanced technology. Today, thisis required for the serious literature search,although the whole Internet search can, ofcourse, take place at any network-linked compu-ter regardless of its location. The rules are lessambitious for the individual seeking only enoughmaterial for a paper on cannibals or a talk oninflation. If one is lucky enough to be in a librarywith a few indexes, the problem is easy to solve.Assuming the question is clear, one turns to anoverview of what has been published in the lastfive to ten years. The normal bibliographiccheckpoints are first bypassed for the library’sown catalogue. Almost always there are morethan enough books in the library to meet the

need. One may turn to the printed general orsubject periodical index to identify pertinentarticles. This usually is adequate to answer therequirements of a literature review. In practice,increasing numbers of users, especially academicsand students, take a search of the Web as theirstarting point, all too often ignoring qualityissues (to their peril).Depending upon the philosophy of the library

or the persuasion of the librarian, another inter-mediary step takes place in the limited literaturesearch. An individual may find five or six booksand as many articles, but have time to use only afew. Which few? The librarian familiar withreference sources and the topic will act as theintermediary and suggest what to use and whatto discard. Also, the reader may have overlookeda vital source that the librarian can identify andlocate. Some consider this step to be unnecessary,not even advisable; others, in an age of more andmore peripheral information, consider it vital tothe literature search.Throughout the search procedure the librarian

makes decisions as to whether or not thisprocess, this source or this bit of information isrelevant. The ability to do this comes from athorough, professional knowledge of needs, amastery of information and, as all seasonedreference librarians will admit, a sixth sense orintuition about what is likely to be right orwrong in the twisting path towards a successfulliterature search conclusion.

References

Landau, T. (1966) Encyclopedia of Librarianship, 3rd

edn, Bowes & Bowes.Prytherch, R. (1990) Harrod’s Librarian’s Glossary ofTerms Used in Librarianship, Documentations andthe Book Crafts, and Reference Book, 7th edn,Gower.

Further reading

Katz, W.A. (1996) Introduction to Reference Work,McGraw Hill [see vol. 2 and the chapters onsearching].

SEE ALSO: reference interview

W.A. KATZ, REVISED BY THE EDITORS

LITERATURE SURVEY

A listing of documents, usually with full biblio-graphical references, on a given subject, includ-

LITERATURE SURVEY 395

ing both older and/or current material, accord-ing to need. A thorough literature survey toestablish the boundaries of a topic and acknowl-edge previous contributions to it is an essentialfeature of a research report, article or mono-graph. A current survey can be prepared bylibrarians or information officers for the infor-mation of their users, to keep them up to datewith the literature.


LOCAL-AREA NETWORK

A local-area network (LAN) is a communicationnetwork that is restricted to a small geographi-cal area, often within a single building or groupof buildings (typically an office complex or auniversity campus). They vary in transmissionmedium and in topology: optical fibres, co-axialcable or telephone wiring may be used fortransmission, and topologies include bus, starand ring arrangement.

SEE ALSO: information and communicationtechnology; intranet

LOCAL STUDIES COLLECTIONS

Local studies collections contain accumulationsof books and other material in all formats‘covering the local environment in all its physicalaspects, including geology, palaeontology, clima-tology and natural history, and in terms of allhuman activity within that environment, past,present and future’ (Library Association LocalStudies Group 2nd edn 2002). Local studiesbring local people of all ages and expertisetogether to examine their shared heritage. publiclibraries are renowned for the depth of theirlocal studies collections, but County RecordOffices, museums, the universities and localhistory societies also provide local studies formany, including special interest groups, genealo-gists, planners, environmentalists and those in-volved in school curriculum work.A few collections have remarkable antece-

dents, as in Manchester Chetham’s Libraryfounded in 1653. The early nineteenth centurysaw ‘topographical’ collections in libraries, theGuildhall and Warrington for example, and inthe local libraries established after the 1850Public Libraries Act. By acquiring relevant offi-

cial district records and historical sources, citylibrarians augmented the original donations fromhistorians and book collectors that reflected theirstudy of ecclesiastical or manorial history, thelives and pedigrees of landed gentry.Over the years, local studies collections

evolved from being closed, supervised collectionsinto more accessible departments with openbrowsing sections. Their scope has been continu-ally extended to support areas of investigationnot considered by the early writers. Present-daystudents require evidence on land development,the social history of villages or factory life inindustrial towns. Librarians need historic andcontemporary resources to answer queries onneighbourhood businesses, folklore, births andmarriages, local authors and locally printedmaterial.Collection policies will take account of the

area and the needs of the users as well as thesuitability of available material, printed andelectronic. Alongside the books, pamphlets andephemera, current collections in larger librariesbring together material in all formats on suchdiverse topics as local education, health andhospital care, environmental studies of the coun-tryside, rural or urban transport, civic andvernacular architecture, entertainment and holi-day pastimes. Resources include historic plansand maps, especially the Ordnance Survey edi-tions. Local free and paid-for newspapers maybe stored and microfilmed. News-sheets, parishmagazines and journals with local content maybe included with census enumerators’ returns, theGeneral Register Office Index of births, mar-riages and deaths, trade directories, theatre pro-grammes and sale catalogues. An importantsection of the collection will be illustrations ofall kinds, lantern slides, prints, engravings, post-cards and photographs. Non-print material isnow commonplace so audio-tapes, film andvideo may be stored as well as the newer digitalcompilations on cd-rom, such as The SheffieldTime Machine, a virtual tour of a historic cityusing digitized archive photographs, advertise-ments, film clips, sound effects and trade direc-tory entries. Smaller branch libraries will holdlesser but useful collections of local material,which will include standard texts and specificdetail about the catchment area, photocopiedfrom other local studies files.Recent advances in Web-based technology and

lottery funding have encouraged librarians to

396 LOCAL-AREA NETWORK

assemble local material for digitization and dis-play on the Internet. The Devon Library andInformation Service Local Studies web-pages andsites such as Knowsley Local History – its peopleand heritage are local studies resources in theirown right, promoting the local history of theregion to students across the world and persuad-ing non-library users to add their own domesticdata to the various community archives. It isthrough e-mail and the Internet that professionalcontacts can be kept most easily with colleaguesin other countries experiencing similar develop-ments in local studies practice.Even before the advent of such electronic

access, use of local studies collections had grownimmeasurably, in part because many adults nowenjoy more leisure time and in part through theactive promotion of the collections by librarystaff. As well as organizing library classes tofamiliarize schoolchildren and adults with thesource material, local studies librarians workwith library publishers and adult educationtutors using illustrative material from the collec-tions. In consultation with their users they maydiscover hitherto hidden aspects of local studiessuch as the history of black and Asian commu-nities in Britain. They may mount displays, givetalks to civic societies and organize events show-casing the potential use of the historic records.Libraries in both Scotland and Northern Irelandhave combined to hold country-wide local stu-dies weeks on individual themes to entertain andinform the public. Some collections are based inlocal studies centres alongside archive offices,while other library authorities invoke regionalinitiatives fostering co-operation between cul-tural and heritage units in order to improve theservice for the whole community. In a nationalcontext, Newsplan, supported by libraries, mu-seums, archives and the newspaper industry,aims to conserve and microfilm the historic localnewspapers of the United Kingdom with fundingfrom the Heritage Lottery Fund.Outside pressures on the library service – Best

Value, social exclusion issues requiring collec-tions to be accessible to the disadvantaged (seesocial exclusion and libraries), disasterpreparedness planning, standards and perfor-mance indicators – all affect the local studiesdepartment, but not always to its detriment. Aslocal studies collections have expanded and beentransformed by the use of the new media, themanagement of these collections remains as

necessary as ever, especially where there arequestions over core funding and staff deploy-ment. Discussions with Record Offices and otherrepositories may help to rationalize collections,avoid unnecessary duplication and inform staffand readers. Talking books can be producedusing local studies texts. A British Library pilotproject archiving appropriate websites will in-clude a local studies site, and concerns about thepotential lack of an issue of record for OrdnanceSurvey maps are being looked at. Invariably theconservation and preservation of collectionsin every format is a major concern, since thedevelopment of stimulating customer-orientedservices in the present must not be to thedisadvantage of future generations. The traditionof local studies collections encapsulates a sense ofplace and the people within that place. Everyeffort should be directed to making this uniquematerial, held within the local studies collections,available now and in the time to come.

References

Library Association Local Studies Group (2002) LocalStudies Libraries. Library Association Guidelines forLocal Studies Provision in Public Libraries, 2nd edn,Facet Publishing.

Further reading

Dewe, M. (ed.) (1987–91) A Manual of Local StudiesLibrarianship, 2 vols, Gower.

ELIZABETH A. MELROSE

LOTKA, ALFRED JAMES (1880–1949)

Biologist and statistician.Born in the eastern part of the Austro-

Hungarian Empire of US parents, he was edu-cated in France, Germany, Britain and the USA.His career encompassed the chemical industry,the US Patent Office, the National Bureau ofStandards, Johns Hopkins University and thestatistical bureau of the Metropolitan Life Insur-ance Company. His achievements were recog-nized by the presidency of the PopulationAssociation of America (1938–9) and the Amer-ican Statistical Association (1942).His scientific work brought insights from

chemistry, biology and mathematics into play inan analytical model of population. His interest inpopulation in terms of culture and ecological

LOTKA, ALFRED JAMES 397

influences led him into a number of related areas.Among these was the quantitative analysis of therelationship between the number of scientificwriters and the number of papers they produced.Essentially, he observed that, whilst manyauthors produced a single paper, only a smallminority produced more than a few papers. Thissharp distinction between those few whose scien-tific contribution is at a high volume and thegreat number of other contributors is referred toas Lotka’s Law and is one of the essentialbuilding blocks of information theory.

Further reading

Lotka, A.J. (1956) Elements of Mathematical Biology,New York [includes a 94-item bibliography of hispapers].

SEE ALSO: information theory

LUHN, HANS PETER (1896–1964)

Information scientist and engineer. He worked onKeyWord in Context (KWIC) indexes and Selec-tive Dissemination of Information (SDI), andpioneered the use of mechanical, and later

electronic, devices for the processing of textualmaterial.Born in Barmen, Germany, he went to school in

Germany and learned printing in Sankt Gallen,Switzerland. His first information retrievalinvention, after he had emigrated to the USA inthe 1920s, was an optical coincidence system todetermine which cocktails could be prepared fromavailable ingredients. In the late 1940s he wasasked by IBM to find a solution to the problem ofsearching chemical compounds represented incoded form, and developed a machine (the LuhnScanner) to search files of punched cards onwhich these codes were recorded. The arrival ofthe computer offered better solutions to theseproblems, and his 1958 paper ‘A business intelli-gence system’ proposed an automatic method toprovide current-awareness services to scientistsand engineers. In 1960 the American ChemicalSociety adopted his KWIC method of indexingand published Chemical Titles by this method.

Further reading

Schultz, C.K. (ed.) (1968) H.P. Luhn: Pioneer Informa-tion Scientist. Selected Works, Macmillan.


398 LUHN, HANS PETER

M

MACHINE LANGUAGE

A language used within a computer, for internalcommunication between its related parts and forperforming arithmetic and editing functions.


MACHINE-READABLECATALOGUING

A generic term for catalogue records (see cata-logues) that can be stored in and retrieved froma computer. It is a structured format that enablesstandard bibliographic records in book and othercatalogue formats to be manipulated by compu-ter in a standard way to facilitate the exchange ofrecords between libraries.Specifically, the MARC (Machine-Readable

Cataloguing) format, now in almost universaluse for automated library catalogues, originatedin the deliberations of the library of congresson the possibility of using automated techniquesfor its catalogue provision in the early 1960s.After several pilot programmes by the Library ofCongress and the british library, the MARCformat became the universal standard for catalo-gue records worldwide. As more countries beganto use MARC, various national variationsemerged. The unimarc format is an attempt togather national variations into one universalexchange format. In recent years, with the devel-opment of appropriate software, it has becomerelatively easy to convert from one MARCformat to another.Normal database structure involves holding

data in records and fields, and the MARC format

is an attempt to do this for standard cataloguingrecords, at present incorporating data in anglo-american cataloguing rules (AACR).A ukmarc record is made up of two sections.

The first consists of (1) the record label, whichincludes processing instructions and informationsuch as the total length of the record, the format(book etc.), (2) the directory, which is an indexto the control and data fields within a record,and (3) the control fields, which are fixed-lengthfields input by the cataloguer and consist of datasuch as country of publication, language, etc.The second section comprises content designa-

tors, which hold the bibliographic data of theitem concerned. The content designators struc-ture the data into particular fields and subfields.The fields are identified by a three-digit tagrepresenting the elements of the bibliographicrecord and the access points:

001–009 Control fields010–099 Coded and numeric data100–244 Main-entry access points245–299 Titles and title paragraph (title,

edition, imprint)300–399 Physical description400–499 Series statements500–599 Notes600–699 Subject access points700–799 Added-entry access points800–899 Series access points900–948 References949–999 Reserved for local implementation

Along with tags, each field includes two fieldindicators that distinguish particular cataloguingcases such as added entries.Within each field the data is further broken

down into subfields. These are signalled by aseries of subfield codes that are defined for eachfield. Within the personal author field, the mostcommon subfields are $a indicating surname, $hfirst name, $c dates, e.g. 100 10$aRobinson$h-John$-c1919–1980.

Use of MARC format

Most large centralized databases use MARCformat, which means that it is the predominant,widespread standard for catalogue records. Itwas, however, developed solely for cataloguesthat, although computerized, were not accessibleonline. With the proliferation of online public-access catalogues (opacs) there are considerabledoubts as to whether or not the format is stillappropriate. This debate centres around twoconsiderations: first, MARC format is solidlylinked with AACR and includes fields for mainentry, uniform titles, etc., which may no longerbe suitable in online searching, and, second,many other information databases of periodicalarticles are now available that do not use MARCformat yet suffer no loss of searching power.Indeed, some would argue that the record struc-ture of these databases gives better retrievalpossibilities, especially in subject searching.However, for the moment MARC remains largelyunchallenged as the standard format for catalo-gue records.

Further reading

Gredley, E. and Hopkinson, A. (1990) ExchangingBibliographic Data: MARC and Other InternationalFormats, Library Association.

Hagler, R. (1991) The Bibliographic Record andInformation Technology, 2nd edn, Adamantine Press.

Hill, R.W. (1994) Setting the Record Straight: Under-standing the MARC Format, 2nd edn, The BritishLibrary.

Rowley, J. and Farrow, J. (2000) Organizing Knowl-edge: An Introduction to Managing Access to In-formation, 3rd edn, Gower.

UNIMARC Manual (1987) IFLA UBCIM (2nd edn1990, British Library Bibliographic Services Divi-sion).

SEE ALSO: bibliographic control; catalogues;East Asia

ANN O’BRIEN

MACHINE TRANSLATION

The translation of text from one natural (i.e.

human) language to another using computers.The machine translation (MT) process may befully automatic or involve different levels ofhuman intervention such as pre-editing (prepara-tion of input texts), post-editing (revision ofoutput texts) and interactive MT.

Historical perspective

Historically, MT research can be traced to thelate 1940s. The success of cryptanalysis usingcomputers during the Second World War ledsome scientists to believe that translation couldbe treated as a cryptography problem. The earlyresearchers were generally very optimistic andthought that MT would be achieved in the nearfuture. A turning point that ended the earlyenthusiasm was the publication of the ALPACreport in 1964 by the Automatic LanguageProcessing Advisory Committee of the NationalAcademy of Science in the USA. The reporteffectively regarded the MTwork as an expensivefailure. In the wake of the ALPAC report MTresearch continued on a much-reduced scale. MTgradually came out of recession around the mid-1970s, which were marked by the developmentof SYSTRAN for the Commission of the Eur-opean Communities (CEC). Since the 1980s MThas enjoyed increasing interest and progress inboth academia and industry. Geographically, theUSA and the Soviet Union were once the mostimportant countries contributing to MT, mainlyRussian–English MT. Current key players are theEuropean Union (EU), the USA and Japan. Thehistorical advancement of MT is reviewed inHutchins (1986). A good introductory text isArnold et al. (1994).

MT system architecture

MT systems are generally classified into threecategories or generations according to theirarchitecture, i.e. direct translation systems (firstgeneration), indirect translation systems (secondgeneration) and AI (artificial intelligence)-based systems (third generation). At present mostexperimental MT systems are of second-genera-tion design and most commercial ones areeffectively of first-generation architecture.The direct translation system is designed spe-

cifically for a particular pair of languages. Itoperates in one stage by translating a source-language (SL) text directly into a target-language(TL) text. The MT process employs a bilingual

400 MACHINE TRANSLATION

SL–TL dictionary. The earliest direct translationsystems were the ‘word-for-word’ systems with orwithout minimal analysis of word structure(morphology) and sentence structure (syntax) ofthe languages. Later systems tended to applysome form of syntactic analysis. The analysis ofmorphology and syntax, or more generally com-putational linguistics, is now a separate discipline(though it stemmed from MT), but MT is stillheavily based on the theories and techniques ofcomputational linguistics (Grishman 1986). Theaforementioned SYSTRAN used by CEC forEnglish–French translation is an example of thedirect translation system.The indirect translation approach consists of

two subcategories: ‘interlingual’ systems and‘transfer’ systems. The former operate in twostages: analysis and synthesis. An SL text is firstanalysed into interlingual representations, whichare then synthesized to a TL text. The interlinguais an artificial language with a set of semanticprimitives common to all languages, or a moreabstract syntax free of the morphological andsyntactic constraints of natural languages. Tocreate such an interlingua has, however, proveddifficult. In fact, some of the systems initiallyadopting the ‘interlingual’ approach, e.g. METALof the University of Texas, later switched to the‘transfer’ architecture. Presently, almost all theindirect translation systems use the ‘transfer’method, which operates in three stages: analysis,transfer and synthesis. An SL text is first ana-lysed into SL representations, which are thentransferred into TL representations, to be finallysynthesized to a TL text. The EU’s multilingualMT system EUROTRA is such an example. Animportant characteristic of the second-generationarchitecture is modularity, albeit absorbed tosome extent into the first-generation systems. Infact, to separate the MT process into severalstages is a reflection of modularity. Other aspectsof modularity mainly include the separation ofgrammar formalisms from linguistic analysisalgorithms, and the stratificational bottom-upanalyses of morphology to syntax. The majoradvantage of modularity is that part of thesystem can be modified or enhanced withoutchanging the rest of the system. For example, anindirect translation system can be extended froma bilingual to a multilingual system, whereas adirect translation system can hardly achieve that.The first- and second-generation MT systems

are generally linguistics-oriented. The third-gen-

eration ones are largely based on AI techniques.An important characteristic of these systems isthe emphasis on semantics or the development ofmodels that capture domain knowledge. Whilethe second-generation MT systems (mainly‘transfer’ systems) may also involve some seman-tic analyses, these are usually very limited andserve as constraints on the syntactic analysis. Forthe AI-based systems, semantics becomes thecentral focus. Some knowledge-representationmethods, such as preference semantics and con-ceptual dependency, have been experimentedwith alongside MT. The knowledge-based MT(KBMT) at Carnegie Mellon University, an ex-ample of AI-based MT, investigates discoursepragmatics and the use of domain knowledge toresolve ambiguities in translation.MT has had many achievements in the past

but still faces difficult challenges. Some research-ers have pointed out the limitations of currentsecond-generation architecture and the applica-tion of AI to MT (Nirenburg 1992–3). Forexample, the current second-generation MT sys-tems are largely based on syntactic theories butthese linguistic models sometimes break down ina real environment. Use of sophisticated theoriesdoes not necessarily enhance the effectiveness ofMT. Another difficult problem for MT has beenthe resolution of ambiguities in natural lan-guages. The ambiguities occur at all levels oflinguistic analyses, from morphology and syntaxto semantics. For example, at the morphologicallevel there is the problem of the homograph, i.e.words of the same spelling but different meaning,e.g. ‘can’ meaning able to and ‘can’ meaningmetal container. Anaphora, i.e. pronoun refer-ence, is another instance of ambiguity, as illu-strated in the following sentences.

The men created the translation machines. Theyworked well.

The men created the translation machines. Theyworked hard.

Due to these complexities, some of the morerecent research suggested approaches that trans-cend the second- and third-generation systems(Arnold et al. 1994). One notable proposal is theexample-based translation that stores a corpus ofbilingual example phrases; then the translationcopies the closest example that is selected using abest-match algorithm. Another approach appliesstatistical techniques to calculate the probability

MACHINE TRANSLATION 401

of occurrence of words and phrases. Manyresearchers envisage that future high-quality MTsystems require an integration of these empiricaltechniques with the orthodox linguistic and AImethods.The problem of computer translation of hu-

man language remains so complicated that eventhe best current MT systems cannot provide aperfect translation. However, they have a numberof practical uses. The best MT systems can getthe main idea of a text across to someone whowould otherwise understand nothing of it at all.Content scanning in bodies like the EuropeanCommunity is thus made possible by the creationof a rough draft containing the general gist of atext. MT can also aid professional translators,particularly when they are translating highlyrepetitive texts, such as technical documentation.It is particularly useful for translating Web pages,e-mail and chat, since it not only translates thetext, but preserves links, pictures and other non-textual features.

References

Arnold, D., Balkan, L., Meijer, S., Humphreys,R.L. and Sadler, L. (1994) Machine Translation:An Introductory Guide (http://clwww.essex.ac.uk/MTbook/).

Grishman, R. (1986) Computational Linguistics: AnIntroduction, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Hutchins, W.J. (1986) Machine Translation: Past, Pre-sent, Future, Chichester: Ellis Horwood.

Nirenburg, S. (ed.) (1992–3) ‘Machine translation’,Current Research in Machine Translation (forumissue) 7(4): 229–322.

Further reading

Machine Translation (1986–) Kluwer. Quarterly journalthat publishes articles on all major aspects.

SEE ALSO: communication; computer science;expert systems; translations

ZIMIN WU, REVISED BY EDITORS

MACHLUP, FRITZ (1902–83)

Economist.Born near Vienna, in the Austro-Hungarian

Empire, and was taught at the University ofVienna by the most distinguished economists ofthe Austrian School. He held academic posts atthe University of Buffalo, Johns Hopkins Uni-versity, Princeton University and New York Uni-

versity. He was an extremely prolific author infields including international finance, methodol-ogy of the social sciences and microeconomicproblems. His eminence as a writer and teacherwas recognized by many formal honours, includ-ing the presidencies of the American Associationof University Professors (1962–4), the AmericanEconomic Association (1966) and the Interna-tional Economic Association (1971–4).In 1962 he published the seminal Production

and Distribution of Knowledge in the UnitedStates, a work that brought the full intensity of apowerful economic intelligence to play on thearea of knowledge and information for the firsttime. Machlup perceived very clearly the scopeand importance of this new field, particularly inthe light of the knowledge explosion of the latetwentieth century. In the 1970s he began a muchlarger assignment, the projected ten volumes ofKnowledge; Its Creation, Distribution and Eco-nomic Significance, the first volume of whichappeared in 1980. Although the series had onlyreached three volumes by the time of his death,he fully deserves to be regarded as the founder ofthe study of the economics of information.

Further reading

Dryer, J.S. (ed.) (1978) Breadth and Depth in Econom-ics. Fritz Machlup – the Man and His Ideas, D.C.Health.


MAGNETIC STORAGE

Introduction

The predominant form of computer-based sto-rage technology, as the permanent data-retentioncapability of magnetic media ensures reliablestorage. The ability to write and rewrite to thesame device an unlimited number of times sub-stantially increases the utility of magnetic storageover non-rewriteable technologies. The largemarketplace for computer-based storage has re-sulted in significant R&D effort being deployed,which has successfully reduced the cost per bit ofstorage.

Tape-based storage

Magnetic storage was first used widely in earlyvoice recorders, which originally utilized an iron-

402 MACHLUP, FRITZ

based (ferrite) wire for storage and later a thintape, coated with a magnetic oxide, whichrevolved around a tape head. The head couldeither apply an electric field, which wouldmagnetize the material under the head at thatinstant in a particular orientation to write data,or, alternatively, sense an electric field induced bythe previously magnetized material passing closeto a coil of wire, to read the data.This tape-based storage was widely used for

data retention in early computer systems. How-ever, the spool-based nature of tapes means thatthe access time for information is a function ofthe current position of the tape and the locationof the data. Where information is located close tothe current tape position, data is much morequickly accessed than information stored furtheraway. This time difference can be a matter ofminutes. Where the order of access to data is notknown in advance, this results in slow andunpredictable operating speeds as the tape iswound forwards and backwards. Furthermore,this rapid acceleration and deceleration can leadto tape stretching or even snapping, both ofwhich affect reliability.For archival storage, tape offers an attractive

combination of low cost and high data-storagecapacity and is widely used in this applicationarea.

Magnetic disks

The precursor of the magnetic disk was thedrum. Obsolete today, the drum provided thefirst device where the speed of data access waslargely independent of its location. A drumcomprised a cylinder of magnetic coated materialmounted on a spindle and rotating at up toseveral hundred revolutions per minute. Close tothe outer surface of the drum is a line of read–write heads. Each head is associated with oneslice of the drum, known as a track, and reads/writes data on that track only. Since the drive iscontinuously rotating, it takes only a few milli-seconds for a piece of data to be accessed. This isin marked contrast to tapes, where spooling fromone end of a tape to another may take minutes.However, the cost and complexity of drum-basedstorage meant that originally only the largestcomputer systems could make use of it.The benefits of drum-based storage led to a

demand for a lower-cost method of storage formass-market applications. The magnetic disk was

developed in response to this demand. As itsname implies, a disk is a single flat circular sheetof material coated with a magnetic layer, onceagain organized as concentric tracks. Each trackcomprises a number of sectors with intersectorgaps to permit easy determination of where thehead is.The disk spins horizontally and a single head

moves across its surface to read/write data. Thesingle head reduces costs. Furthermore, since thedisk is lighter than the drum it could be rotatedmore quickly, hence reducing access time. It isthis essential approach, developed in the 1960s,to using a disk (or sometimes a platter ofvertically stacked disks) that contemporary disk-based systems use.Developments since the 1960s have been

many, but the essential structure has been re-tained. Storage density has been improved byusing materials with much more powerful mag-netic properties, permitting more bits per unitarea to be stored. Disk heads have moved closerto the disk platter (sometimes only a fraction of amillimetre away) in order to pick up the weakercurrents induced by high-density storage. Thislatter development has necessitated hermeticallysealing the disk and head within a dust-freeenvironment. Such an encapsulated storage de-vice is often known as a ‘Winchester disk’. Thesedisks are the most widely used today in contem-porary information storage systems.The floppy disk, a device that uses flexible

plastic coated with magnetic material for thedisk, has been widely used since the mid-1970sas a low-cost, low-density, portable storagemedium.

Future developments

By the early 1990s the predominance of magneticdisk storage was coming to an end. The text-based nature of information storage was chal-lenged by multimedia data Such databasesrequired orders of magnitude more storage thantext. Consequently, the demand for storage capa-city rapidly increased. Second, new materialswith superior magnetic characteristics proved tobe expensive and difficult to manufacture. Forapplications where data is read-only or forapplications such as archiving where data is onlywritten once, compact-disc (CD) technology wasrapidly adopted. The development of writeableand erasable optical-disk technology in the

MAGNETIC STORAGE 403

mid-1990s changed the whole data storage pro-cess.

Further reading

McLeod, J. (1983) Winchester Disks in Microcompu-ters, Elsevier Publications.

Patterson, D.A. and Hennesy, J.L. (1990) ComputerArchitecture: A Quantitative Approach, MorganKaufmann Publishers.


S. JONES

MAILING LIST

An internet discussion forum in which messageson some subject area, contributed by subscribedmembers, are sent by e-mail to all other mem-bers. Mailing lists are distinct from Usenet news-groups because of the requirement to subscribe.

MAINFRAME COMPUTER

A large centralized computer system, which wasthe normal means of handling large volumes ofdata processing in the late 1970s and early1980s. The early 1990s saw a move away fromreliance on a central mainframe computer to-wards distributed computing using networkedpersonal computers and servers.

SEE ALSO: information and communicationtechnology; networks

MANAGEMENT SUPPORTSYSTEMS

Management support systems (MSS) can bedefined as ‘systems that involve the use ofinformation technologies to support managerialdecision-making’ (Scott Morton 1984). Conse-quently, management support systems are ageneric category that includes management in-formation systems (MIS), decision supportsystems (DSS) and expert systems, which areapplied to managerial tasks. It should be notedthat the term management support systems doesnot cover all the computer-based systems typi-cally found within a library. For example, officeautomation systems or systems that solelyautomate the process of issuing and returning

books without explicitly supporting the decision-making process would not typically be classifiedas management support systems.

References

Scott Morton, M. (1984) ‘The state of art of research’,in F. McFarlan (ed.) The Information Systems Re-search Challenge, Harvard Business School Press, pp13–45.

Further reading

Turban. E. (1993) Decision Support and Expert Sys-tems: Management Support Systems, 3rd edn, Mac-millan.

SEE ALSO: information management;information systems

MANUSCRIPT

Literally a document of any kind that is writtenby hand, but more particularly the originalversion, before it has been printed, of a literaryor musical composition in handwritten or type-script form. Information professionals distinguishbetween manuscripts, which typically form partof a library collection, and official documents orrecords, which are regarded as archives.

MANUSCRIPT LIBRARIES

Whilst the narrow definition of a manuscript isself-evident, many manuscript collections in re-search libraries contain a diversity of materi-als, not least because of the way in whichresearch materials find their way into libraries.Perhaps a wider definition of these collectionswould be that they contain the unpublishedmaterials of an author, first and subsequentdrafts, notes, letters and non-book materials.Some would refer to these artefacts as archivalmaterial, and in many university, state andnational libraries this would be the case. Whilstthere is no doubt about what Eastern manu-scripts and Western mediaeval and Renaissancemanuscripts are, where modern Western manu-script material is concerned, in most cases awider definition now obtains.In the Western hemisphere, manuscripts con-

tinued to be produced after the introduction ofprinting from movable type. The Vatican Library,the bibliothèque nationale de france and theEscorial Library were founded in the fifteenth and

404 MAILING LIST

sixteenth centuries; these and similar foundationswere central to the transmission of knowledgeconsidered important enough to the mainte-nance and improvement of civilization. Themanuscript copy was central to this, and it islargely due to those early librarians and theircareful custodianship, often in times of politicaluncertainty, that the great works of classical andArab authors are accessible to present-day read-ers. Manuscript librarians have been developingtheir special skills over a long period of time.This body of carefully built-up expertise iscurrently under threat.The skills demanded of custodians of manu-

script collections are primarily those of anyoneengaged in collection management, i.e. theacquisition (see acquisitions), organization,maintenance and exploitation of such materials.Those involved in acquisitions need to possess asensitivity to important and relevant collections,an ability to negotiate with, on the one hand,prospective donors and vendors and, on the other,those who are responsible for financing suchtransactions in order to bring about a satisfactoryoutcome. In the case of living authors, makingarrangements concerning the eventual transfer ofarchives can be tortuous and require great tact,often in the face of competition from other,possibly richer, institutions.The organization of such collections is also

well documented. Effort has been brought tobear on the computerization of records, manylibraries now having purpose-built software foraccessioning and cataloguing. In the United King-dom, that developed for the british library hasbeen made generally available.Since the mid-1970s there has been increasing

concern regarding maintenance, deterioration andaccident. In Europe and North America there havebeen many conferences highlighting conserva-tion issues. As a result many libraries havewritten disaster preparedness plans (see disasterpreparedness planning) that can be implemen-ted swiftly when serious damage by fire or floodis threatened. Preventative maintenance nowenjoys a higher profile than in the recent past.Traditionally, keepers of manuscript collec-

tions have been responsive to scholarly enquiryrather than active in promoting the use of theirmaterials, save through their scholarship in pub-lishing catalogues and articles highlighting im-portant acquisitions. However, in the UnitedKingdom during the 1980s, as a result of

political focus upon the public funding of mu-seums and libraries, librarians have had to enterthe marketplace. Those responsible for archival,rare-book and manuscript collections have notbeen excepted from this trend. In addition toactively promoting the use of their materials,staff have had to engage in fundraising through,for example, the publication of greetings cardsand other reproductions from the collections.There is now a growing demand that the needto maintain and increase such collections withinthe public domain should be justified in terms ofcold commercial criteria. This is no isolatedexample of cultural insanity, however, but is setin the context of a widespread and continuousreview of government policy on expenditure onpublic services. Here there is cause for concern,for those seeking answers to such questions pointto the rapid advance and increasingly economicalavailability of information and communica-tion technology.While library buildings and conservation of

materials have high profiles and continue toattract funds, long-term staffing issues are largelyignored. Possibly the biggest threat to manuscriptand rare-book collections is that in many largeacademic libraries there are now few qualifiedspecialists to oversee the collections. Althoughmanuscript materials and rare-book collectionscan be found in large public libraries, specia-lists are rarely employed. As yet there has beenno focus on the problem that will arise when theexisting experts retire from the scene and thereare no replacements available with that localknowledge acquired through years of on-the-jobtraining.The state of uncertainty felt in the mid-1990s

by those engaged in rare-book and manuscriptlibrarianship was not only engendered by govern-ment indifference to libraries and a lack of publicawareness and esteem, but also by professionalneglect. In public libraries the focus is on com-munity librarianship, and in academic li-braries a focus on the provision of textbooksfor a growing and more financially insecureundergraduate population has resulted largely ina weakening of the position of manuscript andrare-book librarians. In public libraries rarematerials are often seen as elitist, and in aca-demic circles specialists are frequently seen asluxury appointments that, increasingly, heavilyused libraries can no longer afford. The fashionfor flexible staff has had a knock-on effect on

MANUSCRIPT LIBRARIES 405

professional education. During the last twenty-five years there has been a steady decline in theteaching of book and manuscript skills withindegree and postgraduate courses in librarianship.The decreasing number of posts open to thoseinterested in rare-book and manuscript librarian-ship could result in such remaining professionalelements disappearing altogether from the sylla-bus.The impact of information technology on

libraries is also changing the traditional outlookon manuscript and rare-book collections. Thisconcern was voiced at an international sympo-sium held at Harvard University in September1992. Twenty-three papers on this topic weredelivered to many of the foremost experts in thefield. The ability to digitize and thus makegenerally available to anyone with the appropri-ate equipment access, not only to bibliographicdatabases but also to full texts, will undoubtedlyraise questions concerning the cost of maintain-ing collections of old manuscripts, possiblytransferring this responsibility from library fund-ing to heritage funding. Keepers of manuscriptsand rare books will have to justify their policieswhen questioned on the need to acquire and keepsuch materials when they can be so easilydigitized and accessed by a greater number ofindividuals. In the mid- to late 1990s, however,the digitization of manuscripts themselves, andthe increasing availability of manuscript catalo-gues on the World Wide Web, has perhaps easedsome of these concerns. By 2000, another sym-posium on manuscripts in libraries, held at theHarry Ransom Center at the University of Texasat Austin, took a more optimistic view. Therelevant papers can be found in Libraries andCulture, vol. 37, part 1 (winter 2002).In the case of modern manuscript materials,

where authors’ preliminary notes, letters, variantscripts and final texts form the basis of a hugescholastic industry, the impact of new technologyis already being felt by the rare-book and manu-script trade. Generation of text through word-processing software means that, for the mostpart, only the author’s final text will remainextant. It is scarcely likely that writers will wishto preserve variant material. Whilst this meansthat there will be less hard copy for librarians toacquire in the future, there will also be adiminution in material available for postgraduatestudy and research.

Further reading

Association of College and Research Libraries (1999)‘Guidelines for the security of rare books, manu-scripts and other special collection’, College andResearch Libraries News 60: 3–19.

Bibliographic Access to Medieval and RenaissanceManuscripts (1992) Haworth Press.

British Manuscript Collections (1989) Automated Cat-aloguing: A Manual, British Library.

Brindley, L. (2002) ‘The future of libraries and human-ities research’, Libraries and Culture 37: 26–36.

DeWitt, D.L. (1994) Guides to Archives and Manu-script Collections in the United States: A Bibliogra-phical Guide, Greenwood Press.

Duckett, K.W. (1975) Modern Manuscripts, AmericanAssociation for State and Local History.

Reiman, D.H. (1993) The Study of Modern Manu-scripts: Public, Confidential and Private, JohnsHopkins University Press.

Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (1994)Surveys of Historical Manuscripts in the UnitedKingdom: A Select Bibliography, 2nd edn, HMSO.

Stockdale, R. (2000) ‘The retrospective conversion ofthe British Library manuscripts’ catalogue: A de-scription of the project’, Journal of the Society ofArchivists 21: 199–213.

Wendhof, R. (1993) Rare Book and Manuscript Li-braries in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard Uni-versity Library.

SEE ALSO: digitization; national archives; rare-book libraries

IAN ROGERSON

MAP

A graphic representation of all or some part ofthe earth’s surface, showing physical features andhuman aspects such as political boundaries etc.,usually drawn to scale. Maps rely for their abilityto represent geographical space on a number oftechnical devices, such as the projection, scale,grid system and sets of symbols to representparticular features. Their content can be indexedand the information presented in a gazetteer,and a collection of maps can be published as anatlas. Great numbers of maps are compiled andpublished by national cartographic agencies, suchas the UK Ordnance Survey, and there are alsocommercial specialist map publishers. The pecu-liar storage, cataloguing and interpretation pro-blems presented by maps mean that they areoften kept in a separate map library and lookedafter by specially trained map librarians. Muchmapping data is nowadays assembled from re-mote sensing devices conveyed by satellites andheld in the form of electronic databases of

406 MAP

geographical information. geographic infor-mation systems supplement the scope of printedmaps, but have not replaced them.

MAP LIBRARY

A library in which a major component of thecollection is cartographic material – maps,charts, atlases, globes, relief models, remotelysensed imagery and digital data.Within this definition, map libraries – in terms

of size, organization and the material held – forma very disparate group. In some collections onlycurrent mapping is valued, while in others super-seded maps are kept as valued historical docu-ments. A map library may be a major entity in itsown right or it may form a very small part of alarger organization, perhaps without full-timestaffing. Map libraries exist, for example, inacademic (see academic libraries), historicaland research institutions (see research li-braries), in national libraries and copy-right libraries, in government departments andlocal authorities, in mineral and oil explorationcompanies, military organizations, cartographicand survey organizations. The maps are used asworking tools or as a historical resource, thelatter also providing an archive of cartographicactivity.

Maps and the library user

Although requests for maps can be generic, forexample – all skiing maps or Braille maps – or bedefined by cartographer (especially for antiquar-ian maps) or publishing house, most queries arearea-specific. A major use for maps in historicalcollections is as a record of the landscapethrough time: to locate places now disappearedor renamed; to plot land use through time; tohelp interpret written documents; to identifyadministrative or property boundaries, and soon.Depending on the scale and its intended

purpose, a map may cover an area in one sheet(a single sheet map) or in a series of sheets – amap series, defined by Parry and Perkins (1987)as ‘a set of map sheets drawn to a commonspecification which when assembled in theircorrect relative positions cover a large area ofland and which together may be regarded asconstituting a single map’. The relationship ofthe sheets can be shown on a graphic index or

cover diagram. This shows the sheet lines and thename or number of the individual sheets, and canalso be marked up with the libraries’ holdings.

In most general map libraries, staff need tospend considerably more time helping users thanis required in many other libraries. Not only arerequests complicated by map series and theconcept of scale, but the very act of compiling amap, involving generalization from reality and itsrepresentation as symbols on a flat surface,means that interpretation of maps must be donecautiously. Even the intended purpose of the mapor, for example, a political sponsor, can influencethe type of information included or excluded orthe accuracy of its portrayal.

From a purely practical point of view, mapsare usually large and therefore the library mustbe equipped with large tables plus weights toprevent curling, long rulers and magnifyingglasses.

Storage

Maps may be printed or manuscript. They maybe available on stone, vellum, paper, cloth and avariety of other materials. The variety of formatsand the generally large size of cartographic itemsresults in map libraries requiring many differenttypes of storage. The vast majority of maps incollections are on paper. These may be storedfolded, rolled or flat. Flat maps may be storedhorizontally in drawers, perhaps folded in half,or vertically, in suspended folders or on strips ofpaper or plastic attached to the map and in turnsuspended.

Cataloguing and classification

A primary means of access to a map collection isthrough the area covered by the map or mapseries. Geographical systems of classificationmay be of three types: alphabetic, alphanumericand numeric (Larsgaard 1998). All libraries usinggeographical classifications need to address theproblem of how to deal with places that changetheir name or countries that change their bor-ders. Widely used alphanumeric systems areLibrary of Congress, DDC, and that devised bythe UK Ministry of Defence, GSGS 5307 (Minis-try of Defence 1978). Non-geographic classifica-tions, for example by issuing body orprovenance, are widely used in archives andrecord offices.

MAP LIBRARY 407

It is not uncommon for map library collectionsto be uncatalogued, retrieval relying on theclassification scheme or staff knowledge. In manyinstitutions maps are seen as ‘difficult’ and/orephemeral material. Automation of map catalo-gues has trailed behind that of their book-basedequivalents, with maps often being added tosystems essentially designed for books as anuncomfortable afterthought. Nevertheless, in-creasing numbers of map catalogues are auto-mated, resulting in much greater powers ofretrieval. marc format is used in, for example,the british library and library of congressmap libraries, allowing online access and muchgreater potentiality for co-operative cataloguing.There are also many home-grown automatedmap catalogues in use.Map series can be catalogued at the series

level, resulting in one catalogue entry for manysheets; or at the sheet level, providing manyentries for each series. The latter option requiresa considerably greater amount of time butpotentially provides easier access to the collec-tion, particularly if geographic co-ordinates areincluded on a suitable automated system. Agraphics interface can combine catalogue entrieswith graphic indexes.An International Standard Bibliographical De-

scription has been published for cartographicmaterials – ISBD(CM) (1987) – and a manual ofinterpretation for the anglo-american catalo-guing rules, AACR2 (1982), for cartographicmaterials is also available.Apart from geographical coverage other fun-

damental elements in a cartographic catalogueare scale, authorship (more often an organizationthan an individual and frequently equated withthe publisher, at least for modern maps), date ofpublication and of information, format (map,globe, printed, manuscript), subject (geological,administrative, etc.) and size.

Digital data

Increasingly maps are being produced in digitalform – often without a paper counterpart.Depending on the sophistication of the data-base, this offers many advantages to the mapuser – it may be possible to view only selecteddata, to incorporate it into a Geographic Infor-mation System (see geographic informationsystems), to centre a map on a particular siteand therefore to ignore the sheet lines necessary

with paper maps. Such products are found inmap libraries and the role of the map librarian isconsequently changing, but they may equally befound in computer departments or in people’soffices. The archiving of this information issomething that is being addressed (Board andLawrence 1994). Should the digital product orsome hard copy, perhaps microform (see micro-forms), output be preserved? At present digitalproducts are not subject to legal deposit in thecopyright libraries – How are we to provideaccess to the data and archive it for futuregenerations? Is this the role of the map library?

References

Board, C. and Lawrence, P. (eds) (1994) Recording OurChanging Landscape, Royal Society and the BritishAcademy in association with the British Carto-graphic Society.

Cartographic Materials: A Manual of Interpretation forAACR2 (1982) American Library Association.

ISBD(CM): International Standard Bibliographic De-scription for Cartographic Materials (1987) IFLAUniversal Bibliographic Control and InternationalMARC Programme.

Larsgaard, M.L. (1998) Map Librarianship: An Intro-duction, 3rd edn, Libraries Unlimited.

Ministry of Defence (1978) Manual of Map LibraryClassification and Cataloguing, GSGS 5307.

Parry, R.B. and Perkins, C.R. (eds) (1987) WorldMapping Today, Butterworths.

Further reading

Dubreuil, L. (ed.) (1993) World Directory of MapCollections, 3rd edn, compiled by the Section ofGeography and Map Libraries of the InternationalFederation of Library Associations and Institutions,Saur.

Perkins, C.R. and Parry, R.B. (eds) (1990) InformationSources in Cartography, Bowker-Saur.

SEE ALSO: digital library; national archives;special libraries

ANNE TAYLOR

MARC

The acronym invariably used for the standardformat for machine-readable cataloguing.

SEE ALSO: UKMARC; UNIMARC; USMARC

MARK-UP LANGUAGES

Mark-up is information embedded within anelectronic document, in order to control the

408 MARC

processing of that document by computer pro-grams. It makes explicit for computer processingthings that are implicit for the human reader.Mark-up is usually in the form of encoding tags.A mark-up language can be a specific set ofencoding tags or a method for defining encodingtags.

Mark-up for display

Documents created by word-processing pro-grams contain mark-up that controls the appear-ance of portions of the document, for examplecentred text or text in italics. Normally thismark-up is not easily visible to the user who seesonly the effect of the mark-up when the docu-ment is displayed. Before the widespread use ofword processing, text formatting systems usedvisible mark-up to control the appearance ofdocuments, for example with formatting instruc-tions such as .ce to cause the next portion of textto be centred. The formatting program processedthe document to produce a version suitable fordisplay or printing. The typesetting system TeX,still widely used in computer science andrelated disciplines, operates in this way.

Mark-up for analysis

Other forms of mark-up are used with computerprograms that manipulate or analyse documentsin some way. Document retrieval systems usuallyrequire features such as author, title and key-words to be inserted in a particular formatwithin a document. In the humanities moredetailed mark-up systems have been developedto handle different types of primary texts such asverse, drama, manuscripts, transcriptions of con-versations and dictionaries. These languages areused to identify each word that has beenretrieved by page number, act, scene, line numberor whatever unit is the most appropriate for thetext.

Generalized mark-up

Mark-up languages for formatting and for analy-sis developed more or less independently of eachother. However, formatting languages can beambiguous for any other form of computerprocessing where, for example, something initalic might be a title or a foreign word or anemphasized word. Furthermore, most mark-uplanguages were designed for use with only one

program, making it necessary to perform somekind of conversion on the document for use withother programs. It made sense to develop amachine-independent mark-up scheme that couldbe used with many different programs withoutmaking changes to a document.This is the basic principle underlying the

Standard Generalized Mark-up Language(SGML). SGML became an international stan-dard in 1986, but it has now largely beensuperseded by a simpler version called the Ex-tensible Mark-up Language (XML), which be-came a recommendation of the World Wide WebConsortium (W3C) in 1998. Both are metalan-guages. They provide a framework for creating amark-up system according to certain rules. Mark-up tags within SGML and XML are descriptiverather than prescriptive. They specify compo-nents within a document rather than what acomputer program is to do with those compo-nents. Pride and Prejudice would be encodedthus: 5 title4Pride and Prejudice5 /title4 .With this mark-up in place one computer pro-gram could make an index of all titles, whileanother could display titles in italic and a thirdcould make the titles into hypertext links, allwithout making any changes to the document.The set of mark-up tags defined for any group

of documents is called an SGML or XMLapplication. The tags are defined in a processknown as document analysis where sample docu-ments are examined and features within thedocuments and the relationships between thefeatures are specified in detail. Documents areassumed to be hierarchical in structure with tagsnested within each other. A formal specificationof the document structure can be defined in aDocument Type Definition (DTD) or, for XMLonly, a schema. The DTD or schema can thenused by a computer program to validate themark-up or to control the processing in otherways.

SGML and XML applications

The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is asimple application of SGML. Other SGML andXML applications have been developed fordigital libraries (see digital library) and forelectronic publishing. One of the best known isthe Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), an interna-tional project that defined an SGML applicationfor the humanities. Humanities primary source

MARK-UP LANGUAGES 409

texts are particularly complex and the TEIdeveloped specifications for encoding many fea-tures within them from editorial annotations tolinguistic analysis to transcriptions of oral ar-chives. The TEI guidelines are publicly availableand are used by many digital library projects.They are now being converted to XML.

XML is just as useful for encoding metadataor for the text that needs to be associated withimages in order for those images to be search-able. The Resource Description Framework(RDF) now being promoted by the W3C as ageneral-purpose metadata system is based onXML as is the Encoded Archival Description(EAD). XML is now being widely adopted inindustry and many new applications are beingdeveloped. Up till now most effort has concen-trated on defining XML applications but there isa steady development of software for desktoptools and for use by programmers comfortablewith Unix. The W3C also has other activitiesassociated with XML including style sheet lan-guages and a method of linking across documentsthat is much more powerful than that providedby HTML.

Mark-up theory

Such has been the recent interest in mark-uplanguages that a whole new research area ofmark-up theory has developed in the last fewyears. Within it, questions have been raisedabout the distinction between descriptive andprescriptive mark-up, about the relationship be-tween mark-up and ontologies (see ontology),and on the problems of representing documentsas hierarchies.

Further reading

Burnard, L. (1995) ‘What is SGML and how does ithelp?’, Computers and the Humanities 29: 41–50.

Coombs, J.H., Renear, A.H. and DeRose, S.J. (1987)‘Markup systems and the future of scholarly textprocessing’, Communications of the ACM 30: 933–47.

Encoded Archival Description (2001) (http://lcweb.loc.-gov/ead/) [official website for the EAD].

Hockey, S. (2000) Electronic Texts in the Humanities.Principles and Practice, Oxford University Press.

Text Encoding Initiative (2001) (http://www.tei-c.org/)[introductory and advanced material about the TEI].

The XML Cover Pages (1994–) (http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/) [comprehensive source of informa-tion about XML and related activities].

SEE ALSO: image retrieval; informatics;standards specifications

SUSAN HOCKEY

MARKET RESEARCH

Systematic investigation of the type, quality andquantity of services required by users (sometimesalso referred to as clients or customers) is thebasis of marketing in the context of library andinformation services provision. The concept of a‘market’ for library and information servicesemerged in the 1960s and early 1970s whenstudies of user requirements started to be takenmore seriously. Prior to this time it would befair to say that service provision was profession-ally determined and systems-led rather thancustomer-driven.Pioneering investigations by Groombridge

(1964), Luckham (1971) and Totterdell and Bird(1976) all focused on British public libraryservices. Cronin (1984a, 1984b), who has con-tributed significantly to the marketing literature,suggests that these earliest studies were attemptsto explore the relationship between the thinkingof service providers and the perceptions ofdisparate communities of users. He suggests thatthe majority of user studies since then ‘havebeen relatively unsophisticated in terms of theconceptualisation, methodologies and statisticalrigour’.

In spite of these shortcomings, some of whichwere addressed by the setting up of the Centrefor User Studies at Sheffield University, thelibrary profession has begun to understand theneed for market research to support the designand planning of services and products. Theconcept of medium- to long-term strategic plan-ning was a 1980s phenomenon that encouragedfeasibility studies, surveys of various types andcommunity profiling. The Cheshire survey (Che-shire Libraries and Museums 1985) was animportant milestone in this respect. Marketresearch has, however, not been restricted topublic libraries, and many commercial institu-tions, who provide an in-house library service,and academic bodies now undertake marketresearch exercises to determine the type andamount of library support activity that may beneeded in order that the organization may func-tion effectively.

410 MARKET RESEARCH

Techniques

Techniques used in library market research arelargely drawn from those employed within thecommercial sector and may be designed to assessboth the quantitative and the qualitative aspectsof service provision and use. They are tests ofboth fact and opinion. Various methodologiesmay be used, such as questionnaires, completedby either the recipient or an interviewer; ‘userpanels’ or ‘focus groups’, in which the views of alarger number of people are collected through adiscussion under the direction of a neutral facil-itator; or using analysis of data collected as partof library housekeeping – reservations, enquiryfailure rates. There is also an increasing use of asurvey technique, ‘Priority Search’, in whichparticipants indicate their preferences.Telephone surveys provide a simple way of

obtaining both quantitative and qualitative datafrom users and non-users. Fax and electronicmail can also be used where time-scales areshort, but in such cases response rates are some-times variable. Postal surveys, in which a printedquestionnaire is sent to the participant, are quitecommonly used. But this method generally suf-fers from a low response rate and the additionaldifficulty that respondents are self-selecting –they choose whether to respond or not, andresults are often biased. Response rates cansometimes be improved by offering an incentive,such as participation in a prize draw, or byreducing the inconvenience and cost of respond-ing by providing pre-paid postal envelopes or aFreephone telephone number.

Sampling

To avoid the bias that a non-representative groupmay impose, proper structuring of the sample isone of the critical factors in market researchstudies. For some surveys it is feasible to examinethe whole population under study, but usuallysome sort of sample is constructed. Randomsampling, which involves selecting participantsat will or using random number tables, iscommonly used by libraries, as is systematicsampling. This requires examining or interview-ing, for example, every tenth person entering thelibrary or every fifth record in a file. Two othermethods of sampling are occasionally usedwithin library market research. These are struc-tured sampling, in which records/participants arechosen according to some predetermined criteria

(e.g. age, sex), and cluster sampling, whereparticipants are chosen by some other collectivefactor (e.g. those entering the library during somepredetermined time period).

Data analysis

Results can be processed manually, but it is moreusual to make use of one of the proprietarysoftware packages, such as SPSS or SNAP, whichare specifically designed to handle large amountsof information and present it graphically.Most of the market surveys undertaken in the

library and information sector are locally fo-cused, but national surveys have been under-taken, of which the most notable is the BritishPublic Library Review of 1994, which wascarried out by ASLIB on behalf of the UKDepartment of Heritage (Myers 1994).

References

Cheshire Libraries and Museums (1985) The CheshireLibrary Survey: New Town, New Library, CheshireLibraries and Museums, BLRDD Report no. 5838 [astudy on the use of and attitudes to Runcorn Librarybefore and after its opening].

Cronin, B. (1984a) ‘The marketing of public libraryservices in the UK – practical applications’, Euro-pean Journal of Marketing 18(2): 45–55.

—— (1984b) ‘The marketing of public library servicesin the United Kingdom – the rationale for a market-ing approach’, European Journal of Marketing 18(2):33–44.

Groombridge, B. (1964) The Londoner and His Li-brary, Research Institute for Consumer Affairs.

Luckham, B. (1971) The Library in Society: A Study ofthe Public Library in an Urban Setting, LibraryAssociation.

Myers, J. (1994) ‘Stable, quiet retreats, or bustling withinnovation’, Library Association Record 96(8):426–7.

Totterdell, B. and Bird, J. (1976) The Effective Library:A Report on the Hillingdon Project on PublicLibrary Effectiveness, Library Association.

Further reading

Durcan, A. (1984) ‘A reference library talks to itsusers’, European Journal of Marketing 18(2): 65–71.

Jackson, A. and Martin, P. (1991) ‘The non-use ofManchester’s library service: An investigation’, Pub-lic Library Journal 6(4): 109–13.

Line, M.B. (1972) Library Surveys, C. Bingley.Local Government Training Board (1987) GettingCloser to the Public – Part 1: What it Means, LGTB.

National Consumer Council (1986) Measuring Up,NCC.

Reid, C. and Webster, K. (1993) ‘Business needs andsupply in Scotland’, Business Information Review10(2): 36–47.

MARKET RESEARCH 411

Rowlands, J. (1992) The Cuckoo Factor: An Investiga-tion into the Effects of Transient Populations on theDevelopment of Library Services, HumbersideCounty Council Leisure Services.

Sugg, A. (1998) Consulting the Customer: UsingMarket Research in Libraries, Capital PlanningInformation.

SEE ALSO: libraries; marketing

DON KENNINGTON

MARKETING

Marketing is commonly associated with high-budget advertising campaigns designed to sell,influence and persuade people to buy things theydo not want or need. This is not surprising inlight of the fact that the average person experi-ences thousands of advertising impressions perday through print, broadcast, the world wideweb, product packaging and event sponsors. Butmarketing is much more than advertising, selling,persuasion or promotion. Marketing is a triedand true systematic approach that relies heavilyon designing the service or product in terms ofconsumers’ needs and desires, with consumersatisfaction as its goal.

Brief history of marketing

Marketing was popularized after the SecondWorld War. Prior to that time emphasis wasplaced on producing products without any spe-cial regard for consumer needs or demand,coupled with the intent to sell that same productto an undefined market for a profit. Demand atthis time was far greater than supply and thecustomer usually sought out the producer. Even-tually this trend reversed and consumers realizedthey could make choices as well as demands ofthe producers. Hence was born marketing.

MARKETING FOR NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATIONS

Marketing for non-profit is defined as the volun-tary exchange of values (e.g. books for knowl-edge) with targeted markets (e.g. university agelibrary users), built upon organizational goalsand objectives (e.g. increase university age regis-trations by 25 per cent in one year), that achievecustomer satisfaction (higher grade point averagebased upon productive library use).Non-profit sectors rapidly adopted marketing

practices in the late 1970s as changes in theexternal environment created competition, and

more limited funding sources. Agencies such aslibraries, museums, hospitals and zoos weresuddenly faced with diverse and demandingclientele who were no longer satisfied with thestatus quo.

Introduction to marketing activities

By describing the elements of a marketing model,its application to libraries can be further illu-strated. A model is simply a step-by-step emula-tion of a process that illuminates importantcomponents or variables that are imperative tothe success of the process. The four steps includemarket research, market segmentation, mar-keting mix and marketing evaluation.

1 Market research is finding out all relevantdata regarding the library’s market. A mar-ket is all the people who have some statedinterest in a particular product or service orcould be expected to do so. The marketresearch process is continuous, identifyingmarkets and opportunities, and gatheringand processing relevant data needed tosuccessfully serve those markets.

2 Market segmentation is based upon the factthat markets are heterogeneous. A marketsegment is a group of potential users whoare identified through the market researchprocess as sharing similar wants and needs.It is imperative for library managers todefine and understand various markets inorder to allocate resources efficiently and toprovide services effectively.

3 Marketing mix is comprised of product,price, place and promotion, the 4 Ps. Whilethe mix is the most visible part of the model,it is not exclusively the most important.Librarians historically participate heavily inthe promotion arm of the mix. Less explicitregard has been given by the library profes-sion to aspects of price, place and productwhen considering which segments to prior-itize service to.

Product is defined as anything that can beoffered to a market to satisfy a need. A largeassortment of materials, services and pro-grammes constitute the library’s product lines. Alibrary offers goods, either tangible (e.g. booksand Internet access) or intangible (e.g. personalassistance, or value of the library as a premiercommunity institution).

412 MARKETING

Price is defined as the actual charge made byan organization as well as the toil and trouble ofacquiring it. Library services are not free.Although the library may or may not chargespecific prices for its products, the user incurscosts in obtaining service. Time spent preparingto go to the library, travelling there or onlinesearching time has a price. Unless the userexpects to be rewarded with information worthmore than the cost of obtaining it, the user willforego library use.

Place is defined as how the organization makesits products and services available and accessibleto markets. Location of facilities and optimumaccessibility is critical to library success. geo-graphic information systems are facilitatingoptimal library facility location (Koontz 1997:85–108).

Promotion articulates what the library is doingand what it is. The four groups of promotiontools include advertising, sales promotion, perso-nal selling and publicity.

4 Marketing evaluation is a formalized activ-ity, often called the marketing audit, whichcan occur before an organization markets,during the marketing process and aftermarketing begins. It takes a comprehensiveand systematic review of the organization’sinternal and external environment, strategiesand activities, identifying problem areas andopportunities, and recommending a plan forimprovement.

SUMMARY

Marketing represents an organized way of offer-ing library services cost-effectively and efficiently,based upon user interests, communication meth-ods, imaginative design of service and products,and feedback that improves what the library isdoing.

References

Koontz, C. (1997) Library Facility Siting and LocationHandbook, Greenwood [an introduction to Geo-graphic Information Systems (GIS) for marketanalysis].

Further reading

Hart, K. (1999) Putting Marketing Ideas into Action,Library Association Publishing [an introduction to

marketing techniques that can be put into action bylibraries].

Kotler, P. (1996) Strategic Marketing for NonprofitOrganizations, Prentice Hall [extends private-sectorconcepts of marketing to the non-profit marketingenvironment, and develops a framework of utilizingmarketing for strategic planning].

CHRISTINE M. KOONTZ

McKERROW, RONALD BRUNLESS(1872–1940)

Bibliographer and literary scholar.After Harrow and Cambridge, McKerrow

taught English in Japan and became interestedin hand printing. When he returned to Britainhe was persuaded by A.H. Bullen to edit thework of Thomas Nashe, which began alifetime’s interest in the printing, publicationand textual transmission of Elizabethan andJacobean literature. McKerrow was Secretary ofthe Bibliographical Society from 1912 to 1934,and, as such, negotiated the transfer of TheLibrary from the Library Association to theSociety.He is best remembered for his Introduction to

Bibliography (1927, and subsequent editions),which until the 1970s was a standard work forstudents of literature and, to a lesser extent,librarianship. He also compiled and edited animportant dictionary of members of the Englishbook trade from 1557 to 1640 (1910), which isstill valuable; was the founder and first editor ofthe Review of English Studies, which introducednew standards into English literary scholarship;and was a major contributor to many bibliogra-phical enterprises of the period including the pre-1640 Short-Title Catalogue.

Further reading

Greg, W.W. (1940) ‘Ronald Brunless McKerrow’, Pro-ceedings of the British Academy 26: 488–515.


McLUHAN, (HERBERT) MARSHALL(1911–80)

Canadian sociologist and writer on communica-tions.Educated at the universities of Manitoba and

Cambridge, from 1946 to 1966 he taught in theEnglish department at the University of Toronto,

MCLUHAN, (HERBERT) MARSHALL 413

as Director of the Centre for Culture andTechnology at the University of Toronto and, in1967, was appointed Albert Schweitzer Professorin the Humanities at Fordham University, NewYork. He first examined the effects of technologyand the media on society in his book TheMechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man(1952), in which he analysed the socio-psycholo-gical impact of mass communication and inter-preted it as an extension of the human nervoussystem. This thesis he reinforced and expanded inworks including The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)and The Medium is the Massage (1967). The titleof the latter is a play on the slogan with whichhis work is identified: ‘the medium is the mes-sage’.His provocative and deliberately outrageous

formulations of his ideas received wide attentionand he became one of the most well-knownpublic figures of the 1960s. His thesis was thatas society switched its attention from the printedword towards electronic media of communica-tion, books would disappear and the character-istics of a particular medium would influence theindividual more than the content it carried. Heargued that electronic communication wouldcreate a world of instant awareness, ‘the globalvillage’ in which a sense of private identity wouldbe impossible. Much of his commentary is stillvalid, but the attention-grabbing style in whichhe expressed it has dated badly and this has ledto an eclipse of his reputation.

Further reading

Marchand, P. (1998) Marshall McLuhan: The Mediumand the Messenger, MIT Press.

SEE ALSO: communication; mass media

MASS MEDIA

Organizations using information and commu-nication technology to manufacture and dis-tribute public messages, in the form ofinformation and entertainment, to large, dis-persed and anonymous audiences. The key char-acteristics of such organizations are that thecommunication process is normally one-way, notinteractive or reciprocal, and that the flow isfrom the few to the many, who are anonymousfrom the perspective of the producers. In normalusage the mass media are understood to includebook publishing, newspapers and magazines,

film, radio and television. Other technologies,including records (vinyl, cassette and compactdisc) and video recordings, are sometimes in-cluded in what is unavoidably an imprecise,umbrella term. The internet is now sometimesdescribed as a mass medium, but both commonsense and pedantry suggest it is better conceivedof as a new technology and system by whichmass-media organizations and others distributeor access information. The size of the audience isnot the defining criterion. In many countries inrecent years cinema-going has become a habitlargely restricted to a minority (mostly young)section of the population. While cinema retainssome of the characteristics of a mass medium, themajority of film viewing is on television screens,either from broadcasting or videotapes.While essentially a plural phrase, in recent

decades the term mass media has commonly, ifirritatingly to many ears, been used in thesingular. Raymond Williams (1976) notes thatthe term incorporates three converging senses.First, it denotes an agency or intervening sub-stance. Thus newspapers are the means by whichnews is distributed to their readers. Second, theterm media refers to the technologies. Third, asthey have evolved in capitalist societies, themedia are the carrier of some other material thanoriginally intended. Thus broadcasting or news-papers become the media for the transmission ofadvertising to consumers. It is in this sense that itis sometimes suggested that the economic func-tion of commercial television is to rent its viewersto its advertisers.All mass media develop from small-scale

beginnings, often lacking at least one of thedefining characteristics. Newspapers, for exam-ple, evolve from the provision of newsletters forprivate patrons, through the evolution of printingafter the late fifteenth century, into pamphletaccounts of single events and the corantos ofseventeenth-century Europe providing generalnews of a short period for a wider readership.These only become the full-blown newspapers ofthe eighteenth century, published daily and witha miscellaneous content, with the establishmentof joint stock companies to provide the financialbasis for their production. In the nineteenthcentury, population increases and urbanizationprovided a new audience, while technologicalinnovation (steam printing, the rotary press,wood-pulp-based paper) provided the means forlarge-scale production. The growth of consumer

414 MASS MEDIA

markets, the ‘retail revolution’, and with it theadvertising industry, provided the basis for thecommercial expansion of the newspaper industryinto its twentieth-century form.As this example illustrates, the mass media are

first and foremost industries, whose form andsocial function can best be understood by theirrelation to the wider economy and to changingsocial conditions. In the twentieth century themedia grew into a major industrial sector, occu-pying a key place in most advanced economies.They also provide the main means by whichpeople occupy their leisure time. This has led tofive features of their recent growth. First, themedia are dominated by multinational businessessuch as News Corporation, Disney, Viacom andAOL Time Warner. Such companies operateacross most media sectors. Second, the provisionof entertainment and information has becomeincreasingly mixed, with popular newspapers inparticular significantly driven by entertainmentobjectives, while the film and television industriesare largely integrated. Third, the introduction ofnew technologies has made the definition of massmedia much less certain. Cable, video andsatellite have changed the character of broad-casting, while the rapid evolution of computingand telecommunications has revolutionizednewspaper production. Fourth, the growth ofpay-television and the massive expansion ofbroadcast material available on increasing num-bers of diverse channels have begun to create adifferentiated audience for broadcasting. This,coupled with the ‘digital divide’, which has ledto a major gap in access to and experience ofnew technologies between low- and high-incomecountries, and between low- and high-incomegroups within countries, is beginning to create afragmented and varied experience of mass mediathat questions the very definition of the term.Finally, the previous developments have all posednew questions about state and internationalpolicy, and regulation of the mass media.All states have sought to control the media,

from the earliest licensing of printers. Thisregulation attempts to control two aspects of themedia: their industrial and organizational formon the one hand, and the content of what theydistribute on the other. Growing diversity ofdistribution technologies allied to the increasingpower of multinational media companies havechanged the ability and, in many cases, the desireof nation-states to regulate the media. In parti-

cular, public broadcasting organizations, notablyin Europe, have seen their centrality challengedby the expansion of the private sector. In somecountries concern about the content of the media(particularly relating to sex and violence, or,notably in Third World countries, the impact ofimported material on cultural sovereignty andintegrity) has conflicted with a desire to encou-rage their industrial development. The intrinsicconflict between industrial and cultural policy islikely to continue to be a feature of mass-mediaregulation.

References

Williams, R. (1976) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Cul-ture and Society, London: Fontana

Further reading

Garnham, N. (2000) Emancipation, the Media, andModernity, London: Oxford University Press. [Atheoretical discussion of the modern media opposingarguments for post-modernism or information socie-ties as useful descriptions of recent changes. Despitepolemic and a theoretical style, a valuable andinsightful account of key issues.]

McQuail, D. (2000) McQuail’s Mass CommunicationTheory: An Introduction, 4th edn, London: Sage.[The most widely used and authoritative textbookreviewing a broad range of research and debate.]

Thussu, D.K. (2000) International Communication:Continuity and Change, London: Arnold. [Criticaland informed account, mainly of broadcasting, tele-communications and related sectors, with relevanttheoretical and empirical material.]

Tunstall, J. and Machin, D. (1999) The Anglo-Amer-ican Media Connection, London: Oxford UniversityPress. [A clear descriptive account of the recentdevelopment of the USA and UK media worlds, andtheir global expansion, connections and rivalries.]

SEE ALSO: book trade; broadcasting; film;knowledge industries; telecommunications

PETER GOLDING

MEDICAL INFORMATICS

Introduction

Medical informatics can be described as thescientific field that combines biomedical informa-tion with computer sciences, psychology, epi-demiology and engineering. To understand theconcept of medical informatics it is first neces-sary to understand how medical data is compiled

MEDICAL INFORMATICS 415

and the various uses and communication of thatinformation.Medical data is primarily derived from patient

activity, e.g. the amount of time a patient spendson a waiting list prior to visiting the consultant,the length of stay of a patient in a hospital bed,the type and amount of drug used to treat aspecific condition and the trialing of drugs ordevices with patients prior to use in the medicalfield. Vast amounts of data are generated bypatient activity and biomedical research. Medicalinformation is used to plan, control, manage andmonitor healthcare services. The efficient collec-tion, collation and dissemination of informationand, subsequently, resources is crucial to theeffective management of health services, hence arobust and sophisticated approach to the use ofcomputer and communications systems is re-quired to be adopted in the medical arena.Ted Shortliffe of Columbia University, New

York, is quoted as saying:

[T]hat the emergence of Medical Informaticsas a new discipline is due in a large part to therapid advances in computing and communica-tions technology, to an increasing awarenessthat the knowledge base of biomedicine isessentially unmanageable by traditional paperbased methods, and to a growing convictionthat the process of informed decision makingis as important to modern biomedicine as isthe collection of facts upon which clinicaldecisions or research plans are made.(Quoted at www.cs.man.ac.uk/mig/links/what.-

medinfo.html)

Evidence-based medicine

The need to support clinical decisions withevidence in a structured way rather than relyingupon personal experience or the oral exchange ofinformation from peers is a relatively new con-cept in medicine. It is of course an obvious stepand one that has been long overdue for thepatient. David Sackett developed the principlesof evidence-based medicine (EBM) in Canada. Toprovide information for clinical decision-makingdemands an infrastructure of information andcommunication technology, trained person-nel and systems for the provision of textual andstatistical information. It also requires acceptanceof the concept from the clinical staff. The Sackettprinciples dictate that the best evidence is found.

Evidence is graded according to clearly definedrules. This can be controversial as one clinicianmay accept a set of research findings as definitiveand yet another colleague may disagree.

An international perspective

The history of medical informatics is rooted inthe North American model of healthcare services,where healthcare is provided for a specified feeand the patient must provide an assurance ofmethod of payment to the healthcare providerprior to treatment. This almost invariably in-volves the use of insurance schemes. The patientis usually insured by his or her employer, thusguaranteeing payment for healthcare service. Tomanage such health schemes, which generate agreat volume of patient data that has to be linkedto financial data, specialized computer systemsare used. This was the origin of the interest fromthe late 1970s onwards in the development ofsystems that did more than merely allocate a feefor the treatment of a specific condition.The use of information in management of

patients by using EBM is clearly an active anddeveloping use of medical informatics by medicaland nursing staff and by other practitioners ofprofessions allied to medicine, exemplified in thework of the NHS Centre for Reviews andDissemination, housed at the University of York,UK. The Centre has established a database ofinternational reputation for Randomized ControlTrials (RCT) known as the Cochrane Collabora-tion. The RCT is often regarded as the pivotalinformation in clinical decision-making.

The United Kingdom experience

The National Health Service (NHS) in the UK isa multimillion pound organization employingnearly 1 million people; therefore it is essentialthat all data be managed efficiently. The NHSwill need to invest in a substantially improvedinfrastructure of computing provision within theservice until 2005 to meet current demands andfuture expectations.One of the major developments in the use of

medical informatics in the UK is the establishmentof NHS Direct (www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk). This is ahealth information service for the use of thegeneral public. The service is nurse-led and acti-vated by telephone; each enquiry from the publicis answered by nursing staff using a controlledprotocol. The decision tree process contained in

416 MEDICAL INFORMATICS

the protocol is designed to reassure the enquirerand provide basic advice, prior to contacting adoctor and /or seeking medical treatment.NHS Direct can also be accessed via the

Internet. This version contains decision trees forsearching for specific enquiries, general languagecan be used and specialized medical knowledge isnot always required. The advantage of using theInternet application is that the enquirer caninvestigate in his or her own time without a thirdparty and view or print the material immediately.The Internet service is planned to be fullyinteractive in the next few years.Although many similar services can be found

on the Internet, NHS Direct is probably uniquelyauthoritative as an information system intendedfor patients rather than service providers.A major component of the NHS’s informatics

development is the Electronic Patient Record(EPR), which can be seen as the backbone of themedical informatics concept in the NHS. TheEPR is designed to capture all of the data aboutan individual patient in a single record, ratherthan allowing many to exist in various agencies.This is a major paradigm shift in the recording ofpatient information in the NHS. The focus is onthe patient not the condition or disease and it is aholistic approach to the management of informa-tion about the patient in the NHS. The EPR isbeing developed and has six levels of dataspecification. The use of the EPR demands thestrategic and standardized provision of ICTfacilities throughout the NHS. It also demands aculture shift in the staff’s approach to usinginformation. The use of the EPR will necessitatesharing of patient information by healthcareprofessionals within the same organization andalso between primary and secondary sectors ofthe service. The benefits of improved access topatient-centred data via the EPR for all health-care professionals will be subsequently measuredin the improvement for patients in both ease andspeed of treatment and information provision.

Conclusions

Medical informatics is an invaluable tool for thefuture use of the vast amounts of patient andbiomedical information generated by both medi-cal services and the pharmaceutical industry,enabling it to be managed and used for thebenefit of the patient and the services. However,international standards for the creation, access

and dissemination need to be understood andaccepted, and are still awaiting developmentdespite the work that has been done at York.

Further reading

Shortliffe, E.H. (ed.) (2000) Medical Informatics: Com-puter Applications in Health Care and Biomedicine,New York: Springer-Verlag.

Wyatt, J.C. (2000) Clinical Knowledge and Practice inthe Information Age: A Handbook for HealthProfessionals, London: RSM Press.

SEE ALSO: evidence-based healthcare; healthscience libraries

JANET HARRISON

MEGABYTE

One million bytes of digital data; usually writtenas Mb.


MENU

A list of choices in a computer system, presentedon screen by a program that allows the user toselect a particular option and indicate it in one ofa number of ways such as pressing the ‘Return’key or the mouse button. Menus range from verysimple text lists occupying the entire screen, topull-down or pop-up menus that appear from amenu bar or icon.

METADATA

Metadata are structured information used tofind, access, use and manage information re-sources, primarily in a digital environment. Ametadata scheme consists of a pre-defined set ofelements that contain information about a re-source. Two major factors influenced the devel-opment of metadata schemes: the need forsystematic discovery and retrieval of networkedresources; and the ability to embed metadata inthe digital object.The term ‘metadata’ is a late entry in the

vocabulary of the organization of information,but the concept is not. Librarians, informationspecialists and archivists used ‘bibliographicdata’ to organize and produce a variety ofretrieval tools, including catalogues, indexes

METADATA 417

and finding aids. In the 1980s, computerscientists began to use the term ‘metadata’ todescribe information that documented the char-acteristics of the data contained in databasemanagement systems (DBMS). This use inDBMS popularized the definition of metadata as‘data about data’ and began association of theterm with a computer environment. The variousmethods of information organization convergedin the network environment of the 1990s, and‘metadata’ became the common term for infor-mation about a resource.As the number of digital resources increased,

information organizers questioned the practical-ity of applying detailed, labour-intensive biblio-graphic standards to volatile electronic resources.Some information communities abandoned li-brary standards such as the anglo-americancataloguing rules (AACR) and the machine-readable cataloguing (MARC) format todevelop simpler systems for digital resourcediscovery and retrieval. This resulted in thedevelopment of a wide variety of metadataschemes.Some metadata schemes, such as the dublin

core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), are gen-eral in nature and are designed to accommodateinformation about digital resources in a widevariety of formats and disciplines. Other meta-data schemes, such as the Categories of Descrip-tion for Works of Art (CDWA), are specializedand apply to information in a specific medium orwithin a specific discipline. Common to allmetadata schemes is a set of defined dataelements that describe the resource. Beyond that,each scheme varies as to the number, definitionand content of data elements.

Metadata functions

Metadata assist both humans and computers in avariety of descriptive, structural or administrativefunctions. Descriptive metadata, like traditionalbibliographic data, identify a resource, describeits attributes, characterize its relationships toother resources and provide location and evalua-tive data for the resource. Structural metadataprovide information that links together the sepa-rate files of a composite resource and providesthe computer with architectural guidelines forstorage, navigation, sequence and presentation ofthe resource. Administrative metadata are oftendivided into subcategories, including technical,

provenance, preservation and rights managementinformation. Technical metadata supply informa-tion about the digitization process, file formatdetails, technical aspects of images or sound, ormigration data. provenance metadata provideinformation about the original source of adigitized object and track its authenticity. pre-servation metadata help ensure that the digitalobject exists and is technically accessible over thelong term and include information about encryp-tion techniques, file modification history andoperating-system environment. Rights manage-ment metadata include information on intellec-tual property, reproduction and access rights.The creation and maintenance of metadata isoften a collaborative effort that takes place overthe life cycle of a resource, with a variety ofindividuals and organizations contributing to theprocess.

Metadata characteristics and standards

Characteristics common to all metadata includesemantics, syntax and structure. Semantics refersto the number, type and content of metadataelements, and can vary from simple metadata setswith two or three data elements, to complexschemes with many data elements and contentprescribed by standards and rules. Syntax refersto the way in which content is structured accord-ing to a specified grammar. Metadata syntax mayrange from an undefined syntax like the originalDCMES to a complex coding system such as amark-up language (see mark-up languages) likeStandard Generalized Mark-up Language(SGML). Structure refers to the overall architec-ture that contains the metadata content andsyntax. The structure is based on standards andtechnology that form the foundation for themetadata’s storage, transmittal and use. Meta-data may be embedded in the digital object theydescribe and extracted as needed, or they mayreside in a separately indexed database. The datacan be contained in a variety of architecturalstructures, including Z39.50-compliant librarycatalogues, proprietary databases or the ResourceDescription Framework (RDF) standard.Interoperability and extensibility are desirable

characteristics of metadata schemes. Interoper-ability refers to the ability to transfer metadataamong different schemes and information sys-tems. A core element set that is common to allmetadata schemes will facilitate the exchange

418 METADATA

and use of metadata at a general level ofdescription and retrieval. Extensibility allowsexpansion of the core element set to providemore precise description and retrieval. Elementqualifiers are used to narrow the meaning of anelement. Encoding scheme qualifiers are used toidentify the standards used and to help interpretthe content of a metadata element. Extensibilityprovides greater specificity in description andretrieval, but creates a more complex syntax forinteroperability.Standards are critical for successful metadata

interoperability and may be applied to datacontent, formal syntax or parsing rules andmetadata architectures. Crosswalks map dataelements from one metadata set to another toassist data conversion across information systemsand to facilitate interoperability. Successful cross-walk mapping requires standardized elements,syntax and structure.

Research

Ongoing research aims to test and improve manyaspects of the metadata process. Projects coverareas such as assessment of subject-specific meta-data needs; development of tools to automatemetadata creation; and design of new architec-tures to support the efficient and accurate ex-change of data among different systems andcommunities.

Further reading

Baca, M. (ed.) (1998) Introduction to Metadata: Path-ways to Digital Information, Getty InformationInstitute.

Dempsey, L. and Heery, R.M. (1998) ‘Metadata: Acurrent view of practice and issues’, Journal ofDocumentation 52(4): 145–72.

Hudgins, J., Agnew, G. and Brown, E. (1999) GettingMileage out of Metadata: Applications for theLibrary, American Library Association.

Vellucci, S.L. (1999) ‘Metadata’, Annual Review ofInformation Science and Technology 33: 187–222.

SEE ALSO: bibliographic description; digitallibrary; informatics; information retrieval; mark-up languages; organization of knowledge;standards specifications

SHERRY L. VELLUCCI

MICROFORMS

Miniaturized graphic communications media,

generally on film, but also on paper or card, andcontaining for the most part print, but occasion-ally diagrams, drawings and other illustrationsalso. Some equipment or device for enlarging theimage is required in order to ‘read’ the medium.There are several types of microform, distin-

guished by their format and other characteristics.They may be broadly categorized into rollmicrofilm, microfiche, micro-opaques and minia-turized print, but there are other variants.Roll microfilm is customarily available in

standard widths of 35 mm or 16 mm and isgenerally supplied on open reels. The 35 mmformat, with its relatively large frame size, isparticularly suitable for recording newspaperpages, engineering drawings, charts and plans.The 16 mm format is useful for recording period-icals and has found a role in special applicationssuch as recording correspondence and businessarchives. Alternatives to the open reel, employ-ing permanent housing of the film within acontainer, such as a cassette (with two built-inreels or cores) or a cartridge (with a single reel orcore), have been developed to overcome some ofthe basic inconvenience and risk of damageassociated with handling loose film and thread-ing it into viewers.Several systems have been developed for cod-

ing roll film to identify individual frames tofacilitate document image retrieval.An adaptation of roll microfilm is unitized

microfilm, in which short lengths of cut film areused for image storage. In this way small docu-ments, or single periodical articles can be indivi-dually treated, although there are some attendanthandling difficulties. A further development,which was of some significance when punchedcards were popular for sorting and retrieval, wasthe use of unitized microfilm in aperture cards.These incorporated a piece of microfilm as aninsert in a ‘window’ in a standard punched card.Microfiche is basically a flat rectangle of sheet

film upon which images are recorded. Severalsizes of microfiche may be encountered but themost common currently available is equivalent tothe international A6 paper size. Superfiche andUltrafiche are variants created by more sophisti-cated and precise technology. Superfiche imagesare reduced by seventy-five times to provideabout 1,000 frames per sheet. Ultrafiche imagesare reduced by 150 times to provide about 3,200frames per sheet. Jacketed fiche, which may beregarded as an extension of unitized microfilm,

MICROFORMS 419

features the use of transparent carriers or ‘jack-ets’ into which short lengths of film are insertedto facilitate storage and protection when hand-ling.Both roll microfilm and microfiche are avail-

able in monochrome (black and white) or colour,though the latter is quite expensive and conse-quently scarcer in libraries. Monochrome filmmay be either negative (white print on a blackbackground) or positive (black print on a whitebackground).Computer Output Microfilm (COM) is a term

that does not strictly describe a microform formatbut rather the means by which information isrecorded on the medium. Information from com-puter processing is directly output and recordedon to microfiche rather than paper (or screens),utilizing special equipment to produce it.Micro-opaques, also called microcard or mi-

croprint, are sheets of opaque flat card on whichimages are recorded, either photographically orby photolithography. Partly because of the needfor specialized viewers and because of the diffi-culty of achieving quality of enlarged imagescomparable to microfilm and microfiche, theirappeal is not great.Miniaturized print represents the transition

from true microform to conventional print. Forthis format material is reduced by two or fourtimes from the original and produced photo-lithographically. It can just be read with thenaked eye, although it is more usual andcomfortable to use a hand-magnifier. Thisformat allows a significant reduction in thevolume of material to be accomplished butwithout the need for sophisticated equipment.Miniaturized print has found a particularlyuseful application for otherwise bulky referencebooks, of which the Oxford English Dictionaryand the British Museum Catalogue of PrintedBooks are examples.Microforms have fulfilled an important role in

collection development in library and infor-mation services, and in the broad area of admin-istrative processes also. The use of microforms asa document publishing medium for a variety ofmaterial, including books, pamphlets, period-icals, theses, papers and manuscripts, has had asignificant impact on library collection-building.They have brought economy in terms of produc-tion and duplication, storage and transportationof both original and republished material. Theyhave also contributed to increasing the availabil-

ity of copies of important and scarce items, andat the same time contributed towards the pre-servation of material. Microform document pub-lishing practices may be divided into categories:original or primary publishing, where materialmakes its first appearance in microform; parallelpublishing, where paper and microform versionsappear simultaneously; and retrospective publish-ing, where previously published paper material isproduced or ‘reprinted’ in microform. Microformis also used as a tool of preservation; users arerequired to consult films of rare, valuable ordamaged documents in order to protect theoriginals.In addition to their potential for general

administrative applications, such as the filmingand storage of correspondence and financialrecords or the copying and distribution of localreports and documents, microforms have fea-tured in more specialized areas of library andinformation service management. They formedan important stage in the evolution of the librarycatalogue (see catalogues) with the introduc-tion of COM for the production and distributionof catalogues, although this phase of develop-ment is now largely superseded by Online Public-Access Catalogues (opacs).Microforms are a medium dependent on

equipment, together with a certain level of userskill. The design and quality of microforms andequipment are therefore critical to their success-ful exploitation, as is the provision of a suitablereading environment. The availability of viewingand printing machines goes some way to over-coming the user resistance to reading micro-forms for sustained periods, although much ofthe technology that is available is still of old-fashioned and inconvenient design.Microform material has established a very

useful niche in library and information servicesand it is now a feature of services and collectionsin libraries of various types and sizes. In the1940s there was speculation that microformswould rapidly displace paper and print materialfor many purposes. More recently the speedyeclipse of microform by the newer electronicmedia, particularly cd-rom, has been forecast.The current reality encompasses neither of thesescenarios. Though early claims for the popularityof microforms were undoubtedly exaggerated, arole emerged for them. They will continue forsome time to provide a useful and inexpensive

420 MICROFORMS

means of archiving and distributing specializeddocumentation.

Further reading

British Standards Institution Micrographics – Vocabu-lary, BS ISO 6196 (all parts in the series).

Davies, J.E. (1982) ‘Why microforms? Managementexperience in a modern university library’, Interna-tional Journal of Micrographics and Video Technol-ogy 1(4): 183–98.

Teague, S.J. (1985) Microform, Video and ElectronicMedia Librarianship, London: Butterworths.

SEE ALSO: informatics; knowledge industries

J.E. DAVIES, REVISED BY THE EDITORS

MIDDLE EAST

The Middle East includes all the Arab countriesand Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Israel. All theArab countries have Arabic as a native language.English, French and German are widely knownamong educated people throughout the region.

Egypt, Turkey and Iran are the biggest coun-tries in terms of population (60 million). Sudan,Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Mauritania are thebiggest in terms of total area (2–2.5 million sq.km). In terms of national income Saudi Arabia isthe richest country in the region. Generallyspeaking, more than half of the population inthe Middle East are illiterate. Book publishing ismodest. Annual income per capita varies drasti-cally from one country to another. In petroleumcountries the average is $100,000. In non-petro-leum countries the average is only $1,000.

The library situation is affected by localconditions, so it differs greatly from one countryto another. This account tries to illustrate the

general picture of the library movement in theregion as a whole.

National libraries

The majority of countries in the region havenational libraries or libraries playing the roleof a national library; for example in Israel andAfghanistan, where the university library is thenational library as well. These are the HebrewUniversity Library in Israel and Kabul UniversityLibrary in Afghanistan. Some national librariesplay a dual role as national and public libraries.The oldest and biggest national library in theMiddle East is the Egyptian National Library(Dar Al Kutub Al Misryyah), with its 3 millionprinted books and 80,000 manuscripts. It holdsalso a great quantity of papyri and coins. It wasfounded in 1870 and in 2002 was joined by thenew Library of Alexandria as an Egyptiannational and regional library. The youngest andsmallest national library in the region is that ofthe United Arab Emirates (1984). The nationallibrary in the majority of countries is responsiblefor the national bibliography, as in Egypt,Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq and Qatar. The EgyptianNational Bibliography is the oldest in the region(1955). Countries without national libraries areOman, Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait.Table 17 illustrates the dates of foundation of

the major national libraries in the region.

Public libraries

The public library movement in the Middle Eastis very weak if compared with Europe or NorthAmerica, and in respect of the total population ofthe region. In countries like Egypt and Iran thereare only 300 public libraries for 60 millionpeople in each country. In Saudi Arabia there are

Table 17 National libraries in the Middle East

Egypt 1870 Iraq 1963

Syria 1880 Qatar 1963

Tunisia 1885 Mauritania 1965

Morocco 1920 Saudi Arabia 1968

Lebanon 1921 Yemen 1968

Iran 1935 Libya 1972

Turkey 1946 United Arab Emirates 1984

Algeria 1963

Source: Shaban A. Khalifa (1991) Egyptian National Library, Cairo, Al Arabi Publishing House [in Arabic]

MIDDLE EAST 421

only thirty libraries for 10 million inhabitants. InIraq, seventy-seven libraries serve 20 millionpeople. In Turkey, however, the situation is muchbetter, with 600 public libraries.Holdings of public libraries vary from several

hundreds of volumes to several hundreds ofthousands. The main library materials to befound in these libraries are books and period-icals. Some libraries in Turkey, Egypt, Moroccoand Iran hold manuscripts; a very few publiclibraries hold audiovisual materials in Egypt,Tunisia and Saudi Arabia.The majority of public libraries in the region

use traditional methods in controlling their col-lections. There are few libraries using automatedintegrated systems; they include Greater CairoPublic Library, Guiza Public Library and Helio-polis Public Library in Egypt, and Jeddah PublicLibrary in Saudi Arabia.Public libraries in Middle Eastern countries are

operated by various agencies; among these wecan distinguish:

1 National libraries, where many of them runa system of public libraries as branches. Thisis found in countries like Egypt, Qatar andTunisia.

2 Ministries of Culture, as in Tunisia, Mor-occo, Syria and Turkey.

3 Ministries of Education, as in Turkey, Iran,Egypt, Lebanon and Bahrain.

4 Ministries of Endowments. Since almost allcountries of the region are Muslim, theseministries operate many public libraries.

5 Ministries of Mass Communications, as inQatar, Iraq and other countries.

6 Municipalities. In many countries of theregion municipalities run some public li-braries, as in Iran, Egypt and Turkey. Ac-cording to the Iranian Library Act of 1965,each municipality has to allocate 1.5 percent of its revenue to public libraries. Insome countries we find different agenciesoperating public libraries of their own.

The total number of public libraries in theregion does not exceed 2,000 libraries for morethan 400 million inhabitants.

School libraries

Generally speaking, education before universityis divided into three stages: elementary (primary),preparatory and secondary. There are three kinds

of schools in the region: government schools,private schools and foreign schools.Elementary school libraries are only collec-

tions of not more than a few hundred books,often uncatalogued and unclassified. These booksare put there only for circulation among pupilsand are held without change for many years.The majority of preparatory and secondary

schools have real libraries, with collections ran-ging from 3,000 to 15,000 volumes. Few schoollibraries hold periodicals and audiovisual materi-als; very few school libraries hold machine-read-able data files or optical disks. Catalogues arestill in card form in the majority of theselibraries. Some libraries, as in Qatar, Iraq, Egypt,Tunisia, Iran, Turkey and Syria, do not have anykind of catalogues. School libraries are oftenopen access.Library services are limited to lending and

simple reference services. These libraries areusually run by unqualified persons.

University libraries

All the countries of the Middle East have institu-tions of higher education. The oldest universitiesare to be found in Egypt: Al Azhar University (areligious institution) was founded more than1,000 years ago; Cairo University was foundedin 1908.Some countries of the region have upwards of

fifteen universities, as do Turkey and Egypt; somehave only one university, as do Qatar, Bahrain,Tunisia and Oman. Independent colleges arewidespread in many countries.There are different levels of university li-

braries in Middle Eastern countries. Some uni-versities have only one library for all faculties toserve both undergraduates and postgraduates,and for both students and staff. This situation isfound in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain, forexample. Some universities have two libraries,one for staff members and postgraduate students,the other for undergraduate students. Some uni-versities do not have a main central library, butonly faculty libraries. On the other hand someuniversities have three levels of libraries, i.e. acentral library, faculty libraries and departmentallibraries. The central library offers service to allfaculties, all departments, all students and allstaff members. The faculty library is used only bystudents and staff members of that particularfaculty. The departmental library is used only by

422 MIDDLE EAST

students and staff members of that particulardepartment.Some universities are very big, for example

Cairo University with its 100,000 undergraduatestudents, 20,000 postgraduate students and16,000 staff members. Some universities are verysmall, for example Qatar University with its5,000 students and 300 staff members.Collections of university libraries range from

150,000 volumes to over 1 million volumes.Faculty libraries’ collections range from 15,000volumes to 100,000 volumes. Departmental li-braries’ collections are usually small because theyserve a narrow area; they range around 1,000–2,000 volumes. Periodicals, microforms, audio-visual materials, machine-readable data files andoptical laser disks form an important part ofuniversity libraries’ collections in many countries.Some university libraries are still primitive inhandling library materials and services. Some arefully automated, such as Qatar University andthe Saudi universities. Services in the majority ofuniversity libraries are limited to lending materi-als. Only a few libraries offer advanced servicessuch as current awareness, SDI, referenceservices or online searches.Seating capacity is very low in respect of the

users’ community in many of the libraries; forexample, Cairo University Library has only 200seats for 150,000 users. Seating capacity isadequate in Saudi libraries, at Qatar University,and in Oman, the Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait.Some libraries are overstaffed, e.g. Cairo Uni-

versity Library with its 550 workers. On theother hand some are understaffed, as in Afghani-stan and Tunisia. Generally speaking, there is ashortage of qualified and professional staff.

Special libraries

special libraries in the Middle Eastern coun-tries belong to different agencies:

Parliamentary agencies.Justice departments and law courts.Government departments.Research centres.Armed forces.Scientific societies.Guilds and professional societies.Special clubs.

The work of a special library is determined bythe brief of the agency of which it is part. The

library of the Ministry of Agriculture works inthe field of agriculture; the library of a bankdeals with money, economics and banking. Sospecial libraries cover a wide range of specializa-tions. There is a great number of these librariesin many countries of the region. In Egypt, forexample, there are more than 5,000 speciallibraries, and in Turkey more than 3,000 li-braries.Some countries are very poor in special

libraries, for example Afghanistan, Mauritania,Algeria and Sudan. Some special libraries arevery rich, for example NIDOC (National Infor-mation and Documentation Centre) in Egyptwith its 300,000 volumes and 1,000 periodicaltitles. Some are fully automated but the majorityare still primitive in handling materials andservices.Many of these libraries are run by unqualified

persons without even a specialized background inthe field of the library.

Cataloguing and classification in MiddleEastern libraries

DDC is widespread among the libraries of theregion either in the original form or in anadapted version and translation. UDC is usedonly in some special libraries. LC is used in a fewuniversity libraries. Many still use local classifi-cations and artificial classifications by size oraccession number. anglo-american catalo-guing rules (AACR2) are adopted either in theoriginal version or in an adapted, modified andtranslated version.

Library education

Many countries in the Middle East have formallibrary and information education. Some of themhave more than one school. In Egypt there areten schools offering undergraduate and postgrad-uate studies. In Saudi Arabia there are fiveschools at both levels. In Iraq there are fiveschools. Turkey, Israel, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya,Lebanon, Syria, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Algeria,Sudan and Jordan all have formal libraryeducation. Qatar, Bahrain and Jordan offeronly postgraduate education.Degrees obtained are Bachelor’s, Diploma,

Master’s and Doctorate. Some schools followthe credit hours system, while some follow thefull academic-year system. The oldest and biggestschool in the region is the one at Cairo

MIDDLE EAST 423

University, with 1,200 students in both levels andsixty staff members. This school was opened in1950/1.


There is a regional library association for theArab countries called the Arab Federation forLibraries and Information (AFLI). This federationwas set up in January 1986. Not all countries ofthe Middle East have national library associa-tions. Countries with library associations areEgypt, Tunisia, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Iran, Turkeyand Lebanon. In Egypt there are several libraryassociations: the Egyptian Association for Li-braries, Information and Archives; the SchoolLibrary Association; the Society of Microformsand Information; the Society of InformationSystems. The oldest and biggest in the region isthe Egyptian Association for Libraries, Informa-tion and Archives. It was set up in 1948 andmembership has now reached 20,000.

Professional publications

There are several current periodicals issued in theregion in Arabic and English. The most famousare Modern Trends in Library and InformationStudies, School Library Journal (both in Egypt),Arab Journal for Librarianship and InformationScience (Saudi Arabia) and Library Journal (Jor-dan). In addition, there are subject headings lists,classification schemes and authority lists ofnames. There are plenty of monographs, researchpapers, seminars and conference papers. It isestimated that fifty new titles are issued everyyear in the region dealing with librarianship andinformation either in Arabic or in English, ortranslated.

Further reading

Sardar, Z. (1988) Information and the Muslim World:A Strategy for the Twenty-First Century, Mansell.

Sernikli, A. (1995) ‘National libraries in Turkey, Mid-dle East and Central Asia’, Newsletter of the IFLASection of National Libraries’ (June): 29–43.

Wise, M. and Olden, A. (eds) (1994) Information andLibraries in the Arab World, Library AssociationPublishing.

SHABAN A. KHALIFA

MIDDLEWARE

Software that connects networks with computer

applications, sometimes referred to as ‘glue’.Rather than requiring applications to providetheir own identification, authentication, author-ization, directories and security, these can beprovided through the agency of middleware. Thispromotes standards and improves interoperabil-ity across networks, allowing applications tofunction more effectively in a resource-sharingenvironment.

Further reading

NSF Middleware Initiative (www.nsf-middleware.org).

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

The increasing importance and use of informa-tion in human activity is nowhere more visiblethan in the field of military intelligence. Therevolutions in information practice and technol-ogy that occurred in the twentieth century, firstmanual in nature and later automated, werereflected in the gradually increasing status thathas been awarded to military intelligence in theplanning of warfare and state security.In the context of military affairs and state

security, intelligence is an activity that has toperform a series of informational functions:appropriate data about opponents has to beidentified, acquired, confirmed, organized, corre-lated and interpreted, and the resultant informa-tion made available to those who need it. Goodintelligence may be succinctly defined as up-to-date information about the enemy that has beendistilled by experts from raw data.Information about other countries is now

recognised as an indispensable resource for thewell-being of the sovereign nation state. Suchinformation can be economic, scientific, techno-logical, diplomatic, political or military in char-acter, but each are interlinked and overlap,meaning that any effective effort to gather andanalyse military information inevitably takesaccount of intelligence drawn from other spheresof activity. This holistic view of military intelli-gence makes sense when one examines thedefinition of ‘intelligence’ per se: the ability notonly to acquire but also apply knowledge.Intelligence, derived from the Latin ‘intelligere’(to understand), entails the processing and ana-lysing of data, which is best achieved whencontextual or impinging knowledge is utilised. Inthis respect, the term ‘military intelligence’ might

424 MIDDLEWARE

easily be replaced by ‘military information’, inrecognition of the argument that information inits modern meaning is the result of raw datahaving been worked upon and appropriatelyorganized for consumption by the human mind.There are essentially three types of military

intelligence – to be distinguished from methodsused to obtain it, such as reconnaissance (dis-continuous, mobile observation), surveillance(stationary, continuous observation) and signalsinterception and decryption (codebreaking). Stra-tegic intelligence comprises information obtainedabout the aims and capabilities of other nationsand is at a premium before battle arises. Thereare any number of examples in history of theimportance of strategic intelligence to thosecollecting it. In the third century bc, in all thebattles that the Carthaginian general Hannibalfought in Italy he was significantly outnumberedand was thus forced to rely heavily on strategicintelligence to help him decide when and wherehe engaged the enemy. In late 1941 Stalin’s spieswere able to tell him that Japan’s strategicambitions lay in the direction of the Pacific,thereby enabling him to transfer troops trainedin winter warfare from the Far East to protectthe beleaguered cities of Moscow and Leningrad.One of the most celebrated events in the historyof military intelligence is the success of theBritish in the Second World War in breaking theGerman military code with the help of a capturedEnigma machine designed for mechanical enci-phering, thereby giving the Allies access to Ger-man plans at the strategic as well as the tacticallevel.Tactical intelligence comprises information at

the operational, combat level that is sought afterby commanders whose aim it is to direct forcesto accomplish strategic objectives. Before the eraof modern warfare, obtaining and exploitingintelligence on the battlefield was chiefly acommunications problem. The speed of commu-nication, by such means as written reportsdelivered by messenger, was slow. However, withthe development of telegraph, telephone radioand radar (and now satellite technology), com-munications within the arena of battle became‘real time’. Although this has guaranteed neitherthe accuracy of the information being trans-mitted nor, because easier communication vastlyincreased the volume of information being car-ried, its speedy processing and analysis, instanta-neous transmission of information has arguably

nonetheless enhanced the ability of leaders tomake effective decisions. It has also improved thestatus of intelligence in the operational arena,where historically reliance was mostly on mate-rial superiority and the genius and intuition ofcommanders.The third form of military intelligence –

counter-intelligence – is essentially defensive innature. It relates to information about the intelli-gence capability of an opponent and is essentiallyabout neutralizing the threat posed by foreignspies and internal insurgents. The development ofcounter-intelligence in the United Kingdom in thetwentieth century shows how modern militaryintelligence is less about adventure and intriguethan about intellectual sweat and the mundaneconstruction of systems for information collec-tion and retrieval. Founded in 1909, the SecurityService, which became known as MI5, was giventhe task of countering sabotage, espionage andsubversion at home and across the British Em-pire. The vast amount of information that flowedinto the organization before and during the FirstWorld War forced it to construct a relativelyefficient manual information management sys-tem. The hub of MI5’s information activity wasits registry, where documents were arranged byhundreds of clerks in subject and personal files,backed up by detailed indexing and cross-refer-encing in a card catalogue. At the start of theSecond World War, MI5’s information manage-ment system virtually collapsed due to years ofneglect and a tidal wave of data flooding thesystem. This crisis led to informational renewalin the form of the appointment of a small armyof civilian, professional knowledge workersdrawn from the law, banking and the universi-ties, and the introduction of punched-card ma-chines, microfilming and improved cardindexing.Since the Second World War, intelligence

organizations around the world like MI5 havemade successful use of computers and newtechnologies of surveillance to gather, organizeand evaluate data. This has increased dramati-cally the contribution of intelligence to theconduct of military affairs, although the rise ofinternational terrorism since the 1970s hasshown that even the most sophisticated informa-tion systems cannot prevent ‘intelligence failure’resulting in devastating surprise attacks.Throughout most of human history it has been

possible to conduct warfare without intelligence,

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE 425

however ineffective the result may have been. Butto go to war without armed forces has until nowbeen impossible. With the advent of informationwarfare, however, where theoretically victory canbe claimed without recourse to bomb, bullet ormissile by targeting the information infrastruc-ture of the enemy, the importance of informationcapability in the military sphere has never beenmore important.

Further reading

Aldrich, R.J. (1998) Espionage, Security and Intelli-gence in Britain 1945–1970, Manchester UniversityPress.

Black, A. and Brunt, R. (2000) ‘MI5, 1909–1945: Andinformation management perspective’, Journal ofInformation Science 26(3): 185–97.

Handel, M.I. (ed.) (1990) Intelligence and MilitaryOperations, Frank Cass.

Hinsley, F.H. (1993) British Intelligence in the SecondWorld War, abridged edn, HMSO.

House, J.M. (1993) Military Intelligence, 1870–1991:A Research Guide, Greenwood Press.

Sebag-Montefiore, H. (2000) Enigma: The Battle forthe Code, Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Sheldon, R.M. (1986) ‘Hannibal’s spies’, InternationalJournal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 1(3):53–70.

ALISTAIR BLACK

MINITEL

A French videotex system, based on low-costterminals, in conjunction with a central video-tex computer system. It was introduced as ameans of promoting information technology inFrance by making a specific aspect of it availablein virtually every home, and, as such, it was anotable success. Initially it provided an electronictelephone directory service, but has subsequentlycarried a variety of other information and com-munication services. It is the largest videotexnetwork in the world. However, its ubiquity andpredominantly French-language content has ar-guably inhibited French take-up of the Internet,which is seen by some French commentators asover-reliant on the English language.

SEE ALSO: electronic public information services

MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS

Communications systems and devices that can beused in any location, and do not need to bephysically connected to a network in order to

access it. The earliest examples were radios usedfor two-way communication in the middle ofthe twentieth century, chiefly for military pur-poses, and usually known as ‘walkie-talkies’. Thedevices were very heavy, were normally carried inbackpacks and often had to be put on the groundbefore they could be used. Truly mobile devicesbecame comparatively common in civilian lifeonly in the 1970s, with the development ofCitizens’ Band Radio, for which a small numberof short-wave frequencies were allocated forprivate use. Lorry drivers warning each other ofpolice speed traps are said to have been the mostfrequent users.These early station-to-station devices, which

were limited in range and in portability, havebeen almost entirely displaced by the now ubi-quitous mobile telephone, sometimes called the‘cellular telephone’, or ‘cell phone’. Mobilephones became available in the 1970s in theUSA (so-called ‘first generation’, or ‘G1’), but itwas not until the mid-1990s that cheap light-weight devices made them into a normal acces-sory of business and personal life in thedeveloped world. This was a result of theintroduction of digital services (‘G2’), developedin Europe during the 1980s, and introducedcommercially in 1992.When a call is initiated, the phone sends a

signal to the nearest receiving station, which thentransmits that signal through a series of inter-linked ‘cells’ until it finds the intended recipient(identified by a unique number). Whenever amobile phone is switched on, it can be found bythe nearest transmitter, although there are stillareas with a small population or topographicaldifficulties (such as high mountains), even inNorth America and Western Europe, where thecellular network has not yet reached. There arelinks between the cellular networks and theconventional cable-based telecommunicationsnetworks. In effect, a mobile phone gives unlim-ited access to all the voice communicationssystems that can be accessed through a conven-tional hard-wired telephone. Perhaps the greatestsingle breakthrough for mobile communications,however, was the addition to the networks of thefacility for text messaging (technically, ShortMessaging Service, or SMS), which seems to havebecome the normal medium of communicationfor many younger (and not a few older) peoplethroughout the Western world. At the same time,the installation of cellular networks in some parts

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of the developing world, and especially insoutheast asia, has begun to overcome someof the problems encountered by traditional ptts,especially in rural areas.The next phase of development will be the

further digitization of the cellular networks, aprocess that has already begun with the hybrid‘G2.5’ devices. These offer both voice commu-nication facilities and some internet access,although this is limited in functionality and veryslow. At present it is normally achieved bylinking the instrument to a portable computer,but the next generation (‘3G’) of phones will bede facto computers. The 3G services have beenintroduced in Japan, and will be graduallyintroduced elsewhere from late 2002 onwards.These will offer full mobile Internet facilities.Indeed, the capacity for voice communicationsseems likely to be one of the less commonly usedfunctions of 3G devices; they will be networkedpersonal computers with all the normal facilities,as well as being the equivalent of a personalstereo (often, no doubt, playing music down-loaded from the Internet) and having a full rangeof multimedia functionality.Mobile devices will continue to supplement

and displace conventional fixed-location hard-wired devices for the foreseeable future, andbecome a key element in the application ofinformation and communication technol-ogy in social and economic life. Their impact onthe provision of information services can only bea matter of speculation at this stage in theirdevelopment, but it seems likely to be verysignificant.

MOBILE LIBRARY

Variously referred to as book bus (or, in French,bibliobus), ‘mobile library’, ‘bookmobile’ ormerely ‘mobile’, the term tends to be applied tomotor vehicles that are used to transport collec-tions of library materials for the benefit of userswhose access to libraries is limited by distance orother impediment. More accurately applied, theterm describes the collections rather than thevehicles. The distinction is worth making becausethe forms of transport can vary greatly, includingbook boats for remote coastal communities inScandinavia, a railway coach in Mali, a donkeycart in Zimbabwe (Tate 2002b), pack camels inKenya (Tate 2002a), pack mules in the Andes

and bicycle bags in Mozambique. The mobile-library concept improves on earlier ideas such asthe itinerating libraries inaugurated by SamuelBrown (1779–1839) in early nineteenth-centuryScotland. Brown’s itinerating libraries were smallcollections of books, transported in speciallyconstructed boxes to designated centres, wherethey were left for local use for a period ofmonths, until exchanged with different collec-tions that had been left in other participatingcommunities. Similar book box service is stillprovided to rural areas in some developingcountries.In contrast a mobile library service addresses

similar problems by bringing a much largercollection to a target location for a much brieferperiod (a few hours or less) at more frequentintervals (weekly or monthly, for instance) withonly the books that have been borrowed remain-ing in the community until a future visit. Becauseof the high proportion of stock on loan, the totalnumber of volumes available from a mobilelibrary is normally about three times that carriedon the vehicle. The content of the collection canbe exchanged frequently from the base libraryresources and this ensures that a good range ofstock is available to a regular user over a periodof time.

History

The British experience can be used as an exampleof early development and advanced practice. Thefirst known British travelling library was set upin Warrington in 1859. Others were then devel-oped by the Mechanics Institutes (communityself-help educational and leisure organizationsinvariably providing library services) during thesecond half of the nineteenth century. In 1904Glasgow Public Libraries purchased a librarydelivery vehicle and by 1920 horse-drawn mobilelibraries were replaced by motor vehicles. Britishcounty libraries were developed in the mid-twentieth century to extend library service torural areas. They tended to rely first on bookboxes sent to community centres in villages andsmall towns, but subsequently they developedextensive mobile library networks. By 1955 thegreat majority of British counties had mobilefleets.The 1950s saw the introduction of mobile

libraries into urban areas. These urban servicesrecognized that sheer distance from fixed library

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service points is not the only factor isolatingpotential library users. People can be isolatedwithin a larger community because of a lack ofpublic transport, particularly if they are too frailto walk, they live in sheltered accommodation,they have a physical handicap or mental illnessthat does not allow them to venture out alone,they are carers for people in these categoriesor they are in some other way housebound.Whilst urban mobiles take the public lendinglibrary service to whole districts, in the same waythat rural services do, mobile services are alsoprovided direct to families with houseboundmembers, or groups of people living in careinstitutions.

Vehicles

Without forgetting that mobile libraries are notexclusively provided using motor vehicles, it isthe case, in countries where they are usedextensively, that the vehicles can be used todefine the types of service. The vehicles arealmost always custom-built by specialist body-builders on standard chassis types. Typicallythere can be a number of sizes and specifications,on a variety of chassis.

HOUSEBOUND VEHICLES

These are small vehicles, normally of 6 to 7 m.Their stock generally consists of leisure reading,frequently geared to older people, e.g. large-printand spoken-word materials. They make visits atfortnightly or monthly intervals.

RURAL MOBILE LIBRARIES

Their size is larger: 8–10 m. Their stock of2,000–3,000 volumes can include a full range ofleisure material, plus audiovisual items. Theyprovide service primarily to adult users, butinclude books for pre-school children on aregular basis and junior books during schoolholiday periods. They visit frequently, usually ona fortnightly basis.

URBAN MOBILE LIBRARIES

A typical size is 10–12 m with a stock of up to4,500 items. In addition to a substantial collec-tion of popular books, a representation of moreadvanced or scholarly works is possible. Theytend to offer a good range of audio and videomaterial, plus some reference and informationresources. Mobiles of this size generally have

telephone links so as to offer information service.They visit weekly or fortnightly.

TRAILER LIBRARIES

Their size is 12 m and upwards. Their stock of4,000 and upwards includes a range of titlescomparable to that of a small- to medium-sizedbranch library. A networked computer can beprovided in a vehicle of this size. They serve largevillages and suburban communities, and visitweekly or twice a week.

SCHOOL MOBILE LIBRARIES

Vehicles, typically of 8–10 m, are used by manyBritish public library systems to provide centralsupport for the services provided by individualschools. They will stock 2,000–3,000 juniortitles, and a school library will be able toexchange a substantial number of volumes torefresh its own collections and obtain materialson topics currently being studied by the pupils.They will normally visit each term or semester.

Technical features

The development of mobile libraries has beenrapid since the mid-1970s. In Britain this hasowed a great deal to regular UK Mobilemeets.Such events were organized by the Branch andMobile Libraries Group of the Library Associa-tion and attendance by in excess of fifty mobilelibraries of all varieties and 300 delegates wastypical. Major improvements to be found onmobile libraries are in three categories.

1 Disabled access, including lifts, step lights,low-profile steps and improved handrails.

2 User/crew comfort and safety, with featuressuch as automatic reversing stops, automaticdoors, air curtains, carpeting, video rever-sing equipment, coach heating and ventila-tion, and opaque roof and side windows.

3 Improved stock and information provision,including adjustable shelving, paperbackspinners and carousels, kinderboxes, compu-ter circulation control, photocopiers, net-worked computers and CD-ROMs forinformation.

References

Tate, T. (2002a) Camel Library Services in Kenya, IFLAProfessional Report 73.

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—— (2002b) The Donkey Drawn Mobile LibraryServices in Zimbabwe, IFLA Professional Report 72.

Further reading

Orton, G.I.J. (1980) An Illustrated History of MobileLibrary Services in the UK, Branch and MobileLibraries Group.

Pybus, R.L. (1990) The Design and Construction ofMobile Libraries, 2nd edn, Branch and MobileLibraries Group.

—— (1985) Mobile Libraries in England and Wales: AGuide to Their Construction and Use, 2nd edn,Branch and Mobile Libraries Group.

SEE ALSO: public libraries; rural library services;school libraries; services for visually impairedpeople; social exclusion and libraries; SoutheastAsia

BILL WEBB, REVISED BY THE EDITORS

MODEM

Modulator-Demodulator: the device that linkscomputers to the telephone network and thuspermits access to networks. The modem worksby enabling digital data to be modulated so thatit is compatible with the analogue signals carriedby the telephone system. Signals are sent to themodem of a remote computer, where they aredemodulated and the original data restored.


MONASTIC LIBRARY

Christian monasteries have a tradition of librariesthat goes back to their origins. The Rule of StBenedict required monks to read and to copymanuscripts. Monastic libraries were the princi-pal means of the preservation and transmissionof ancient texts, and many medieval texts, beforethe invention of printing. The type of librarian-ship practised was essentially curatorial andmany did not have library premises as such, onlya series of storage places within the monastery.The collections of many monastic libraries weredispersed after events such as the Dissolution ofthe Monasteries, in sixteenth-century England, orthe French Revolution. However, richly stockedmonastic libraries do still survive in some partsof Europe.

SEE ALSO: ecclesiastical libraries; history oflibraries

MONITORING

In business and industry, describes the regularoverseeing of a process, or activity, which seeksto establish the extent to which inputs, workschedules, other required actions and targetedoutputs are proceeding according to plan, so thataction can be taken to correct any deficienciesdetected. Also an aspect of a broader surveil-lance practised in modern society by govern-ment, security agencies, corporations and otherbodies, generally using technology such asclosed-circuit television and the interception ofelectronic communication. Workplace monitor-ing tracks employee activity, using the technicalcapacities of the computer systems in use so as toestablish that targets are met, activity is directedtowards the objectives of the organization andthat theft and wastage do not occur. Monitoringof network use is a prerequisite for the filteringof Internet use that is applied by those who –whether in the home, workplace, educationalinstitution, or library – provide Internet accessand fear the ‘harmful’ or distracting capacity ofthe content available.

MONOGRAPH

A separate treatise that is concerned with asingle, distinct subject, usually giving a detailedand thoroughly researched treatment of the topic.The monograph is the most respected means ofscholarly communication in many huma-nities disciplines. However, in cataloguing, andtherefore in the parlance of some libraries, it isused to mean any publication that is not a serial,thus losing the full resonance of the term.

MORAL RIGHTS

The rights of authors to have their creationsrespected. They are not property rights, in theway that copyright is. Moral rights derive fromcontinental European traditions of intellectualproperty law, and have subsisted in somecountries (e.g. France) for a century or more. Anumber of moral rights can be found in variouscivil jurisdictions, but the fundamental one is theright to be acknowledged as the author of a work

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(the right of paternity) and the right not to havea work subject to derogatory treatment (the rightof integrity). Common-law countries have onlyrecently adopted the concept. In the UK theCopyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 intro-duced the moral rights of paternity and integrity,and extended the right to object to false attribu-tion of authorship. The exercise of the right ofintegrity is a problem for those who indulge inparody, for humorous or satirical purposes. Inthe past, such activities were not curtailed by acopyright law that concentrated on preventinginfringement of the economic rights of authors.

MOREL, EUGÈNE (1869–1934)

French promoter of the idea of free publiclibraries.A librarian at the bibliothèque nationale

de france, he was impressed by the publiclibraries he saw on a visit to England andsystematically gathered data on library develop-ment, publishing a number of articles and booksbased on this subject. His 1910 book LaLibrairie publique was not merely the firstFrench book to be devoted entirely to publiclibraries; it also sought to substitute the word‘librairie’ for ‘bibliothèque’ and all its antiquar-ian associations.He became the dominant figure in French

librarianship, and much of the twentieth-centurymodernization of the French library world can betraced back to his advocacy. His achievementsincluded the first application of decimal classifi-cation in a French public library, the organizationof the first course of lectures on modern librar-ianship in France (1910–14) and the reform ofthe French copyright deposit law in 1925. Healso had a strong interest in technical improve-ments such as film strips, microfilm and mechan-ical processes for the duplication of cataloguecards. His reputation outside France was con-siderable, and his book Bibliothèques was theinspiration for the Belgian law of 1921, whichhas been described as the first compulsory librarylaw in continental Europe. He was an activemember of the predecessor of fid, the Interna-tional Institute of Bibliography.

MULTIMEDIA

Literally meaning ‘many media’, the term is

commonly used to describe digital objects thatuse a combination of text, graphics, sound andvideo. Such objects may be stored on opticaldisks, or downloaded from the World WideWeb. More loosely, the term has also come to beused somewhat imprecisely, especially by librar-ians, to replace the term ‘audiovisual materi-als’, i.e. films, videos, audio CDs, records, tapes,slides, etc.

MULTIMEDIA LIBRARIANSHIP

Defining multimedia is difficult. This is itsstrength: it is all-pervasive, a force that isimproving the presentation and application ofinformation, and one of the elements leading tonew organizational forms and alliances in infor-mation services management. At one level itrefers to an electronic presentation of informa-tion in a range of forms: text, visual images andsound, and also in a number of formats. Thisinformation will be digital, specifically designedto exploit, and capitalize on, the special featuresoffered by this medium. In the informationtechnology sense the term can also refer to theautomated systems that take care of the house-keeping aspects: the creation, storage, manage-ment, retrieval and preservation of themultimedia artefacts.At an organizational level, it is applied to

collections of material in different formats. Theseare organized as a coherent whole and comple-ment each other, containing traditional andelectronic material as well as three-dimensionalobjects. Examples of this are to be found inhybrid libraries, such as the AGORA project,making available images of all types, biblio-graphic records, URLs and full text.

The role of multimedia

Taking this together, all libraries, if they are todischarge their proper functions, are now multi-media libraries. They embrace the internet,electronic document delivery, IT services anduser support. They also adopt the principle ofaccess and the resulting cross-sectoral, public–private and cross-border partnerships. In themultimedia field, this approach has led to majordevelopments offering massive collections of textand multimedia resources – multidisciplinary andcross-sectoral in that they link libraries, mu-seums, archives and other sources.

430 MOREL, EUGÈNE

The significant influence is obviously technol-ogy. One of the disadvantages of using multi-media was the poor quality of this technology,now changing so fast that comment will be outof date before publication. An example of this isbroadband video streaming, making availablehigh-quality film, video and music for a verywide range of interests. As well as the expectedareas of sport, drama, travel and music there arealso examples of high quality in academic dis-ciplines including education, and also in training.There are still limitations imposed by the stan-dard of the end-user’s equipment, but this is alsochanging. There have also been significant ad-vances in downloading technology, thus begin-ning to overcome the difficulties of streaming.Technological developments are now providingcheap, powerful and widely available computers.

Some applications

Communications technology is making thispower available to a larger audience, undermin-ing to some degree a view, when the electronicrevolution was gathering force, that it wouldproduce an information-starved, underprivilegedunderclass. The potential of WAP (wireless appli-cation protocol), allowing mobile communica-tions devices to connect to purpose-builtwebsites, is apposite. In spite of indications thatthe technology is not delivering, examples likethe relaunching of websites carrying railwaytimetables indicate that it can succeed, and canfulfil a useful purpose. Current technologicallimitations still mean that the multimedia contentof these sites is crude. However, if the plans ofgovernments and industry come to fruition, itwill deliver sophisticated multimedia presenta-tions to any location.The reverse comment can be made about

interactive television. Here the technology hasbeen available for many years, but use isdepressed by low or uneven programme quality.Even here, organizations like the UK Departmentof Health are considering it as a medium fordisseminating health information.Alongside this, the information profession is

becoming increasingly confident in its technicalmanagement of multimedia. Web catalogues arecommon, not only within but also betweeninstitutions. Many of these systems have consid-erable potential for handling multimedia.There is now also a growing sophistication in

the ways in which content is described, and thisenriches the use of the artefacts themselves.There is an increased emphasis on content devel-opment. The libraries that will hold the keys tomultimedia are pushing for a shift from physicalownership to the management of access todistributed resources. This involves partnershipswith other information providers, and commer-cial interests are becoming major players. It isnow possible to buy a complete education – pre-school to postgraduate – from a commercialsupplier.

It is no surprise that in this environmentmultimedia has made a wide-ranging impact.The technological revolution described brieflyabove has gone hand in hand with social andeducational change that has made lifelong lear-ners of us all.

The influence of multimedia

The strengths of multimedia are the ability tocommand and hold interest, and to tell a story ina way that promotes learning and enhancesleisure experiences. Because of this, multimediais now well established as a learning and trainingmedium. Here there is some evidence that thedelivery mechanism is now changing from CD toonline, and it is clear that a properly designedinteractive multimedia presentation has an im-pact that other formats do not, and offerslearning opportunities that match the learner’sstrengths and inclinations. Multimedia is also astrong element in Web-based corporate learningportals (see portals and gateways) offering on-demand learning. It is especially effective where amessage has to be conveyed with a minimum oftext, but also in change situations, reskillingand winning or retaining a competitive edge,where traditional methods may be less effective.E-learning is also cheaper to deliver, but not toproduce. The influence of multimedia specialistsis evident in the development of standards foronline learning resources, with a number ofprojects, and formal research, now providing animpetus towards the proper design of Webresources and the layout of Web pages. It is alsonotable that the standards of multimedia publish-ing are improving in general, as the characteris-tics of the Internet and the traditional qualities ofthe printed page are married with the require-ments of user-friendly on-screen reading.

MULTIMEDIA LIBRARIANSHIP 431

Further reading

AGORA (www.hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/agora).Ariadne (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk).DLib Magazine (www.dlib.org).Journal of Academic Media Librarianship (www.wings.buffalo.edu/publications/mcjrnl/v8n1/index.html).

Landoni, M., Wilson, R. and Gibb, F. (2000) ‘From thevisual book to the Web book: The importance ofgood design’, Fourth European Conference on Re-search and Advanced Technology for Digital Li-braries, Lisbon, Portugal, 18–20 September 2000.

Thompson, A.H. (2001) ‘Library Association referenceawards: Electronic media’, MmIT 27(3) (August):260–3.

SEE ALSO: digital library; electronic books;picture libraries

LYNDON PUGH

MUSEOLOGY

That part of information science concerned withthe identification, preservation and communica-tion of the museality of material testimonies ofculture and nature (primarily museum objects) toensure the protection of human heritage and theproper interpretation and transmission of theirmessages. Museology also concerns itself withforms of organized and institutionalized humanactivity (mostly in museums) designed to furtherthese objectives.

The divisions of museology

Museology is divided into general museology,which is the central discipline, and a number ofspecial museologies that surround it. Historicalmuseology studies the historical development ofthe discipline. Theoretical museology lays thetheoretical foundations of the discipline and linksit with different epistemological views. Specialmuseology relates general museology to otherdisciplines studying the material evidence ofmankind’s heritage. Applied museology dealswith practical implications of museological prin-ciples (van Mensch 1989). The New Museologymovement (since 1983) extends the museologicalparameters from collections, institutions andaudiences to heritage, territory and population.

Museological methodology

Museological methodology acts as a link betweentheoretical and applied museology. It is based on

four parameters: scope of heritage, museologicalfunctions, museological institutions and society’sattitude towards its heritage. Its key concepts arethe following: field, form, pattern, object andpurpose of museological activity (van Mensch1994).

The subject of museology

The subject of museology is the study of theprocess of discovery and transmission of infor-mation stored in individual objects or complexesof human heritage, thus reducing the field ofmuseal indefiniteness of a given museum object,collection or system of cultural or natural heri-tage. Equally, museology also studies the mannerand history of their preservation and thetransmission of their messages. The range ofmuseological interests covers the social, cultural,scientific, organizational and technological as-pects of museological work in the course ofinformation and communication processes.

Museality

The material and form of the object are thecarriers of museality. Museality is a qualitativeproperty of a given object, which defines itssignificance as a document of a given realitydetermined by space, time or social setting. Thesedeterminants may participate in the identificationof museality synchronously, asynchronously or indifferent combinations (Maroević 1994).

The museum object

The museum object is a heritage item worthy ofbeing preserved. In the museal reality it becomesa document of the reality from which it has beenisolated. A heritage object is a physical objectwhose material and form carry rich layers ofmeaning to be communicated as messages fromthe past to the present and to be preserved forthe future. The specific aspects of meaning ofmuseum objects are the following: practical,aesthetic, symbolical and metaphysical (vanMensch 1994). The museum object is the source,carrier and transmitter of information. It is a linkbetween museology and a fundamental disci-pline. While the fundamental discipline focuseson one aspect of the object and remains confinedto the documentational and partly communica-tional approach, museology develops an openapproach to the object as an unlimited source of

432 MUSEOLOGY

information to be preserved and communicated.The consequence of this approach is an analyticalstudy of different identities of the museumobject, whereby it becomes a source of informa-tion. Its conceptual identity is that which itsmaker had in mind before making it; its factualidentity is its shape at the moment when it wasmade; its functional identity reflects and followsits changing uses; and its structural identityreflects its changing material structure in thecourse of its lifetime; finally, its actual identity isa changeable property reflecting the object’sactual state at present (van Mensch 1989).

The museum

The museum is a permanent institution thatholds collections of objects as corporeal docu-ments and generates knowledge about thesedocuments. The key functions of the museuminclude preservation, study and communica-tion. Preservation involves the transfer of se-lected objects to a museological institution ortheir preservation in situ; the preservation –preventive or remedial – of the object’s materialsubstance, form and meaning, respecting theprescribed procedural ethics; preparation of mu-seum documentation; and socialization of pre-servation. Research and study is directed towardsthe analysis, description, cultural, social andother comparative evaluation of the object in itsown (original or artificial) setting; applied re-search has to do with the conservation, re-storation and presentation of museum objects.Communication takes the form of exhibitions ofdifferent kinds, publication of museum documen-tation and research results, and presentation ofcultural heritage.

References

Maroević, I. (1994) ‘The museum object as a docu-ment’, ICOFOM Study Series (ISS) 23: 63–70.

van Mensch, P. (1994) ‘Towards a methodology ofmuseology’, ICOFOM Study Series (ISS) 23: 111–22.

—— (ed.) (1989) Professionalising the Muses, Amster-dam: AHA Books [on the theoretical approach tomuseology].

Further reading

Hooper-Greenhill, E. (ed.) (1994) Museum, Media,Message, Routledge [conference proceedings].

Maroević, I. and Edson, G. (1998) Introduction to

Museology: The European Approach, Verlag Dr. C.Mueller Straten.

Pearce, S. (ed.) (1990) Objects of Knowledge, LeicesterUniversity Press [new research in museum studies].

Stransky, Z.Z. (1980) ‘Museology as a science’, Museo-logia 15: 33–40.

IVO MAROEVIĆ

MUSEUM

Definitions

Depending on the definition, the term ‘museum’can cover a wide variety of organizations. Mostdefinitions include traditional institutions holdingcollections such as natural history or archaeologyand collection-holding art galleries and historicbuildings. Some definitions go further: the Amer-ican Association of Museums (AAM) also in-cludes institutions that may not have collections– such as art centres, children’s museums, plane-tariums and science and technology centres; ormay have ‘living collections’ – such as naturecentres, aquariums, arboreta, botanical gardensand zoos. The International Council of Museums(ICOM) definition includes, among other things,‘natural, archaeological and ethnographic monu-ments and sites and historical monuments andsites of a museum nature’, non-profit art exhibi-tion galleries, nature reserves, and cultural cen-tres ‘that facilitate the preservation, continuationand management of tangible or intangible heri-tage resources (living heritage and digital creativeactivity)’ (ICOM 2001).

Purposes and functions

The United Kingdom tends to adopt a narrowerdefinition of museums, but one that sets out theirpurpose quite well: ‘Museums enable people toexplore collections for inspiration, learning andenjoyment. They are institutions that collect,safeguard and make accessible artefacts andspecimens, which they hold in trust on behalf ofsociety’ (MA 2002). From this definition thereflows a series of values, which are common tomost concepts of museums throughout the world.Museums are not-for-profit, they regard theircollections as held on behalf of society, they arefundamentally educational, they offer and encou-rage wide public access for reasons ranging fromenjoyment to scholarship, they regard their col-lections as to be held permanently in the public

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domain (some US art museums sell items fromtheir collections, but this is the exception ratherthan the rule), they safeguard their collectionsand aim to transmit them in good condition tofuture generations.Museums have a number of core functions.

They acquire items for the collection – by gift,purchase or fieldwork (while expensive paintingscatch the headlines, most items acquired bymuseums have low financial value); they preserveitems, by ensuring they are secure from theft ordamage and through conservation, with a grow-ing emphasis on preventive conservation; theycatalogue (see catalogues) and document items(see museum documentation); they display aselection of items and interpret them in galleriesregularly open to visitors; they undertake re-search, or facilitate research; many museumsoffer extra educational services. Museumsthroughout the West are seeking to increaseaccess, for example through outreach work; andin some countries, such as the UK, many mu-seums have a growing focus on work aiming toimprove social inclusion.The importance of public service, access and

education cannot be overstated: a collection thatdid not offer wide public access would not beregarded as a museum. AAM’s first code ofethics, published in 1925, states in its preface:

Museums. . .hold their possessions in trust formankind and for the future welfare of the[human] race. Their value is in direct propor-tion to the service they render the emotionaland intellectual life of the people. The life of amuseum worker is essentially one of service.

The revised Code of Ethics of the UK MuseumsAssociation states similarly ‘Museums belong toeverybody. They exist to serve the public. Theyshould enhance the quality of life of everyone,both today and in the future. They are fundedbecause of their positive social, cultural, educa-tional and economic impact’ (MA 2002: para.2.0).

History and governance

The first organization recognizable as a museumin modern times is probably the AshmoleanMuseum at the University of Oxford, opened in1683. Some key national museums opened in theeighteenth century, the British Museum in 1753and the Louvre in 1793 (in the USA the Smithso-

nian Institution’s first building, the Castle, wascompleted in 1855). The nineteenth century sawthe founding of many great museums by, forexample, local authorities in the great Britishindustrial cities. Increasing numbers of museumswere established in the twentieth century, withmany new types being created in large numbersin the latter part of the century, such as children’smuseums in the USA, ecomuseums in France andmuseums of industrial and social history in theUnited Kingdom.Governance structures of museums vary. Some

are directly run departments of central govern-ments, although this model is increasingly fallingfrom favour and in many countries governmentsare increasingly introducing ‘arm’s-length’ ar-rangements in which responsibility for the mu-seum is vested by government in a board oftrustees. Many museums are directly run by localgovernment; others, particularly in the USA, butelsewhere too, are non-profit organizations (suchas charitable trusts) that may receive a large (ornegligible) part of their income from publicsources, but are fully independent. Still othersare run by universities or the armed forces.

Some current trends and problems

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing museums inthe early twenty-first century is to increaseknowledge and use of their collections, especiallythose that are not normally on public display.This includes the need to fully document anddigitize them, as well as to make them physicallyaccessible. While a few museums have goodstorage and extensive digital records of theircollections, many collections are under-used,badly stored or inadequately documented.Museums continue to grow. New museums

open regularly and existing ones routinely extendtheir buildings. They play an increasing role intourism and economic regeneration strategies.One trend is for internationalization, with theGuggenheim and the Hermitage openingbranches outside their home countries. Anothertrend is for museums to return items to theiroriginal owners or place of origin. This is true of,particularly, human remains and related artefactsin the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand,and also of artworks seized from their rightfulowners by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Therehave been a few isolated examples of the returnof material from European museums to once-

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colonized countries, but it is not yet clearwhether this will be a major trend.Museums are increasingly focusing on their

relationships between their collections and people– both individuals and communities. Peopleregard museums as trusted, relatively neutral,institutions and a reliable source of balancedinformation and informal education. They areoften described as society’s new cathedrals andthey can play a role in public life greater thantheir value as information sources, with keyitems in collections sometimes having iconicsignificance for a community and museum build-ings being a notable part of the public realm(particularly if they offer free admission).

References

ICOM (2001) International Council of Museums,Statutes, 2001 edn, Paris

MA (2002) Museums Association, Code of Ethics,2002 edn, London: Museums Association (www.mu-seumsassociation.org).

Further reading

American Association of Museums (www.aam-us.org).International Council of Museums (www.icom.org)[includes access to the Virtual Library MuseumPages, an extensive reference site with links to manymuseum websites worldwide].

Museums and Galleries Yearbook (Museums Yearbookbefore 2002), 2 vols, published annually, London:Museums Association [the most comprehensive list-ing of UK museums].

Museums of the World (2001) 2 vols, München: K.GSaur [the most comprehensive listing of museumsworldwide].

The Official Museum Directory, 2 vols, publishedannually, New Providence NJ: National RegisterPublishing [the most comprehensive guide to mu-seums in the USA; published in association with theAmerican Association of Museums].

UK Museums Association (www.museumsassociation.org).

Network of European Museum Organisations (www.ne-mo.org) [includes links to European museumsassociations].

SEE ALSO: museology

MAURICE DAVIES

MUSEUM DOCUMENTATION

This refers to all the recorded information amuseum holds about the items in its care. It alsodescribes the activity of gathering, storing, manip-ulating and retrieving that information. Docu-

mentation is guided by an acquisitions anddisposals policy and by a detailed collectionmanagement policy. It provides the basis forgood collection and information management,enabling people to find the information they need.

Documentation systems

Museums and museum collections vary enor-mously in their structure and organization,and deal with material ranging from works ofart through to natural science specimens andarchaeological finds. Documentation systems aretherefore very specialized at the informationlevel but they do employ a number of commonprocedures. Used in relation to one anotherthese procedures form an integrated system,which can be both manual and/or computerized.

Standard documentation procedures

The process as outlined in SPECTRUM: The UKDocumentation Standard (see Cowton 1997)comprises some twenty procedures. Of theseprocedures, the Museums and Galleries Commis-sion (MGC, now Re:source: the Council forMuseums Archives and Libraries) has identifiedeight primary ones. Attainment of the minimumSPECTRUM standard in all eight ensures com-pliance with the documentation requirement ofMGC’s Museum Registration Scheme (1995).

Object entry

The process normally begins when an object –e.g. a painting, a button, a ceramic, etc. – entersthe museum as an enquiry, a gift or a loan.Object entry is ‘the management and documenta-tion of the receipt of objects that are notcurrently part of the collections’ (SPECTRUMInteractive 1997). This procedure establishes theterms and conditions under which objects will bereceived, uniquely identifies new objects andensures that the museum can account for allobjects left in its care. It covers issue of a receiptand recording of key information about theobject including the reason for its arrival. Theprocedure also helps establish legal title if theobject is subsequently accepted into the perma-nent collection.

Loans in

This procedure is defined as ‘managing anddocumenting the borrowing of objects for which

MUSEUM DOCUMENTATION 435

the institution is responsible for a specific periodof time and for a specified purpose, normallydisplay, but including research, education orphotography’ (SPECTRUM Interactive 1997). Itcovers areas such as loan agreements and re-cords, security, environmental control and condi-tion of borrowed objects, insurance andindemnity.

Acquisition

Objects offered to the museum via the objectentry procedure are reviewed against the mu-seum’s acquisitions policy (a policy governing thetypes and range of objects the museum collects)as well as any relevant laws treaties and codes ofpractice. If they are accepted, the acquisitionprocedure is invoked. Acquisition refers to ‘doc-umenting and managing the addition of objectsto the permanent collections of the institution’(SPECTRUM Interactive 1997). It involves theprocess of transfer of legal title from the donor tothe museum, the assigning of a unique permanentidentity number (the accession number) to theobject and the completion of an entry in themuseum registers. The accession number is thenmarked on to the object and this becomes the keylink between the object and its associated infor-mation.

Cataloguing

Once the object has been formally acquired it iscatalogued. The procedure is defined as ‘thecompilation and maintenance of primary infor-mation describing, formally identifying or other-wise relating to objects’ (SPECTRUM Interactive1997). Catalogue information (see catalogues)can be created and maintained by documentingthe continuing research into an object and itscontexts and/or by access to collections manage-ment documentation, e.g. loans, acquisition,conservation. It is within cataloguing that mostrecording diversity is found, due to the types ofinformation recorded for different types of col-lection and for different purposes. Within amanual system for example, the cataloguingprocess will result in a core record, plus anumber of card indexes ordered by, for example,donor, location, number or object type. Within acomputer system, retrieval is obviously moreflexible.

Location and movement control

Once it is within the museum collection, proce-dures are established so the object can be easilylocated whether on display, in store, being con-served, etc. The procedure deals with ‘documen-tation and management of informationconcerning the current and past locations of allobjects or groups of objects in the institution’scare’ (SPECTRUM Interactive 1997).

Loans out

This procedure mirrors the Loans in procedure,facilitating the borrowing of objects, usually byanother museum. Again, it involves the creationof a loans agreement, obtaining assurances as tosecurity and care, insurance or indemnity detailsand a change to the location record.

Dispatch

This procedure covers the ‘management anddocumentation of objects leaving the institution’spremises’ (SPECTRUM Interactive 1997). Thepurpose is to ensure that the institution’s legaland policy requirements are met when objectsleave the museum, that the institution is able toaccount for all objects dispatched, that locationinformation is maintained, and that properauthorization and a receipt is obtained. A de-accession and disposal procedure covers acces-sioned objects permanently removed from collec-tions although there is always a presumptionagainst this (MA 2002)

Retrospective documentation

Documentation not completed according to theprocedures above is treated as a backlog. Retro-spective documentation enables ‘the improve-ment of the standard of information and theproduction of new information for an existingcollection’ (SPECTRUM Interactive 1997). Thisinvolves having a policy and stated time-scale foreliminating backlogs.

Other procedures

There are a number of other procedures thatform either offshoots or subroutines within adocumentation system. These include inventorycontrol, conservation and collections care, va-luation control, insurance, indemnity, reproduc-

436 MUSEUM DOCUMENTATION

tion, risk management and object conditionchecking.

References

Cowton, J. (ed.) (1997) SPECTRUM: The UK MuseumDocumentation Standard, 2nd edn, Cambridge: TheMuseum Documentation Association.

Museums Association (2002) Code of Ethics for Mu-seums, London: Museums Association.

Museums and Galleries Commission. (1995) Registra-tion Scheme for Museums and Galleries in theUnited Kingdom: Registration Guidelines, London,MGC.

SPECTRUM Interactive, the UK Documentation Stan-dard (1997) 2nd edn, Museum Documentation Asso-ciation [the electronic version of the standard as aWindows help file].

Further reading

Ashby, H., McKenna, G. and Stiff, M. (eds) (2001)SPECTRUM Knowledge: Standards for CulturalInformation Management, Cambridge: MDA.

Holm, S. (2002) Cataloguing Made Easy: How toCatalogue your Collections, 2nd edn Cambridge,Museum Documentation Association.

—— (1998) Facts and Artefacts: How to Document aMuseum Collection, 2nd edn, Cambridge: MDA.

Stiff, M. and McKenna, G. (ed.) (2000) Standards InAction: SPECTRUM IT Guide Book 2, Cambridge,MDA.

SPECTRUM documentation fact sheets are available tofrom the MDA website (www.mda.org.uk).

DIANE LEES, REVISED BY SANDE NUTTALL

MUSEUM PROFESSIONAL

Someone involved in professional aspects of therunning of a museum, whose expertise mightbroadly relate either to the care of the collectionsor to communication with the user community.The term deliberately leaves reference to theparticular skills of the individual concerned opento further definition.The term usually used in the past for those

responsible for museum work was curator. Notonly does this fail to express the modern, out-ward-looking trend of museums all over theworld, but it also does not comprehend all thoseaspects of museum work that are not curatorial.One broad division of museum work does consistof those with specialists skills relating to thecollections, which would include curators assuch, information specialists documenting thecollections, often called registrars, and conserva-tors with skills relating to a host of relevantmaterials and genres. A second division includes

those whose skills are in education, communica-tion, interpretation, exhibition design and relatedmatters. The balance of professionals within andbetween these divisions in a given museum willvary greatly according to the nature of themuseum’s specialty. Education for museum workis complicated by the range of skills needed, andit is difficult for a professional association suchas the Museums Association (founded 1889) inBritain to serve all its potential constituencieseffectively. The existence of specialist associa-tions such as the Museums Documentation Asso-ciation is thus quite natural.

SEE ALSO: information professions; museumdocumentation

MUSIC LIBRARIES ANDDOCUMENTATION

A sector of the information profession encom-passing the provision and bibliographic controlof books on music, printed and manuscriptmusic, audiovisual materials and online re-sources.

Range and scope of music libraries

A number of broad categories of music librarysupply different services to specific groups. pub-lic libraries make available material for educa-tion and leisure to a particular community;academic and conservatoire libraries providematerial for students, researchers and lecturers,and often house important collections of sourcematerials; national libraries offer researchfacilities and access to unique and valuableheritage collections; broadcasting libraries pro-vide materials for live and recorded perfor-mances; Music Information Centres give accessto scores and recordings of the music of aparticular country (usually specializing in con-temporary works); and specialist societies holdcollections covering, for example, the works of aspecific composer, instrument, genre or aspect ofmusic.

Characteristics of the materials

Music, as one of the performing arts, does nottruly exist other than at the moment of perfor-mance. Printed music and multimedia materialsare therefore media that allow the re-creation ofthe originals which they represent. It is this

MUSIC LIBRARIES AND DOCUMENTATION 437

performance aspect that gives music materialstheir particular characteristics and special needsin their provision. For example, they must bedelivered in time to meet specific deadlines forrehearsals, examinations, concerts or recordings,and must be in the format exactly as specified.An alternative edition or arrangement or a piecesimilar in character cannot be offered as asubstitute. Music is thus both time- and reper-toire-specific, and library and information ser-vices must be structured to reflect this (Foreman1992).

Bibliographic control and resourcediscovery

The difference between printed music and mono-graphs must be appreciated in order to under-stand the difficulties inherent in the former’sbibliographic control. Music is unique inthat the same composition can be published inmany different physical formats and editions,each suited to a particular purpose. Examples ofsuch formats are full score, vocal score, orches-tral parts, piano reductions and arrangements,and only one of these formats will satisfy a user’sparticular requirements. For example, a stringquartet cannot perform from a miniature score ofthe work; each member of the quartet requires anindividual part.Lack of effective bibliographic control means

that identifying known items and discoveringtheir availability for loan or purchase can betime-consuming and difficult. Specialized knowl-edge of publishers’ output and library holdings isoften essential. A significant proportion of con-temporary music is available only on hire frompublishers and this, coupled with the problems ofother types of undocumented ‘fugitive’ materialsuch as publishers’ archives, popular music ephe-mera and other special collections, means thataccess to a significant amount of material isdenied simply because its existence is unknownto most people. Access via the internet to thecatalogues of many large academic and nationallibraries, including the british library’s currentcatalogue of printed music, is gradually improv-ing the situation, but search techniques arevaried, often cumbersome and can be time-consuming.The introduction in 1993 of the International

Standard Music Number (ISMN) (ISO 1993),after a decade of development, should do much

to improve bibliographic control of printedmusic. It is now possible to provide each pub-lished physical format of a piece of music with aunique control number. As music publishersapply these numbers to their back catalogues ofavailable material, cataloguers can add them toexisting records in library databases, thus en-abling the benefits of automated data-processingto be enjoyed by printed music as well asmonographs and serials.The development of online resources over the

past few years has given rise to a number ofinitiatives designed to improve music resourcediscovery. For example, in the UK, there are: theonline union catalogue of performance sets,Encore!; the collection description database Ce-cilia; Music Libraries Online using Z39.50 tosearch across UK conservatoire catalogues; andEnsemble, a programme of retrospective conver-sion of music catalogue records then added to theCURL database. Many libraries have developedprogrammes of digitization of some of theirmusic holdings and so are able to provide accessto materials via the internet. Examples includethe Library of Congress, the Bodleian Library atOxford University and the National Library ofAustralia.

Sound recordings

sound recordings are another broad categoryof material collected by music libraries, and, aswith printed music, they have their own char-acteristics. Storage and display of audio materialsis inextricably linked with considerations of theirsecurity, militating against ease of access. Themultiplicity of physical formats of sound carriersmust be recognized and catered for. Bibliographiccontrol of the sound carriers themselves is ham-pered by the lack of a universally adoptedcontrol numbering system (although there existsthe International Standard Recording Number(ISRN), which applies to the recording itself),and information on availability relies even moreheavily on record companies’ catalogues andcommercially produced discographies than itdoes for printed music.

Early printed music, manuscripts,periodicals and music literature

There are four major international projects con-cerned with the documentation of source materi-als in music librarianship. RISM (Répertoire

438 MUSIC LIBRARIES AND DOCUMENTATION

Internationale des Sources Musicales, begun in1953) provides details of music printed before1800 and manuscript source materials, togetherwith a directory of libraries in which items areheld (Lesure 1989). RILM (Répertoire Interna-tionale de Littérature Musicale) lists writings onmusic from monographs and periodicals, plusother sources such as conference proceedings andFestchriften (Brook 1989). The database is avail-able as a cd-rom called MUSE (Music Search).RIPM (Répertoire Internationale de la PresseMusicale) has as its flagship a series of indexesto nineteenth-century music periodicals. FinallyRIdIM (Répertoire Internationale d’IconographieMusicale) is concerned with the encouragementof the study of music in art. All projects enjoy thesupport of the International Association of MusicLibraries (see below) and the International Musi-cological Society. In addition, consideration isbeginning to be given to ways in which access toinformation held in collections of concert pro-grammes can be achieved.

Specialized associations

The International Association of Music Libraries(IAML), Archives and Documentation Centreswas founded in 1951 for the express purpose ofproviding a forum for the discussion and devel-opment of aspects of music librarianship andthe documentation of music materials at aninternational level. Many countries have sinceformed their own national branches, for exam-ple the United Kingdom (United Kingdom andIreland from 2002), Germany, France, Spain,Italy and Estonia, which, in addition to con-tributing to international projects and initiativessuch as outreach to assist the information pooror the development of bibliographic standards,concentrate on specific domestic issues. Forexample, the United Kingdom branch publishedproposals for a Music Library and InformationPlan designed to improve access through co-operation (Woodhouse 1993), and in 1991 the

French branch published a study of how Frenchlibraries should react to the increase in the useof music as a leisure pursuit in France (Hausfa-ter 1991). There are two parallel organizations,the International Association of Music Informa-tion Centres (IAMIC) and the InternationalAssociation of Sound Archives (IASA), coveringmusic information centres and sound archives,respectively. The other major specialized asso-ciation in the music field is the (American)Music Library Association (MLA). This wasfounded in 1931 to provide a focus for theinterests and concerns of music librarians in theUSA, who had, until then, been representedthrough the american library association(ALA). The MLA is active in music libraryeducation and has published a considerable bodyof material on music libraries, has its ownperiodical, Notes, and an electronic bulletinboard, MLA-L, accessible via the Internet.

References

Brook, B.S. (1989) ‘The road to RILM’, Modern MusicLibrarianship: Essays in Honour of Ruth Watanabe,Barenreiter, Pendragon, pp. 85–94.

Foreman, L. (1992) Lost and Only Sometimes Found,British Music Society.

Hausfater, D. (1991) La Médiathèque musicale pub-lique: evolution d’un concept et perspectives d’avenir,AIBM.

International Standards Organization (ISO) (1993) ISO10957: International Standard Music Number, ISO.

Lesure, F. (1989) ‘Les Debuts du RISM’, Modern MusicLibrarianship: Essays in Honour of Ruth Watanabe,Barenreiter, Pendragon, pp. 79–83.

Woodhouse, S. (1993) Library and Information Planfor Music: Written Statement, IAML (UK).

Further reading

Bradley, C.J. (1990) American Music Librarianship: ABiographical and Historical Survey, GreenwoodPress.

—— (1973) Reader in Music Librarianship, IndianHead.

Jones, M. (1979) Music Librarianship, Bingley.

SUSI WOODHOUSE

MUSIC LIBRARIES AND DOCUMENTATION 439

N

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

The central archives in a national archivaladministration.The Archives Nationales de France were the

first national archives to be formally established(12 September 1790). Since that time, almost allcountries of the world have developed nationalarchives. They normally operate under legisla-tion. The size, structure and level of competenceof national archives vary greatly from country tocountry. Countries with federal systems of gov-ernment have also a central archives administra-tion – the equivalent of national archives – andseveral have state archives, as in the USA,Germany and Canada.

Reasons for establishment

There are several reasons why countries find itnecessary to establish national archives. First,governments need to have a mechanism throughwhich non-current records are selected for per-manent preservation while valueless recordsare destroyed in a systematic and regular manner.The development and implementation of suchrecords management programmes will natu-rally require the existence of a central archivesadministration, often called national archives. Inthis regard, it is the responsibility of this institu-tion to develop policies, standards and proce-dures for the efficient management ofgovernment records and archives. The existenceand implementation of such policies, standardsand guidelines is especially important in thatwhen valueless records are allowed to glut publicoffices, they hamper the efficient conduct ofbusiness and occupy valuable office space andequipment.

Second, records are the main administrativetools through which the work of a government iscarried out. They contain evidence and commit-ments that must be preserved to protect thegovernment itself. Furthermore, the records alsocontain vital information on the rights andprivileges of the citizens that are derived fromthe citizens’ relationship with the government.Since this immense concentration of officialinformation is later transferred and preserved inthe national archives, it therefore serves as thememory of the nation. There is no doubt that thegovernments would, just like persons withoutmemory, find it quite difficult to function with-out this memory, the national archives.From 1790 when the first national archive was

established, a citizen’s right to have access topublic archives has been recognized. This needwould have been very difficult to fulfil if therewere no central places where members of thepublic and research scholars could have thenecessary facilities to inspect documents thathave been selected for preservation. Availableevidence shows that research needs are now themost significant force leading to expansion andimprovement of national archival services allover the world. It must, however, be pointed outthat not all documents may be made accessible toresearchers. Some records may contain sensitiveinformation that may, for some time, need to berestricted from public inspection. National ar-chives must therefore find a balance between therequirements of the government to keep somerestriction to certain documents, and the needs ofthe users. But, as a general principle, documentsshould be open to public inspection to themaximum extent that is consistent with theinterest of the citizens.

The holdings and subject coverage

The public service in any given country createsand receives an immense wealth of documenta-tion in the course of business. The data andinformation contained in these public recordscover an extremely wide range of subjects. Therecord, documents and publications are also indifferent formats and sizes. When these recordsare no longer needed for administrative andother purposes by the creating departments, thevaluable ones are transferred to the nationalarchives. It therefore follows that a nationalarchive will contain records, documents andpublications with an equally wide variety ofsubjects, which may range, for example, fromleisure to nuclear energy, from education todefence, and from agriculture to industry. It mustbe noted, however, that the size, complexity andsubject coverage of the holdings will differ fromone national archives to another, depending onvarious factors, which include the geographicalsize of the country, population and the level ofdevelopment.

Requirements

A national archive must meet certain require-ments if it is to function efficiently. One suchrequirement is a building, preferably purpose-designed with controlled temperature and humid-ity. This is especially necessary for storage areasfor audiovisual records, moving images and othermaterials that are sensitive to high and fluctuat-ing temperatures and humidity. Even conven-tional paper records need appropriate storageconditions if they are to be preserved for a longtime. It will also be necessary for the building tohave sufficient safeguards against fire, floods andother similar dangers. The need for appropriateand adequate storage space can, of course, neverbe emphasized enough since it is a basic require-ment for every national archive.It is not enough for a national archive just to

have a building. The building should have thenecessary facilities to preserve archives, docu-ments and publications. These include suchthings as archival shelves, reprographic facilitiesand well-equipped conservation workshops. Inaddition, a national archive should have ade-quate facilities and capabilities for arrangement,description and indexing of records and archives.These facilities should include the use of infor-mation technology.

A national archive will also need to haveadequate personnel, who must be well qualifiedand experienced. This requirement has becomemore complicated in that the range of expertsneeded for records and archives management hasgreatly increased. Apart from general archivists,national archives now need information technol-ogy experts, preservation chemists and otherexperts with diverse academic backgrounds. Forexample all national archives need experts tomanage electronic records throughout the entirelife cycle. Most other non-paper records alsoneed such specialized personnel. The total num-ber of personnel and the type of experts requiredwill vary from country to country, of coursedepending on the size and complexity of theparticular national archive.And finally, a national archive should have

adequate financial resources for its recurrent anddevelopment budgets. Money is needed, forexample, for staff salary, procurement and main-tenance of equipment, as well as for the main-tenance of the archive building itself. It is mainlythe inadequate provision of personnel and finan-cial resources in developing countries that maketheir national archives so different from those ofdeveloped countries in terms of performance.

SEE ALSO: freedom of information; NationalArchives of the United States; Public RecordOffice

MUSILA MUSEMBI

NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THEUNITED STATES

The National Archives is the repository of theofficial government records of the USA and thehome of the nation’s ‘Charters of Freedom’: theDeclaration of Independence, the US Constitu-tion and the Bill of Rights. Its Office of theFederal Register edits and publishes importantlegal and rule-making publications of the federalgovernment. Its grant-making body, the NationalHistorical Publications and Records Commission,subsidizes printed publications series and pro-vides grants for the care of historical records.The research collections of the National Ar-

chives encompass the nation’s civil, military anddiplomatic activities. They are enormous andinclude many different formats. At its facilitiesin Washington, DC, the records total more than

NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE UNITED STATES 441

4 billion pieces of paper and 10 million stillpictures; more than 90,000 reels of motionpictures, reaching back to the inauguration ofPresident McKinley in 1897; 164,000 sound andvideo recordings, including Congressional hear-ings, Supreme Court arguments and the Nurem-berg trials; 2.5 million maps and charts; nearly 3million architectural and engineering plans; andnearly 16 million aerial photographs. This doc-umentary record of the US people includesgenealogical and census records, military serviceand pension records, and ship-passenger listsrecording the arrival of immigrants.The USA was relatively late in establishing

such a repository. The Department of State andthe library of congress were the principalrepositories of government records before 1934,when a long campaign led by the historian J.Franklin Jameson culminated in the establish-ment of the National Archives of the UnitedStates, which is known formally as the NationalArchives and Records Administration (NARA).The Act of Congress establishing the National

Archives, signed by President Franklin DelanoRoosevelt on 19 June 1934, stipulated that allarchives or records belonging to the Governmentof the United States would be placed under thecharge of an Archivist of the United States, whowould be appointed by the President of theUnited States with the consent of the US Senate.A National Archives Council was established toadvise the Archivist, particularly regarding thetransfer of documents from other governmentagencies. President Roosevelt appointed R.D.W.Connor of North Carolina, who had been nomi-nated for the post by the American HistoricalAssociation, to be the first Archivist of theUnited States.Personally interested in history, President Roo-

sevelt supported Connor and his early efforts todefine and build the National Archives. Theactivist Roosevelt administration also created asubstantial number of records to be housed in thenew National Archives Building, then beingconstructed adjacent to the Mall in centralWashington, DC, under the supervision of archi-tect John Russell Pope. This colossal structure,located between 7th and 9th Streets and boundedby Constitution Avenue to the south and Penn-sylvania Avenue to the north, occupies a strategicplace in the group of buildings known as theFederal Triangle. It opened in 1935. A secondmajor National Archives building was opened in

1994 in College Park, Maryland, near Washing-ton, DC, on the University of Maryland campus.In its early days, the National Archives em-

phasized identifying and ensuring the preserva-tion of those records of the US government thathave permanent historical value. However thegrowth of US government during the SecondWorld War brought with it a boom in theproduction of federal records and a new role forthe National Archives: archives management.The need to manage (and dispose of) currentrecords had become an overriding concern, andregional records centres were created throughoutthe USA under the Archives’ supervision.The Administrative Services Act of 1949 es-

tablished a new National Archives and RecordsService within the government’s General ServicesAgency, a step that many people felt underminedthe independence of the National Archives. TheFederal Records Act of 1950 established proce-dures for the creation, maintenance and retire-ment of federal records. It also provided the legalbasis for the transfer in 1952 of the Declarationof Independence and the US Constitution to theNational Archives from the Library of Congress,where the documents had resided since 1921 andbeen on public display since 1924.President Roosevelt was responsible for an

important new function of the National Archivesthat was spelled out in the 1949 AdministrativeServices Act: administration of the Franklin D.Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York. In1938 he had revealed a plan for dedicating hispersonal and presidential papers to the federalgovernment and housing them in a separateresearch centre that would be built with privatefunds. Previously, most presidents had been con-tent to leave their papers to the Library ofCongress. A national committee raised the neces-sary funds, then title to the site transferred to thegovernment, accepted by Congress and placedunder the care of the National Archives.Today the National Archives operates and

maintains ten presidential libraries and twopresidential materials projects that preserve andmake available to the public the papers and otherhistorical materials of twelve US presidents. Theyare: Herbert Hoover Library, West Branch, Iowa;Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, NewYork; Harry S. Truman Library, Independence,Missouri; Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abil-ene, Kansas; John F. Kennedy Library, Boston,Massachusetts; Lyndon B. Johnson Library, Aus-

442 NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE UNITED STATES

tin, Texas; Gerald R. Ford Library, Ann Arbor,Michigan; Jimmy Carter Library, Atlanta, Geor-gia; Ronald Reagan Library, Simi Valley, Califor-nia; George Bush Library, College Station, Texas;Nixon Presidential Materials Project, CollegePark, Maryland (The Nixon Library, located inYorba Linda, California, is not part of theNational Archives Presidential library system);and the Clinton Presidential Materials Project,Little Rock, Arkansas.The National Archives administers nineteen

regional records facilities in various citiesthroughout the USA. These centres store thenon-permanent records of the agencies in theirregions, and they preserve and make accessible toresearchers materials that document the actionsof the federal government in their regions. Therecords range from court cases relating to thesinking of the Titanic and farm foreclosuresduring the Great Depression, to naturalizationpapers for Hollywood movie stars and Chineseimmigration files.John W. Carlin was sworn in as the eighth

Archivist of the United States on 1 June 1995. Amajor renovation of the original National Ar-chives Building began in February 2000. Theresearch side of the building, located on Pennsyl-vania Avenue, is open for business throughoutthe renovation. The exhibition side, on Constitu-tion Avenue, closed on 5 July 2001, and willreopen in 2003. The exhibition Rotunda is beingremodelled and expanded, and new encasementsand exhibition cases are being designed for theCharters of Freedom.

Further reading

McCoy, D. (1978) The National Archives: America’sMinistry of Documents, 1934–1968, University ofNorth Carolina.

National Archives website (www.nara.gov).

SEE ALSO: archives

JOHN Y. COLE

NATIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

In the very broadest sense, this means the listingof information products relating to a particularnation. In practice it encompasses a very diverserange of such activities, and offering too specifica definition would almost certainly risk acciden-tally excluding some facet or other. It most

commonly deals with books and pamphlets, butshould ideally also list the whole national doc-umentary heritage (other than that which isproperly the domain of the national archives).Ideally, its scope should include serials, printedmusic, maps, multimedia materials, governmentpublications (see government publishing) andelectronic information products. In most casesthis means material produced within the nationalterritory, but is often broadened to includematerial on the subject of the nation, or somespecific feature of the nation; material producedby members of the nation, originating where-soever it might; and material in the nationallanguage. It is generally subdivided into retro-spective bibliography and current bibliography.Retrospective national bibliography has

usually been achieved by the publication of thecatalogue of the national library (see nationallibraries), usually relying on the institution’scollections that result from the exercise of legaldeposit rights. The published Library of Con-gress Catalog exemplifies this. However, thisdoes not fully sum up the scope of retrospectivenational bibliographic activity, since the work ofa project like the Eighteenth-Century Short TitleCatalogue expands the information on pastpublished output far beyond the limitations ofthe national library’s holdings, however close tocomprehensiveness those holdings may seem toapproach.Current national bibliographic listing was

originally undertaken by the book trade as anaid to commerce in books, and this activity stillsurvives in publications like the CumulativeBook Index in the USA. However, since theUNESCO Conference on the Improvement ofBibliographic Services in 1951, regular listing ofbooks and other documents has been seen as afunction of a national agency, often, but notexclusively, forming part of the national library.The degree of currency actually achieved by themany national bibliographies that are now pub-lished varies greatly from country to country, butlong time-lags between the appearance of adocument and the appearance of a listing are therule rather than the exception. The aim today isto create not simply a serial bibliography pub-lished on paper, but an electronic nationalbibliographic database in machine-readable for-mat (marc was created for this purpose). Such adatabase can be used to generate bibliographic

NATIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY 443

products in paper or card form, and madeavailable online and via the Internet.

SEE ALSO: bibliographic control; bibliography

NATIONAL INFORMATIONSYSTEMS

A national system that systematically exploitsinformation providers and resources in a co-ordinated way, for the benefit of users. Therudimentary idea of a national library system(see national libraries) dates back to thenineteenth century and even earlier, in the USAand Europe, with the feasibility of interlibraryloans. The Kenyon Report of 1929 proposed theestablishment of the UK National Central Li-brary (1930) to organize a national system. TheSecond World War (1939–45) provided newperspectives for research work and therefore theneed for a national network of broadly basedliterature resources in a wide range of subjectsbut, above all, science, engineering and technol-ogy.In the late 1960s the International Council of

Scientific Unions was concerned about thegrowth of scientific literature, and with unescoit organized an intergovernmental conference in1971 on a World System of Information inScience and Technology (UNISIST). In 1974 theDocumentation, Library and Archives Depart-ment of UNESCO (DBA) organized an Intergo-vernmental Conference on the Planning ofNational Documentation Library and ArchivesInfrastructures (the NATIS Conference). Theconference discussions were based on five papers:(1) recommendations of previous regional meet-ings of experts; (2) integrated planning of overalldocumentation library and archives structures;(3) universal bibliographic control andinternational marc (UBCIM); (4) planningfor information technology; (5) planning infor-mation manpower. Little consideration had beengiven to the systematic organization and dissemi-nation of information, one of the vital resourcesof any country. The Conference advocated astrong national information policy, while UBCwas conceived as a long-term programme for aworldwide system for the control and exchangeof bibliographical information, through the es-tablishment of an international centre, later setup at the british library. The manpower

planning paper examined trends in educationand training, and proposed an internationallyagreed core curriculum for documentation, li-brary and archives programmes.The objectives of the Conference were: (1) the

formulation of a national policy; (2) the stimula-tion of user awareness; (3) promotion of thereading habit; (4) assessment of user needs; (5)analysis of existing information resources; (6)analysis of manpower resources; (7) planningthe organizational structure; (8) supplying man-power for NATIS; (9) planning the technologicalneeds of NATIS; (10) establishing a legislativeframework for NATIS; (11) financing NATIS;(12) UBC; (13) assistance to Member States,especially in proposing suitable methodologies,application of information technology andthe development of professional education andtraining; (14) promotion of UBC; (15) a long-term programme of action in planning coherentnational information systems; and (16) conveninga further conference in 1978 (actually 1979).Following the Conference there was a meeting ofexperts to design a plan of action for UBC in1975 and a general conference on UBC in 1978.The NATIS concept was further outlined in

the first NATIS newsletter (later subsumed inthe UNISIST Newsletter), which proposed togovernments the need to establish nationalsystems to facilitate access to informationthrough documentation, library and archiveservices, as well as assuming responsibility forthe education of citizens in this area. Focalpoints were established in a number of coun-tries, usually in national libraries, though inmany countries they did not provide for thedevelopment of information services on the scaleexpected.The conference hardly justified its long-term

aims. The notion of a national informationpolicy was frustrated in industrialized countriesby established vested interests and in developingcountries by petty jealousies. Only Jamaica reallyset up a NATIS programme, though there wereother tentative attempts. UNISIST and NATISprogrammes were seen as rival programmes,respectively, for the industrialized and the devel-oping world (and not as complementary pro-grammes). But the Conference resulted in thedevelopment of UBC and the better organizationof international cataloguing. It stimulated theorganization of professional education and train-ing, and provided the foundation for the library

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and information profession as an internationalprofession. The Conference resulted in a consid-erable amount of literature (1970s and 1980s).With the rivalries within UNESCO, the with-drawal of the USA and the United Kingdom fromUNESCO in 1984–5, and the world recession,the effort put in by UNESCO to continue theprogramme has been minimized. In 1978 UNI-SIST and NATIS were amalgamated to becomethe General Information Programme (PGI; Pro-gramme Général de l’Information). The BritishLibrary’s PGI Committee, active in the late1970s, faded out in the early 1980s. In 1988PGI and the UNESCO library, documentationand archives were merged to become the Officeof Information Programmes and Services. Gradu-ally NATIS was omitted in favour of UNISIST. Inlater medium-term plans of UNESCO, all refer-ence to UNISIST was dropped. A book byMichael Hill, which took a broader view of theconcept of NATIS and which replaced ‘systems’with ‘policies’, effectively reshaped the idea intoan acceptable form for a decentralized, flexible,evolving information environment (Hill 1994).Vitiello (2000) provides detail of many nationalinformation policies.

References

Hill, M.W. (1994) National Information Policies andStrategies, Bowker Saur.

Vitiello, G. (2000) ‘National information policy andplanning’, in M. Line et al. (eds) Library andInformation Work Worldwide 2000, Bowker Saur,pp. 139–65.

Further reading

Anderson, D. (1974) Universal Bibliographical Control,UNESCO (COM 74/NATIS/REF.3).

Annuar, H. (1977) The Integration of Library, Doc-umentation and Archives Services in Southeast Asia.Proceedings of the Third Conference of SoutheastAsia Librarians (CONSAL), Pusat Dokumentasillmiat Nasional.

Burchinal, L.G. and Becker, J. (1974) Planning forInformation Technology, UNESCO (COM 74/NA-TIS/REF.4).

Foskett, D.J. (1976) NATIS: Preliminary Survey ofEducation Training Programmes at University Level,UNESCO.

Havard-Williams, P. and Franz, E.G. (1975) ‘Planninginformation manpower’, UNESCO Bulletin for Li-braries (February): 2–15.

MacMurdoch, A. (1976) ‘Workshop on the planning ofNATIS’, Guyana Library Association Bulletin 5(2):1–4.

Regional Meetings of Experts on the National Planning

of Documentation and Library Services (Arab Re-public of Egypt, 1974: Uganda, 1970; Sri Lanka,1967; Ecuador, 1966). Summary of the Main Re-commendations, UNESCO (COM 74/NATIS/REF.1).

Zaher, C.R. (1976) National and International LibraryPlanning in UNESCO and National Library Plan-ning: Key Papers Presented at the 40th Session of theIFLA General Council, Verlag Dokumentation, pp.15–19.

SEE ALSO: Caribbean; information policy

PETER HAVARD-WILLIAMS

REVISED BY EDITORS

NATIONAL LIBRARIES

National libraries vary widely in their origins andfunctions. In one or another form they are foundin more than a hundred countries. At its meetingin Bangkok in 1999 the CDNL (Conference ofDirectors of National Libraries) defined a na-tional library as:

[A]n institution, primarily funded (directly orindirectly) by the state, which is responsiblefor comprehensively collecting, bibliographi-cally recording, preserving and making avail-able the documentary heritage (primarilypublished materials of all types) emanatingfrom or relating to its country; and which mayalso be responsible for furthering the effectiveand efficient functioning of the country’slibraries through such tasks as the manage-ment of nationally significant collections, theprovision of an infrastructure, the coordina-tion of activities in the country’s library andinformation system, international liaison, andthe exercise of leadership. Normally theseresponsibilities are formally recognised,usually in law. For the purpose of this defini-tion a country is defined as a sovereignindependent state.

Institutions termed national libraries also occurin non-sovereign national entities such as Catalo-nia, Québec and Wales.

Origins and orientations

The origins of national libraries are closely linkedto those of legal deposit and the acquisitionsof bibliophile monarchs and wealthy individuals.The earliest national libraries originated duringthe Renaissance as royal or private libraries. Inseveral European countries (e.g. the Netherlands)

NATIONAL LIBRARIES 445

the national library is still called the royal library.Over time royal libraries became more generallyaccessible and they were eventually designated asnational libraries as a result of political uphea-vals (e.g. France) or more gradual constitutionaldevelopment (e.g. Sweden). At the risk of over-simplification three main national library orien-tations can be distinguished.The older national libraries can be considered

to exemplify the heritage orientation, character-ized by an emphasis on the nation’s documentaryheritage, the management, preservation and ex-ploitation of rich collections of old, rare andvaluable materials (‘treasures’) and service tolearned scholars and researchers.A second group arose in the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries in response to nationalisticand modernizing movements (e.g. South Africa,Thailand, Venezuela). They place emphasis onthe development of a national infrastructure (e.g.a national bibliography, national union cata-logues, national interlibrary lending schemes)to support the work of the nation’s libraries andinformation agencies. Today most national li-braries in the developed world combine thecharacteristics of these two orientations. This isillustrated most notably by the merging andrationalisation of formerly distinct institutions inthe UK to form the british library (1973) andin France to form the bibliothèque nationalede france (1994).A third group arose in developing countries

(e.g. Namibia, Papua New Guinea), where thenational library is often called a ‘national libraryservice’. These offer services to the generalpopulation through a network of public li-braries, school libraries and other (e.g.hospital and prison) libraries, much as a metro-politan or county public library service would ina developed country.Most national libraries experience a tension

between the functional demands of two or moreof these orientations, which imply diverse clientgroups. This is compounded in the case of dual-purpose national libraries that also serve asparliamentary libraries (e.g. the US libraryof congress), university libraries (e.g. Hel-sinki University Library in Finland) or other.

Current developments and issues

National libraries face challenges posed by poli-tical and socio-economic conditions in their

countries, rapid developments in informationand communication technology (ict) andglobalization.They have taken advantage of ICT to make

their catalogues and national bibliographiesavailable online, on CD-ROM and on the worldwide web. Many, foremost among them theLibrary of Congress, have embarked on digitiza-tion projects for purposes of preservation andaccess. In some countries legal deposit has beenextended to audiovisual, broadcast and electronicmedia. Their national libraries are grappling withthe legal and technological problems of acquir-ing, organizing, preserving and providing long-term access to born-digital materials such asonline and CD-ROM databases, electronic jour-nals and websites. The Internet has opened upopportunities for the creation of national librarywebsites and portals. The European Union hasfunded a number of cooperative R&D projectsaimed at exploiting such opportunities.Preservation of print and other analogue ma-

terials remains a major challenge for nationallibraries; the new technologies notwithstanding,microfilm remains the technology of choice forlong-term preservation.In many developing countries national li-

braries are underfunded and lead a precariousexistence. Even in developed countries they facemany constraints. Of necessity they are beingmanaged more professionally, with emphasis onidentifying and understanding the national li-brary’s environment and clients, the rethinkingof missions, functions and collections policies,the development of strategic partnerships, therelevance, timeliness and quality of products andservices, the efficiency and costs of operations,cost-recovery, promotion and marketing. In somecountries management reviews and reorganiza-tions have taken place. More attention is given toformal evaluation of outputs and impacts, strate-gic planning and the development of coherentcorporate plans.The future of national libraries in their present

form cannot be taken for granted. It has beensuggested that they may develop into, or bereplaced by, virtual or hybrid (analogue/virtual)libraries. Nevertheless there have been significantinvestments in national library buildings duringthe 1990s. These include not only the strikingand controversial buildings of the British Libraryand the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, butalso those of national libraries in countries

446 NATIONAL LIBRARIES

ranging from Denmark to Estonia, Mexico andNamibia. If this is anything to go by, there can belittle doubt that well-managed national librariescan survive – if they adapt to their rapidlychanging environment.

Further reading

Alexandria: The Journal of National and InternationalLibrary and Information Issues (1989–). [The fore-most journal dealing with national libraries. Itcontains an annual survey on the world literatureon national libraries.]

Cornish, G.P. (1991) The Role of National Libraries inthe New Information Environment, PGI-91/WS/3,UNESCO.

Gabriel: gateway to Europe’s national libraries (2001)(www.bl.uk/gabriel/en/welcome.html).

Line, M.B. (1990) ‘Do we need national libraries, and ifso what sort? An assessment in the light of ananalysis of national library and information needs’,Alexandria 2: 27–38.

Line, M.B. and Line, J. (eds) (1995) National Libraries3; A Selection of Articles on National Libraries,1986–1994, ASLIB.

Lor, P.J. (1997) Guidelines for Legislation for NationalLibrary Services, CII-97/WS/7, UNESCO.

Mchombu, K.J. (1983) ‘Alternatives to the nationallibrary in less developed countries’, Libri 35: 227–49.

PETER JOHAN LOR

NAUDÉ, GABRIEL (1600–53)

Librarian to Cardinal Mazarin and author of oneof the first significant treatises on librarianship,Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (1627).Born in Paris and originally a student of

medicine, he became librarian in succession toseveral great book collectors, including CardinalRichelieu and Queen Christina of Sweden. ForMazarin, whose librarian he became in 1643, heassembled a library of over 40,000 books,collected from all over Europe. In this library hewas able to put into practice many of the ideasexpressed in the Advis. He believed that ascholarly library should contain books that arevaluable for their content, rather than their rarityor beauty. He advocated the arrangement oflibrary collections by subject and argued that theowners of great libraries should make theircollections freely accessible to scholars. His ideason the internal environment of the library wereprogressive, showing attention to natural lightingand precautions against dampness and intrusivenoise. Although his book was never widely

available, it was influential, reaching GottfriedWilhelm leibniz and John Durie, author of theReformed Librarie-Keeper (1650).

SEE ALSO: librarian

NAVIGATION

Finding ways to move from one web page toanother. Like the use of the word surf forunstructured Web use (see surfing), navigationis a maritime metaphor intended to reflect theenormous extent and changeability of the inter-net. Navigation can mean using a web browserto view new sites, or moving between pageswithin a website. A website can be expected toprovide a navigation bar consisting of links to itsmain sections for easy internal navigation.search engines and hyperlinks will provide themeans to move from one site to another.

SEE ALSO: hypermedia; information theory

NETIQUETTE

Codes of behaviour for internet users, devel-oped by users themselves. They concern how todeal with insults (flaming), uncontrolled messa-ging (spam) and the running of Internet games,chatrooms, newsgroups and special-interest web-sites.

Further reading

Shea, V. (1994) Netiquette. San Francisco: AlbionBooks.

NETWORK

A system of physically separate computers withtelecommunication links through which they canexchange information and share resources. Alsoused in the abstract sense to mean modes ofinteraction between people.

NETWORKS

Computers linked by a telecommunicationssystem. Networks offer two resources. First, theyoffer access to the people who use computers onthe network, by means of electronic mail,conferencing or chat facilities. Second, networkspermit the use of files (text, graphics, sounds and

NETWORKS 447

video), software, databases and peripherals (likeprinters or fax machines) stored on, or attachedto, computers on the network.

Types of network

A critical limiting factor on the operation of anynetwork is the speed of the telecommunicationssystem that links computers on the network.Some networks use the public telephone systemto link computers. A modem is needed totranslate digital data into analogue form fortransmission and then back into digital formwhen received. Most networks use some form ofdigital link, ranging from a simple serial connec-tion to a leased line connection. Because net-works link a variety of computers and softwarepackages over different telecommunications lines,telecommunications standards like TCP/IP(Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Proto-col) are vital.Originally networks operated peer to peer,

with no one computer controlling significantresources that other computers on the networkdepended on. However, many networks nowoperate on the client–server principle, which, inhardware terms, means that one central compu-ter (the server) supports the other computers (theclients). For software there is a correspondingsplit between functions carried out on the servercomputer and those on a client computer. Func-tions can thus be divided between two comple-tely different software packages, one acting asserver, the other as client. Topologies determinehow computers in a network are connected andthere are a variety of models (e.g. bus, star andring) that have implications for the functions andmanagement of a network.The computers owned by an organization at

one site can be networked. Such a network isknown as a local-area network (LAN). Aswell as supporting standard applications LANsallow new applications. One such is groupware,software that enables people to share informationand communicate over the LAN. A network thatis not limited to one organization and one site isknown as a wide-area network (WAN).There are different types of WAN. One such is

a co-operative network where costs are sup-ported by a group of separate institutions orindividuals. An example is Fidonet, which is anetwork of bulletin board systems (BBS) runon ordinary microcomputers owned by private

individuals who use special software to set upmenus of services. Other people access a BBS bytelephone from their computer.Another type of WAN is a commercial (for-

profit) network, available to the public at large,or to closed user groups, on a fee-paying basis.One such is CompuServe, which in 2001 hadover 1 million subscribers worldwide. There areother commercial networks that compete withCompuServe.Academic networks are WANs financed by

public money, usually to support research. Onesuch is JANET (the Joint Academic NETwork) inthe UK. Research institutions like universities payflat-rate annual fees to maintain their internetconnection.The final type of WAN are metanetworks –

these are ‘networks of networks’ encompassingany or all of the above types; the Internet is theprime exemplar of a metanetwork – it is a vastconglomerate of interconnected computer net-works that brings together people, informationand computer resources from across the globe.Virtual private networks (VPNs) are extensionsof LANs across a WAN, which hide private datafrom the public network(s) it travels across.

Virtual communities

Networks bring people together, either as co-workers connected by LANs (and sometimesVPNs) or as what Rheingold (1994) calls virtualcommunities, people who use a WAN to commu-nicate regarding a common, shared interest. Forexample, the oldest virtual community is theinvisible college of scientists on the Internet,who have long seen themselves as an interna-tional community, where ideas are more impor-tant than national origin.The basic communication tool a network

offers is electronic mail (e-mail), an asynchro-nous, textual messaging system by which indivi-duals send and receive messages. Conferencing issimilar to e-mail except that messages are notsent to individuals but to named, topic-basedforums or discussion areas, which individualsaccess to read and post messages. Synchronouscommunication is possible using chat or instantmessaging facilities, in which text messages areexchanged instantaneously between individuals,or by videoconferencing, in which video picturesand sounds of participants are synchronized.Voice alone may be transmitted over a computer

448 NETWORKS

network, for example using VOIP (Voice OverIP) on the Internet. Most of these facilities areprovided by groupware over a LAN, to whichare added shared diaries and calendars, and alsoworkflow management, the tracking of progresson shared tasks.There are privacy issues to communicating

over a network, since all communications can beintercepted and recorded without participantsbeing aware. encryption technologies, especiallypublic key encryption systems, can help bykeeping communications coded and readableonly by the intended participants. There are alsopreservation issues in networked communica-tion, since much important communication maynever be recorded, and, conversely, much unim-portant material may be stored for posterity (forexample the archive of Internet newsgroup post-ings currently available on Google), although theresearch potential of this material may provegreat.

Information resources

Information on networks is stored in computerfiles. Computer files can be of two types: datafiles and software files. The latter are applica-tions (like word processors) that users can runfrom a network. An advantage of a network isthat it promotes resource sharing, for exampleten users might share one copy of an applicationthat is only needed rarely. Obviously, softwareuse on a network should not violate purchaserestrictions and limits often have to be set onhow many copies of a software application canbe running at any one time.Data files have two problems on a network.

First, there is the problem of how to find them,and, second, how to view/use them. The worldwide web started out as a LAN application atCERN in Switzerland, which used hypertextlinks to locate files on CERN’s network. Hyper-text though becomes unmanageable with largenumbers of files, and search engines, which aresearchable databases of files on a network, areneeded. Once a data file is found it needs to beviewed, a task that the potential variety ofmachines on a network complicates. Usually afile format has an associated viewer (softwarethat just opens the data file and does not changeit). For example, HTML (HyperText Mark-upLanguage) files use Web browsers like InternetExplorer as viewers. Each data file format has its

own viewer, and it can be problematic assem-bling the collection of viewers needed. Thisproblem gets more acute if data files containingmultimedia (images, sounds and video) areused.

Files do not just appear on a network: some-one must publish them. Typically, files will eitherbe published via some centralized server, or via adecentralized intranet, a local implementationof Web technologies, which can allow individualsto publish files. If the audience for those filesincludes authorized individuals outside the orga-nization that owns the intranet then it becomesan extranet. Content management software aidsthe publication of files in a form suitable forintra- and extranets.

Finally the storage of files on a network mighttake up large volumes of disk space. Disk mirrorsand RAID (Random Array of Inexpensive Disks)are devices for automatically backing up (makingcopies of) files. Optical media (like writeableCDs) or magnetic tape might be used for long-term preservation of files.

Conclusion

Networks should not be seen as consistingsolely of computers nor existing solely tosupport an organization. Mobile telephones,hand-held devices, televisions and even domesticequipment like fridges are now all potentiallyconnectable to a network. Sitting at a desk inthe office is no longer the only place one canuse a network: small devices, like for example3G (third generation) mobile phones, will enablenetwork use on the move. Broadband technolo-gies are delivering faster access via cables whilewireless networking protocols like 802.11B andBluetooth give freedom from cables (see wire-less applications). While the functional foun-dations of networks will persist, their physicallimitations in terms of reach and flexibility arequickly evaporating.

References

Rheingold, H. (1994) The Virtual Community: Home-Steading on the Electronic Frontier, Secker.

Further reading

Comer, D. and Droms, R. (2001) Computer Networksand Internets, 3rd edn, Prentice Hall.

Pool, I. De Sola (1990) Technologies without Bound-

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aries: On Telecommunications in a Global Age,Harvard University Press

SEE ALSO: communication; informatics;information and communication technology;information policy

ALAN POULTER

NEURAL NETWORK

A method of designing a computer system thatattempts to mimic some functions of the humanbrain. Like the brain, neural network computersare made up of large numbers of simple proces-sing elements (called ‘neurons’), which receiveincoming data in parallel, then map this into apattern representing an acceptable solution. Theyare particularly good at analysing problems withmany variables. They do not depend on pro-gramming in the conventional sense, but derivetheir abilities from ‘learning’ about the problemwith which they are to deal. They are used in awide variety of commercial applications, includ-ing speech and image recognition, financialanalysis, medical diagnosis, database manage-ment systems, and image and signal processing.

SEE ALSO: informatics

NEWSPAPER

A publication issued periodically, usually daily orweekly, traditionally containing the most recentnews. Because radio, television, teletext andother media can now offer immediate newscoverage, newspapers in many industrializedcountries are increasingly dominated by featurematerial. The newspaper industry is large, multi-national and to an increasing extent cross-ownedwith other media industries; in some countries itis severely constrained by state censorship.

SEE ALSO: communication; knowledge industries

NEWSPAPER LIBRARY

A library provided for the needs of the staff of anewspaper; sometimes affectionately referred toas the ‘morgue’. Although such a library willusually contain some reference books and otherpublished materials, its chief content will becuttings files, notes assembled by staff membersand photographs and other illustrations. Electro-

nic access to information is increasingly used inan industry dependent on the speed at which itcan assemble and disseminate information, so theconventional newspaper library is effectivelybeing replaced by a swifter and more compre-hensive form of access.

SEE ALSO: mass media

NORDIC COUNTRIES

The Nordic countries, Denmark, Finland, Ice-land, Norway and Sweden, are often also knownby the geographical term ‘Scandinavia’. Thesecountries have managed to develop co-operationin all aspects of life – professional, political andsocial – that is unique in the world. Nordic co-operation takes multiple forms in this region ofmore than 1 million sq. km where 25 millioninhabitants move freely without passports. Allthe countries have common history although thathistory has often been of the ruler and the ruled.Nowadays Nordic co-operation is led by theNordic Council, which is a Nordic parliament(established in 1952), and its executive counter-part, the Nordic Council of Ministers (estab-lished in 1971). Each government appoints oneof its ministers as the Minister of Nordic Affairsto co-ordinate actions on the highest level ofgovernment. Supported by a Nordic budget, co-operation is practised by means of about thirtyinstitutions that are mostly small and scatteredaround the Nordic region, covering all aspects ofsociety including women’s issues, Asian studies,volcanology, theoretical physics, drug and alco-hol issues, to name but a few.

Nordic library co-operation

Nordic co-operation in the field of library devel-opment has existed for close to a century. Thebirth of formal co-operation was in 1914 whenthe first Nordic library journal, Nordisk tidskriftför bok- och biblioteksväsen (Nordic journal forbook and library issues), was published witheditors from four of the five countries (Icelandwas not included). This journal is still published.Informal co-operation among the national librar-ians existed even before that. Large co-operativeprojects were launched in the 1950s including acommon acquisition plan, the Scandia Plan, anda Nordic union catalogue of serials, NOSP.During the 1970s, library co-operation became

450 NEURAL NETWORK

more formal with financial support from theNordic coffers and the establishment of the firstNordic institution within this field in 1970,called NORDDOK. That was later supersededby NORDINFO, the Nordic Council for Scien-tific Information, founded in 1976, which co-ordinates co-operation among research and spe-cial libraries in the Nordic region. NORDINFO,which is located in Helsinki, Finland, financescommon projects where there are obvious bene-fits beyond what can be achieved at the nationallevel. Financial support covers research anddevelopment, courses, conferences and summerschools as well as information activities whereefforts are made to pool specialist knowledge inall the countries and make advances that can beof use to most of the region. Actual projects haveincluded three centres of excellence, one onelectronic publishing, one on networking andone on digitization. These centres actually existin different countries but they received additionalfunding from NORDINFO for new develop-ments during a period of three years. Presentlyemphasis has been placed on Nordic develop-ments related to the electronic library.A separate committee, NORDBOK, the Nor-

dic Literature and Library Committee, was estab-lished in 1989. NORDBOK is located inCopenhagen, Denmark. It was founded to en-courage and support the distribution of Nordicliterature among the Nordic countries as well asto strengthen co-operation between Nordic pub-lic libraries. NORDBOK gives grants to trans-lations of Nordic works from one language toanother. It also finances courses and projectsrelated to public library development. BothNORDINFO and NORDBOK are administeredby boards that include members from all theNordic countries.

Library organization and management

In spite of great difference in population from the8 million Swedes as contrasted with less than 300thousand Icelanders, all the countries adhere tosimilar economic and social systems and services,and hence their library services are quite compar-able and well developed, although from theorganizational point of view they differ.In Denmark Biblioteksstyrelsen (The Danish

National Library Authority) is the Danish gov-ernment’s central administrative and advisorybody to public as well as research libraries and

is an independent agency under the Ministry ofCulture. In Sweden, BIBSAM (The Royal Li-brary’s Department for National Co-ordinationand Development) has the main task to co-ordinate and develop the provision of informa-tion for higher education and research anddevelopment, primarily by taking measures tohandle issues related to research libraries andStatens kulturråd (The Swedish National Councilfor Cultural Affairs), which leads the publiclibrary development.

As of 2002 Norway has a new directorate forlibraries, archives and museums that is to takeover three former authorities, Statens bibliotek-tilsyn (Norwegian Directorate for Public Li-braries), Riksbibliotektjenesten (The NationalOffice for Research Documentation, Academicand Special Libraries) and Norsk museumsutvik-ling (Norwegian Museum Authority). In Icelandand Finland the largest libraries, the combinedNational and University Library in each country,have assumed much of the leading functions onthe national level.

Electronic library development

All the Nordic countries have emphasized thedevelopment of digital libraries (see digitallibrary) to facilitate the citizen’s access toinformation. In most cases the research librarieshave been at the forefront of these developmentsbut in some cases, such as in Denmark, thepublic libraries have also formed a part of thenational electronic library. Each country hasselected their own form for this development,although it has been possible to create develop-mental projects that have served all the Nordicregion.

In Denmark the Denmark Electronic ResearchLibrary (DEF) was set up as a five-year project,1998–2002, funded by the Ministries of Culture,Research and Education. It forms a part of theinformation technology plan ‘Info 2000’ issuedby the Danish government. DEF has as its mainobjective to provide users with relevant researchinformation, regardless of where the researcheror the information is located. Through thewebsite of the DEF the user can access subjectgroups, library catalogues and electronic jour-nals, as well as the homepages of participatinglibraries and links. The participants are most ofthe Danish research libraries that in one way or

NORDIC COUNTRIES 451

another are involved with the development of acomprehensive national virtual library.In Finland the Finnish National Electronic

Library, (FinELib) was formally launched in1998. The development of FinELib is in line withthe national information policy that the FinnishMinistry of Education has published, called‘Education, training and research in the informa-tion society. A National Strategy 2000–2004’,where there is an emphasis on content produc-tion and on developing learning environments.FinELib has three main goals, which are (1) toincrease the amount of information available tousers, (2) to improve information retrieval fromthe Internet, and (3) to develop a graphical userinterface to facilitate user access to heteroge-neous information sources. FinELib is a consor-tium of universities, trade schools, researchinstitutes and public libraries. The consortium isfinanced partly by the government and partly bythe libraries themselves. The electronic libraryforms a part of the National Library that is alsothe Library of the University of Helsinki and isoperated as an integral part of that library but alldevelopments are done in co-operation with theconsortium partners. It has mainly been active inacquiring and making accessible a variety ofelectronic material (licences) such as journalsand databases.The National and University Library of Ice-

land is the country’s largest – and in fact the only– research library with substantial collections. Ithas been in a leading position in developing theelectronic library and has been very active indigitizing old, unique Icelandic material, includ-ing maps and manuscripts (Saganet). The countryhas chosen a common automated library system,Aleph, which is to be used in all libraries of thecountry. Nationwide contracts have been signedwith international vendors. Everybody in thewhole country with access to the Internet hasaccess to the licensed electronic journals anddatabases.One of the most important national digital

projects in Norway is Cultural Network Norway(Kulturnett). This project aims at strengtheningco-operation and development among libraries,archives and museums, as well as educationaland research institutions. Library Network Nor-way is a project that is administered by theNorwegian Directorate for Public Libraries butlinked to the Cultural Network. Its purpose is toserve as a gateway to all Norwegian libraries.

In Sweden, SVEBIB, the Swedish ElectronicResearch Library, is administered by BIBSAM.SVEBIB is expected to include all types ofelectronic resources that are relevant to theSwedish research and higher-education commu-nities, and make these available to all students,teachers, scientists and scholars of the Swedishuniversity system. SVEBIB has been defined as acollection of Web-based electronic resources usedin research and higher education that are madeavailable as broadly as possible within a countryvia the Internet.All the countries carry out their own develop-

mental projects aimed at the digital library, someof which have become Nordic and receivedNordic financial support through NORDINFO.One can mention Tiden, the Nordic DigitalNewspaper Library, i.e. newspapers from theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries that havebeen digitized from microfilms. Another projectis NORDVEST, the digitization of old printedmaterial from Iceland, Greenland and the FaeroeIslands. This is considered to be unique materialthat requires the development of new technicalsolutions due to the different languages. SVUC,the Scandinavian Virtual Union Catalogue, is aproject partially financed by NORDINFO withthe ultimate goal to provide a virtual single pointof access to the union catalogues and nationalbibliographies in the Nordic countries.

Library education

Nordic library education is undergoing radicalchanges. In Sweden, Norway and Denmark theformer largest library schools are being trans-ferred to the university levels and are hiring theirfirst professors. Finland and Iceland have hadtheir library education on a university level for along time. In this area the Nordic countries haveestablished a network, NordISNET (Nordic In-formation Studies Research Education Network),with representation from all the library schools.The aim of the network is to enhance Nordic andBaltic research education in information studiesby pooling the mentoring expertise for specificsupervision and teaching, and by creating acritical mass of doctoral students for organizingcourses and by exchanging doctoral students. Byorganizing courses, workshops and supervision,and by publicizing and supporting participationin the national research courses, the networkassists the participating institutions to form more

452 NORDIC COUNTRIES

comprehensive, specialized and tailored doctoralprogrammes for their own doctoral students.


Although all the Nordic countries have theirown library associations, often divided ac-cording to types of libraries, there is also muchactivity at Nordic level. The Nordic Federationof Research Libraries Associations (NVBF) wasfounded in 1947 and has been very active eversince. Today the following national researchlibrary associations are affiliated to the Federa-tion and the members of all of them areautomatically attached to the Federation: Fore-ningen af Medarbejdere ved Danmarks For-skningsbiblioteker (Association of StaffMembers of Research Libraries in Denmark);Suomen Tieteellinen Kirjastoseura (The FinnishResearch Library Association); Upplýsing – Félagbókasafns-og upplýsingafræða (Information – theIcelandic Library and Information Science Asso-ciation); Norsk fagbibliotekforening (The Nor-wegian Association of Special Libraries); SvenskBiblioteksförening (The Swedish Library Associa-tion). The main objective of NVBF is tostrengthen the co-operation between staff mem-bers of the Nordic research libraries and in thisway also to improve the contact between theirlibraries as institutions. This objective is encour-aged by the holding of joint Nordic librarymeetings, conferences and summer schools ineach of the member countries. A general con-ference for all members is organized every threeyears, the aim of which is professional briefingthrough lectures and discussions that will enablethe participants to take a stand on librarymatters of current interest.

On the international level, Nordic librarianshave been very active in IFLA as well as FID andEBLIDA where they have been strong advocatesof Nordic values in library services.

The most important common feature of libraryservices in the Nordic countries is the concept offree and equal access to documents and informa-tion, both for the present and the future popula-tion. This policy is supported by nationalinformation policies and national legislation in-cluding legislation on copyright and legal depos-its. In all the Nordic countries the library systemis instrumental in guaranteeing active participa-tion in the democratic processes.

Further reading

Nordic websites:www.nordinfo.helsinki.fi/index.htm.www.dpb.dpu.dk/df/nvbf_eng.html#intro.www.bs.dk/index.ihtml.www.info.uta.fi/informaatio/nordisnet/.Denmark:www.bs.dk/index.ihtml.www.deflink.dk/.Finland:www.lib.helsinki.fi/english/index.htm.hul.helsinki.fi/finelib.www.jyu.fi/~library/virtuaalikirjasto/engvirli.htm.Iceland:www.bok.hi.is/english/third.htm.Norway:www.rbt.no/.www.bibtils.no/index.htm.Sweden:www.kb.se/bibsam/.www.kb.se/svebib/.

SEE ALSO: library co-operation; libraryeducation; national libraries

SIGRÚN KLARA HANNESDÓTTIR

NORTH AMERICAN LIBRARIESAND LIBRARIANSHIP

The changing environment of librariesand librarianship in the USA and Canada

North American libraries have been adapting toa rapidly changing technological environment forthe last quarter of a century. Complicatingrevolutionary changes in information and com-munication technologies have been burgeoningamounts of information, changes in the publish-ing industry, rising costs, competition for finan-cial resources and changing demographics, bothwithin the field and in the general population.Digital information production and delivery,especially the Web, has provided new sets ofchallenges and opportunities. Whilst the virtuallibrary has grown by leaps and bounds, thelibrary as place is being reaffirmed.

The digital environment

As the twenty-first century begins, libraries of alltypes have been transformed by the pervasivenessof information and communication technologies.The Web, which made its debut in the early1990s, has revolutionized most library functions.

NORTH AMERICAN LIBRARIES AND LIBRARIANSHIP 453

Some special libraries rely solely on informa-tion accessible through the Internet.Library users now can check library holdings

(both of their local and of remote libraries),request interlibrary lending items, receivedocuments, access reserve reading materials forcollege courses and sometimes gain access toentire electronic books without leaving theirhomes or dormitories.Librarians select and digitize resources to post

on the specially designed sites on the World WideWeb for sharing with users anywhere in theworld, making unique or fragile materials widelyavailable. They select digital resources created byothers and make them available to their usersthrough subject-specific or audience-specific Webguides, applying traditional skills to a newformat. Some librarians respond to referencequestions posed by electronic mail or throughthe Web, while a few offer a real-time electronicreference service. Some academic librariesnow measure the number of ‘hits’ to their variousdatabases and Web pages as well as the numberof people who enter through their physical doors.More than 95 per cent of all public libraries inthe USA and virtually all academic librariesprovide public access Internet connections, ac-cording to government reports by McClure andBertot. Many have Internet rooms or computerlaboratories where users can have assistance inlocating and using digital resources. The prolif-eration of information of questionable value hasprompted a movement to provide instruction ininformation literacy, or how to be a skilfuland critical consumer of information, not just inacademic and school libraries, but also inpublic libraries.It has also prompted a movement, in the USA

strengthened by a series of legislative enactments,to place software ‘filters’ (see filtering) onInternet browsers in public and school librariesin an effort to protect minors from exposure topornographic materials. The US CommunicationsDecency Act was struck down, and the Chil-dren’s Internet Protection Act has been chal-lenged in court by the American LibraryAssociation and its allies. The ALA maintainsthat filters limit adults to reading suitable forchildren and deny access to valuable materialseven for children, and, furthermore, that they arenot effective at screening out undesirable materi-als. It recommends Internet use policies, alsoadopted by many Canadian libraries, as an

alternative. Nevertheless, significant numbers oflibraries offer filtering software on computersintended for use by children, and some smallpercentage have installed it on all computers.The vulnerability of children to people who

might glean information about them throughtheir interactions with the World Wide Web hasalso highlighted the issue of privacy in thedigital world. Not only do Web-based companiesgather personally identifiable information fromusers for their own purposes, but also some havesold this information to others without users’knowledge. In addition, the ease of compilingpersonal information through Web search en-gines has made privacy a major concern oflibrarians and others. Especially in the wake ofterrorist attacks on the USA in September 2001,librarians have had to re-examine and re-affirmtheir policies on confidentiality of library re-cords, especially since some of the alleged terror-ists were said to have used library computers tocarry out their planning.Although free access to Internet-connected

computers poses problems at times, the highprice of desirable materials that can be accessedthrough the Web also is problematic. The hugecosts associated with the many electronic in-dexes, abstracts and full-text, numeric, or evenimage databases made available to library usershave added shared licence (see licences) agree-ments to the many extant types of resourcesharing – such as reciprocal borrowing privileges;regional union lists; shared cataloguing throughOCLC, RLIN and the National Library ofCanada; and courier and document deliveryservices. Licensing of databases by state-wide orregional library consortia has become common-place, and librarians have had to learn skills ofcontract and licence negotiation as part of theirmaterials acquisitions practices.

The economic, political and legalenvironments

These databases pose other problems for librar-ians, however, as content aggregators continue totry to replace copyright law with contract law,subverting the ‘fair use’ doctrine. Copyright,‘click-through’ or ‘shrink-wrap’ licences for digi-tal products, and issues surrounding cost-per-use,are very much in contention, especially in theUSA, where the Digital Millennium CopyrightAct (DMCA) and the Sonny Bono Copyright Act,

454 NORTH AMERICAN LIBRARIES AND LIBRARIANSHIP

which extends copyright to the life of the creatorplus ninety years, are being challenged in thecourts. Librarians contend that these revisions ofcopyright, and the use of ‘digital rights manage-ment’ technologies to enforce these rights, willlead to ever more commodification of informa-tion, thereby widening the ‘digital divide’ andinhibiting the creation of new knowledge. Boththe ALA and the Canadian Library Associationhave adopted policies to help ensure equitableand universal access to information.Content aggregators – publishers – and librar-

ians continue also to be at odds over the costs oflibrary materials. During the last two decades ofthe twentieth century, many book and journalpublishers merged with media and entertainmentcompanies, forming huge multinational corpora-tions, whose perspectives differ widely fromtraditional publishers, thus reducing effectivecompetition. The historic co-operative relation-ship of librarians and publishers has becomeincreasingly strained; perhaps only in the areasof children’s literature and opposition to censor-ship does it survive in relatively good health.Serials prices, in particular those in science and

technology, but in other areas as well, havecontinued to increase at a rate much greater thanthe rate of inflation. At the same time, publishershave tried to impose contract limitations on theuse of their journals. Librarians, however, havenot simply reacted, but – in addition to thenecessary cancellations of many titles based onuse of sophisticated management data such ascost-per-use of individual titles – have utilizednew digital technologies to launch competitorjournals. The Association for Research Libraries’Scholarly Publications and Academic ResourcesCoalition (SPARC), the largest such initiative, isan example of the way in which libraries aretrying to use new technologies to seize theinitiative to provide the best information at thelowest possible cost.Providing more with less has become a fact of

life for most North American libraries. Althoughthe 1990s were a period of relative prosperity,competition for revenues and a public generallyunsympathetic to increased taxes has meantcontinued constraints for many libraries. Theearly twenty-first century saw an economicdownturn that put additional duress on bothprivately and publicly funded libraries. Underpressure to improve the bottom line, corpora-tions have asked their libraries to document their

value. Public or academic libraries have forseveral years sought collaborations with othercommunity agencies or corporate funders, atrend that concerns some who prefer that li-braries not be allied with any particular view-point or brand. Training librarians for advocacyon behalf of libraries has become increasinglyimportant. In spite of scarce resources, however,many communities have raised revenues to buildor renovate public libraries or to add branches innew city neighbourhoods, as Chicago, Illinois,has done.In fact, the library as place seems to have

gained in importance, in spite of librarians’ fearsthat it would become obsolete. Vendors of elec-tronic books and other library resources appear tobe less of a threat, at least to date, than initiallyperceived. The bankrupt e-book company netLi-brary was acquired by the non-profit library co-operative OCLC in January 2002. Questia, a fee-based library-like vendor of books and articlesthat went live in January 2001, had laid off three-fourths of its workforce by November of thatsame year. While many young people turn first tothe World Wide Web for information, and whilethe online bookstores, Amazon.com and Barnesand Noble.com have raised a good deal ofconcern and given librarians different models ofservice, libraries are heavily used. Americanscheck out an average of seven books per personannually; reference librarians in academic andpublic libraries answer more than 7 millionquestions weekly, according to statistics gatheredby ALA’s Office for Research and Statistics.Libraries and librarians continue to play theirtraditional role of providing access to informa-tion, but now use new skills and new technologiesto do so – and serve much different populationsthan in the past.

Changing library workforce

Continuing professional development opportu-nities to enable librarians to keep up with theever-changing skills needed in today’s library hasbecome a major issue throughout North Amer-ica. Schools of library and information science,consortia and professional associations, as wellas various commercial vendors, all providecourses aimed at the library profession. Technol-ogy, advocacy and change management coursesare much in demand.Helping librarianship look more like the

NORTH AMERICAN LIBRARIES AND LIBRARIANSHIP 455

diverse populations libraries serve has become amajor focus of the ALA and of library education.Since 1998 Spectrum scholarships have assistedstudents of colour to attend ALA-accreditedschools in the USA and Canada. In addition totrying to meet the need for librarians of colour,the profession is facing an ageing workforce:more than 25 per cent of US librarians will reachsixty-five by 2009; the median age of librarianswas forty-seven, the highest for any occupation,according to 2000 US Census figures. Alreadyacademic and public libraries face criticalshortages in some areas. In 2001 the ALAplacement centre at annual conference posted831 position openings and had only 260 appli-cants. Although the worsening economy hasslowed hiring in some areas, it is clear that theshortage persists and will worsen.

Although a number of library schools closed inthe 1980s, school closings cannot be blamed forthe shortage. The vast majority survived andreinvented themselves as schools of library andinformation science, with curricula embeddedfirmly in information and communication tech-nologies. Most are thriving and some, like Flor-ida State University and Washington University,have grown quite dramatically. Some havedropped the name ‘library’ in order to commu-nicate that their graduates are not bound to aparticular type of institution and possess a widearray of information technology skills and per-

spectives. Several are delivering courses to distantlearners through Web-based technologies. Anumber have instituted undergraduate ‘informa-tion studies’ degrees. All are coping with the needfor graduates to have both traditional libraryskills of materials selection, cataloguing, refer-ence provision and the like, and the new skillsconnected with the digital library – not onlyInternet searching skills, but skills of digitization,Web design and so on. Graduates with suchskills, however, are often able to get morelucrative non-library positions with the govern-ment, technology firms and other kinds of cor-porations. In addition, in the digital environment,libraries, archives and museums are converging.The new US Institute for Museum and LibraryServices reflects that convergence through itsfunding priorities. Skills applicable to the selec-tion and digitization of library materials can beput to good use in archives and museum settings.The number of schools providing students withopportunities to specialize in archival or museumstudies is increasing. Thus, while schools oflibrary and information science enrol more stu-dents than ever before, the combination of agreying workforce and a wide array of positionsto choose from both within and outside librariesand other cultural institutions has created agrowing shortage of librarians to cope with anincreasingly complicated library environment.

LOUISE S. ROBBINS

456 NORTH AMERICAN LIBRARIES AND LIBRARIANSHIP

O

OBJECT-ORIENTED TECHNOLOGY

Objects store computerized data. However,unlike standard computer record and field struc-tures, which store only data, objects store bothdata and the set of procedures that can operateon that data. Storage of data and procedurestogether is known as encapsulation. Data storedin objects can only be manipulated by means ofmessages to the stored procedures for that data.A class is a group of objects that store identicalprocedures and data. A subclass of objectsderived from an object class inherits the proce-dures and data for that object class and can addprocedures and/or data of its own.

Origins

Object-oriented technology appeared in compu-ter science in the early 1980s as a better meansof developing software. Encapsulation couldproduce reliable, fully documented objects thatcould be used by more than one piece of soft-ware. Object classes, and the hierarchy of sub-classes that could be constructed using them,helped programmers organize and develop thefunctions and routines that habitually appearedin their software. Object-oriented technology wasalso ideal for handling the complexity of buildinga graphic user interface for software. Mostprogramming languages now handle objectseither natively or through extensions (e.g. Cþþis an extension of C which includes objects).

Applications

More recently object-oriented technology hasmoved into two areas that have implications forcomputerized information management. The first

area is object-oriented databases and the struc-tured documents they can store. The second areais the change in focus of operating-systemsfunction, from giving primacy to supportingapplications like word processors or spreadsheetsthat manipulate data, to giving primacy to thedata itself. This data is typically stored in anobject-oriented manner. Operating systems thatdo this are known as ‘document-centred systems’.These two areas are converging.

STRUCTURED DOCUMENTS

standards specifications exist for structureddocuments. The two most notable ones are OpenDocument Architecture (ODA), typically used inoffice automation and Standard GeneralizedMark-up Language (SGML), used in electronicpublishing. Both these standards concentrate ondescribing document content rather than appear-ance. Neither standard is particularly suited toimplementation using relational databases, asthese databases use records and fields to storedata. However, object-oriented databases appearto be not only much better suited to handlingtext retrieval functions on structured docu-ments, but also able to integrate multimediadata (e.g. images) and hypermedia links(Heather and Rossiter 1989).

DOCUMENT-CENTRED SYSTEMS

Object-oriented databases are just beginning tomake a commercial impact. Structured documenthandling is still in its infancy. By contrast,document-centred capabilities are already presentin many leading operating systems, for example,Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) in Micro-soft Windows. There is intense commercial com-petition to improve the object-orientation of

basic operating-system functions (Lu 1992).There is a vendor-neutral standards body, theObject Management Group (OMG), but this hasnot stopped vendors from fostering their ownstandards.

References

Heather, M.A. and Rossiter, B.N. (1989) ‘Theoreticalstructures for object-based text’, in WOODMAN’89: Workshop on Object-oriented Document Ma-nipulation, AFCET, pp. 178–92.

Lu, C. (1992) ‘Objects for end users’, Byte (December):143–52.

Further reading

Bhalla, N. (1991) ‘Object-oriented data models: Aperspective and comparative view’, Journal of In-formation Science 17: 145–60 [a good introductionto object-oriented technology in general and object-oriented databases in particular].

Furuta, R. (1989) ‘An object-based taxonomy forabstract structure in document models’, ComputerJournal 32(6): 494–504 [a wide-ranging paper ad-dressing the theoretical aspects of applying objects tostructured document handling].


ALAN POULTER

OCLC

An enormous networked database consisting ofrecords from US and UK marc, and recordscreated by member libraries for material notcovered by the MARC files. It began as OhioCollege Library Centre, founded in 1967, but, inrecognition of its much expanded membershipoutside Ohio, has since 1981 been known asOnline Computer Library Center. Over the yearsit has provided a wide range of services, includ-ing a microcomputer-based serials control sys-tem, a circulation control system and an onlinepublic-access catalogue (see opacs) system.OCLC is a major source of catalogue data forlibraries throughout the world.

SEE ALSO: Kilgour, Frederick Gridley

OCR

OCR (optical character recognition) is a techni-que for machine recognition of printed or typedcharacters based on their appearance. The char-acters to be identified are electronically scanned;

the image of each character is analysed and, ifrecognizable, is then converted into the equiva-lent internal character code. OCR technologysuccessfully permits the reading of documentscontaining a mixture of fonts in different sizesand styles. The output is a digital file that canbe handled by the computer as if it had beenkeyboarded.


OFFICE AUTOMATION

Office automation has been defined as the‘planned integration of new technologies withoffice processes to increase the productivity andeffectiveness of all knowledge workers’ (Hicks1995). In this context, knowledge workersare those employees, including managers, pro-fessionals, secretaries and clerks, whose respon-sibilities largely focus upon the processing oftext and data. Office automation is a genericterm that covers all aspects of text, imageand even voice processing supported by commu-nications software within the office environ-ment.

Background

The use of information and communicationtechnology and information systems tosupport the effective management of libraries isnow commonplace throughout the world. Onearea that computer-based technology can bemost productively applied in is the area ofautomating all of a library’s many clerical andoffice-based procedures. The office is a particu-larly appropriate area for computerization be-cause of the huge quantities of paperwork thatare routinely processed. The long-term objectiveof office automation is to replace many of theoffice functions that required reams of paperand filing cabinets full of documents with thecreation of an office that is largely paperless(Sedacca 1991). Although much progress hasbeen made in the development of office automa-tion software, the creation of a paperless officeis still a long way off. The remainder of thisarticle examines the principal technologies in-volved in office automation and then identifiesthe major organizational issues relating to itsimplementation.

458 OCLC

Primary office automation technologies

There is currently a wide variety of computer-based applications available that may supportthe automation of office activities in most typesof organizations, including libraries. Each of themajor technologies is briefly reviewed below.

WORD PROCESSING

Word processing refers to the software andhardware required to create, store, edit and printdocuments. Such systems are the single mostcommon application of information technologyto office work. Word processing greatly simplifiesthe task of creating and revising documents, asthey need to be typed in only once, and may thenbe revised as many times as necessary. One of themost important facilities available within word-processing packages is their ability to merge textand data. This facility, for example, allows datasuch as a library member’s name, address anddetails of overdue books to be merged with textin a standard recall letter.

DESKTOP PUBLISHING (DTP)

desktop publishing packages are ones that cansupport the integration of text, data, charts andgraphics in order to design, display and printhigh-quality documents comparable to thoseproduced by professional typesetters.

ELECTRONIC MAIL

electronic mail systems such as e-mail (Horten1992) are used for the transmission, storage anddistribution of text material in electronic formover a communications network. Electronic mailtherefore facilitates organizational communica-tions as it enables managers to communicateeffectively with large groups of employees in acost-effective manner. More sophisticated formsof electronic mail are now becoming available, inwhich the sender records a spoken message thatis digitized before being transmitted to therecipient. The recipient may then command themessage to be reconverted into a spoken formwhen ready to hear it. Such systems are knownas voice mail systems (VMS).

FACSIMILE

The facsimile, or fax, is where the telephonesystem is used for the transmission and receipt ofhard-copy documents, in a fast and relativelycheap manner.

ELECTRONIC CALENDARS

Typically electronic calendars, or diaries, keeptrack of appointments for individuals. However,electronic calendars are increasing in sophistica-tion, and they can now be used to organizemeetings automatically by searching the indivi-dual diaries of all required attendees to determinewhen a mutually satisfactory meeting can beinitiated.

CONFERENCING SOFTWARE

Meetings requiring the attendance of manyindividuals from a variety of locations can bedifficult, time-consuming and costly to arrangeand conduct. Consequently, much effort hasbeen directed towards finding ways of utilizinginformation technology to allow conferences totake place without the attendees leaving theirown offices. Automated conferences can takeplace on a number of levels, from the fairlybasic, where electronic mail is used to exchangeideas and data with regard to a specific issue, tothe very sophisticated, where a two-way, full-motion video and audio link is activated. Thelatter type of conferencing is known as video-conferencing.

DOCUMENT IMAGE PROCESSING (DIP)

This is where information technology is appliedto the task of capturing, storing, processing andretrieving images that may include data, text,graphics, documents, photographs and evenhandwriting. Document image processing offersthe potential to use optical scanners, massstorage devices and PC networks to replace theoffice paper mountain (Bird 1993).

The integration of office automationsoftware

The various text, voice and image-processingtools are typically run on personal computersusing ‘off the shelf’ packaged software. Tooperate most effectively, these applications arethen interconnected, typically using a LAN,which is a telecommunications system thatencompasses a relatively small area such as abuilding or group of buildings. Originally, officeautomation systems were largely isolated fromother commercial systems. Most users and sup-pliers of office automation software now recog-nize that its full potential can only be realized ifit is fully integrated with other information

OFFICE AUTOMATION 459

systems applications, so that an organization’sdata may be directly incorporated into reports,documents and correspondence (Lawrence 1990).Furthermore, office applications may be directlylinked to online information services, so that up-to-date information may be directly incorporatedinto documents.The utilization of office automation software,

integrated with other applications, offers organi-zations the opportunity greatly to increase theefficiency and productivity of their office opera-tions. Libraries are prime candidates for theintroduction of such technologies because of thelarge quantities of paperwork that are generatedand processed within their offices.

References

Bird, J. (1993) ‘Going for a DTP’, Computer Weekly(19 August): 21–2.

Hicks, G.W. (1995) Information Systems for Managers,West.

Horten, M. (1992) ‘Mail models’, Computing (18June): 24–5.

Lawrence, A. (1990) ‘Office practices that need inte-grated architectures’, Computing (15 November):30–2.

Sedacca, B. (1991) ‘Desk bound systems’, Network(June): 125–34.

Further reading

Thorne, T.J. (1991) Office Automation: The Barriersand Opportunities, Touche Ross [a good introduc-tory text].

SEE ALSO: computer science; informatics;records management

NEIL F. DOHERTY

OFFICIAL PUBLICATIONS

A document that has to be produced in multiplecopies in an appropriate reprographic process byan organization considered to be an official bodythat is making it available to a wider public. If an‘official body’ comprises any organization fundedby or accountable to government, then anyconsideration of official publications must in-clude grey literature. Similarly, because inter-national organizations and local or stategovernments are funded by national govern-ments, they too must be considered to be officialpublishers. After defining an official body, IFLA(in Johansson 1982) stated that ‘An officialpublication is defined by the status of the issuing

source regardless of the subject matter or con-tent’.The effect of this definition has been to include

many thousands of documents once judged to betoo transitory to be included in the opus of acountry’s national publishing. This category ofdocument is now universally defined as greyliterature. Since the definition was originallydrafted, an unforeseen development has been thediversity of publication and the format of pub-lication. Government information is routinelysold in microform (see microforms) or on cd-rom databases: free information is published onthe internet or as photocopies.

Range

Official publications include not only those thatdisseminate legislative, regulatory and statisticalinformation but also those that propose, stateand review policy and which publish the resultsof government research. Legislative documentsnormally exclude works specifically for legalpractitioners but include primary and secondarylegislation, bills and debates (like Hansard in theUK). Regulatory documents like treaties, circu-lars and guidelines comprise a large proportionof official publishing. The EC publishes much ofits detailed regulatory and legislative informationnot as individual documents but in a multipartserial, Official Journal of the European Commu-nities. Policy documents cover the entire range ofgovernment activity. The most influential of theseare reviewed on an annual basis in the sixth issueof each volume of the Journal of GovernmentInformation.

Publishers

The size and variety of official publishers repeat-edly cause a problem for the citizen who wishesto access official information. Normally, eachcountry has its own government publisher (likethe Government Printing Office in the USA andHMSO in the UK). Such publishers will usuallyprovide subscription services to enable librariesto buy their whole output or publications on aspecific subject. These documents will normallycross government departmental boundaries.Smaller government publishers, however, mayonly disseminate documents from a single gov-ernment department or agency of, quite often, asingle office. These documents are known as‘departmental publications’ and often do not

460 OFFICIAL PUBLICATIONS

conform to normal bibliographical or book-tradestandards. For the librarian, access, biblio-graphic control and availability of depart-mental publications is a greater challenge thanthe control of central government publishing.Departmental publications have beendescribed as ‘fugitive publications’ because oftheir transitory nature. The publications of inter-national organizations and local or state autho-rities have many of the features of departmentalpublications. Some organizations like the UnitedNations have a catalogue of all their publishedand semi-published documents. Obviously, manyorganizations work over a wide geographicalarea and so central sales offices cannotbe established. These bodies may have salesagencies with other commercial or governmentpublishers, but the lack of comprehensive catalo-gues of publications and the divergent number ofsmall publishers within an organization make itimpossible to expect a comprehensive service.

Electronic publication

Electronic access to government information dur-ing the 1970s and 1980s was only through onlinedatabases. Relevant ones were normally biblio-graphies of particular publishers. The importantsubject databases (with the notable exception ofERIC) excluded any coverage of official publica-tions. CD-ROM databases brought the advan-tages of low-cost electronic storage, access anddistribution for the more esoteric datasets. Initi-ally CD-ROMs containing bibliographical orstatistical databases were published, but slowlyofficial publishers started to produce full-textdatabases. At about the same time, in the early1990s, access to online databases started todecline and some services were discontinued.The development of Internet databases is an

indicator of future trends. Although full-textdocuments are regularly made available, it re-mains to be seen whether they will remainpermanently so. The purpose of posting informa-tion on a network will vary between individualagencies: some will use it to draw attention tonew information or publications; others will useit as a public relations tool; and some will try totransmit neutral and necessary information totheir public. The quality and purpose of thesehome pages is variable, with a few of themproviding effective links to a wide range of otherinformation providers. The White House page

(www.whitehouse.gov/) in the USA and those ofthe Open Government initiative (www.open.gov.uk/) in the UK are good examples. The libraryof congress pages (lcweb.loc.gov/) are arguablythe best pages for government information in theworld.

Resources

In the USA, the Depository Library Programensures that over 1,400 public and academiclibraries receive, free of charge, the entire pub-lishing output, or a selection of it, from theGovernment Printing Office. This is to ensurecitizen access to all government publishing. Thereis no equivalent system in the UK and the onlylibrary with a collection that comprehensivelycovers both the grey as well as the mainstreampublishing is the british library. All nationallibraries profess to have a comprehensive col-lection of their national official output, but theincreasing amount of departmental publishing,grey literature and electronic products is makingsuccess hard to achieve. The primary journals inthe field are published in the USA, the Journal ofGovernment Information is published by Elsevierand JAI Press publish Government InformationQuarterly; both are international in scope.

References

Johansson, E. (1982) ‘The definition of an officialpublication’, IFLA Journal 8: 393–5.

Further reading

Butcher, D. (1991) Official Publications in Britain, 2nd

edn, LAPL.Cherns, J.J. (1979) Official Publishing: An Overview,Pergamon.

Hernon, P. and McClure, C.R. (1988) Public Access toGovernment Information, 2nd edn, Ablex.

SEE ALSO: e-government; government publishing

ALASTAIR J. ALLAN

OFFICIAL SECRECY

The practice of governments everywhere ofdenying their citizens, and, by the same means,the citizens of other countries, access to certaininformation, in government possession or alreadycirculating, which they allege will be harmful tothe state, the government, the nation or someparticular part of any of these.

OFFICIAL SECRECY 461

Secrecy in totalitarian states

The security apparatus of the totalitarian ordictatorial state not only extends to suppressionof comment and discussion amongst its citizens,so as to hinder or prevent the development ofeffective opposition, but also includes the protec-tion of secrets, both within and without itsfrontiers. Typically, a proliferation of secretservice agencies and units, answerable only to apresident, a junta or a political party, will pursuesuspected dissidents with an apparatus of infor-mers and surveillance procedures, sometimesoperating within the framework of the law, butfrequently recognizing no limitation on theirability to detain, torture and kill those theysuspect of offences or who threaten their power.They will also combat the agents of other powersthat are seen to threaten the security of the stateand, in turn, seek to obtain military intelli-gence and other information about these rivals.The whole espionage and counter-espionageoperation has spawned a massively popular genreof books, films and TV programmes, so thatgenuine agencies such as the CIA, KGB, Mossador MI5 are merged in the popular consciousnesswith a host of other fictional ones. Real examplesof the action of government agencies in theprotection of official secrecy and suppression ofdissent can be drawn from all over the world,very frequently despite the explicit provisions oftheir constitution and laws (Article Nineteen1991).

Secrecy in the USA

The association of official secrecy and dictator-ship should not be allowed to mask the impor-tance of official secrecy in democracies too.Arguably the least secretive government in theworld is that of the USA, where the FirstAmendment to the Constitution prohibits Con-gress from ‘abridging the freedom of speech, orof the press’. However, the USA does have lawson libel, obscenity, national security and accessto government information that limit this consti-tutional freedom. The 1966 Freedom of Informa-tion Act (FOIA) provides mechanisms for thecitizen to gain access held by government and itsagencies, but if the government does not wishsome aspect of its work to be subject to publicscrutiny, it is able to put into effect the NationalSecurity Decision Directive (NSDD). During the

Reagan presidency, for instance, this form ofsecret decree was used approximately 300 times.Additionally, the classes of documents exemptfrom the FOIA were expanded during this period,and security classification of documents aboutagencies such as the FBI and the CIA becamemore usual. On occasion this was extended todocuments already held in libraries and untilthen regarded as being in the public domain(Bamford 1983).

Secrecy in Britain

Even more secretive, and perhaps the mostsecretive of all democratic states, is the UK,which has a strongly established culture ofofficial secrecy. British legislation is pervadedby restrictions on access to one category ofinformation or another, and government agen-cies routinely withhold information, the releaseof which might not be considered harmful, butwhich, in their judgement, would not be helpfulto the enquirer. Government ministers can sup-press information that they are advised may bedamaging to national interests by the use ofPublic Interest Immunity Certificates (PIICs).The media, in turn, operate under a number ofrestrictions, including the attention of the De-fence, Press and Broadcasting Committee, whichseeks out forthcoming books, articles and broad-casts with defence implications. If the Commit-tee feels an item is likely to be damaging tonational security, it can then issue a ‘D Notice’to prevent its appearance. Additionally, the lawcourts have the power to postpone or banpublication of information that they feel mightthreaten the administration of justice. Mostnotoriously, the UK Home Secretary in 1988banned the broadcasting of words spoken by therepresentatives of Irish ‘terrorist’ organizations.Archives are also affected, and documents arenot opened to researchers for a period afterdeposit: the British public record office im-poses a standard thirty years, but as much as 3per cent of the documentation received by thePRO is restricted indefinitely or for specifiedperiods such as 100 years. The general tendencytowards concealment was scarcely dented by thegovernment Code of Practice on Access toInformation, which came into effect in April1994. Its replacement, the Freedom of Informa-tion Act 2000, is not scheduled to come into fulloperation until 2005.

462 OFFICIAL SECRECY

At the apex of the system of secrecy in Britainis the Official Secrets Act, the current version ofwhich was passed in 1989. The Act applies tomembers of the security and intelligence ser-vices, and other government employees andcontractors who might possess potentially dama-ging information. It binds them to secrecy forlife on a whole range of official information, butmost particularly defence, the secret service andinternational relations. Also amongst those cov-ered can be librarians in British governmentemploy. The Act tends to be enforced as strictlyas possible. Thus, for instance, in 1997 a formerMI5 official, David Shayler, felt obliged to leavethe country to avoid prosecution when he madepublic allegations that the agency regularlyexceeded its powers. Whilst Shayler was beingpursued under the law, details of his allegationswere published in other countries and distribu-ted via the Internet. Unable to obtain hisextradition under the criminal law provisions ofthe Act, the government turned to actions underthe civil law (infringement of copyright, breachof contract and of confidence) as alternatives.Whilst the actions against Shayler dragged on,information service providers and providers ofInternet access (such as libraries) were forced tocalculate the risk involved in making availablethe information that was the source of thedispute. The situation was similar to the earliercase of Spycatcher by Peter Wright (1987),which had made similar revelations to those ofShayler. Although published in Australia, thebook allegedly offended against British officialsecrecy law. The British government soughtthrough the law courts not merely to preventpublication in Britain, but to suppress it inAustralia, and stop copies entering the country(Turnbull 1988). Whilst the government’s ulti-mately unsuccessful actions were in progress,librarians who placed it on their shelves hadreason to feel that they too were at risk. Suchcases show up the tension between secrecy andconcealment in a country with notionally un-censored media and libraries free from outsideinterference.

References

Article Nineteen (1991) Information, Freedom andCensorship, Library Association.

Bamford, J. (1983) The Puzzle Palace: A Report onAmerica’s Most Secret Agency, Viking.

Turnbull, M. (1988) The Spycatcher Trial, Heinemann.

Wright, P. (1987) Spycatcher: The Candid Autobio-graphy of a Senior Intelligence Officer, Viking.

Further reading

Rogers, A. (1997) Secrecy and Power in the BritishState: A History of the British Official Secrets Act1911–1989, Pluto Press.

SEE ALSO: freedom of information

PAUL STURGES

ONE-PERSON LIBRARY

The term used to describe a library or informa-tion service run by one individual, often withlittle or no assistance. Other terms used todescribe this include the solo librarian, thesingleton post and the one-man band. The lastmentioned was not seen as being a sexist term bythose who use it in the UK, according torepresentatives of ASLIB’s One-Man Band(OMB) special interest group. It has its originsin entertainment terminology, describing a personwho carried and played a multitude of musicalinstruments. It has also been applied morebroadly to describe anyone running a smallbusiness without supporting staff. The SpecialLibraries Association of the USA defines ‘sololibrarians’ as ‘information managers withoutprofessional peers in the same organization’. Theterm ‘singleton post’ is used in UK governmentlibraries and is seen as ‘one in which thepostholder is the only professional in the library’(Burge 1995).

Employing organizations

The term ‘one-person library’ (OPL) is usedlargely to refer to those library or informationunits that exist within what are commonlydescribed as special libraries, e.g. withincommercial and industrial organizations; profes-sional practices; membership associations; gov-ernment departments or agencies; voluntarybodies and other types of organization, excludingpublic libraries. Around 95 per cent of themembership of ASLIB’s OMB group works inspecial libraries. Although there are probablymany small branches within public library ser-vices that are operated by a single member ofstaff, that individual would not be likely to bethe only library worker within the parent organi-zation, as is often the case in special libraries. He

ONE-PERSON LIBRARY 463

or she would be part of the overall staffingwithin the network of units that make up eacharea’s public library service, thereby havingaccess to other colleagues and probably workingas part of a team.

Staff support

Single operators, more than any other group ofinformation workers, seem to be strongly awareof the importance of professional contact andinteraction in combating the feeling of profes-sional isolation (Shuter 1984). Membership ofinterest groups such as the ASLIB one alreadymentioned or, in the USA, the Solo Librarians’Division of the Special Libraries Association,provides such contact in the form of a networkof like-minded LIS workers. In addition to thegroups set up specifically with the solo operatorin mind, formal and informal subject interestgroups are also likely to have a number of sololibrarians among their membership. Those em-ployed in OPLs find networking invaluable,providing considerable stimulus for new think-ing, with the chance to test new ideas and seeksolutions to problems, as well as to establishreciprocal arrangements for the exchange of, andaccess to, additional sources of information.Newsletters are also seen as a valuable elementin networking and are used to draw attention torelevant events and developments, e.g. membersof ASLIB’s OMB group receive a newsletter aspart of membership. In the USA there is acommercially produced newsletter, One-PersonLibrary, available on subscription from SMRInternational of New York.As is suggested by the above definition, the

OPL presents its incumbent with a range oftasks to perform and priorities to meet, usuallywithout the possibility of delegating any of theseto a colleague. Some posts are held by profes-sionally qualified librarians or informationscientists, while others are not. Burge (1995)notes that, in the case of singleton posts in UKgovernment libraries, the postholder is profes-sionally qualified and in the majority of caseswill have some form of clerical support. Inmany other OPLs the grading of the post, therequirement for qualifications and the provisionof clerical support will vary considerably. Insome cases an OPL will have been created assuch; in others it may have come into beingthrough overall reductions in staffing levels.

OPLs may also operate on a part-time basis orinvolve a postholder running units at more thanone site within the same organization. Somesmall libraries may not have permanent staff butcontract out the running of their OPL to anindependent operator.

Management and personal skillsrequired

Given the demands made on the solo operator,frustration may be experienced, but so may aconsiderable amount of personal development. Apositive attitude will certainly help in turningwhat could be perceived as potential obstaclesinto opportunities, as is illustrated by severalpersonal case studies in the chapter ‘On yourown’ in Personal Development in InformationWork (Webb 1991). Motivation, the use ofinitiative and a generally entrepreneurial ap-proach, as well as skills in communication andwork organization, are all seen to play a vitalpart in running an effective OPL. Investment of alittle time in keeping up to date with professionaldevelopments can lead to considerable savings oftime in the long run. Making sensible use ofinformation technology can not only improve thelibrary or information service, but also enhanceits status and its ability to feature as a centraland essential part of the organization’s owndevelopment. The successful operation of anOPL or information services is dependent on thelibrarian having established clear objectives inline with organizational needs, supported byappropriate procedures and systems. Effectiveways of setting about this by taking a systematicapproach to the planning and development ofsuch a service is set out in Creating an Informa-tion Service (Webb 1996).

References

Burge, S. (1995) Broken Down by Grade and Sex: TheCareer Development of Government Librarians,Library Association, Government Libraries Group.

Shuter, J. (1984) The Information Worker in Isolation:Problems and Achievements, MCB University Press.

Webb, S.P. (1996) Creating an Information Service,ASLIB.

—— (1991) Personal Development in InformationWork, ASLIB.


SYLVIA P. WEBB

464 ONE-PERSON LIBRARY

ONLINE

Access to a computer system via telecommuni-cations links. The particular significance of theterm for LIS is as a means of remote access todatabases of information, particularly biblio-graphic information. It is used, therefore, indistinction to access to information on paper,CD-ROM or any other format where a copy ofthe original is held by the user.

SEE ALSO: information retrieval

ONLINE SERVICES

The key technological components of onlinesystems are computers that can act in time-shared mode and teleprocessing systems withterminal equipment. Online services employ on-line systems technology to provide remote userswith access to information organized in data-bases with greater flexibility, precision and speedthan comparable print resources can.

Technological development

Online systems developed rapidly from the 1960sthrough the convergence of several streams oftechnological advances: time-sharing computersthat permit large numbers of users to conductsimultaneous interactions with systems that maybe located far from the central computer and itsinformation store; increasingly efficient interac-tive computer programmes, powerful and user-friendly; rapid-access storage devices that grew incapacity and decreased in data storage costs;computer terminals and compact, inexpensivepersonal computers that can transmit, receiveand display information; telecommunicationsnetworks that provide fast, cheap data transmis-sion; growing volumes of numerical, textual andgraphical information (databases) created bypublishers and other organizations in computer-readable form. Local-area networks permit on-line access over a limited site (e.g. a universitycampus). Wide-area networks operate nationallyand internationally, and may themselves belinked together in a network of networks (theinternet).

Functions of online services

Most database producers, particularly those com-piling bibliographic databases, license their data-

bases to other organizations called ‘onlineservices’ or ‘host computer services’ or simply ahost, which provide the computer, software andtelecommunications support that enables re-mote users to access the databases. The largerhosts provide access to several hundreds ofdatabases in a wide range of subject areas (theyare sometimes called ‘supermarket’ hosts). Theoperation of such services requires large invest-ments in hardware and software. The functionsof hosts are structuring, loading and subse-quently updating the databases into large time-sharing computers; maintaining 24-hour access;connecting their computers to national and inter-national networks; maintaining user-friendly pro-grammes so that the databases can beinterrogated easily and efficiently; offering down-loading facilities enabling users to store anddisplay retrieved information locally; providinggateway access that permits users to switch toother hosts; connecting to document deliveryservices by means of which the full texts ofretrieved references are delivered electronically(electronic mail, fax) or by post. Hosts markettheir services at exhibitions and conferences, andprovide systems and database manuals, news-letters, ‘help desk’ services and training courses.

Service charging

The main components of most charging systemsrelate to telecommunications rates; the elapsedtime a user is connected to a host computer;storage of regular search routines; downloadingand printing fees for retrieved information. Thelatter are often components of the royaltycharges paid by hosts to database producers,with whom the copyright of the database usuallyresides. Some hosts charge a fixed annual sub-scription to their specialized services that allowsunlimited access over a 12-month period.

End-user access

In the earlier years of online services, connectingto hosts and searching databases was a complex,expensive activity and the task was often dele-gated to specialist ‘intermediaries’ (librarians andinformation officers). More recently the trendhas been towards encouraging the individualsactually seeking the information – the ‘end-users’– to do their own searching. Staff and students atBritish universities can search, by means ofterminals in offices, laboratories and libraries,

ONLINE SERVICES 465

databases relating to science, engineering, medi-cine and the social sciences that are accessiblethrough a joint academic network (janet). Eachuniversity supports the services with annualsubscriptions, enabling academic end-users tohave free and unrestricted access to the databaseat the point of use. Users can download theresults of their searches into an e-mail service.Complementary document delivery services havebeen implemented through which an end-usercan request (and pay for by credit card transfer)copies of original documents.

Localized online search services

Databases recorded on cd-roms, though origin-ally intended to be searched on ‘stand-alone’personal computers, are increasingly being madeavailable for simultaneous search for a numberof online users by means of local area networks.Such services are popular on university campusesas they are cheap to operate and the searchsoftware provided by the CD-ROM producers isusually very user-friendly. As the capacity of harddisks is increasing (and the unit costs of storagedeclining) some organizations are beginning toload relatively large databases on their owncomputers – bypassing commercial hosts – toprovide networked online services for closedcommunities of end-users.

Further reading

Armstrong, C.J. and Hartley, R.J. (1997) Online andCD-ROM Database Searching. 2nd edn, Mansell.

Vigil, P.J. (1988) Online Retrieval: Analysis and Strat-egy, Wiley.

Walker, G. and Janes, J. (1999) Online Retrieval: ADialogue of Theory and Practice, Libraries Unlim-ited.

SEE ALSO: computer science; electronic public-information services; informatics; informationpolicy

HARRY EAST

ONTOLOGY

A term from the discipline of philosophy appro-priated by the artificial intelligence (AI)community. Whilst in philosophy it signifies asystematic account of existence, in AI it is used ina more limited sense as a specification, or a set ofdefinitions, of a conceptualization. A knowledge-based system, or AI agent, is necessarily com-

mitted to some conceptualization of the domainwithin which it is to operate. In practice anontology sets out the concepts and relationshipsthat make up the formal vocabulary used inbuilding an AI agent. Ontologies are an essentialcomponent of the semantic web.

Further reading

Gruber, T.R. (1993) ‘A translation approach to portableontologies’, Knowledge Acquisition 5: 199–220.


OPACS

An OPAC (Online Public-Access Catalogue) is adatabase of bibliographic records describing theholdings usually of one particular library. Itallows searching by name, title and subject, andoffers online access through public terminals.Online catalogues were developed in the late

1970s and since then have become widelyaccepted as the contemporary form of catalogue(see catalogues) in the developed world. Sincetheir advent, vast numbers of bibliographic re-cords have been converted into computer format,using the MAchine-Readable Cataloguing (marc)format, although public use of catalogues wasoften still in printed form, by cards, or in micro-form (see microforms). A number of major USlibraries pioneered online access and developedthe first online catalogues. Gradually, biblio-graphic agencies, co-operatives and commercialcompanies developed library automation sys-tems that included OPAC. During the 1980s,most academic libraries and an increasing num-ber of public libraries (especially in the USA, theUK, Australia and Europe) installed online cata-logues. One of the major advantages of an onlinecatalogue (apart from enhanced access to librarymaterials) is that if linked to an automatedcirculation system it can indicate the currentstatus of an item, e.g. on loan, available forborrowing, etc., in an integrated system.

The database

An online catalogue database normally consistsof bibliographic records describing mainly mono-graphs, compiled according to international stan-dards such as anglo-american cataloguingrules (AACR) and MARC format, commonlyused classification codes such as Library of

466 ONTOLOGY

Congress and DDC, and standard subject head-ings such as LCSH. This approach replicates thestandard inner form of early manual catalogues,and online catalogues have been criticized forsimply transferring the flat, linear structure ofmanual catalogues into an online environment,rather than taking the opportunity to rethink theinternal structure of the bibliographic recorditself.

Methods of access

Early online catalogues were ‘command-driven’,i.e. it was necessary for the user to learn a set ofcommands in order to type in a search. Currentsystems usually offer a ‘menu-based’ approachwhere the user makes a choice of access pointsfrom a menu. As graphical user interfacesbecome more common, more catalogues offerthis method of access, and Web-type access isbecoming standard.

Access points

Access points in online catalogues generally echothose of manual catalogues but offer supplemen-tary access that greatly enhances retrieval. Theability to search by ‘keyword’ or ‘freetext’liberates the user from the need to have fullauthor or title information. However, many on-line catalogues do not incorporate full authoritycontrol over authors and subjects, and this lackcan result in inaccurate and imprecise searching,as opposed to the best practice in manualcatalogues.

Subject searching

The most problematic area of searching is that ofsubject access. In the USA, the traditional subjectaccess system, LCSH, has been incorporatedonline, but whereas in manual catalogues theonus was on the user to find the correct subjectheading, it was then possible to browse thoughlists/cards for relevant books. In some onlinecatalogues, it is necessary to input the full orpartial subject heading string. This can makesubject searching much more difficult. Manysystems now offer keyword searching on subjectheadings, which allows users to use naturallanguage in searching but undermines the powerof a highly structured system such as LCSH. Inthe UK, where LCSH has not been common inmanual catalogues, a few libraries have now

adopted this system; some others have trans-ferred online their own subject index, usuallydeveloped in-house, while other libraries have noformal subject system and rely on keywordsearching of title and other fields for subjectaccess. Overall, there is some evidence thatwhere both are available there has been a movefrom strict subject searching to keyword search-ing (Larson 1991).Traditionally, monographs have been poorly

indexed in online catalogues and although key-word access has improved retrieval by subject,online catalogues are badly served in comparisonwith the amount of subject information availablein databases of journal articles. An attempt toreduce this anomaly is the move to add extrasubject-rich data, such as contents pages, extrakeywords and terms from back-of-the-book-in-dexes. This has the effect of increasing theexhaustiveness of the indexing but frequentlyresults in an excessive number of items beingretrieved.

Current considerations

As online catalogues become the norm, some ofthe initial euphoria that characterized theirarrival has been replaced with a more measuredview of their worth. Early online catalogueswere difficult to use and often led to no itemsbeing retrieved in searches of any complexity.Recent emphasis has been on simplifying searchprocedures, but in some cases the result of thishas been excessive reliance on keywords, whichcan lead to excessive numbers of items re-trieved. Online catalogues increasingly includenon-monographic and other special materialssuch as music, manuscripts, etc. Once again thestandard access points facilitate general retrievalbut are often inadequate for highly specificrequests.The increasing ability to access information

via networks such as the internet is having anincreasing effect on the role of catalogues as anessential requirement in any library. Many li-braries make the catalogues of remote librariesreadily available and readers have access todatabases of journal articles alongside them.Copies of documents may be requested anddelivered by post, fax and, increasingly, byelectronic means. Although there is a diversity ofinterfaces and retrieval languages, it is increas-ingly possible to access the resources of remote

OPACS 467

libraries using the commands of the home cata-logue. Developments such as these have increas-ingly impinged on the role of the catalogue inindividual libraries. As yet, however imperfect,the online catalogue is the most popular andsuccessful way of indicating the holdings andstatus of items in a library.

References

Larson, R.R. (1991) ‘The decline of subject searching:Long-term trends and patterns of index use in anonline catalog’, Journal of the American Society forInformation Science 42(3): 197–215.

Further reading

Buckland, M.K. (1992) Redesigning Library Services: AManifesto, American Library Association.

Hildreth, C.R. (1991) ‘Advancing towards E3OPAC:The imperative and the path’, in N. Van Pulis (ed.)Think Tank on the Present and Future of the OnlineCatalog: Proceedings, 1991, January 11–12, Amer-ican Library Association, Reference and Adult Ser-vices Division, pp. 39–48.

Hughes, J.E. (2001) ‘Access, access, access! The newOPAC mantra’, American Libraries 32: 62–4.

O’Brien, A. (1994) ‘Online catalogs: Enhancements anddevelopments’, in M.E. Williams (ed.) Annual Re-view of Information Science and Technology, vol. 29,Learned Information, pp. 219–42.

SEE ALSO: bibliographic description; catalogues;indexing; online services; user studies

ANN O’BRIEN

OPEN ACCESS

A system of access to library materials in whichusers have the freedom to move around thecollection and make their own selection ofmaterial to consult on the premises or to borrow.The term is used in distinction to closed accessand is a distinguishing feature of modern librar-ianship. During the twentieth century it hasreplaced closed access virtually everywhere ex-cept in archival and research collections or theremnants of the library systems of totalitarianstates. Because it lays the collections open to therisk of theft and damage, it can call for higherlevels of library security (see security in li-braries). Despite the enhanced autonomy of theuser, it does not remove the need for readerassistance services and creates a strong need foruser instruction programmes.

OPEN SOURCE

A term coined in 1998 to describe what had untilthen been described as free software or freeware.It represents a radically different, non-proprietor-ial view of software from that generally held bythe major software companies. Most commer-cially available software is supplied only incompiled versions (that is, the source code inwhich the developer originally created it has beentranslated into a form that the computer canunderstand). This is not only necessary forpractical purposes, but reinforces the control thatcompanies have over the intellectual prop-erty in the product and enables them to protectthe code from commercial rivals. In contrast,open-source software is available free of charge,and includes both the source code and thecompiled version. Developers who accept theopen-source concept believe that software is acommon good that should be shared rather thansold for profit, and that it can best be adapted,improved and de-bugged by its users. To makethis possible the users need access to the sourcecode.Although Linus Torvalds’s release of his

Linux operating system in 1991 predates theuse of the term it is, nevertheless, the bestexemplar of the principle. Linux has beenimproved over the years as a result of the co-operative efforts of large numbers of enthusias-tic users. The difficulty with Linux and otheropen-source products is that when problemsoccur the user is obliged to be more knowledge-able and resourceful than normal. To counterthis difficulty it is accepted that versions ofopen-source products can be sold rather thansupplied free, but when users buy open-sourceproducts they are actually paying for the war-ranty and technical support that can then beoffered. Thus Red Hat Software sells OfficialRed Hat Linux on precisely this basis. Theopen-source movement now includes a non-profit company, the Open Source Initiative,which certifies open-source products on thebasis of a nine-point definition.

Further reading

Fitzgerald, B. and Keller, J. (2002) Understanding OpenSource Software Development, Addison-Wesley.

Opensource.org, The Open Source Definition (www.opensource.org/docs/definition_plain.html).

468 OPEN ACCESS

OPEN-SYSTEMSINTERCONNECTION

OSI is the term adopted by the InternationalStandards Organization (ISO) to describe manu-facturer-independent standards for interconnect-ing computer equipment. It is a response to theproblem of mixing computer systems and term-inals supplied by different manufacturers in asingle network. The standards are guided by aframework, known as the OSI reference model,which defines the relationships between the hard-ware and software components within a commu-nications network.


OPERATING SYSTEM

The essential program loaded into a computerwhenever it starts up, which controls access to allthe resources of the computer and to its periph-erals, and supervises the running of other pro-grams. In the past it was usually supplied as if itwere part of the computer hardware, but operat-ing systems such as MS-DOS, Unix and Micro-soft Windows were developed independently ofhardware design and manufacture. The varioustypes of operating systems are referred to asplatforms.


OPERATIONS RESEARCH

Used to enable rational decision-making in manyprofessional, official, business and industrialcontexts through prediction of the behaviour ofcomplex systems, with the aim of improving oroptimizing system performance. The approach isinterdisciplinary and experimental, encompassingmanagerial decision-making, mathematical andcomputer modelling, and the use of informationtechnology. Operations research professionalsaddress a wide variety of design and operationalissues in communication and data networks;computer operations; and many areas relating tobusiness productivity and efficiency. A typicalarea for the use of operations research would beto assist in deciding how best to employ re-sources in a search for information so as to

minimize the costs associated with the searchand yet avoid the errors that inadequate informa-tion might produce.

SEE ALSO: economics of information;information systems; management supportsystems

OPTICAL DISK

A storage medium for digital data that is writtento, and read, by lasers. The storage capacity foroptical disks is much greater than that ofmagnetic disks and their durability is greater.For the user, they behave in three main ways:

. Read only – audio CDs and CD-ROMs comewith data already encoded on them, and thiscannot be modified.

. Write once – data can be written on WORM(write once, read many) disks, but after thatthey perform as a read-only disks.

. Erasable – data can be written, erased andreplaced with new data. With the availabilityof reasonably priced CD burners and theimprovement of access speed, they are increas-ingly popular as a data storage or back-upmedium.

ORAL TRADITIONS

Found in all societies, but particularly significantwhere the main method of exchanging informa-tion is through oral communication. This is thecase in developing societies, where print cultureis a recent innovation and oral culture is domi-nant for the majority of people.

Present status

Before the invention of writing and printing,communication was based on oral traditions.When writing and printing became well estab-lished in Western countries and strong economiespermitted the establishment of viable publishingindustries, there was a steady replacement of oralculture by a written culture – that is, one basedon the written word. In contrast, in most ThirdWorld countries, with high levels of illiteracycoupled with weak economies that cannot sup-port a viable publishing industry, oral traditionsstill dominate in the exchange of information.The evolution from an oral to a print-based

ORAL TRADITIONS 469

culture has led to the conclusion that oral cultureis a stage before the invention of writing or theacquisition of literacy (Ndiaye 1988). Rehnemahas called the above conclusion an ethnocentricview of history and points out that ‘it is wrong tosuppose that a society must necessarily move inlinear progression from the oral stage associatedwith a primitive form of expression, to that ofwriting, seen as a higher form of mental devel-opment’ (Rehnema 1982).The fear that oral culture will be weakened by

a culture based on the written word has led to arejectionist approach whereby calls have beenmade for libraries in the Third World to rejectprinted materials and develop oral librarianship.This stems from a perceived conflict between oraltraditions and print-based information systems(Amadi 1981). The possibility that oral traditionscould make a major contribution to Third Worldlibrarianship if libraries are reformed has beenraised (Durrani 1985).

Aspects of oral traditions

Various terms, which are often used interchange-ably with oral tradition, but which are in actualfact distinct aspects of it, are briefly exploredbelow.

ORAL LITERATURE

Oral traditions have been viewed as a rich sourceof contemporary literature in Third World socie-ties because most of their literature is not foundin the written form (Finnegan 1970). Oralliterature is subdivided into several forms. Thefolk tale is perhaps the best known. This form,often of high creativity, contains various themesand aims at bringing the lessons of life to itsaudience. Poetry and songs constitute anotherwell-known form. These include praise poemsand elegiac, religious and political poems. Pro-verbs are short sayings encapsulating the experi-ences of members of society in a brief andmemorable statement full of imagery and suc-cinct expression. Good examples include thisproverb from the Fulani of Nigeria: ‘You willnot see an elephant moving on your own head,only a louse moving on another’s’; or this Swahiliproverb from East Africa: ‘Heavy silence has amighty noise.’The various forms of oral literature add up to

a vast information resource base and suggestionshave been made that libraries have a section that

consists of oral literature resources (Oyeoku1975). unesco has initiated several programmesto promote research and create awareness for thepreservation of oral literature (UNESCO 1974).

ORAL HISTORY

The value of oral traditions is perhaps mostevident as a primary source of history. Suchrecognition arises from the effort of Third Worldcountries to write their history from their ownperspective rather than that of colonial adminis-trators (Mbaye 1990). To achieve this aim, inter-views are conducted with elderly people andrecorded on tape and later transcribed. A goodexample of this aspect of oral traditions was theGeneral History of Africa Project sponsored byUNESCO, which was launched in the mid-1970sand aimed at producing a text reflecting the pastof Africa from an African point of view.There have also been several oral history

programmes based in the national archives ofcountries in developing and developed countries.Interest in oral history has resulted in OralHistory Associations dedicated to research andgeneral scholarship in a number of countries(Starr 1977).

ORAL COMMUNICATION

Another functional dimension of oral traditionsis their role as a communication channel. Oraltraditions are a medium of communication thatcan be used to disseminate information to ruralpeople and other disadvantaged groups to speedup national development (Aboyade 1984). Thereare also groups of professional people who preferoral communication to written forms of commu-nication when seeking work-related information(Allen 1969).An innovation attempted in Southeast Asia

involved the use of a video medium by ordinarypeople within an oral culture to communicatemessages to government officials and transferinformation to people in other parts of theworld, and this met with great success (Stuart1987). In some cases, the dominance of oraltraditions has been condemned and is regarded asthe main hindrance to the use of print-basedinformation systems in the Third World (Reddyand Sandeep 1979).

INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE

Oral traditions contain a vast unrecordedknowledge base of people not yet drawn into a

470 ORAL TRADITIONS

print and electronic media culture. Such knowl-edge, which has enabled tribal people to survive,is passed from one generation to the nextthrough a chain of oral communication, invol-ving folk tales, ritual, ceremonies, myth and ritesof passage (Chambers 1983). The realization thattribal societies possess valuable knowledge,sometimes superior to its Western counterpart,arises from the disastrous mismanagement of theenvironment using modern scientific methods(Linden 1991). There are several areas wheretraditional knowledge has gained wide recogni-tion. In medicine, the WHO has advised ThirdWorld countries to incorporate traditional medi-cine into their health services. Tribal healers arehelping scientists in their search for plants withuseful medicinal properties. In agriculture andenvironmental management, tribal practices arebeing re-examined for possible wider adoption.There are several issues to be addressed beforeuse of indigenous knowledge can be re-estab-lished. Many Third World government agenciesstill regard all forms of indigenous knowledge asan impediment to development. The oral natureof this type of knowledge means that, as elderswho possess it die, valuable information disap-pears. Western education and urban migrationhave alienated the youth from their culture, sothat they are unwilling to learn and inherit thisknowledge from the older generation.

References

Aboyade, B.O. (1984) ‘Oral tradition as a medium forinformation transfer in rural communities’, NigerianJournal of Library and Information Studies 2(2): 69–75.

Allen, T. (1969) ‘Information needs and uses’, in C.Cuadra (ed.) Annual Review of Information Scienceand Technology, vol. 4, William Benton, pp. 1–29.

Amadi, A.O. (1981) African Libraries: Western Tradi-tion and Colonial Brainwashing, Scarecrow Press.

Chambers, R. (1983) Rural Development: Putting theLast First, Longmans.

Durrani, S. (1985) ‘Rural information in Kenya’,Information Development 1(3): 149–57.

Finnegan, R. (1970) Oral Literature in Africa, Clar-endon Press.

Linden, E. (1991) ‘Lost tribes, lost knowledge’, TimesInternational (23 September): 44–54.

Mbaye, S. (1990) ‘Oral records in Senegal’, AmericanArchivist 53(4): 566–74.

Ndiaye, R. (1988) ‘Oral culture in libraries’, IFLAJournal 14(1): 40–6.

Oyeoku, K.K. (1975) ‘Publishing in Africa: Breakingthe development barrier’, in E. Oluwasanmi, E.Maclean and H. Zell (eds) Publishing in Africa inthe Seventies, University of Ife Press, pp. 277–88.

Reddy, E. and Sandeep, P. (1979) Communication forAdult Education and Development in Rural Context,Department of Non-Formal Adult ContinuingEducation.

Rehnema, M. (1982) ‘The sound library, a simple butrevolutionary tool for development’, UNESCO Jour-nal of Information Science, Librarianship and Ar-chives Administration 4(3): 151–8.

Starr, L. (1977) ‘Oral history’, in A. Kent, H. Lancourand J. Daily (eds) Encyclopedia of Library andInformation Science, vol. 20, Marcel Dekker, pp.440–65.

Stuart, S. (1987) ‘The village video network: Video as atool for local development and South to Southexchange’, Convergence 20(2): 63–8.

UNESCO (1974) African Oral Tradition: Selection andFormulation of Some Themes, UNESCO.

SEE ALSO: Africa; communication; rural libraryservices

KINGO MCHOMBU

ORGANIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE

The description (indexing) and organization(classification) for retrieval of messages re-presenting knowledge, texts by which knowl-edge is recorded, and documents in which textsare embedded. Knowledge itself resides in mindsand brains of living creatures. Its organizationfor retrieval via short- and long-term memoryis a principal topic of cognitive science.Library and information science deals with thedescription and organization of the artefacts(messages, texts, documents) by which knowl-edge (including feelings, emotions, desires) isrepresented and shared with others. Theseknowledge resources are often called informa-tion resources as well. Thus ‘knowledge organi-zation’ in the context of library and informationscience is a short form for ‘knowledge resourcesorganization’ or ‘knowledge representations or-ganization’. It is often called ‘information orga-nization’.The organization of knowledge in library and

information science consists of several aspects:identification of messages (often called works);identification of texts in which messages (works)are represented; description of documents inwhich texts are presented; and description of thecontent, features and meaning of messages. Theresulting identifications and descriptions are or-ganized into indexes, catalogues, databases, digi-tal libraries and other information retrievalsystems for access by searchers. The creation

ORGANIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE 471

and organization of these identifications anddescriptions are called indexing, abstracting,cataloguing (see catalogues), bibliographicclassification, bibliography, records man-agement and knowledge management, invarious contexts.Although language texts often predominate in

organization of knowledge activities, the proce-dures apply to every form or format of message,text and document: artistic and musicalcreations, visual images and three-dimensionalobjects (sculpture), scientific and mathematicalformulations, performances, as well as worksrepresented in spoken or written language. Like-wise every sort of medium is encompassed bythe organization of knowledge: paper, film,video, clay tablets, three-dimensional objects,electronic digital media, and combinationsof formats and media, now called ‘multi-media’.This article addresses the major procedures for

the description and organization of knowledgeresources in library and information science:indexing, cataloguing and classification, includ-ing document and content description, vocabu-lary control and the methods, both automaticand intellectual, for performing these functions.It then turns to the products of knowledgeorganization – catalogues, indexes, databasesand digital libraries (see digital library), andaddresses the fundamental attributes of theseinformation retrieval systems: scope anddomain, presentation media, documentary units,analysis base, indexing exhaustivity, vocabularyspecificity, indexing methods, syntax for indexheadings and search statements, vocabulary man-agement, document surrogation, and surrogateand index display.

Role in library and information science

If the provision of information on demand, or inanticipation of demand in response to perceivedneed, is the major function of librarianship, andif the study of information retrieval is the majorfocus of information science, then the organi-zation of knowledge resources to facilitate infor-mation access and retrieval is a central concernof both fields. It is a fundamental contribution oflibrary and information science to society. Itshistory is as old as writing and the developmentof the first documents. This article focuses oncurrent methods.

Indexing, cataloguing and classification

Indexing, cataloguing and classification are threemethods, often confused, for organizing knowl-edge resources. Indexing (that is, indicating)involves methods for providing access to docu-ment collections, single documents and parts ofdocuments without regard to the location ofthese documents. Cataloguing is the indexing ofdocuments in particular collections. Classifica-tion is the grouping and arrangement of index (orcatalogue) categories and entries in accordancewith relations among them, as opposed to alpha-betical or numerical arrangement based on entryterms.Because cataloguing and classification depend

on indexing – indeed they represent special casesof indexing – indexing itself is the fundamentalmethod for organizing knowledge resources.Therefore, this article will emphasize types andattributes of indexing and indexes.

DOCUMENT DESCRIPTION

Indexing always involves the description ofdocuments that contain messages of interest,unless the document is self-evident, as in back-of-the-book indexes. Document descriptionusually involves noting the creator(s) of themessage and its text, the name(s) given to thetext, the version of the text, the name of thedocument’s publisher, distributor and/or manu-facturer, the size, shape, format and medium ofthe document, and similar notable characteris-tics.There is an enormous literature guiding the

description of messages (works), texts and docu-ments of all formats and media. The most widelyused rules for description and non-topical accessare the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules(AACR) (1998), but there are many specializedguides, such as Standard Citation Forms forPublished Bibliographies and Catalogs Used inRare Book Cataloging (VanWingen and Urquiza1996), Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Books(Library of Congress, Office for DescriptiveCataloging Policy 1991), Map Cataloging Man-ual (Library of Congress, Geography and MapDivision 1991), Archival Moving Image Materi-als: a Cataloging Manual (Library of Congress,AMIM Revision Committee 2000), Archives,Personal Papers, and Manuscripts: a CatalogingManual for Archival Repositories, HistoricalSocieties, and Manuscript Libraries (Hensen

472 ORGANIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE

1989) and Sheet Music Cataloging and Proces-sing: a Manual (Shaw and Shiere 1984), as wellas innumerable style guides for citing documentsin various contexts. According to Wellisch(1980), building on work by Wilson (1968),there are no major theoretical problems in thedescription of texts and documents, apart fromtheir content or meaning. We know how to do it,and we have plenty of guidance for doing itproperly. This does not mean that it is easy,because messages, texts and documents come inan enormous variety of shapes, sizes, media andformats, from many types of publishers andproducers, with little standardization. Unresolvedtheoretical issues lie largely in the realm ofidentification and description of content andmeaning.With the onset of electronic documents, the

world wide web and the internet, the defini-tion and description of documents have becomeunsettled, leading to discussions about revisingthe Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (Weihs1998; Schottlaender 1998). In the meantime,specialized guides for indexing and cataloguingelectronic resources have appeared, such asCataloging Internet Resources: a Manual andPractical Guide (Olson 1997).

DOCUMENT IDENTIFIERS

Also in the context of electronic knowledgeresources, there has been increased interest inextending concise document identifiers, patternedafter ISBN for books and ISSN for serials, tomany other types of resources. Examples includeDOI (Digital Object Identifier), SICI (Serial Itemand Contribution Identifier), PII (Publisher ItemIdentifier), BICI (Book Item and ComponentIdentifier), ISMN (International Standard MusicNumber), ISRC (International Standard Record-ing Code), ISAN (International Standard Audio-visual Number), ISWC (International StandardWork Code), URN (Uniform Resource Name)and PURL (Persistent Uniform Resource Loca-tor). Good summaries of these efforts have beenprovided by Green and Bide (1997), and Paskin(1997).

IDENTIFICATION OF MESSAGES (WORKS)

For at least 100 years, cataloguing codes haveemphasized the need to identify the underlyingmessage or work that is represented in a text andrecorded in a document. The purpose of thiswork identification has been to enable users to

find, in one place, all versions of a particularwork, regardless of its particular text or manifes-tation (translations, reproductions, new printingsunder various titles, etc.). Thus, records anddescriptions for all versions of Shakespeare’sHamlet or books of the Bible or a Beethovensymphony or a Van Gogh painting can begathered together, regardless of the many differ-ent titles such works may have been given.The traditional method used to identify works

has been to assign to every work a single ‘mainentry heading’ and, if a work has appeared undervarious titles (e.g., in various languages or thesame language), a standard or uniform title aswell. Traditionally, the main entry heading hasbeen the first or chief author (if there are morethan one), or if a chief author cannot beidentified, the original title of the work. Together,the main entry heading and title of the work (auniform title if needed) have identified the work.‘Main entry heading’ has been one of the most

misunderstood (and misleading) terms in librarycataloguing. The misunderstanding stems fromits former association with printed book catalo-gues in which there was a ‘main’ full entry, withmany less complete secondary entries referring tothe complete entry. This complete entry wasplaced under the main entry heading. Thispattern of publication has continued in manyprinted indexing and abstracting services, wherebrief author and subject entries lead to a fullentry with full citation and abstract.But the fundamental and continuing purpose

of the main entry heading has not been toprovide a full entry. Library catalogues havegenerally made every entry complete since thedevelopment of the unit card or unit entry in thesecond half of the nineteenth century. Similarly,in modern opacs (online public-access catalo-gues) and information retrieval databases, everyaccess point can lead to as full a record as theuser desires. The purpose of the main entryheading is not access to particular records ordocuments – every access point given to a recordor document is equal in this regard. The mainentry heading, together with a title, is used toidentify a work and to gather together all itsmanifestations.Anyone who suggests that the main entry

heading is no longer needed in the electronicenvironment either does not understand thefunction of the main entry heading or does notbelieve the capability of gathering together all


manifestations of the same message or work isworth preserving. Of course there are other waysto identify messages and to link or gather them inelectronic indexes and catalogues. Unfortunatelymany persons who advocate the elimination ofmain entry headings do not seem to understandtheir purpose.

CONTENT DESCRIPTION

Much more problematic than the identificationof messages, texts and documents is the descrip-tion of the content, meaning, purpose and relatedfeatures of messages (representations of knowl-edge) found in documents, document collectionsand parts of documents. Some type of subjectdescription or indexing, subject cataloguing orclassification is required in order to organize andprovide access to messages in documents when-ever particular documents are not known inadvance. In contrast to document description,there is no consensus within the library andinformation science community on how thisshould be done, and many methods competewith or complement each other. This is the majorresearch area in information science, often re-ferred to as information retrieval. Most of therest of this article will therefore focus on contentdescription.

VOCABULARY CONTROL

After documents and their content have beendescribed, these descriptions must be stated interms that will match the query terms of search-ers. This requires some sort of vocabulary controlor management. The traditional approach hasbeen to require the use of a restricted set ofterms, with occasional provision of cross-refer-ences from alternative terms. This method hasbeen applied to every aspect of indexing, includ-ing names of authors and other persons (Blair,Eric, see Orwell, George), titles of messages (Thetragicall historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke,see Hamlet), names of topics (informatics, seeinformation science) and features, such as intel-lectual level (juvenile literature, see children’sbooks).Names of persons and messages are standar-

dized, in traditional practice, on the basis ofdetailed rules for their establishment, such asAnglo-American Cataloguing Rules (1998).Names of topics and features have been standar-dized over the past century through the produc-tion of large lists of approved headings, such as

Library of Congress Subject Headings (Library ofCongress, Subject Cataloging Division 2001). Inthe later decades of the twentieth century, in-formation retrieval thesauri emphasizing single-concept terms rather than complex subject head-ings were created to standardize indexing termi-nology for many disciplines and subject fields.The Art and Architecture Thesaurus (1994) is aprominent example.Research in psychology and information

science has repeatedly demonstrated the enor-mous variability in the use of language by hu-mans describing or seeking information(Collantes 1995). This is true for searchers aswell as for indexers (Saracevic et al. 1988). Studyafter study indicates that indexers and searchersagree on terms about 25 per cent of the time.Most of the variability appears to be due todifferences in choices for terms, and the remain-der to differences in perception or conceptualiza-tion of topics or features (Iivonen 1994). Furnaset al. (1987) suggest that a good informationretrieval system needs to provide as many asfifteen ways to express a topic or feature in orderto accommodate up to 80 per cent of the searchstatements submitted by users.With the growing use of automatic indexing

techniques and the increasing need to searchacross multiple databases where even controlledvocabularies can be extremely diverse, informa-tion scientists have begun to suggest and experi-ment with searching thesauri (as opposed toindexing thesauri). Searching thesauri do not listrequired preferred terms that indexers must use,but rather attempt to map the vocabulary of asubject field, linking variant terms for singleconcepts as well as related broader, narrowerand associated terms. Their purpose is to facil-itate searches regardless of the vocabulary usedin indexes, rather than control or restrict index-ing vocabulary.Recently there has been increased interest in

‘ontologies’ (see ontology) to facilitate vocabu-lary management and conceptual navigation inthe context of electronic searching and machinemanipulation. Ontology, of course, is a basicbranch of philosophy devoted to the understand-ing of being, existence and reality. The term wasborrowed by researchers in artificial intelli-gence and knowledge engineering to representattempts to describe, in a formal, machine-manipulable way, the characteristics of reality or‘the real world’ in small domains. These ontolo-


gies have taken on the characteristics of classifiedthesauri.According to Hjerppe (1996), the main differ-

ence between the usual information retrievalthesaurus and an ontology is that thesauri aredesigned for direct use by humans who areseeking help with terminology and access, whileontologies are designed for integration into soft-ware operations. As a result, the rules forconstructing categories and hierarchies in ontol-ogies tend to be much more rigorous. Modernthesauri, such as the Unesco Thesaurus (Unesco1995) and Eurovoc (European Communities1995), display associated terms in clusters calledmicrothesauri, without regard to formal relation-ships among terms. When end-users are seekinginformation about marital status, for example,Eurovoc displays such terms as ‘cohabitation’and ‘divorced person’ together in the samemicrothesaurus cluster. In contrast, the typicalontology would be careful to distinguish betweenthe activity of ‘cohabitation’ from the property ofbeing ‘divorced’ or the entity of ‘divorced per-son’. These differences reflect the differing re-quirements for a human–machine interfacecompared to a machine–machine interface. For adiscussion of ontological categories, see Poli(1996). Vickery (1997) provides an excellentoverview of ontologies in information retrieval.

Automatic and intellectual methods

There are two fundamental approaches to thedescription of the content, meaning and possibleapplications of messages for the purposes ofinformation retrieval: human intellectual analysisand machine analysis on the basis of computeralgorithms. Human indexing is often erroneouslyreferred to as ‘manual’ indexing, but it isperformed by the mind, not the hands. Increas-ingly, these two approaches to the analysis ofmessages are being combined in order to takeadvantage of the strengths of each approach, andto counterbalance their weaknesses. An overviewof human and machine methods with suggestionsfor effective allocation of the two approaches areprovided by Anderson and Pérez-Carballo(2001).

AUTOMATIC INDEXING

Automatic indexing has been used almost exclu-sively for the analysis of linguistic text messages(Belkin and Croft 1992; Salton et al. 1994).

Research has only just begun to apply automatictechniques to images (Fidel et al. 1994), espe-cially to the content of visual messages, asopposed to features such as shapes, colour andcontrast. Similarly, only limited attention hasbeen focused on the application of automatictechniques to the description of documents, as indescriptive cataloguing, as opposed to the de-scription of the content of messages (e.g. Knut-son 1993; Molto and Svenonius 1991; Weibel1992).Automatic techniques usually rely on statisti-

cal analysis of the occurrence of words in texts.To this basic technique are often added methodsfor isolating word roots. Syntactic parsing issometimes attempted to identify word phrasesthat should be treated as a unit. Semantic aspectscan be added to automatic indexing by matchingwords or phrases against comprehensive thesauri,in order to establish uniform terminology and tolink related terms.Co-occurrence of words, terms, phrases and

bibliographic citations has long been exploited tohelp locate related terms or documents. In theassociative interactive dictionary developed byDoszkocs (1978), terms are ranked according tofrequency of co-occurrence with terms in, orassigned to, retrieved texts, so that the mostclosely related terms are presented first. Forexample, this procedure listed terms like ‘post-natal’, ‘gestational’ and ‘foetus’ as most closelyrelated to the initial search terms ‘pre-natal’ and‘toxicity’.More recently, co-occurrence of phrases has

been used to create innovative browsable inter-faces for digital libraries (Gutwin et al. 1998).Co-occurrence of bibliographic citations is the

basis for citation indexes, which help searchers totrack authors and documents that cite previouswork of interest. Bibliographic coupling can beused to cluster groups of documents that sharethe same citations (Kessler 1963). Co-citation isused to identify clusters of new documents thattend to get cited together, helping to identifyemerging patterns of research (Small 1973).Latent semantic analysis is an example of

advanced methods of automatic indexing. Here,messages are described not by means of indivi-dual terms, which can be quite diverse even whenthe same topic is discussed, but on the basis ofclusters of terms that, through statistical analysis,have been identified as closely related throughco-occurrence across large numbers of texts.


Latent semantic analysis attempts to overcomethe challenge of diverse terminology by usingthese clusters of terms, which tend to be morestable than individual terms (Deerwester et al.1990).Some of the most advanced methods for

knowledge representation and organization arefound in expert systems. Based on research inartificial intelligence and natural-language pro-cessing, expert systems are increasingly impor-tant for decision support, management supportsystems, medical informatics systems, andspatial and geographic information systems(Gluck 1994). Unlike the information retrievalsystems described in this article, which point toand retrieve existing texts, expert systems createnew texts in ways that permit a variety ofinference and control operations on knowledgerepresentations so as to suggest answers toproblems. To permit these operations, expertknowledge is represented in the form of rules,frames, classes, hierarchies, attributes, proposi-tions, constraints, procedures, certainty factors,possibility intervals and fuzzy variables (Hayes-Roth and Jacobstein 1994). Ontologies, discussedabove under ‘Vocabulary control’, grew out ofthese efforts.

HUMAN INTELLECTUAL INDEXING

The process of human indexing is much moredifficult to describe. The procedures used byhumans to perceive and identify significanttopics, features, meaning or possible applicationsof linguistic texts, images or other types ofmessages are rooted in the cognitive processes ofthe mind and brain. These processes are not wellunderstood and constitute a major focus of fieldslike cognitive psychology, cognitive science andartificial intelligence. We know that humanindexing consists of at least two major steps:identification of topics and features, and descrip-tion of these topics and features in terms appro-priate for retrieval. We also know that indexers,both experienced experts and inexperienced no-vices, will perform the indexing process in wildlyvarying ways (Leonard 1977). This variability isreduced with use of controlled vocabularies(Iivonen 1994). Fugmann (1993) believes thatindexing variability can be reduced significantlyby increasingly rigorous guides or rules foridentification of topics and assignment of terms.Human methods are discussed in detail in Ander-son and Pérez-Carballo (2001).

COMPUTER-ASSISTED TECHNIQUES

Increasingly, systems for knowledge organizationare taking advantage of both human and auto-matic indexing techniques. Automatic indexingtends to be more exhaustive, with more specificterminology. (Exhaustivity and specificity arediscussed below.) Human indexing tends to bemuch more selective and evaluative, often usingmore generic and more consistent terminology,and it may also be more successful in identifyingmessages of interest when the topic of interest isnot explicitly mentioned or discussed in the text.Even when automatic indexing is eschewed,

computer techniques are used frequently to facil-itate human indexing.

INDEXING SOFTWARE

Indexing software is widely used by humanindexers, not only to analyse text directly andsuggest indexing terms, but also to provide avariety of tools and techniques to assist thehuman indexer in performing such routine tasksas formatting and arranging entries, creating andverifying cross-references, checking terminologyagainst a thesaurus, suggesting terms that oftenco-occur with terms already designated, suggest-ing classification categories based on co-occur-rence of terms and copying headings previouslyassigned to other documents. Fetters (1995) hassurveyed such programs designed for back-of-thebook indexers. Hodge and Milstead (1998) havediscussed the application of computer-assistedtechniques by large-scale indexing and abstract-ing services.

STRING INDEXING ALGORITHMS

One of the earliest applications of computers toindexing was the creation of algorithms forcreating complex headings, each beginning witha different access term, from a set or ‘string’ ofterms associated with a document (Craven1986). PRECIS, the Preserved Context IndexingSystem, developed under the direction of DerekAustin for the British National Bibliography,was an early and widely influential example(Austin and Dykstra 1984). String algorithmswere also used to create the earliest automaticindexes, KWIC (KeyWord in Context), KWOC(KeyWord out of Context) and KWAC (Key-Word and Context). These types of indexeswill be described in more detail below under‘Syntax’.


FRAME-BASED PROMPTING SYSTEMS

One of the more sophisticated attempts toprovide computer-based aids to improve humanindexing is the MedIndEx project of the USNational Library of Medicine (Humphrey1993). Indexers are provided with a frame inwhich relevant categories of terms are suggested.Because in practice terms are often assignedin clusters, the assignment of one term maycall forth suggestions of other terms thatare frequently associated with the first term.The hope is that systems such as this willcontribute to more thorough and more consis-tent indexing.

Catalogues, indexes, databases, digitallibraries

The results of knowledge organization are pre-sented in catalogues, indexes, bibliographies,digital libraries and even back-of-the-book in-dexes for monographic treatises, all of whichmay be subsumed under the term ‘informationretrieval databases’ (IR databases). These aresometimes called textual databases or textbases,but in this case ‘text’ refers to any type oforganized set of symbols used to convey amessage (visual, aural, verbal), not just linguistictexts. Also, this sense of IR database is notlimited to any particular medium. It includesprint databases of all types as well as electronic.An older, traditional term for IR databases was‘bibliographic databases’, because all IR data-bases retrieve information about messages, textsand documents described in bibliographic terms.Older IR databases tended to be ‘reference’databases, retrieving only references to messages,texts and documents; many modern IR databasesare ‘full-text’, retrieving the entire text of amessage in various formats.IR databases, including the procedures and

components for making them accessible to users,are the systems through which the results ofknowledge organization are presented to personswho wish to search for messages, texts, docu-ments or the information that they may offer.Just as tools and machines may be seen as

extensions of human muscles, enabling us toperform tasks with considerably more power, IRdatabases may be seen as an extension of ourminds, especially of our memories, and of the IRtechniques of the mind (Anderson 1985). Our IRdatabases, then, are artificial tools we have

created to extend the organizing power of themind.The remaining sections discuss the attributes

of these IR databases.

SCOPE AND DOMAIN

There are thousands of IR databases available forsearching. The first step in any effective search isto select the appropriate databases. Succinctdescription of scope and domain will assist inthis initial selection process.Scope refers to characteristics of documents

that are covered by a database. Domain refers tocharacteristics of the anticipated user community(subject or user domain) and of the sources ofinformation about these documents (documen-tary domain), including the territory covered tolocate them (Bates 1976).

Subject scope and domainAn effective statement of subject scope specifies,in broad strokes, which categories of topics areindexed, and by implication the kinds of topicalquestions or searches that are appropriate for thedatabase. Similarly, the subject domain describesthe kinds of user communities for whom thedatabase is intended. It is not sufficient simply toname the overall subject area or discipline, suchas ‘medicine’. Such a skimpy description does nottell potential users whether databases can re-spond to questions about therapies or drugs ortypes of medical personnel or particular physi-cians or varieties of medical institutions or theeconomics of health insurance. Also, medicaldatabases could be designed for very differentuser domains – researchers, practising healthcareprofessionals, patients, the general public or evenchildren. The user domain will have an impor-tant impact on the kinds of indexing and termi-nology that are appropriate (Hjørland 1997).A thorough statement of subject scope pro-

vides a list of categories of indexed topics, andthis same list can serve as a guide for databaseproducers in selecting appropriate documentsand for indexers as they attempt to indicatetopics of potential importance to users. Sucha list can help promote indexing that respondsto known interests as opposed simply to thecontent of documents. Soergel (1985) calls this‘request-oriented’ indexing as opposed to docu-ment or ‘entity-oriented’ indexing. He gives anexample of a document on the ‘percentageof children of blue-collar workers attending


college’. Request-oriented indexing might use aterm like ‘intergenerational social mobility’, eventhough this topic is not discussed directly.Examples of subject scope categories are con-

crete entities, such as persons (individuals orgroups), artefacts and natural objects; abstractentities, such as institutions, movements, disci-plines, belief systems, theories, hypotheses andimaginary entities (fictional characters, mytholo-gical animals); attributes and properties; rawmaterials or constituent elements; operations,processes and events; places or environments;time and historical periods. The subject scope listshould be more specific for narrower fields, sothat for literature, for example, the followingcategories of topics might be indexed: individualpersons, such as authors and critics, literaryworks, groups of persons, movements, languages,places, genres, performance media, stylistic andstructural features, themes, sources, influences,processes, methodological approaches, theories,devices and tools (MLA International Bibliogra-phy 2000).

Documentary scope and domainWhile the subject scope and domain definesthe topics of documents that should be indexedand the user community for whom the indexingis performed, the documentary scope and do-main defines the characteristics of the actualdocuments that are sought for and admittedinto the database and the documentary featuresthat should be noted for retrieval (that is,indexed). Important non-topical features almostalways include authors, titles and dates ofpublication or creation. Other documentaryfeatures will vary by medium. For print-onpaper documents, they usually include suchattributes as format or genre, periodicity(monographs versus serials of various types),audience or intellectual level, language or othertextual system (e.g. musical notation), place ofpublication, publisher, presence of illustrationsand size.Sometimes the documentary scope of a data-

base can be described simply by listing the namesof documents being indexed. This would apply toa database covering articles appearing only in aselect list of periodicals. Back-of-the-book in-dexes fall into this category as well, because theirdocumentary scope is obvious.Additional documentary criteria can include

quality or appropriateness for particular clientele

or purposes. Such criteria should be specified tothe extent possible.Documentary domain refers to the territory

whence came the documentary data for thedatabase. First of all, is the database based onprimary sources? Are documents described andindexed on the basis of direct inspection andanalysis, versus secondary sources, where dataabout documents are gathered from othersources, such as other indexing and abstractingtools, library catalogues or publishers’ announce-ments? The second aspect of domain is thegeographical territory covered in seeking to finddocuments that fit the subject scope and domain,and the documentary scope. A database that islimited to documents found only in a singlelibrary collection, for example, is very differentfrom a database that includes documents locatedthrough extensive searches all over the world.Catalogues, by definition, are databases whose

domain is limited to a single collection, or, in thecase of union catalogues, to several collections.

DATABASE MEDIA

The medium of the database will determine manyother options. The principal media are print-on-paper, including card files, and electronic media,including online and CD-ROM databases, andthe world wide web (WWW). In the pastmicroforms were important media for IR data-bases, but they have been largely supplanted byelectronic information resources.

Electronic databasesElectronic media permit electronic searches ofdatabase records and texts without actuallyviewing index entries. Search terms may beentered into a search programme, and documentrecords containing these terms can then beretrieved and listed. Indexes that are searchedelectronically rather than through visual inspec-tion are called ‘non-displayed’ indexes (Anderson1997). Of course, indexes can also be displayedfor visual inspection and browsing in electronicmedia.The principal advantages of electronic data-

bases are potentially faster updating (especiallyfor online and WWW databases), elimination ofbulky physical volumes and the increasing ex-pense of producing them, and marked augmentedsearch options and flexibility. Whereas in printdatabases index entries are fixed and one canonly search index headings that have been


previously established, and only in the form andorder in which they are printed, in electronicindexes using electronic search techniques it ispossible to search for any word or sequence ofcharacters, or several words in any order. Thusthe search unit is no longer the complete, pre-established, pre-arranged heading, but individualwords or parts of words, which can be combinedin any order. Also, entire records, sometimesentire texts, can be searched, rather than onlythe terms and headings that have been placed ina searchable index.

Print databasesIn print media databases, indexes must be dis-played, because it is only through visual inspec-tion of arrays of index entries that a user canaccess the database.The principal advantages of print databases

are their portability (assuming they are not toolarge and bulky), the capability of searchingwithout an electronic intermediary, much greatervisual resolution and clarity of typography, andthe larger layout of arrays of entries that ispossible. Also, it is often easier for users toapprehend the structure and arrangement of printindexes simply by looking at them. It is oftendifficult to comprehend the structure and contentof electronic databases, especially those that aresearched unseen via electronic algorithms. Evenwhen indexes are displayed in electronic media,they rarely provide the large-scope display that ispossible in well-designed print databases.Searchable, browsable displays are rapidly

becoming more and more sophisticated in elec-tronic media, and for many purposes theiradvantages outweigh those of print media, espe-cially in economic terms. Nevertheless, there willprobably always be a need for well-designedprint databases as well. If nowhere else, all textsimportant enough to publish in the form of aprint-on-paper book probably deserve a well-designed print-on-paper back-of-the-book index!

DOCUMENTARY UNITS

The size of documentary units that are identified,indexed and organized for retrieval will deter-mine the size of units that can be retrieved. Thisis one of the few ‘causal laws’ in library andinformation science. Size of documentary unit isthe principal variable that underlies distinctionsthat are sometimes made (in error) between‘information’ retrieval systems and ‘document’

or ‘bibliographic’ retrieval systems. It is not thecase that ‘information’ retrieval systems retrievedirect answers to questions, while ‘document’ or‘bibliographic’ retrieval systems only retrievewhole documents, or reference citations to wholedocuments. The real difference is the size ofdocumentary units that are analysed, described,organized and retrieved. In all cases, these aredocuments, or parts of documents, because mes-sages must always be represented by text en-coded in media. This is precisely what documentsare – the combination of the text of a messageand its medium (Anderson 1997). The relateddistinction between ‘full-text’ and ‘reference’databases will be discussed below, under ‘Surro-gates’.The size of documentary units can vary from

very small – single statements for example – tovery large: whole monographs, whole series,complete runs of periodicals, or even largecollections and entire libraries. Whatever isanalysed, described and organized is the docu-mentary unit that will be retrieved or pointed toby the IR database.Traditionally, documentary units have con-

sisted of complete documents in library catalo-gues, and in most indexing and abstractingservices complete monographs or complete peri-odical articles. Some special libraries andmany abstracting and indexing servicesanalyse, describe and organize individual chap-ters in books, especially in collections of separateessays or papers in proceedings. In these cases,the documentary unit matches the documentaryscope of the database.But there is no necessary connection between

the types of documents defined for coverage inthe documentary scope and the documentary unitfor analysis, organization and retrieval. Period-ical articles, for example, can be analysed on apage-by-page or paragraph-by-paragraph basis,and if this is done searchers can be led toparticular pages or paragraphs.Smaller units of analysis are becoming com-

mon in full-text databases. No one wants tosearch the complete text of a document and thenbe referred to the complete text, or even to alarge section. Full-text searches should lead onedirectly to the segment of text most relevant tothe search, and this is exactly what happens ingood full-text retrieval systems. The documen-tary unit is each unit of text, such as, in the caseof linguistic texts, the sentence or paragraph.


Back-of-the-book indexes have traditionallyused the page as the unit of analysis, or doc-umentary unit, so that back-of-the-book indexesrefer searchers to pages, using page numbers. Thetechnical report on indexing from the US Na-tional Information Standards Organization(NISO) (Anderson 1997) suggests that suchindexes might better use natural or inherent unitsof text, such as paragraphs. This is especiallyimportant as more and more books are publishedin both paper and electronic media. For the greatmajority of books the page is not an element ofthe text, but only of the print-on-paper mediumin which the text is presented. Pages of printedbooks do not travel with the text to electronicmedia unless they are artificially imposed. Ifpages were used for the documentary unit in aback-of-the-book index, the index becomes use-less when the text is moved to electronic media,where there are no pages. But if the index pointsto paragraphs rather than pages, the index can beused in electronic media, and it also saves timefor users who no longer have to search forparticular paragraphs on dense pages of text.This new documentary unit for back-of-the-bookindexes does, however, present a challenge tobook designers to come up with a discreet andunobtrusive method for numbering paragraphs!

ANALYSIS BASE/INDEXABLE MATTER

Once the documentary unit has been establishedfor a particular IR database, the analysis basewithin the documentary unit must be determined.The analysis base is the segment or portion of adocumentary unit that is analysed (by humans orby machines) in order to place the unit into thesystem of organization and on which retrievalwill be based. The analysis base can be quitebrief, such as the title of a document or anabstract, or it can extend to the completedocumentary unit. The analysis base consists ofthe textual matter to be indexed, so it is some-times called ‘indexable matter’.The size of the analysis base should relate to

the exhaustivity of indexing. If only a few termsare assigned or extracted to represent documen-tary units, a smaller analysis base, such as titleand/or abstract, may be adequate for mostpurposes. Obviously, however, the suitability ofthe title alone as analysis base will depend on theextent to which the title is an accurate summaryof the content and meaning of a text. We allknow of cases where this is far from the case.

Such titles can be ‘enriched’ with an explanatoryphrase.More exhaustive indexing will need a larger

analysis base, which for periodical articles mightinclude introductory and concluding paragraphsin addition to titles and abstracts, or the entirearticle.

EXHAUSTIVITY

Exhaustivity of indexing refers to the level ofdetail with which the content, meaning, purposeor features of messages and their texts aredescribed for retrieval. In quantitative terms, itis the number of terms assigned to or extractedfrom texts.Highly selective indexing, with low exhaustiv-

ity, is based on a high threshold of importancethat must be met before terms are assigned. As aresult, retrieved documents are likely to be highlyrelevant to a search using their index terms,because only central topics or dominant featuresare indexed. Thus, at least in theory, low-exhaus-tivity indexing can lead to high-precision searchresults, with fewer non-relevant documents re-trieved. On the other hand, many documents thatmay treat a desired topic in passing and maytherefore be relevant to someone wanting every-thing on a topic will not be retrieved, resulting ina loss of desired recall.High-exhaustivity indexing sets a low thresh-

old of importance for terms to be assigned orextracted, resulting in potentially greater recall,because more of the documents in which aparticular topic is addressed will be retrieved.But these documents will include those in whichthe topic is not central, but only peripheral. Userswanting only documents focusing directly on thetopic may judge such peripheral treatments to beirrelevant, therefore lowering the precision of asearch.Automatic indexing tends to operate at very

high exhaustivity levels, often resulting in higherrecall but lower precision. A principal challengein automatic indexing is the development oftechniques to lower the exhaustivity of indexingby identifying the central topics or dominantfeatures of messages and texts in order to makeindexing more selective.Human intellectual indexing tends to be quite

selective, with a high threshold of importance fortopics and features, and therefore a low exhaus-tivity level. It is for this reason that manydatabases combine both types of indexing, rely-


ing on human indexing for certain types of high-precision searches and automatic, often full-text,indexing for certain types of high-recall searches.The influence of exhaustivity does not operate

in a vacuum. The specificity of vocabulary, typeof syntax and the linking of vocabulary toindicate broader, narrower and other relation-ships can counteract or augment the potentialeffects of exhaustivity. The highly specific voca-bulary that is typical of automatic indexing, forexample, can in some cases lead to highly precisesearch results, contradicting the general tendencyof high-exhaustivity indexing.

VOCABULARY SPECIFICITY

The specificity of vocabulary used to describetopics and features will influence the types ofsearches that an IR database can support and theresults of these searches. Specificity refers to theexactness with which a term describes a topic orfeature. If a message discusses Labrador retrie-vers but the index term is ‘dogs’, the term isgeneric rather than specific. This will mean that aperson desiring documents on Labrador retrie-vers must search for ‘dogs’ and then examinemany irrelevant documents or document surro-gates. The precision, or exactness, of the searchwill suffer. On the other hand, if the index termis ‘Labrador retrievers’, the term is specific andthe search should be more precise, but recall maysuffer because there may be discussions of Lab-rador retrievers, along with other dogs, that wereindexed with the terms ‘dogs’ rather than ‘Lab-rador retrievers’.Indexing standards call for more, rather than

less, specificity in indexing terminology, becausegood vocabulary management can help expandsearches to more generic levels when needed. Onthe other hand, the more specific the vocabulary,the more terms there will be. Larger controlledvocabularies are more expensive to maintain andcan be harder to use than smaller vocabularies.Indexing that is based directly on terms used inlinguistic texts, as is the case for most automaticindexing methods, will use terms as specific asthose used in the text.Indexing systems that rely on both controlled

vocabulary assigned on the basis of intellectualanalysis and automatic indexing based on termsfound in the text can take advantage of thedifferences in specificity to balance the advan-tages and disadvantages of each approach.

METHOD OF INDEXING

The method of indexing – human intellectualanalysis, machine algorithmic analysis or combi-nations of these fundamental approaches – hasalready been discussed. It is mentioned againhere to emphasize that it constitutes an impor-tant attribute of IR databases.

SYNTAX

Syntax refers to the grammar of indexing andsearching – the method for combining terms intoheadings and subheadings for entries in printindexes or displayed indexes in electronic media,or for creating search statements for electronicsearches of non-displayed indexes. It also in-cludes techniques for modifying terms insearches, such as stemming and truncation, aswell as specifying variable weights, proximityrequirements or the use of links and operators,such as the Boolean ‘and’, ‘or’ and ‘not’.

Syntax for electronic searchesThe two basic methods for combining terms forelectronic searches are (1) boolean logic and(2) weighted term vectors, sometimes based onprobabilistic criteria. Both of these methods maybe combined with techniques for stemming,truncation and specification of term proximityor location.Boolean searching divides a database into two

mutually exclusive segments – those recordswhose terms match the search statement andthose whose terms do not. Unless some methodof giving weights to terms is used, retrievedrecords all have the same value or weight. Thereis no inherent method for ranking records interms of potential relevance to the search state-ment.The lack of ranked retrieval is the biggest

disadvantage of Boolean searching. As databasesget larger and larger, retrieved sets also get largerand larger, or else search statements are mademore and more restrictive in order to reduce thenumber of retrieved records, thereby increasingthe risk of missing important documents.Term vector or probabilistic searching simply

matches a set of search terms with documentrecords, then, on the basis of this matching, thedatabase is rearranged into a ranked list based onpredicted (or probable) relevance.In describing documents, weights can also be

given to index terms, based on their importancein relation to topics or features of a text. In


automatic indexing this can be based on fre-quency of occurrence in the text, either of theterm itself (perhaps after stemming) or of theterm and equivalent or closely related termsdetermined by reference to a thesaurus or co-occurrence clusters. These weights can be mod-ified by the relative frequency of a term across alldocuments in the database. A term that occursfrequently in many documents is not a gooddiscriminator in searching, so it can be given alower weight, while a term occurring infre-quently in the database as a whole would get ahigher weight (inverse document frequency).Boolean searching became a de facto standard

in electronic databases in the early decades oftheir development because it was in use prior tothe coming of the computer to informationretrieval, but it is now frequently replaced by orcomplemented with term vector or probabilistictechniques, which have become the standard forelectronic searches on the Web.

Syntax for browsable displayed indexesDisplayed indexes, especially those presented inprint databases, must be created in advance ofpresentation to searchers. Such indexes are oftencalled ‘pre-co-ordinate’ because terms are co-ordinated – put together into index headings –in advance of publication. In contrast, in electro-nic searching it is the searcher who combinesterms for the search after the index has beenprepared, so indexing designed specifically forelectronic searching is often called ‘post-co-ordi-nate’.Pre-co-ordinate syntax has become increas-

ingly important for electronic IR databases inrecent years as researchers and database produ-cers have come to recognize the importance ofbrowsing for many users (Rice et al. 2001;Marchionini 1995). Electronic searches of non-displayed indexes are very appropriate for userswho know what they want and know what termsto use to describe it. But for many users who areunsure of what they want or what terms to use,browsing displayed indexes can be very helpful.It is much easier to recognize terms or headingsthat might be relevant, than to try to think ofterms or combinations of terms when the user isuncertain what these might be. Searchers oftensuffer from ‘ASK’ – an ‘anomalous state ofknowledge’ – because they are searching foranswers in topical areas that are unfamiliar tothem (Belkin et al. 1982). Browsable displayed

indexes, whether arranged in alphabetical orclassified arrays, require headings that are cre-ated by indexers or by computer algorithm inadvance of presentation to the user.The many types of syntax for browsable

displayed indexes can be divided into six cate-gories: ad hoc syntax, subject heading syntax,classification syntax, natural-language syntax,permuted syntax and string syntax.

Ad hoc syntaxWhen a displayed index is created for a singledocument, such as a back-of-the-book index, or aone-time index is created for a collection ofdocuments, terms are often combined into head-ings and subheadings on an ad hoc basis ratherthan according to a pre-established syntax systemor list of headings. The indexer selects termsbased on the vocabulary of the text (if it islinguistic text, in the same language as the index)and the anticipated vocabulary of potential users,and creates heading–subheading combinationsdesigned to describe the topics and features ofdocumentary units.It is customary in English language indexes to

use nouns or noun phrases as terms, with pluralforms for discrete objects that can be counted.Prepositions are used sparingly to clarify relation-ships among terms. A good index will provide asufficient variety of subheadings so that no head-ing or heading–subheading combination willpoint to too many documentary units. The NISOtechnical report on indexing (Anderson 1997)suggests that no more than five documentaryunits should share the same heading–subheadingcombination, so that in the compiled index nomore than five locators would follow any head-ing or heading–subheading combination. Modernpractice prefers direct, natural language order formultiword terms (‘fire insurance’ rather than‘insurance, fire’) except for names of persons,which are usually inverted and entered underfamily names. The NISO technical report alsosuggests that only proper nouns be capitalizedand that the use of articles be minimized. Termsthat have different meanings should be qualified,as in ‘mercury (planet)’, ‘mercury (chemicalelement)’.Many of these conventions are used with other

forms of indexing syntax as well.

Subject heading syntaxSubject headings were developed in the mid- andlate nineteenth century in order to provide con-


sistent headings for library subject catalogues.The largest and most famous general compilationof subject headings is that of the US library ofcongress (Library of Congress, Subject Catalo-ging Division 2001). One of the most famousspecialized lists is MeSH: Medical Subject Head-ings of the US National Library of Medicine(2001).The Library of Congress list contains hundreds

of thousands of headings consisting of singleterms, multiple terms in heading–subheadingcombinations (‘Animals – Diseases – Nutritionalaspects’) or phrases (‘Telephone assistance pro-grammes for the poor’). In earlier years, manyterms were inverted (‘Students, Foreign’), butcurrent practice prefers direct natural languageorder. However, because library of congresssubject headings have been developed overmany decades, different patterns have been usedover the years, and today they co-exist. This lackof consistent syntactic patterns is one of the chiefcomplaints levelled against traditional subjectheadings. It is difficult to predict, for example,whether a place-name heading should precede orfollow a topical heading. Both ‘Archives – UnitedStates’ and ‘United States – Library resources’ areused. Similarly, the use of adjectival versus nounforms or heading–subheading combinations ver-sus phrases is inconsistent, as in ‘Animal films’but ‘Animals – Folklore’ and ‘Animals in litera-ture’.In addition to pre-co-ordinated heading–sub-

heading combinations and phrase headings, sub-ject heading lists provide ‘standard’ subheadingsthat may be combined with other headings.Pattern headings for people, cities, nations andmany other categories of topics provide modelsfor the creation of new heading–subheadingcombinations. Strings of headings, subheadingsand sub-subheadings can become quite long, andmaintaining consistency among many differentcataloguers is a big challenge, necessitating largemanuals of procedure (Library of Congress,Subject Cataloging Division 1996).Despite an enormous literature critical of

subject headings, they are the most widely usedmethod for indexing library collections. In theUSA, for example, they are used by every generallibrary of any consequence, so that they providea consistent form of access in thousands oflibraries. They are especially useful as the catalo-gues of many of the largest libraries have becomeavailable on the Internet.

Some indexing and abstracting services usesubject headings for main headings but create‘ad hoc’ subheadings based on topics and featuresof documents being indexed.

Classification syntaxThe syntax of classification systems has beenvery similar to that of subject heading systems.Earlier systems have been largely enumerative, inwhich classes (with captions or headings andnotation) for complex topics have been pre-co-ordinated and laid out (enumerated) in thedesired order. The library of congress classi-fication is one of the most enumerative of themajor systems of classification. The deweydecimal classification, and even more itsoffshoot, the universal decimal classifica-tion, have adopted many synthetic features, bywhich classes for complex topics, with captionsand notation, can be synthesized from variouscategories or facets within the classificationscheme. This style of classification is often called‘analytico-synthetic,’ because topics are first ana-lysed into their components, then a compositeclass is synthesized from the components. Themost modern classifications, beginning with ran-ganathan’s famous colon classification andexemplified by the new edition of the BlissClassification (Bliss 1977), are more fully fa-ceted. Topics and features are listed in facetsaccording to basic characteristics. Ranganathanreferred to the most basic facet categories withthe initials ‘PMEST’, representing ‘personality’(i.e. entities), ‘material’ (i.e. constituent elementsand attributes), ‘energy’ (i.e. operations, pro-cesses, events, etc.), ‘space’ (i.e. places) and‘time’. Classes, with captions and notation, arebuilt up from segments from individual facets(Ranganathan 1965).Fully faceted classifications are most ap-

propriate for display and browsing in electronicenvironments because users may choose the orderof facets – in effect they may create their ownclassifications to suit their purposes. In moretraditional environments, such as arranging itemson shelves or displaying classifications in staticmedia such as print-on-paper, the order of facetsmust be chosen in advance and cannot bechanged. Topics on literature, for example, mightbe classed according to this sequence of facets:nationality, language, genre, period, writer, work,theme. But in the hypertext-based electronicenvironment, facets such as these can be


displayed to users, and users may choose tobrowse facets of greatest interest, and in theorder they prefer. A user might choose, forexample, to browse facets for theme, genre andnationality, in that order. All headings for parti-cular themes would come together, whereas intraditional fixed classifications where theme isconsidered much later in the ‘citation order offacets’, themes would be scattered among nation-alities, genres, periods and other facets. Pollittand his research team at Huddersfield Universityin the UK have been leaders in designing facetedbrowsable classification displays for users inhyptertext environments (Pollitt et al. 1997).chain indexing is a technique for converting

the ‘chains’ or strings of classification headingsor captions into a set of headings for display inalphabetical indexes, so that users have access toa classified display via each distinct term in theclassification heading.

Natural language syntaxIn natural language indexes, the syntax of nat-ural-language text segments, such as titles or keysentences, is preserved in order to create brow-sable index entries consisting of a keyword orkey phrase, plus a contextual subheading orstring of text consisting of all or part of the textsegment. The three most common examples ofnatural language displayed indexes are KWIC(KeyWord in Context, in which the keyword orphrase remains in its original context), KWOC(KeyWord out of Context, in which the keywordis pulled out of its context for display) andKWAC (KeyWord and Context, in which thekeyword is pulled out of its context, but wordsfollowing the keyword are placed next to it).These indexes are usually created by computeralgorithm. As noted under ‘Automatic indexing’,innovative digital libraries have used the KWICformat to display key sentences containing keyphrases identified by co-occurrence and fre-quency criteria.

Permuted syntaxPermuted syntax was developed to provide max-imum access through the combination of allpossible word pairs. Permutations can be basedon assigned terms or on keywords from natural-language segments, such as titles. In principle,permuted syntax could be used to create allpossible combinations of three or more words,but because the number of unique entries ex-pands very quickly (exponentially) as the number

of words in each heading increases, permutationsof more that two words are not practical.

The institute for scientific information(2001) has used permuted indexes (called ‘Per-muterm Indexes’) to complement its citationindexes for many years.

String syntax

String indexing makes use of computer algo-rithms to create multiple entries from a singleset or ‘string’ of terms. The terms themselves maybe assigned and coded for manipulation byhuman indexers (Craven 1986).

The simplest form of string indexing is simplyto list the terms associated with a document inalphanumeric order within the string, but torotate each term, in turn, to the lead position.Thus in an a browsable alphabetical index, thecomplete string will appear under every term inthe string, and, after each lead term, all otherterms will be displayed in alphanumeric order.This technique, sometimes called ‘rotated-termsyntax’, has been used successfully for manyyears by ABC-Clio (2001) in its databases Amer-ica History and Life and Historical Abstracts.More sophisticated forms of string indexing

attempt to arrange terms under a lead term in aconceptually meaningful order, in contrast to thesimple alphanumeric order used in rotationsyntax. In faceted indexing, terms are labelled ortagged with facet or role indicators and the orderof terms is determined by their facets or roles.One of the earliest and most sophisticatedsystems of faceted indexing was PRECIS (Pre-served Context Indexing System) (Austin andDykstra 1984).

In general systems like PRECIS, facets androles consist of very general categories, such aslocation, key entity or system, modifier, actionand agent or instrument. A computer algorithmuses these categories to create index headings,such as:

England

Korean automobiles. sales. effects of adver-tising.

When faceted indexing is used for a particulardiscipline or subject field, facets tend to be muchmore specific. Here is an example from the MLAInternational Bibliography (1981), based on theCIFT (Contextual Indexing and Faceted Taxon-omy) system (Anderson 1979):


[literature]English literature

[genre]short story

[period]1900–1999

[author]Forster, E.M.

[work]‘Dr Woolacott’

[stylistic technique]symbolism

[theme]salvation; homosexuality

These terms, along with their facet codes,result in index headings such as:

Salvation

English literature. short story. 1900–1999.Forster, E.M.

‘Dr Woolacott’. symbolism. treatment ofSALVATION; homosexuality

The lead term is repeated, in full capitals, in itscontextual position in the headings.

NEPHIS (Nested Phrase Indexing System),developed by Timothy Craven (1986), providesa method for coding a subject statement in orderto create multiple entries. The statements can becreated by indexers or they can be existing textsegments, such as titles. Four coding symbols areused: angular brackets (5 4 ) indicate words orphrases under which entries should be created;the ‘at’ sign (@) negates an automatic entry underthe first word of a statement or phrase; and thequestion mark (?) marks connectives betweenterms and phrases, usually prepositions. As anexample, the following coded statement wouldproduce the following entry:

effects? of 5advertising4? on 5 sales? ofKorean

5automobiles4 4? in 5England44

automobiles

Korean –. sales in England. effects of adver-tising

Similar entries would also be created for eachterm preceded by ‘5 ’ in the string.

VOCABULARY MANAGEMENT

The importance of vocabulary control was dis-cussed earlier in this article. Here the emphasis ison methods for integrating vocabulary manage-ment into the design of IR databases.Because of the enormous variability in the

human use of language, some sort of vocabularymanagement is essential in the overall informa-tion retrieval process. If an IR database does notprovide it, then users will have to provide it bytrying to think of the various ways in which isparticular concept might be expressed.The purpose of vocabulary management sys-

tems is to provide links among terms that aresynonymous or essentially equivalent in the con-text of the IR database (e.g. ‘lawyer’, ‘attorney’,‘barrister’, ‘solicitor’) and to point to other termsthat are narrower in scope or share some othertype of relationship. Some systems also providepointers to broader terms as well. (In somecontexts, ‘barrister’ and ‘solicitor’ will be con-sidered narrower terms rather than equivalentterms for ‘lawyer’ or ‘attorney’.)Vocabulary management should be integrated

into the searching system itself, whether it is anelectronic search interface or displayed browsa-ble alphabetical or classified indexes. Usersshould not have to consult a separate thesaurusor list of subject headings, follow up cross-references, then return to the search interface.For displayed indexes, this means that cross-references should be built into the index display.For indexes that are searched electronically, thedisplay of alternative or related vocabularyshould appear as soon as initial search terms arechosen.Thus if a user enters the search term ‘lawyers’

into an electronic search interface, linked termsshould be displayed. A window can be used tolist equivalent terms (‘attorneys’, ‘solicitors’,‘barristers’), narrower terms, if any (‘trial law-yers’, ‘defence attorneys’, ‘tax attorneys’),broader terms (‘legal system personnel’) andrelated terms (‘crime’, ‘law’, ‘justice’, ‘courts’). Ifa controlled vocabulary is used, users should beinformed that the initial term ‘lawyers’ is beingconverted to the established term ‘attorneys’ (orvice versa). Users should have the option ofadding any of the other terms to the search orsubstituting displayed terms for the originalterms. It should also be possible to consult thethesaurus record for any of the displayed termsto see their narrower, broader and related terms


as well. All terms selected should be added to thesearch directly. The user should not have to re-key any of them.Linked vocabulary terms can be displayed in

similar ways in browsable displays.By using the vocabulary management compo-

nent of an IR database, users can narrow thesearch by substituting narrower terms that maybe more specific to the objective of the search;the search can be broadened by adding addi-tional terms or substituting broader terms.Vocabulary management can be based on a

formal thesaurus or on term relationships basedon term co-occurrence in texts. This later ap-proach displays terms that frequently co-occur inthe database with the initial search terms. In anearly example of this approach by Doszkocs(1978), mentioned previously under ‘Automaticindexing’, the following related terms were dis-played for a search on ‘pre-natal’ and ‘toxicity’,ranked according to the frequency of co-occur-rence: post-natal, gestational, foetus, gestations,teratogenicity, embryocidal, peri-natal, placental,mothers, clefts, retardation, foetuses, stillbirths,resorptions, rubratoxins, developmental, palates,organogenesis, foetal, pregnant. Such a list givessearchers the opportunity to consider the rele-vance of a term they may not have thought of.

SURROGATES AND LOCATORS

Documentary units that are indexed and orga-nized for retrieval by an IR database must berepresented in some manner. The process ofrepresentation is called ‘surrogation’ and theresults are called ‘surrogates’. Even in full-textdatabases, where the entire text is present, usersoften want to examine much briefer representa-tions than the full text, in order to decidewhether the text is relevant for their purposes.In ‘reference databases’, which refer to docu-ments not included within the database, surro-gates are the only representations of documentswithin the database. Surrogates usually consist ofcitations to, or descriptions of, documentaryunits, and sometimes also include summaries orabstracts of contents and features. Descriptors orindex terms assigned to documentary units arealso included.Part of a surrogate is the locator, which is the

device used to locate the document itself,whether it is contained within the database or isonly outside the database, as in reference data-bases. Reference databases use citations for

locators that can be used to locate documents inthe larger documentary universe, including li-brary collections or the World Wide Web. Alsoused as locators are the growing number ofidentifiers, as discussed previously under ‘Docu-ment identifiers’.Within full-text databases, including books

with back-of-the-book indexes, a system of inter-nal locators is required. For example, a back-of-the-book index often uses page or paragraphnumbers to refer to the documentary units withinthe full text of the document. In electronicdatabases, internal locators generally consist ofhypertext links leading from brief surrogates tofuller surrogates or full texts.

SURROGATE DISPLAY

The display of surrogates is an important aspectof interface design. In different stages of asearch, users can best be served by differentportions of surrogates. The arrangement andsummarization of multiple surrogates are alsoimportant. Surrogates not only serve to representsingle documents, but also provide data foroverviews of the contents of the entire database(Greene et al. 2000). Overviews can include avariety of graphical depictions of the topicalstrengths of a database.During a subject search, users may only want

to see brief subject-oriented descriptions of docu-ments, such as a string of descriptors, so thatmultiple descriptions can be examined easily andquickly. These brief topical surrogates should bearranged by topic, either in alphabetical orclassified displays, or ranked by potential rele-vance. In author searches, brief surrogates shouldconsist of authors and titles of documents.Eventually users may want to see full surrogates,and here the arrangement of elements shouldrelate to the kind of search. In subject searches,subject elements, such as subject descriptors andbrief summaries, should be placed at the top ofthe full surrogate. This could be followed by afuller abstract and citation with authors, titlesand publication details. On the other hand, inauthor or title searches, these elements should beplaced first.

INDEX DISPLAY

Browsable index displays are absolutely essentialin print databases, because they provide the onlyaccess to the terms and headings representingtopics and features of documentary units. Brow-


sable index displays are increasingly important inelectronic environments, permitting users tobrowse categories, facets or headings prior to orduring a search. Psychological research has longconfirmed that human beings find it easier torecognize relevant terms than to recall them fromtheir memories. This is especially true for topicsor areas with which the searcher is not familiar.Effective index displays suggest alternative op-tions for a search. Vocabulary management dis-plays can also be very helpful for this purpose aswell.Indexes can be displayed in two fundamentally

different ways – alphanumerically, based on theletters and numerals that make up index head-ings, and relationally in classified arrays so thatclosely related topics or features are groupedtogether.

Relational classification displaysAs discussed under ‘Classification syntax’, classi-fied displays can be based on existing classifica-tion systems, such as the Universal DecimalClassification (UDC), Dewey Decimal Classifica-tion (DDC), Library of Congress Classification(LCC) and many others. In electronic environ-ments, however, faceted classifications in whichthe user has control over the selection andordering of facets of interest are appropriate.Within facets, topics can be arranged alphabe-

tically, but this will scatter closely related topics,such as, for example, antelopes and zebras. Inorder to bring together closely related topicswithin a facet, hierarchical, chronological, genea-logical or geographical arrangements are oftenmore appropriate. For example, in the facet forlanguages, the thousands of human languagescould be arranged in alphabetical order, butbrowsers may be better served by grouping theminto language families, such as Indo-European,Uralic, Semitic, etc. These families can then bearranged by subfamilies, such as Germanic,Indic, Romance and Slavic within Indo-Eur-opean, until individual languages are reached.Such a classification will place French, Spanish,Italian and other Romance languages together.

Alphanumeric displaysMany displayed indexes are arranged in alphabe-tical or alphanumeric order. At first glance,alphanumeric order appears to be straightfor-ward and non-problematic, but instead it is anarea of extreme disagreement among informationprofessionals. It is also an example of an area

where opinions, strongly held, are not based onempirical research.The major controversies are about whether to

consider the space and various punctuationmarks as sorting characters, the treatment ofnumerals and the use of sorting criteria otherthan the characters in headings. Depending onthe choices adopted, very different arrangementscan result. Users who do not understand theprinciples of arrangement can miss a sought-afterentry by a great distance.If the space is considered, the arrangement is

called ‘word-by-word’ rather than ‘letter-by-let-ter’, because headings that begin with the sameword will come together. Thus, in word-by-wordarrangement, ‘New York’ will come before‘Newark,’ but in letter-by-letter arrangement,‘Newark’ will come before ‘New York’.Older standards called for numbers to be

arranged as if spelled out in words, whereasmodern standards call for numbers to be ar-ranged according to numerical value, precedingalphabetic letters. But, even here, there is dis-agreement about whether arrangement should bebased on the actual characters present orthe mathematical value of the characters. Forexample, should ‘1/4’ be placed with ‘0.25’ orshould it be arranged on the basis of its char-acters, ‘1’, ‘/’ and ‘4’. Both the American LibraryAssociation Filing Committee (1980) and theLibrary of Congress Processing Department(1980) opt for the latter option, not only forfractions, but also for decimals, so that headingswith fractions or decimals can be wildly out ofnumerical value order. Roman numerals areusually arranged by their numerical value ratherthan on the basis of their alphabetical letters.One of the most controversial areas is arrange-

ment based on extra-alphanumeric criteria. TheLibrary of Congress, for example, still insists thatheadings beginning with the same word shouldbe arranged not on the basis of the followingword, but on the basis of the nature of the entityrepresented and the form of the heading in thefollowing order: persons entered under fore-names, persons entered under family names,places, corporate body names and topical head-ings, and titles of texts. This means that a titlelike ‘Paris after the war’ will come long after aperson named ‘Paris, Virginia’, or an entry for‘Paris (France)’. These principles are rarely ex-plained to users.Such classified sequences within alphanumeric


arrays can be useful for browsing, but only if thearrangement is made clear to users, using suchtechniques as search trees, as advocated byDrabenstott and Vizine-Goetz (1994).

References

ABC-Clio (2001) America: History and Life; HistoricalAbstracts.

American Library Association, Filing Committee (1980)ALA Filing Rules. ALA.

Anderson, James D. (1979) ‘Contextual indexing andfaceted classification for databases in the huma-nities’, American Society for Information Science,42nd annual meeting, Minneapolis, Oct. 14–18,1979. Proceedings, vol. 16, Knowledge IndustryPublications, pp. 194–201.

—— (1985) ‘Indexing systems: extensions of the mind’sorganizing power’, Information and Behavior, vol. 1,pp. 287–323.

—— (1997) Guidelines for Indexes and Related Infor-mation Retrieval Devices, NISO Press (NationalInformation Standards Organization, Technical Re-port; 2)

Anderson, James D.; Pérez-Carballo, José (2001) ‘Thenature of indexing: how humans and machinesanalyze messages and texts for retrieval, Part I:Research, and the nature of human indexing; PartII: Machine indexing, and the allocation of humanversus machine effort’, Information Processing &Management, vol. 37, pp. 231–77.

Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (1998) 2d edn,American Library Association.

Art and Architecture Thesaurus (1994) 2d edn, OxfordUniversity Press/J. Paul Getty Trust.

Austin, Derek; Dykstra, Mary (1984) PRECIS: AManual of Concept Analysis and Subject Indexing,2nd edn, British Library.

Bates, Marcia J. (1976) ‘Rigorous systematic bibliogra-phy’, RQ, vol. 16, pp. 7–26.

Belkin, Nicholas J.; Oddy, R.N.; Brooks, H.M. (1982)‘Ask for information retrieval: part I. backgroundand theory’, Journal of Documentation, vol. 38(2),pp. 61–71; ‘Part II. results of a design study’, Journalof Documentation, vol. 38(3), pp. 145–64.

Belkin, Nicholas; Croft, W. Bruce (1992) ‘Informationfiltering and information retrieval: two sides of thesame coin?’, Communications of the ACM, vol.35(12), pp. 29–38.

Bliss, Henry Evelyn (1977) Bliss Bibliographic Classifi-cation, 2d edn, J. Mills and Vanda Broughton (eds),Butterworths.

Collantes, Lourdes Y. (1995) ‘Degree of agreement innaming objects and concepts for information retrie-val’, Journal of the American Society for InformationScience, vol. 46, pp. 116–32.

Craven, Timothy C. (1986) String Indexing, AcademicPress.

Deerwester, Scott C.; Dumais, Susan T.; Furnas, GeorgeW.; Landauer, Thomas K.; Harshman, Richard(1990) ‘Indexing by latent semantic analysis’, Jour-nal of the American Society for Information Science,vol. 41, pp. 391–407.

Doszkocs, Tamas E. (1978) ‘An associative interactivedictionary (AID) for online bibliographic searching’,American Society for Information Science. 41stAnnual Meeting, New York, Nov. 13–17, 1978.Proceedings, vol. 15, Knowledge Industry Publica-tions, pp. 105–9.

Drabenstott, Karen Markey; Vizine-Goetz, Diane(1994) Using Subject Headings for Online Retrieval:Theory, Practice, and Potential, Academic Press.

European Communities (1995) Thesaurus Eurovoc,Office for Official Publications of the EC.

Fetters, Linda K. (1995) A Guide to Indexing Software,5th edn, American Society of Indexers.

Fidel, Raya; Hahn, Trudi; Rasmussen, Eddie M.; Smith,Philip J. (eds) (1994) Challenges in Indexing Electro-nic Text and Images, American Society for Informa-tion Science/Learned Information.

Fugmann, Robert (1993) Subject Analysis and Index-ing: Theoretical Foundation and Practical Advice,Indeks Verlag.

Furnas, George W.; Landauer, Thomas K.; Gomez,Louis M.; Dumais, Susan T. (1987) ‘The vocabularyproblem in human-system communication’, Commu-nications of the ACM, vol. 30(11), pp. 964–71.

Gluck, Myke (1994) ‘Special topic issue: spatial infor-mation’, Journal of the American Society for Infor-mation Science, vol. 45, pp. 639–717.

Green, Brian; Bide, Mark (1997) Unique Identifiers: aBrief Introduction, Book Industry Communication/EDItEUR, http://www.bic.uk/uniquid.html.

Greene, Stephan; Marchionini, Gary; Plaisant, Cathe-rine; Shneiderman, Ben (2000) ‘Previews and over-views in digital libraries: designing surrogates tosupport visual information seeking’, Journal of theAmerican Society for Information Science, vol.51(4), pp. 380–93.

Gutwin, Carl; Paynter, Gordon; Witten, Ian H.; Nevill-Manning, Craig G.; Frank, Eibe (1998) ImprovingBrowsing in Digital Libraries with Keyphrase In-dexes. Technical report 98–1, Computer ScienceDepartment, University of Saskatchewan, http://www.cs.usask.ca/faculty/gutwin/1998/keyphind-tech-report/html/keyphind-9.html.

Hayes-Roth, Frederick; Jacobstein, Neil (1994) ‘Thestate of knowledge-based systems’, Communicationsof the ACM, vol. 37(3), pp. 27–39.

Hensen, Steven L. (1989) Archives, Personal Papers,and Manuscripts: a Cataloging Manual for ArchivalRepositories, Historical Societies, and ManuscriptLibraries, Society of American Archivists.

Hjerppe, Roland (1996) ‘Go with the flow, or abide bythe side, or watch the wave? Challenges of changefor knowledge organization’, in Green, Rebecca(ed.), Proceedings of the Fourth International ISKOConference, 1996 July 15–18, Washington, DC,Indeks Verlag, pp. 10–25.

Hjørland, Birger (1997) Information Seeking and Sub-ject Representation: an Activity-Theoretical Ap-proach to Information Science, Greenwood Press.

Hodge, Gail M.; Milstead, Jessica L. (1998) ComputerSupport to Indexing, National Federation of Ab-stracting and Information Services.

Humphrey, Susanne M. (1993) ‘The MedIndEx proto-type for computer assisted MEDLINE database


indexing’, American Society of Indexers. 25th An-nual Meeting. Proceedings, ASI, pp. 45–54.

Iivonen, Mirja (1994) ‘Consistency in the selection ofsearch concepts and search terms’, InformationProcessing & Management, vol. 31(2), pp. 173–90.

Institute for Scientific Information (2001) Arts andHumanities Citation Index; Science Citation Index;Social Science Citation Index; Current Contents, ISI.

Kessler, M.M. (1963) ‘Bibliographic coupling betweenscientific papers’, American Documentation, vol. 14,pp. 10–25.

Knutson, Gunnar (1993) ‘The year’s work in descrip-tive cataloging, 1992’, Library Resources and Tech-nical Services, vol. 37, p. 263.

Leonard, Leonard E. (1977) Inter-indexer ConsistencyStudies, 1954–1975: a Review of the Literature andSummary of Study Results, Occasional papers no.131, University of Illinois, Graduate School ofLibrary Science.

Library of Congress, AMIM Revision Committee(2000) Archival Moving Image Materials: a Catalo-ging Manual, 2nd edn, LC.

Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division(1991) Map Cataloguing Manual, LC.

Library of Congress, Office for Descriptive CatalogingPolicy (1991) Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Books,2nd edn, LC.

Library of Congress, Processing Department (1980)Library of Congress Filing Rules, prepared by J.C.Rather and S.C. Biebel, LC.

Library of Congress, Subject Cataloging Division(1996) Subject Cataloging Manual: Subject Head-ings, 5th edn, LC.

—— (2001) Library of Congress Subject Headings, LC.Marchionini, Gary (1995) Information Seeking inElectronic Environments, Cambridge UniversityPress.

MLA International Bibliography (1981, 2000) ModernLanguage Association of America.

Molto, Mavis; Svenonius, Elaine (1991) ‘Automaticrecognition of title page names’, Information Proces-sing and Management, vol. 27, pp. 83–95.

National Library of Medicine (2001) Medical SubjectHeadings, NLM.

Olson, Nancy B. (ed.) (1997) Cataloging InternetResources: a Manual and Practical Guide, 2nd edn,OCLC, http://www.purl.org/oclc/cataloging-internet.

Paskin, Norman (1997 ‘Information identifiers’,Learned publishing, vol. 10(2), pp. 135–56.

Poli, Roberto (1996) ‘Ontology for knowledge organi-zation’, in Green, Rebecca (ed.) Proceedings of theFourth International ISKO Conference, 1996 July15–18, Washington, DC., Indeks Verlag, pp. 313–19.

Pollitt, A. Steven; Smith, Martin P.; Braekevelt, PatrickA.J. (1997) View-based Searching Systems – a NewParadigm for Information Retrieval Based on Fa-ceted Classification and Indexing Using MutuallyConstraining Knowledge-based Views, Centre forDatabase Access Research, School of Computingand Mathematics, University of Huddersfield, http://www.hud.ac.uk/schools/cedar/bcshci.htm.

Ranganathan, S.R. (1965) The Colon Classification,Graduate School of Library Service, Rutgers, theState University.

Rice, Ronald E.; McCreadie, Maureen; Chang, Shan-JuL. (2001) Accessing and Browsing: Information andCommunication, MIT Press.

Salton, Gerard; Allan, James; Buckley, Chris (1994)‘Automatic structuring and retrieval of large textfiles’, Communications of the ACM, vol. 37(2), pp.97–108.

Saracevic, Tefko; Kantor, Paul; Chamis, Alice Y.;Trivison, Donna (1988) ‘A study of informationseeking and retrieving’, Journal of the AmericanSociety for Information Science, vol. 39, pp. 161–216.

Schottlaender, Brian E.C. (ed.) (1998) The Future of theDescriptive Cataloging Rules: Papers from theALCTS Preconference, AACR2000, American Li-brary Association Annual Conference, Chicago, June22, 1995, ALA.

Shaw, Sarah J.; Shiere, Lauralee (1984) Sheet MusicCataloging and Processing: a Manual, Music LibraryAssociation.

Small, Henry G. (1973) ‘Co-citation in the scientificliterature: a new measure of the relationship betweentwo documents’, Journal of the American Society forInformation Science, vol. 24, pp. 265–9.

Soergel, Dagobert (1985) Organizing Information:Principles of Data Base and Retrieval systems,Academic Press.

Unesco (1995) Unesco Thesaurus, Unesco.VanWingen, Peter M. and Urquiza, Belinda D. (1996)Standard Citation Forms for Published Bibliogra-phies and Catalogs Used in Rare Book Cataloging,2nd edn, Library of Congress.

Vickery, Brian C. (1997) ‘Ontologies’, Journal ofInformation Science, vol. 23, pp. 277–86.

Weibel, S. (1992) ‘Automated cataloging: implicationfor libraries and patrons’, in F.W. Lancaster andLinda C. Smith (eds) Artificial Intelligence andExpert Systems: Will They Change the Library?,Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing(1990), Graduate School of Library and InformationScience, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,pp. 67–80.

Weihs, Jean (ed.) (1998) The Principles and Future ofAACR: International Conference on the Principlesand Future Development of AACR, 1997, Toronto,Canadian Library Association.

Wellisch, Hans H. (1980) ‘The cybernetics of biblio-graphic control: toward a theory of documentretrieval systems’, Journal of the American Societyfor Information Science, vol. 31, pp. 41–50.

Wilson, Patrick (1968) Two Kinds of Power: An Essayon Bibliographical Control, University of CaliforniaPress.

Further reading

Aitchison, Jean; Gilchrist, Alan; Bawden, David (1997)Thesaurus Construction and Use: a Practical Man-ual, 3rd edn, ASLIB.

Allen, Bryce L. (1996) Information Tasks: Toward aUser-Centered Approach to Information Systems,Academic Press.

Bates, Marcia J. (1998) ‘Indexing and access for digitallibraries and the internet: human, database, and


domain factors’, Journal of the American Society forInformation Science, vol. 49(13), pp. 1185–205.

Bean, Carol A.; Green, Rebecca (2001) Relationships inthe Organization of Knowledge, Kluwer AcademicPublishers.

Berman, Sanford (1993) Prejudices and Antipathies: aTract on the LC Subject Headings ConcerningPeople, McFarland.

Carpenter, M. and Svenonius, E. (eds) (1985) Founda-tions of Cataloging: A Sourcebook, Libraries Unlim-ited.

Chan, Lois Mai (1995) Library of Congress SubjectHeadings: Principles and Applications, 3rd edn,Libraries Unlimited.

—— (1999) A Guide to the Library of CongressClassification, 5th edn, Libraries Unlimited.

—— (1985) Theory of Subject Analysis: a Sourcebook,Libraries Unlimited.

Chowdhury, G.G. (1999) Introduction to ModernInformation Retrieval, Library Association.

Frohmann, Bernd (1990) ‘Rules of indexing: a critiqueof mentalism in information retrieval theory’, Jour-nal of Documentation, vol. 46(2), pp. 81–101.

Gilchrist, Alan; Strachan, David (ed.) (1990) The UDC:Essays for a New Decade, ASLIB.

Hutchins, W.J. (1975) Languages of Indexing andClassification: a Linguistic Study of Structures andFunctions, Peregrinus.

Korfhage, Robert R. (1997) Information Storage andRetrieval, Wiley Computer Publishing.

Kowalski, Gerald (1997) Information Retrieval Sys-tems: Theory and Implementation, Kluwer AcademicPublishers.

Lancaster, F.W. (1998) Indexing and Abstracting inTheory and Practice, 2nd edn, Graduate School ofLibrary and Information Science, University of Illi-nois/Library Association.

Langridge, D.W. (1992) Classification: Its Kinds, Ele-ments, Systems and Applications, Bowker-Saur.

Miksa, Francis L. (1989) The DDC, the Universe ofKnowledge, and the Post-Modern Library, OCLC.

Milstead, Jessica L. (1984) Subject Access Systems:Alternatives in Design, Academic Press.

Mulvany, Nancy C. (1994) Indexing Books, Universityof Chicago Press.

O’Connor, Brian C. (1996) Explorations in Indexingand Abstracting: Pointing, Virtue, and Power, Li-braries Unlimited.

Salton, Gerard (1989) Automatic Text Processing: TheTransformation, Analysis, and Retrieval of Informa-tion by Computer, Addison-Wesley.

Sparck-Jones, Karen (ed.) (1981) Information RetrievalExperiment, Butterworths.

Stone, Alva T. (ed.) (2000) ‘The LCSH century: onehundred years with the Library of Congress subjectheadings system’, Cataloging and ClassificationQuarterly, vol. 29(1–2), pp. 1–234.

Strzalkowski, Tomek (ed.) (1999) Natural languageInformation Retrieval, Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Svenonius, Elaine (2000) The Intellectual Foundationof Information Organization, MIT Press.

Taylor, Arlene G. (1999) The Organization of Informa-tion, Libraries Unlimited.

Vickery, B.C. (1966) Faceted Classification Schemes,

Graduate School of Library Service, Rutgers, theState University.

Weinberg, Bella Hass (ed.) (1988) Indexing: the State ofOur Knowledge and the State of Our Ignorance:Proceedings of the 20th Annual Meeting of theAmerican Society of Indexers, 1988 May 13, NewYork, Learned Information.

Wellisch, Hans H. (1995) Indexing from A to Z, 2nd

edn, H.W. Wilson.

SEE ALSO: communication; taxonomies

JAMES D. ANDERSON

ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATIONPOLICIES

Organizational information policies parallel na-tional information policies – though they prob-ably stand a better chance of being implemented– and encouragement of them can form part ofnational policies (Moore 1998). Within organiza-tions, they belong to the same category asmarketing or research and development (R&D)policies – an expression of what overall corpo-rate objectives mean in terms of a specific area ofactivity that is essential for achieving them. Likeother organizational policies, they often form thebasis for a strategy (see definitions listed below).Interest in organizational information policies

developed from the late 1970s. A Diebold Re-search Programme report from that period citedby Fried (1979) suggested that top US corpora-tions were ‘groping in the dark’ because over 80per cent of them lacked an overall informationpolicy. The impact of computerization and man-agement information systems probably providedthe stimulus for such policies. Karmi (1983), forexample, presents an information policy matrix,and a case study that was certainly motivated byquestions about computerization. The relatedconcept of information management alsostarted to become current at about this time (seefor example Lewis and Martyn 1986: 33).Some definitions, based on Orna (1999) are:

. Organizational information policy.

. Founded on the organization’s overall objec-tives, defines at a general level.

. The objectives of information use in theorganization.

. What ‘information’ means in the context ofwhatever the organization is in business for.

. The principles on which it will manage infor-mation.

490 ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATION POLICIES

. Principles for the use of human resources formanaging information.

. Principles for the use of technology to supportinformation management.

. Principles it will apply in relation to establish-ing the value added by information andknowledge.

. Organizational information strategy.

The detailed expression of information policy isin terms of objectives, targets and actions toachieve them, for a defined period ahead. Itprovides a supportive framework for informationmanagement, and, supported by appropriatesystems and technology, is the ‘engine’ for:

. Maintaining, managing and applying the orga-nization’s information resources.

. Supporting its essential knowledge base and allwho contribute to it, with strategic intelli-gence, for achieving its key business objectives.

Why do organizations need an informationpolicy? How can they benefit? The short answeris that they need it to ensure that the knowledgethat they need to survive and prosper is kept fedwith information that nourishes it, so that it is fitfor successful action to achieve their objectives.The benefits that organizations can expect

from serious application of an information policycan be summarised as:

. Integration of all information activities, allow-ing information to contribute fully to meetingorganizational objectives.

. Objective criteria for allocating resources toinformation activities, based on their contribu-tion to organizational goals, allowing effectivedeployment of resources, and promoting long-term planning and continuity in developing theuse of information.

. Enriched use of knowledge and informationthrough interfunctional and interdisciplinaryco-operation; discovery of new possibilitiesfor productive use of knowledge and informa-tion.

. Enhanced chances of successful innovation andcompetition, with potential for increased re-turn on R&D investment, increased marketshare, better competitive position.

. Sound criteria for decisions on investment ininformation technology and systems, leadingto productive developments in information

use, support for essential internal and externalinformation interactions.

. Monitoring the organization’s internal andexternal environment for significant intelli-gence makes it possible to anticipate changeand respond to it effectively, and to takeproductive change initiatives.

. Risks it helps to avoid include: missed oppor-tunities; loss of customers/clients; failures oflegal compliance; loss of reputation because oflack of vital information; failures of innova-tion because of poor information interchange;poor return on systems and IT investment;failure to identify threatening change.

Steps towards organizationalinformation policy

Before deciding on an information policy it isnecessary to understand the organization forwhich it is to be designed: what it seeks toachieve; how it manages; how it sees itself andits outside world (organizational ‘culture’ andbusiness values); its history; its structure; itsbusiness processes. That will help in definingand ‘selling’ a policy that has a chance of beingaccepted and implemented.While, in order to survive and prosper, all

organizations need certain kinds of knowledge,and appropriate information resources to ‘feed’that knowledge (no organization, for example,can survive without self-knowledge, and knowl-edge of what is going on in the outside world onwhich it depends for its livelihood), the contentof the life-sustaining knowledge and informationis highly specific for each individual organiza-tion.The next step for any organization that is

serious about developing an information policyshould therefore be to define what constitutes itsessential knowledge and information – thoughvery few actually do so as yet. A useful practicalapproach is to ask and answer these questions:

. What does the organization, and the peoplewho make it up, need to know to achieve itsobjectives?

. What resources of information does it need tomaintain the required knowledge?

Information achieves nothing for organizationsuntil it reaches the people who need it, so that

ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATION POLICIES 491

they can absorb what they require, and act on it.A third vital question is therefore:

. How does the necessary information needto flow around within the organization andbetween it and its outside world? Howdo people need to interact with each otherin getting and using information? In itssimplest terms – who needs to tell whomabout what?

These initial steps make a light demand onresources – they require mainly desk research andthinking time, preferably by a small group ofthose responsible for managing information re-sources, and information systems/IT, with seniormanagement sponsorship. The results indicatethe important issues that the organization’s in-formation policy should address, and can lead toa first formulation of it.It is of course not enough just to have an

information policy statement. It is essential togain senior management commitment and guar-anteed resources for implementing it, and theunderstanding and support of all who areconcerned with managing any resources ofinformation and of the systems/technology infra-structure. For examples of organizational infor-mation policies, see Orna (1990: 167–77, 1999:106–8).

From information policy to informationstrategy

Information policy expresses aspirations – whatshould be. To translate it into a working strategythat delivers the goods, it is first necessary tohave an accurate picture of the existing situation:What resources of information and knowledgedoes the organization actually have? Where arethey? Who is responsible for them? How are theyused? What information interactions take placeinside the organization, and with its outsideworld?That makes it possible to compare the existing

situation with the aspiration, and see how thetwo diverge or converge – the essential basis fordeveloping an information strategy. This processis usually called an information audit. Theresults of the audit should lead to:

. Refinement of the information policy.

. Development and implementation of informa-tion strategy.

Conclusion

The impact of information technology was prob-ably responsible for the initial interest in organi-zational information policies. It is worth notingin conclusion that recent developments in busi-ness-to-business electronic commerce (e-com-merce) raise once again the need for business-wide information policies to protect businessesfrom uninformed technology investment drivenby fear of being left behind and unjustified hopesof a large return on investment.

References

Fried, L (1979) Practical Data Processing Management,Reston Publishing Co. Inc.

Karmi, R. (1983) ‘A methodological framework forformulating information policy’, Information andManagement 6: 269–80.

Lewis, D.A. and Martyn, J. (1986) ‘An appraisal ofnational information policy in the United Kingdom’,ASLIB Proceedings 38(1): 25–34.

Moore, N. (1998) ‘The British national informationstrategy’, Journal of Information Science 24(5): 337–44.

Orna, E. (1999) Practical Information Policies, 2nd edn,Gower.

—— (1990) Practical Information Policies, Gower.

Further reading

Davenport, T.H. et al. (1998) Working Knowledge,How Organizations Manage What They Know,Harvard Business School Press.

—— (1997) Information Ecology, Oxford UniversityPress.

—— (1992) ‘Information politics’, Sloan ManagementReview, Fall, pp. 53–65.

Drucker, P. (1995) Managing in a Time of GreatChange, Butterworth Heinemann.

—— (1995) ‘The information executives truly need’,Harvard Business Review (Jan–Feb): 54–62.

Farkas-Conn, I. (1989) ‘Information as a corporateresource’, Information Services and Use 9: 205–15.

Itami, H. with Roehl, T. (1987) Mobilizing InvisibleAssets, Harvard University Press.

Marchand, D.A. (1997) ‘Competing with information:Know what you want’, FT Mastering ManagementReader, July/August: 7–12.

—— (1997) ‘Managing strategic intelligence’, in Finan-cial Times Mastering Management, Financial Times/Pitman, pp. 346–50.

Nonaka, I. and Takeuchi, H. (1995) The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Cre-ate the Dynamics of Information, Oxford UniversityPress.

Owens, I. and Wilson, T. with Abell, A. (1996)Information and Business Performance. A Study ofInformation Systems and Services in High Perform-ing Companies, Bowker-Saur.

Reponen, T. (1994) ‘Organizational information man-

492 ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATION POLICIES

agement strategies’, Information Systems Journal 4:27–44.

SEE ALSO: information policy; knowledgemanagement; management support systems

ELIZABETH ORNA

OTLET, PAUL-MARIE-GHISLAIN(1868–1944)

Bibliographer and internationalist whose colla-boration with Henri LaFontaine produced theInternational Federation for Information andDocumentation (fid), the Union of InternationalAssociations (UIA) and the universal decimalclassification (UDC). He popularized and gaveits specialized contemporary meaning to theword ‘documentation’.Born in Brussels, he obtained a law degree, but

was more inspired by bibliography. When hebecame aware of the dewey decimal classifi-cation (DCC), he saw its potential for thesubject organization of a universal catalogue ofpublications. An International Institute of Biblio-graphy (IIB) was formed in 1895 for this purposeand a documentary union of governments wasproposed to support it. The Belgian governmentprovided a headquarters for the Institute, where

the principles of decimal classification were usedto list the bibliographical citations that began tobe collected in enormous numbers. Increasingdivergence from Dewey’s system led to theformal constitution of UDC. Although the uni-versal bibliographical project eventually col-lapsed under the pressures of lack of finance andthe size of the task, the Institute survived, afterreconstitution in 1937, as FID.In 1910 Otlet and LaFontaine organized the

first World Congress of International Associa-tions, at which the UIAwas founded. Otlet taughtlibrarianship and documentation in Brussels, andmany of his ideas on documentation weresummed up in Traité; de la documentation(1934).

OUTREACH SERVICE

Services provided by a library outside its usuallocation, particularly those intended to attractnew users or to appeal to groups in the commu-nity who do not make full use of conventionalservices. Target groups are typically the house-bound, ethnic minorities and people in districtsof socio-economic deprivation.

SEE ALSO: mobile library; social exclusion andlibraries

OUTREACH SERVICE 493

P

PACKET SWITCHING

A method of handling messages transmittedacross a network. A packet-switching networkconsists of a number of exchanges interconnectedby high-speed transmission lines. The exchangesare responsible for routing the packets across thenetwork, choosing the best route based on thetraffic on the network at the time; storingpackets temporarily until a transmission path isavailable; and ensuring that packets arrive attheir destination uncorrupted and in the samesequence as they were sent. Packet switchingmakes efficient use of transmission capacitywhere a large number of computer systems andterminals wish to share transmission paths be-tween one another.


PALAEOGRAPHY

Palaeography, a word coined from the Greekpalaios and graphein, meaning ancient writing, isthe study of the past through the forms ofhandwriting. Though regarded as a science ancil-lary to history, it is in fact vital to our knowledgeof any literate society before the invention ofprinting. In studying the medieval West, palaeo-graphy is concerned first with the scripts inwhich Latin was written and then with theiradaptation to the vernacular languages of Eur-ope, but the history of Latin writing and itsderivatives refers back to the Greeks, from whomthe Romans directly and indirectly acquired boththe alphabet itself and the habits of literacy.

The alphabet descended to the West throughthe Phoenicians from a Semitic script, the firstsymbols of which, aleph, ox, and beth, house,have given their names to the whole sequence.The Greeks adapted the letters variously to theirown dialects, but their great contribution was toadd distinctive vowels, which allowed the scriptto be applied freely to other languages. Thestandard form of the Greek alphabet emergedfrom Ionic speech, but the Romans acquired theirversion from the Greek settlement at Cumae,which is why the consonant r is represented by Rin Western Europe, instead of P as in modernGreek and Russian.The earliest forms of writing in both Greek

and Latin are inscriptions cut in stone, to whichthe square forms of majuscule, or capital, letterswere readily suited. The Latin capitals themselveswere soon modified in writing to the moreflowing shapes called Rustic. In both culturesthe spread of literacy produced cursive scripts inminuscule, and a new formal script, known asUncial, was then concocted from a mixture ofmajuscule and minuscule letters. Solemn texts,such as Virgil’s poetry or biblical and patristicworks in the early Church, were usually writtenin capitals or Uncial, which are distinguished asbook-hands. The texts introduced to Anglo-Saxon England by the missionaries led by StAugustine of Canterbury, in ad 597, were of thatkind, and so were the copies of them that theEnglish converts first made.Meanwhile late Roman cursive, visually an

unattractive script, remained current in Italy andMerovingian France. From the eighth century,however, the missionary efforts of the Carolin-gian church, powerfully impelled by clergy fromEngland and Ireland, called for a reformed and

standardized script. The result, carefully devel-oped in the abbeys of the Loire and northernFrance from the best available Roman exemplars,was the handsome, simple and eminently legiblehand known as Carolingian minuscule. In centralItaly, notably at Monte Cassino, a similarly finehand known as the Beneventan script evolved,but the Carolingian hand was adopted, withlocal variations, in most of Western Europe. Itsurvives today in every book printed in theRoman alphabet, as well as on visual displayunits.For several hundred years written texts were

shaped primarily if not exclusively to meet theneeds of the church. There was a constantdemand for Bibles and service books, but alsofor a great variety of other texts. The Churchitself was a literate society, and in lending itsskills to secular authority it promoted literacyamongst the laity also. Writing did not for somecenturies revert to the casual uses common in theclassical world, but cursive scripts, systematicallyabbreviated, were evolved for administrative andliterary work. The medieval administrativescripts are sometimes known as court hands,and their resemblances from one country toanother are often more striking than the differ-ences between them.With the revival of interest in classical learning

that began in Italy in the thirteenth century,scholars searched for reliable texts of Romanauthors. Although the Italians then coined thephrase il medio aevo, the Middle Ages, for theperiod from which they believed themselves tohave emerged, they had little sense of the layersof the past. They therefore supposed that thebeautifully legible Carolingian minuscule was aproduct of antiquity, and they revived it togetherwith the works that it preserved. Their ownparticular refinement of the script is with us stillas Italic. More important, the minuscule wasperpetuated on its merits by the early Italianprinters, such as Aldus Manutius (c. 1450–1515),and by their successors down to the present day.The advent of printing transformed the repro-

duction of literary texts, and formal writing –calligraphy – became a matter of individual taste.However, administrative documents were gener-ally handwritten, and in styles in which speedand economy of effort were more important thanappearance. In England the so-called secretary-hand, derived from court hand, long held its ownagainst the Italian humanist scripts. The outcome

was an odd one, for both eventually gave way toa contrived cursive script known, from themanuals that promoted it, as copperplate, whichspread into offices everywhere with British com-mercial supremacy.The critical study of palaeography has ad-

vanced with other historical sciences, notably inthe work of Jean Mabillon, OSB (1632–1707),and the Maurists, and later of professionalinstitutes such as the French École des Chartes.Photography, as in the collotype plates publishedby the Palaeographical Society (1873) and theNew Palaeographical Society (1903), greatlyadvanced the discipline. Much work has alsobeen done since the late nineteenth century inpapyrology, the elucidation of texts, mainlyGreek, preserved on papyrus in the deserts ofthe Middle East.Palaeography is now inseparably associated

with codicology, the critical assessment of manu-script books, which in England began with thework of Humfrey Wanley (1672–1726). It ex-tends, by the detailed physical examination ofmanuscripts, from the close dating of individualtexts to the reconstruction of lost libraries.

Further reading

Boyle, L.E. (1995) Medieval Latin Palaeography: ABibliographic Introduction, 2nd edn, University ofToronto Press.

Jenkinson, C.H. and Johnson, C. (1927) Later CourtHands in England, Cambridge University Press.

—— (1915) English Court Hand, Cambridge UniversityPress.

Parkes, M.B. (1992) Pause and Effect: An Introductionto the History of Punctuation in the West, ScolarPress.

Reynolds, I.D. and Wilson, N.G. (1974) Scribes andScholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek andLatin Literature, 2nd edn, Clarendon Press.

Sharpe, R. (1997) A Handlist of the Latin Writers ofGreat Britain and Ireland before 1540, Brepols.

Thompson, E.M. (1912) Greek and Latin Palaeo-graphy, Clarendon Press.

SEE ALSO: archives; manuscript libraries

GEOFFREY MARTIN

PAMPHLET

A short publication, sometimes defined as hav-ing at least five but not more than forty-eightpages, but which is not a part of a serial. Anolder sense of the word suggests a polemicalcontent, so that a pamphleteer was one who

PAMPHLET 495

disseminated political comment in the form ofsmall printed documents.


PANIZZI, SIR ANTONY (1797–1879)

Librarian of the British Museum who, if anyonedoes, probably deserves to be referred to as agreat librarian. The concept of what a nationallibrary could and should be was enormouslyadvanced by Panizzi’s example at the BritishMuseum.Born at Brescello, in the (then) Austrian part

of Italy, he became a political refugee inEngland. In 1831 he joined the staff of theBritish Museum. Its book and manuscript col-lections were rich but ill-organized, and accesswas difficult. As Panizzi moved up the hierarchyof the Museum he succeeded in transformingmost aspects of the library for the better. legaldeposit was vigorously enforced to provide forcurrent British literature, and government waspersuaded to provide funds to acquire oldermaterial and foreign publications. He was re-sponsible for the planning of the great RoundReading Room, with its surrounding stackareas, which gave readers proper conditions inwhich to work. A new cataloguing code, thefamous 91 Rules, and an alphabetical namecatalogue in manuscript form were developedunder his direction. In 1856 he was appointedPrincipal Librarian and held the post until hisretirement in 1866. His achievements wereofficially recognized by the award of a knight-hood.

Further reading

Miller, E. (1967) Prince of Librarians: The Life andTimes of Antonio Panizzi of the British Museum,London: Deutsch.

SEE ALSO: British Library; history of libraries;national libraries

PAPER

Exists in many different forms, but the commonunderlying feature is that they all consist offibrous elements bonded to one another.Although in the late twentieth century there

were rapid advances in the electronic storage ofinformation, there is no doubt that paper will

continue to be widely used because of its relativecheapness and convenience. As important, if notmore so, is the fact that much of our existingstock of information and other aspects of ourcultural heritage is in the form of print on paper,which needs care, preservation and conserva-tion (Priest 1987).

Structure and properties

COMPOSITION OF PAPER

A paper-like sheet can be made from manydifferent types of fibre, but virtually all the paperencountered in libraries and archives will bemade from naturally occurring vegetable fibres.The single, central and most important unifyingfeature of such conventional papers is as follows:on dispersion in water, cellulose-based fibresabsorb moisture and become swollen and pliant.When a mat is formed by draining the suspensionthrough a fine, flat wire mesh, the wet fibres tendto be aligned in layers parallel to the plane of thewire, but otherwise in more or less, but not quite,random directions. On drying this wet web, aprofound change takes place. As water is lost, thefibres are drawn into close contact and a specialtype of chemical bond, the hydrogen bond, formsin the regions where fibres overlap and makecontact. This self-bonding is the key to producinga coherent, strong, stiff sheet of paper. No extraadhesive is necessary and paper can be madesimply by draining wet cellulosic fibre andallowing the web to dry.In the Western world, before the introduction

of papermaking machines in the first half of thenineteenth century, paper was made largely fromfibres derived from cotton or linen, mostly fromrags, i.e. discarded textiles. Today at least 95 percent of the paper produced in the world containsfibres derived from wood. The remainder ismostly made from vegetable fibres such asbagasse (from sugar cane), straw or bamboo.However, very small quantities of special gradesof paper are still made from plant fibres such ascotton, linen and hemp, including currency pa-pers, artists’ papers, high-grade printing andwriting papers, and papers especially made forconservation work.

PREPARATION OF FIBRES FOR PAPERMAKING

The first step in making paper is to separate thefibres from their original matrix in the wood.This is known as pulping, of which there are two

496 PANIZZI, SIR ANTONY

distinct types. In mechanical pulping processes,intense mechanical action is employed to frag-ment the wood and break it up into fibrousparticles. In the other major type, known aschemical pulping, wood chips are treated withvarious chemical compounds under heat andpressure. The yield is substantially less than inmechanical pulping but the fibres are recoveredin a virtually undamaged state and so can bemade into much stronger paper. There are nowpulping processes that contain elements of bothof these basic types. Bleaching may also beinvolved if the product is to be a white paper.A key aspect of papermaking is the process in

which the fibres, dispersed in water, are subjectedto an intense mechanical shearing action. Theeffect of beating or refining is to affect markedlythe mechanical properties of the paper. Forexample, increasing the extent of treatmentincreases tensile and burst strength, and also theapparent density. The net effect on the fibres,which is complex in detail, is that they becomemore flexible and are able to bed down togetherto give increased surface area in contact andenhanced interfibre bond strength.

NON-FIBROUS COMPONENTS IN PAPER

Printing and writing papers usually contain aproportion of filler. The outcome, amongst otherthings, is an increase in opacity, smoothness andgeneral uniformity of appearance. Materials inmost common use are clay or chalk (calciumcarbonate). Papers may contain significant pro-portions of these materials, typically around 10–15 per cent by weight.Most types of paper are treated in some way

to control their interaction with water and otheraqueous fluids. A paper made only from beatencellulosic fibres is by its nature extremely hydro-philic and very readily absorbs water. Such paperis completely unsuitable, for example, for writingon with pen and ink. Moreover, in many com-mon commercial processes, paper needs to resistwetting to a greater or lesser degree. The proce-dure by which paper is given water resistance isknown as sizing. Internal sizing, as it is known, iswidely used and involves the addition of sizingagents to the aqueous suspension of fibres beforethe paper is formed. The traditional material iswood rosin, augmented by aluminium sulphate(known as ‘alum’ by papermakers), which acts tofix the rosin on to the surfaces of the fibres.Unfortunately this means that the paper is made

in an acidic environment because of the use ofthe alum. The acidity remains in the paper, andthis is the chief cause of the slow loss of strengththat takes place in much paper upon storage. Inrecent years economically competitive neutral oralkaline internal sizing methods have been intro-duced, which should largely avoid the ageingproblem (Priest 1989). Internal sizing needs to bedistinguished carefully from surface and tubsizing, which involve treatment with starch orgelatine, or similar materials, principally to givesurface cohesion.Although these are usually present in much

smaller proportions, papers can also contain awide range of different additives that performvarious functions, often related to the particulartype of paper. Examples are wet strength agents,optical brightening agents and dyes to control theshade or precise hue of the paper.

COATINGS AND SURFACE TREATMENTS

Coatings and surface treatments represent animportant class of non-fibrous components inpaper. An example is the glossy coated papersused for magazines and increasingly for books.The coatings, which are normally based onpowdered mineral pigments, typically clay orcalcium carbonate, are applied as a distinctprocess not to be confused with fillers. The basicresult is to produce a very much enhancedprinting surface.

PROPERTIES OF PAPER

Like any other material, paper has a set ofimportant properties that need measurement andcontrol if the paper is to meet its functionalrequirements. In essence, there are three impor-tant categories: properties of the bulk material,such as strength, grammage (mass per unit area)and apparent density; properties relating to thesurface of the paper, such as smoothness, whichare of key importance in conversion processessuch as printing; and optical properties, princi-pally colour, brightness and opacity.When used in books, paper clearly needs to be

strong enough for the purpose and have accep-table colour and brightness. On the preservationside, a major problem is undoubtedly the loss ofstrength on ageing. The matter of colour andhow it changes with ageing is also important, butwill relate in different ways to different types ofartefact, e.g. it may be more important in worksof art on paper.

PAPER 497

A basic method of studying the mechanicalproperties of paper is by means of a loadelongation curve. The load at the break pointrepresents the tensile strength of the paper undertest, whilst the elongation at break is a measureof the toughness, or the capability to absorbenergy before breaking.There are many other tests for mechanical

properties, several of which have been based onsome kind of simulation of the forces the paper isrequired to withstand in use. Examples are tearstrength, measured by the energy required topropagate a tear in a sample of paper in which aslit has been made; burst strength (the forcerequired to burst a hole through paper using aninflated rubber diaphragm); and folding endur-ance, measured as the number of times a stripcan be folded to and fro before breaking. Asmentioned above, in addition to mechanicalproperties colour is probably of greatest interestto those concerned with paper as an informationcarrier. Discolouration, normally to a yellowishbrown on exposure to light, is the usual problem.A familiar example is the yellowing seen in oldpaperback books, especially the edges of leaves.A key factor here is the presence or absence oflignin, because paper containing it quickly turnsyellow on exposure to light.

The future: standards for permanentpaper

In the light of the huge problems facing libraries,archives and other repositories, it is vital thatcollections now being created should be as free aspossible from the defects that have caused ourpresent difficulties. In effect, in an ideal world alldocuments and books should be on paper that isas durable and long-lasting as deemed necessary.One way of moving towards this goal is bymeans of agreed standards that specify how suchpaper can be produced.Standards for especially long-lasting archival

grades of paper have been in existence for sometime, but as such papers are usually purchased inrelatively small quantities they are much moreexpensive to purchase than ordinary grades, andhence their use is restricted to specific applica-tions where permanence is of special importance.This situation has changed profoundly in recentyears by the introduction into conventionalpapermaking of the neutral or alkaline sizingsystems. This now makes it possible to set

standards for long-life paper intended for morewidespread use in books and other generalpublications where longevity is of importance.This has brought about a pivotal change in theprospects for the future preservation of booksand documents being produced at the presenttime. However, it is vital that the requirements ofstandards should be practicable and economic forthe manufacturer, otherwise they will fall intodisrepute.

An important step forward was the publica-tion by the American National Standard Institu-tion of ANSI Z39.48–1984, Permanence ofPaper for Printed Library Materials, which hasrecently been updated. The ISO has produced itsown standard for similar types of paper, ISO9706. Its aim is to enable book printers,publishers and others to use a specified papereconomically for all types of document, recordor publications that are likely to be stored inlibraries or archives for a prolonged period. Thespecification is set up entirely in terms ofstipulated test results. It remains to beseen whether or not this new standard willmeet with approval and be used as a basisfor longer-lasting books and documents. Onething is now quite clear – the way is open forthe production of inexpensive paper that morethan adequately meets the normal life expec-tancy for many archival and similar applica-tions.

References

Priest, D.J. (1989) ‘Permanence and neutral/alkalinepapermaking’, in S.H. Zeronian and H.L. Needles(eds) Historic Textile and Paper Materials, Conserva-tion and Characterisation II, American ChemicalSociety.

—— (1987) ‘Paper and its problems’, Library Review36 (part 3).

Further reading

Casey, J.P. (ed.) (1983) Pulp and Paper: Chemistry andChemical Technology, Wiley-Interscience, 4 vols [acomprehensive and widely used text on all aspects ofthe subject].

Hunter, D. (1978) Papermaking: The History andTechnique of an Ancient Craft, Dover PublicationsInc. [this book, which is an unabridged republicationof the 2nd edn of 1947 (Alfred A. Knopf), gives avery good account of early and oriental paper-making].

Smook, G.A. (1982) Handbook for Pulp and PaperTechnologists, TAPPI and Canadian Pulp and Paper

498 PAPER

Association [a good introductory text, dealing parti-cularly well with the technology].

DEREK J. PRIEST

PAPERLESS SOCIETY

A term that expresses the vision of a futuresociety wholly committed to electronic commu-nication. The phrase is usually said to have beencoined by F.W. lancaster and countered byMaurice Line, who said he could no moreimagine a paperless society than he could apaperless lavatory. At the beginning of thetwenty-first century, whilst the enormous growthof electronic communication has curtailed the useof postal services for serious communication (asopposed to junk mail), it does not seem to haveotherwise moderated the output of paper docu-mentation.


PARAPROFESSIONAL

A term used to describe staff in libraries andother information service providers who aretrained to understand and use a range of specifictechniques, procedures and services that can beundertaken according to a set of predeterminedrules, thus enabling them to be assigned high-level support responsibilities specific to librariesand information services but which do notrequire the exercise of professional judgement.

Roles, tasks and responsibilities

Paraprofessionals (sometimes correctly calledlibrary technicians, incorrectly support or non-professional staff) undertake aspects of profes-sional work formerly performed by professionalsbut now perceived as suitable to be carried outat a subprofessional level (compare paramedics,legal assistants). Commonly these tasks aretechnology-based, involving technical libraryskills and requiring low-level decision-making.Examples include acquisitions, original andcopy cataloguing, periodicals control, first-lineenquiries, administration, and supervising andtraining others in the delivery of services directto users. Other less common tasks include plan-ning programmes for children, staff selectioninterviewing, budget planning, online searching,user education (both classroom and indivi-

dual), book selection and interlibrary lending(Burgin and Hansel 1991; Oberg 1992; Oberg etal. 1992).

PARAPROFESSIONALS AS MANAGERS

Higher-level responsibility may be given to para-professionals by employing them as managers ofstaff, services and systems, carrying out suchtasks as reviewing staff performance, deliveringservices at local level and managing workflows.Many of these tasks are perceived by profes-sionals as professional. Supporters of paraprofes-sionals see them as relieving professionals of low-level routine; opponents, as encroachment lead-ing to replacement (Pantazis 1978). The amer-ican library association identified onlysixteen out of sixty tasks as more likely to beassigned to a professional than to a paraprofes-sional (Mugnier 1980).

Skills

Skills required are wide-ranging, and include:planning, budgeting, decision-making, problem-solving, time management, supervision, and in-terpersonal and communication skills (manage-rial); operating equipment, systems, health andsafety (technical); enquiries, empathy with clientgroups (client-based).

Training and educational qualifications

Education and training for paraprofessionals wasevident in Germany from 1906, the former USSRin 1929, and developed in North America andAustralia in the 1950s and 1960s. The LibraryAssociation of Australia guidelines aimed tominimize divergence and maximize portability oftraining programmes (Library Courses (Voca-tional) Standing Committee 1976). Common in-service training practice in the USA and theUnited Kingdom is to treat professionals andparaprofessionals similarly, allowing study timeto enhance qualifications and paying for tuition,courses and conferences.

QUALIFICATIONS

Many paraprofessionals in the United Kingdomhold a City and Guilds of London Institute 737Library Assistant’s Certificate or a Business andTechnician Education Council (BTEC) NationalCertificate or Diploma in Business Studies (whichincludes a double module in library and informa-tion studies). National Vocational Qualifications

PARAPROFESSIONAL 499

(NVQs) in the United Kingdom provide a frame-work for all library and information workers toacquire certificated skills and competences. InSouth Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe and otherAfrican countries, courses run at polytechnics/technikons lead to the award of a NationalDiploma in Library and Information Studies.

Employment

Strong economic pressure to drive down staffcosts has led to the deletion of many professionalposts. Significant numbers of paraprofessionalposts are filled by professionally qualified librar-ians unable to find suitable professional posts.

SALARIES AND GRADES

In the United Kingdom and the USA there issome overlap between salaries on professionaland paraprofessional grades. Confusion (andsometimes disadvantage) is caused by placingparaprofessionals, support and other clerical staffon similar grades. Many paraprofessionals stay ina post for upwards of ten years, but a clearcareer progression (where it exists) tends to beevident only in large organizations.

STATUS

Some professionals denigrate paraprofessionalsbecause they see them as a threat to theirposition. Paraprofessionals are often dissatisfiedwith being paid less than professionals for doing(as they see it) the same work, by a lack ofrecognition and by poor or unclear career pro-spects. However, many paraprofessionals arebetter motivated than professionals to improvetheir performance through training, having parti-cularly positive attitudes to new technology(Burgin and Hansel 1991).

GENDER

Research in the USA found that, in academiclibraries, women paraprofessionals outnumberedmen by four to one (see women in librarian-ship). In libraries where there were some men aswell as women in paraprofessional posts, therewas a tendency for the salary structure to bebetter, for more professional tasks to be assignedto paraprofessionals, for more release time andfunded conference attendance, for post holders tohave better overall educational qualifications andfor there to be a higher turnover (Oberg et al.1992).

SUPPORT

Support mechanisms for paraprofessionals oper-ate through affiliate membership of the LibraryAssociation of the United Kingdom, a separatemembership category of the Association of Col-lege and Research Libraries (ACRL) in the USAand journals such as Library Mosaics.

References

Burgin, R. and Hansel, P. (1991) ‘Library management:A dialogue’, Wilson Library Bulletin 66 (September):66–8.

Library Courses (Vocational) Standing Committee(1976) Guidelines for the Education of LibraryTechnicians: Report of the National Workshop,Melbourne, 24–7 May 1976.

Mugnier, C. (1980) The Paraprofessional and theProfessional Job Structure, American Library Asso-ciation.

Oberg, L.R. (1992) ‘The emergence of the paraprofe-sional in academic libraries: Perceptions and reali-ties’, College and Research Libraries 53(2): 99–112.

Oberg, L.R., Mentges, M.E., McDermott, P.N. andHarusadangkul, V. (1992) ‘The role, status andworking conditions of paraprofessionals: A nationalsurvey of academic libraries’, College and ResearchLibraries 53(3): 215–38.

Pantazis, F. (1978) ‘Library technicians in the hierar-chy’, Canadian Library Journal 35(2): 77–85, 87.

Further reading

Canadian Library Association (1981) Guidelines for theEducation of Library Technicians, CLA.

Davidson-Arnott, F. and Kay, D. (1998) ‘Librarytechnician programs: Skills-oriented paraprofessionaleducation’, Library Trends 46: 540–63.

Howarth, L.C. (1998) ‘The role of the paraprofessionalin technical services in libraries’, Library Trends 46:526–39.

Johnson, C.P. (1996) ‘The changing nature of jobs: Aparaprofessional time series’, College and ResearchLibraries 57: 59–67.

Library Mosaics (1989–) Yenor Inc. (bi-monthly).Library Support Staff.com (www.librarysupportstaff.com).

Nettlefold, B.A. (1989) ‘Paraprofessionalism in librar-ianship’, International Library Review 21: 519–31 [agood overview of the main issues].

Ostertag, J.K. (1992) ‘Annotated bibliography’, in J.K.Ostertag and K.M. Heim (eds) Library Support Staff:Challenges for the 90s, American Library Associa-tion, Office for Library Personnel Resources [anexcellent source of references].

Owen, L.J. (1997) ‘Paraprofessional groups and asso-ciations’, Library Trends 46: 348–72.


ROBERT E. OLDROYD

500 PARAPROFESSIONAL

PARLIAMENTARY LIBRARIES

Parliamentary libraries make an important con-tribution to informing the legislature at thenational or state level. Publicly funded, mostparliamentary libraries exclusively serve the leg-islature, its members, committees and staff.Organizationally, the library may report directlyto the political leadership of the legislature, or itschief executive officer, or a special committee.

Roles and objectives

The parliamentary library is a key component ina legislature obtaining the knowledge and infor-mation it needs to function effectively. In anenvironment dominated by advocacy, legislatorsneed immediate access to information that isobjective, timely, authoritative, targeted at theirunique needs and presented in a form that iseasily accessible to non-experts. Information maybe provided in print, via the Internet (throughparliamentary websites), e-mail, telephone, fax orin-person briefings.

History

France launched its National Assembly library in1796, soon followed by the creation of the USlibrary of congress in 1800. The secondchamber of the Netherlands began a parliamen-tary library in 1815, and in 1818 the firstParliamentary Librarian of the UK House ofCommons was appointed. Parliamentary librariesproliferated widely in the nineteenth century,reaching all continents by the early twentiethcentury. Parliaments in central and easterneurope and russia and the former sovietunion reinvigorated their libraries in the 1990s.Today, nearly every active legislature has aparliamentary library.

Staff and organization

Functioning as a highly specialized library re-quires staff with excellent reference and informa-tion research skills, and knowledge of pertinentresources – particularly electronic sources. As thescale of library activity increases from providinginformation to conducting research, the skills oflawyers, economists, political scientists or otherprogramme specialists are added. Library staffneed to be service-oriented problem-solvers, withhigh energy and a commitment to meeting dead-lines. They should also be proactive, building

their information bases in anticipation of parlia-mentary questions.Most parliamentary libraries are relatively

modest in scale. The median number of staff isapproximately fifteen for libraries in WesternEurope, ten for Latin America and four or fivestaff for the rest of the world. A few parliamentarylibraries are quite large. The US CongressionalResearch Service (CRS) (part of the Library ofCongress) has a staff of over 740, including over370 specialized researchers. Library staffs of 200or more are found in Australia, Canada, India,South Korea and the UK House of Commons.The organization of the library follows its

functions. In some cases, traditional libraryservices are aligned with research. In a few cases,integrated information services combine library,research, documentation, archives and informa-tion technology functions. Where research activ-ity and library services are not directly joined,special efforts should be made to create co-operative linkages to avoid member confusionand duplication of effort.

Services, collections and technology

Most parliamentary libraries offer traditionallibrary services (collections of books, periodicalsand electronic resources; databases; lending ser-vices; bibliographies; clipping services; and refer-ence services). Some also provide currentawareness services, access to parliamentary docu-ments, research support and seminars and brief-ings. The demand for and rapid development ofcomputer-based services to the parliament in thelast decade is noteworthy. After CRS launched itswebsite on the congressional intranet in 1996,the percentage of requests answered by directaccess to the website grew astronomically in thecourse of five years – from roughly 33 per cent oftotal requests in 1997 to nearly 80 per cent in2001. Through the CRS website, congressionalusers can access the current status of legislation(including the text of bills and reports), tracklegislative issues, access all active CRS reports,make requests and use electronic ‘briefing books’on topics of key legislative interest.The spread of such technology is impressive.

Today, roughly 70 per cent of legislatures haveaccess to e-mail, and two-thirds have a parlia-mentary website. Parliamentary libraries haveaccess to both e-mail and the Internet throughthe parliament itself, and over 20 per cent of the

PARLIAMENTARY LIBRARIES 501

libraries either have their own website or haveinformation about the library accessible to clientsthrough the main parliamentary website. Withthe march of globalization and advent of theelectronic revolution, the interest in and ability todo comparative research on the practices of othercountries has been both amplified and acceler-ated.

The international dimension

Parliamentary librarians actively exchange infor-mation needed to inform their legislatures, butalso share ideas on how to serve their clientsmore effectively. In an effort to increase theopportunities for face-to-face contact, a numberof regional library associations have been cre-ated. The oldest is that for Nordic librarians,which was created in 1922. Virtually everycontinent now has such a regional forum. Themost comprehensive is the European Centre forParliamentary Research and Documentation(ECPRD) created in 1977. It brings togetherlibrarians, researchers, document specialists andinformation technology staff. Finally, IFLAprovides an international venue for its Section onLibrary and Research Services for Parliaments toshare ideas and technology. In addition to a fullIFLA program, the Section also offers two specialday-long workshops (on library management andparliamentary research). Finally, the Section hasits own Web page (through the IFLA website)and listserv to enhance exchange of informationand facilitate communication.

Conclusion

In today’s complex world, the key to an effectivelegislature is the knowledge and information thatwill help make individual policy decisions effica-cious, and enhance the role that the legislaturecan play in the policy process of the nation. Theparliamentary library serves as the parliament’sprincipal information broker between the worldof ideas and the world of action.

Further reading

Brian, R. (ed.) (1997) Parliamentary Libraries andInformation Services of Asia and the Pacific, IFLAPublications no. 83, K.G. Saur

Englefield, D. (ed.) (1993) Guidelines for LegislativeLibraries, IFLA Publications no. 64, K.G. Saur.

German Bundestag website (2002) World Directory of

Parliamentary Libraries (www.bundestag.de/datbk/library/alpha.htm).

Robinson, W. (1998) ‘Parliamentary libraries’, inWorldEncyclopedia of Parliaments and Legislatures, Con-gressional Quarterly, Inc., pp. 815–29.

Robinson, W. and Gastelum, R. (eds) (1998) Parlia-mentary Libraries and Research Services in Centraland Eastern Europe, IFLA Publications no.87, K.G.Saur.

Tanfield, J. (ed.) (2001) Parliamentary Library, Re-search and Information Services of Western Europe,ECPRD.

WILLIAM H. ROBINSON

PATENTS

When an inventor makes a new and usefulinvention – that is, a technical idea embodied ina process or product – a patent allows them todevelop and market this within the protection ofa limited time monopoly, usually of sixteen totwenty years. In return the inventor has todeposit in a public place a description of theinvention in such detail that experts in the artcould reproduce that invention. The protectiongiven is a type of intellectual property.Application for protection is normally made

by submitting a written specification to nationalpatent offices. There are provisions in mostpatent systems for a literature search and asubstantive examination of the contents of theapplication. The specification, modified wherenecessary, will be published. It discloses thetechnical content of the invention and the limitsof its legal protection. Patents spread informationabout technological inventions and also rewardthe inventors and developers of products derivedfrom these inventions.

International protection

Patents permit a high degree of internationaluniformity to facilitate technology transferacross, as well as within, national boundaries.Since patents must be new, taken at its mostliteral this would require that all applicationsworldwide would have to be made simulta-neously. Instead, the Paris Convention for theProtection of Industrial Property, 1883, definesthe priority date as the date of first applicationin any convention country. One then has up totwelve months to apply anywhere else and stillclaim the original priority date, applicationnumber and country. These details on the

502 PATENTS

specification identify families of equivalent pa-tents, which give the extent of protection world-wide and indicate the distribution of likelymarkets. The descriptions are unlikely to beidentical as national patent laws dictate what isput in.

The patent specification

Each specification is introduced by a front pagewith bibliographic information. This includes atitle, abstract, names of inventors and applicants,dates and numbers relating to the applicationand publications, classifications – both national,if used, and international – and a diagram, ifrelevant. Then there is the body of the specifica-tion, which outlines reasons for the inventionand gives a technical description with examplesand variations. The last section is made up of theclaims, where what is new is set out to delineatethe legal scope of protection. A list of citations ofdocuments found in the literature search mayalso be given, either listed on the front page or asa separate report.

Information content of patents

TECHNOLOGICAL INFORMATION

The result of the patent bargain is that libraries,websites and electronic information services bothonline and CD-ROM can build up collections ofdocuments giving full details of particular inven-tions. The totality of services allows access viaindexes, abstracts and full text. The informationremains useful indefinitely as problems can recurin related technologies and in analogous form inother areas. Many inventions have to be ‘remade’because of the natural compartmentalization ofhuman endeavours. Patent Office classificationshelp to monitor resemblances as they are de-signed to focus on the invented technology andto distinguish it from applications. In electronicform, patents are also searchable by means oftext words, but to search effectively, the com-plexity of patentable subject matter normallyrequires full text (Bryant and Stein 1983; Bryantet al. 1986). Patents are of great value to theindustries of less developed countries, whichcome to need inventions at a later date than mostdeveloped countries. It is unlikely that oneinvention will fit a new need precisely, but a setof patents can show the scope of what was doneand problems encountered. Using these can help

find a new solution for a new situation (OTAF1979).

COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS

The information in patents databases can be usedto check, by means of statistical manipulations,what a particular company is working on, whoare the productive inventors, what line of pro-blems is being solved in the industry as a whole,and so on. These techniques are used by man-agers, strategic planners, accountants and evennational governments.

Information services

Each country will usually hold a central collec-tion of national patents in print, and manypatent offices also mount websites. Many coun-tries have also established regional patent collec-tions and advice services to encourage and helpwith use of the documentation (Auger 1992;Newton 2000; van Dulken 1998) and manyindustrial companies hold relevant patent docu-ments internally.For technical awareness, many journals cover-

ing chemistry, engineering, etc. also cover themore accessible patents in the discipline. To findall relevant patents, one needs to look at specia-lized patent services, which may be in print, onlineor CD-ROM. Some of these are for single coun-tries. In particular, there are a number coveringthe USA, such as CLAIMS. There are two mainmulticountry services. Derwent’s World PatentsIndex covers forty current countries and autho-rities with titles and abstracts created in-house bystaff. Its strengths are the deep indexing inchemistry and electronics, and its tailored ab-stracts and specialized topic groupings. WorldPatents Index is online on several hosts, includingDIALOG, QUESTEL.ORBIT and STN (Derwent2002). The European Patent Office (EPO) hasinformation services that are collectively namedEPIDOS and include the ESPACE series of fulltexts and indexes on CD-ROM. It also includesthe INPADOC files that cover seventy currentcountries, giving bibliographic information con-tributed by patent offices. Its strengths are thewide country coverage and currency of the infor-mation. Output is online on QUESTEL.ORBIT,DIALOG and EPIDOS, and on CD-ROM (EPI-DOS 2002). To keep track of country coverageand services, it is best to monitor the relevantwebsites.

PATENTS 503

References

Auger, P. (1992) Information Sources in Patents,Bowker Saur.

Bryant, J.H. and Stein, D.P. (1993) ‘Automated patentsearching’, World Patent Information 5: 226–9.

Bryant, J.H., Terapane, J. and Kiron, A. (1986) ‘Studyof automated text searching’, World Patent Informa-tion 8: 4–7.

Derwent (2002) (www.derwent.com).EPIDOS (2002) (www.european-patent-office.org).Newton, D. (2000) How to Find Information: Patentson the Internet, London: British Library.

OTAF (1979) Patent Technology Transfer to Develop-ing Countries, 9th Report, Organization of Technol-ogy Assessment and Forecast, US Congress.

Van Dulken, S. (1998) Introduction to Patents Infor-mation, 3rd edn, London: British Library.

SEE ALSO: information policy; transfer oftechnology

TAMARA EISENSCHITZ

PEER TO PEER

Peer to peer (P2P) is file sharing by Internet userswith fellow users (their peers) whose computershave an IP address and can be used as servers.In the mid-1990s personal computers thatwere not constantly connected to the internetwere not accessible in a way that allowed theirresources of processing power and memory to befully exploited. After 1996 intermittently con-nected PCs became directly addressable by otherusers, and files could be downloaded from them.The chief symbol of P2P has been Napster, whichfacilitated the exchange of music held in MP3compression format through a centralized serverthat could store and resolve addresses. The legalactions for copyright infringement that resultedin Napster’s closure as a free service did noteffect systems such as Gnutella and Freenet,which were technically more truly P2P in thatthey did not rely on a centralized resource. Theexchange of music, video and other formats ingreat quantities, without regard to their copy-right status, represents arguably the greatestchallenge yet to the world intellectual propertyregime.

Further reading

O’Reilly P2P (www.openp2p.com).


PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENTIN LIBRARIES

Performance is generally considered to be theaccomplishment of something or the manner inwhich something is carried out. Library perfor-mance can include the performance of the libraryas a whole, of individual services provided, ofspecific functions or activities or of specificresources within the library (the staff, the collec-tion, the automated systems, the facilities, etc.).Through the years, library performance has beendescribed as the delivery of library services in avariety of ways. Because there are several con-siderations associated with library performancemeasurement, there is sometimes confusion as tothe perspective from which performance is mea-sured. A librarian’s view of performance should,but may not, be the same as that of the user ofthe services provided; similarly, the perspective ofthe funders of the library may differ from thoseof the library users and library staff. Furtherdifficulty can be experienced in defining theobject of the performance assessment.Performance measurement can be used to

support planning, communication of servicesperformed and improvements achieved, decision-making, monitoring of progress and resourceallocation.

The evolution of library performancemeasurement

The measurement of library performance hasbeen much discussed in the literature over thelast thirty-five years. In a review of the literature,Goodall (1987) refers to Morse (1968) as beingthe pioneering work on library effectiveness inwhich both outputs as well as inputs are con-sidered. Soon after, King and Bryant (1971)produced a textbook on the evaluation of infor-mation services and products. This concentratedon document transfer systems and covered all thefunctions and processes necessary to transferdocuments from authors to users. Both booksrelied on operations research techniques.Whereas Morse used a highly mathematicalapproach, King and Bryant presented easilyfollowed tutorials on statistical methods, usersurveys and market research, and experimentaldesign. Unfortunately, neither was widelyadopted by the library community, although bothcovered library services.

504 PEER TO PEER

In 1973, the Public Library Association (anorganization within the american library asso-ciation) performed an extensive review of pre-vious efforts to determine library effectivenessand performance, and an analysis of existinglibrary statistics gathered at the federal, stateand local levels (deProspo et al. 1973). Thereport recommended a new approach to publiclibrary measurement and evaluation: the mea-surement of the outputs of a library and oflibrary services. The report demonstrated that itis possible to gather data that describe theservices a library provides to its users andestablish a basis for selecting ‘meaningful indica-tors’. Following publication of the PerformanceMeasures report, two state-wide projects wereinitiated to test the measures (Clark 1976; Powell1976). Both projects recommended changes inprocedures for gathering data and suggestedadditional measures. Several other adaptationsof the original Performance Measures reportswere reported (Ramsden 1978).Academic librarians have also shown concern

for library outputs, although it was not until themid-1970s that a movement to study libraryusers and uses began to build in the academiclibrary environment. Issues and concerns voicedat the 1976 Conference on Resource Sharing inLibraries (Kent and Galvin 1977) included aspriorities:

. The study of use of collections and relation-ship to cost.

. Study of user requests, user demand, userneeds.

. Research on attitude adjustment of users,librarians and administrators.

The Pittsburgh conference acted as a catalystin bringing to the attention of academic librar-ians the need for better and more relevantperformance criteria and measures. Soon after,the Committee on Statistics began to explore theuse of performance measures and funded Kantorto develop performance measures for academicand research libraries. Four measures were testedby several ARL libraries and a manual forimplementing the measures was produced byKantor (1984).Knightly (1979) identifies four different classes

of evaluation relevant to libraries: inputs (re-sources), processes (capability), outputs (utiliza-tion) and impacts (benefits). Knightly surveyed

managers in sixty-two academic, public andspecial libraries to determine the extent to whichthe performance criteria proposed in the litera-ture were actually in use and to develop guide-lines for future criteria selection. Seven types ofperformance criteria were described, includingassessment on the basis of user opinion, expertopinion, ideal standards, comparison with otherorganizations, quantifiable outputs, quantifiableprocesses, and costs or unit costs. The studyfound that nearly 60 per cent of the performancecriteria cited in the annual reports of librarieswere quantifiable, with about half concerningprocess evaluation and half concerning outputevaluation.In parallel with the above developments in

approaches to library performance and measure-ment, there was also a trend away from the useof national standards for library service towardslocal determination of library needs because they:

. Focused on library inputs rather than on theservices that resulted.

. Were used both as minimum standards and aslevels of excellence.

. Had no empirical base.

. Imposed an inappropriate uniformity on pub-lic libraries.

In 1978, the prevailing thought regardingpublic library performance measurement wasthat public libraries should use a community-based planning process to determine local needsfor service. In 1981, ALA funded King ResearchInc. to develop such a process and a manual foruse by local librarians. The manual (Palmour etal. 1980) recommends the measurement of out-put both as a part of the data gathering thatprecedes the setting of goals and objectives, andas essential to providing a baseline against whichprogress towards the objectives can be assessed.Soon after the publication of the Planning

Process for Public Libraries the Public LibraryAssociation Goals Guidelines and StandardsCommittee decided to produce a ‘how-to’ guideto public library performance measurement. TheCommittee assembled a set of output measuresfrom the Planning Process and other relevantdocuments and from the experience of its mem-bers. The objective of the exercise was to providethe public library profession with consistent andstandardized methods of collecting output data.The manual (Zweizig and Rodger 1982) contains

PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT IN LIBRARIES 505

procedures for collecting and reporting results ontwelve output measures. These measures wereselected after field-testing in five public libraries.A brief conceptual explanation is given for eachmeasure, data collection measure and interpreta-tion results. This manual became the majorperformance measurement tool for public li-braries in the USA.Both the Planning Process and Output Mea-

sures manuals have been updated (McClure et al.1987; Van House et al. 1987). The main differ-ence between the new and the original editions isthe addition of two further considerations inplanning and evaluation. The first is the role ofthe public library in the community it is intendedto serve. This concept was introduced in theoriginal planning process, but was not dealt within detail, particularly not in terms of the multi-plicity of roles that public libraries seemed to beadopting. The concept of library roles was basedon observations that public libraries were tryingto be ‘all things to all people’ and that they foundit difficult to provide all the levels of servicedesired. It was further recommended that li-braries select a subset of roles upon which theywould focus their efforts. The manuals alsostated the desirability of providing comparativedata. Because the original manuals did notprovide such useful comparisons, the PublicLibrary Data Service was established to collectand make accessible a selective set of data frompublic libraries in the USA. Meanwhile, Moore(1989) prepared an extended version of thesemeasures for the international library commu-nity.Subsequent to the development of output

measures and the production of several manuals,the general literature reflected the concentrationon satisfying user needs. This paralleled theconcept of the ‘user-friendly’ system. Reportingon a study initiated in 1977, Chweh (1981)reviewed the criteria that 209 library usersindicated as the ten most important criteria injudging a ‘good’ library. The sample of libraryusers was drawn from public, academic andschool libraries in the Los Angeles area. A totalof 1,249 different criteria were identified. Theten highest ranked were:

. Availability of books.

. Availability of periodicals.

. Quality of reference service.

. Good reference collection.

. Keeping the library quiet.

. Integrity of the catalogue.

. Friendly service.

. Copying facilities.

. Non-book materials.

. Helpful librarians.

A model questionnaire was proposed butresults do not distinguish among users of eachtype of library separately as it is likely thatdifferent sets of criteria would emerge.A somewhat similar approach to library eva-

luation was taken by Hannabuss (1983). Heexplores the relationship between the perceivedvalue of a library and the marketing of libraryservices. The article discusses a number of con-cepts related to value assessments such as effec-tiveness, efficiency, benefits, cost benefits andcost-effectiveness. The most interesting aspect ofHannabuss’s paper is its recognition that evalua-tion and promotion are two interrelated func-tions.User satisfaction as a measure of public library

performance was further explored by D’Elia andWalsh (1983) as a subjective indicator of publiclibrary performance. It had been used to:

. Evaluate the performance of various serviceswithin a library.

. Measure a given library’s overall level ofperformance.

. Compare this level of performance with thosereported for other libraries.

Results of a survey of public library patronsshows that user satisfaction is:

. Potentially useful for evaluating the perfor-mances of services within a library.

. Influenced by the demographic characteristicsof the users; it should not be used to comparepresumed levels of performance for librariesserving different communities.

. Not related to the user’s degree of use (a resultcontradicted by subsequent King Researchstudies in all types of libraries).

In response to a growing interest on the partof librarians in identifying techniques to use inevaluation of library services, Lancaster (1977)prepared a basic text for courses on libraryevaluation. Lancaster sets forth a framework fordescribing library operations and services. The

506 PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT IN LIBRARIES

book focuses on a review and synthesis of theliterature to date. In 1988, Lancaster published acomplementary book that was intended as apractical guide to the conduct of evaluationwithin libraries. A second edition of If You Wantto Evaluate Your Library was published in 1993and included a new chapter on evaluation ofbibliographic instruction and on expansion ofcost-effectiveness, cost–benefit evaluation andresource-sharing.In 1990 and 1991, Griffiths and King prepared

two manuals. The Keys to Success manual(1990), prepared for the British Library Researchand Development Department, defines in detail aprocess by which performance, effectiveness,cost-effectiveness and impact indicators can bedeveloped for library and information services. Aconceptual framework is presented and examplesof measures, indicators and models are developedand each is discussed as to how they can beinterpreted presented to management, fundersand users. The Advisory Group for AerospaceResearch and Development (AGARD) manual(Griffiths and King 1991), in contrast, focusesmuch more on the underlying evaluation meth-ods. There are three major distinctions betweenthe approach developed by Griffiths and Kingand other prior work. The first is the comprehen-siveness of their approach: it addresses inputs,outputs and various levels of outcomes. Second,it recognizes that measures of inputs, outputs andoutcomes cannot be considered in isolation fromeach other. Third, by developing a process forperformance measure and indicator developmentthey provide a tool that can be used by librariesof all types to address both current and futureservices.The Keys to Success manual was evaluated by

Bloor (1991) to determine whether the measurescould be applied in practice and whether theycould be incorporated into a decision supportsystem for libraries. The study concluded that:

. Keys to Success can provide a simple andeffective means of analysing library data. Themanual’s calculations are straightforward andthe results easy to understand. This means itcan be used constructively at all levels, provid-ing useful information for decision-makingwithin the library, and also for communicatingwith the people that it serves and thoseresponsible for its funding.

. Because the main principles of the manual are

general, it is relevant to academic and othertypes of libraries, as well as public libraries.

. The measures and performance indicatorsdescribed in the manual offer a frameworkfor collecting and analysing data about how alibrary is working, how it is being used andhow far it is meeting the needs of the people itwas set up to serve.

Since the Keys to Success framework was con-sidered a useful part of a library decision supportsystem, it was integrated into operational deci-sion support systems for academic libraries,further developed by Adams et al. (1993).In 1992, Griffiths and King received a Special

Libraries Association research grant to summar-ize evidence derived from twenty-seven indepen-dent studies performed over a ten-year period,including over 10,000 survey responses. Thebook (Griffiths and King 1993) provides mea-sures of library service performance (e.g. produc-tivity, unit costs, etc.) and effectiveness (e.g.indicators of the extent to which service attri-butes and other factors affect service use). Thebook also presents abundant evidence of theusefulness, value and impact of information, andof the substantial contribution that corporate andgovernment libraries make.

Adaptation, adoption and acceptance oflibrary performance measures

The years 1992–2001 have seen tremendousgrowth in the application and use of libraryperformance measures through greater geo-graphic penetration and adoption by libraries inall sectors and of all types. As might be expected,performance measures evolved to address electro-nic information services and products.This phase in the evolution of library perfor-

mance measures can be characterized by theadaptation of measures and the development ofhandbooks and manuals geared to specific typesof library, followed by the development of guide-lines and standards reaching across library types.This evolution builds ownership in the varioussets of performance measures through design,development, testing, adoption and routine use.The knowledge gained in these activities can thenbe used to share experiences with differentprofessional groups, leading to the developmentof common sets of measures or standards.In the UK, noteworthy publications during this


phase include the Follett Report (Joint FundingCouncil 1993), which focused on traditionalinput measures followed two years later by aframework for measuring the effectiveness ofacademic libraries (Joint Funding Council 1995);the development of a collection of service-levelagreements (Revill and Ford 1994). In the USA,library performance measures expanded to ad-dress public library services to children andyoung adults (Walter 1992 and 1995), a ‘lite’manual for evaluating library performance,which focuses on how to design useful evaluation(Zweizig et al. 1996). A further indicator of thegeographic diffusion of library performance mea-sures was the selection and adaptation of perfor-mance measures for the set of InternationalFederation of Library Associations (IFLA) inter-national guidelines for performance measurementin academic libraries (Poll and te Boekhorst1996). From an original list of thirty indicatorsdrawn from a review of the literature, seventeenare included in the guidelines, each focusing onlibrary effectiveness. In 1998, the InternationalOrganization for Standardization published ISO11620 (1998), a standard on Library Perfor-mance Indicators. It specifies twenty-nine indica-tors grouped into three areas: user satisfaction,public services and technical services, with parti-cular emphasis on cost-effectiveness. The stan-dard includes suggestions on data collectionmethods as well as guidelines for accuratelyinterpreting each indicator.Using a stakeholder method to design a set of

user-chosen library performance measures, acomprehensive comparative study (Crawford etal. 1998) of several sets of indicators wasperformed by Glasgow Caledonian University.This study demonstrated clearly that differentstakeholders have differing performance priori-ties, confirming the importance of understandingthe audiences for the performance measurementactivities.While performance measures and indicators

were proliferating and being applied by manymore libraries than ever before, questions re-turned to issues of the usefulness of the measuresand the whole measurement process. Two meta-indicators were proposed (D’Avigdor 1997) relat-ing the effort involved in measurement andevaluation against both the effort needed toproduce the services being evaluated, and thedecisions and actions taken by library manage-ment.

Most recently, attention has turned to theproliferation of electronic and digital libraryservices. Several performance measures aimedspecifically at these services have been developedfor academic and public libraries (McClure andLopata 1996; Bertot et al. 2001). As more andmore technology is applied to information sys-tems and library services delivery, the tendencyhas been to use the technology to produce avariety of statistics. Gilbert (2000) identifiedseveral categories of problems with electronicallygenerated statistical reports. The problem cate-gories include problems with definitions, respon-sibility, information generated from job trackingsystems and the generation of web statistics.Gilbert concludes with a set of recommendationson ensuring the electronic generation of mean-ingful statistics, especially the importance ofbeing sure about what is being measured.

In February, 2001 the National InformationStandards Organization (NISO) sponsored aforum on performance measures and statistics,in preparation for a review of the LibraryStatistics Standard (Z39.7–1995). A broad spec-trum of the library and business (vendor) com-munity gathered to discuss issues related to themanagement of library services and electronicresources. The full proceedings of the meetingand a resource webography can be found on theNISO website (2001) (www.web.syr.edu/jryan/infopro/stats.html).

Conclusions

Only since 1980 has there been a concerted efforton the part of libraries and library organizationsto formalize the process of performance evalua-tion.

A major change in emphasis from inputmeasures to output measures occurred in themid- to late 1970s. A similar shift from outputsto outcomes assessments occurred in the early1990s. Performance cannot be measured solely interms of inputs or outputs or outcomes. Rather, itis the set of relationships among all three types ofmeasures that yields results that can be inter-preted and actions that can be taken to improveperformance.

There has been a concentration on quantifyinglibrary performance, sometimes to the exclusionof any recognition of qualitative and non-quanti-fiable aspects of library services. Again, a ba-

508 PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT IN LIBRARIES

lanced approach, including quantitative measuresand non-quantitative approaches, is needed.Finally, the definition and adoption of perfor-

mance criteria and measures tend to reflect thepolitical and societal values of the time. Recently,productivity was a focus of international con-cern. This was followed by a shift in emphasis tothe issue of competitiveness. In the mid-1990squality became the predominant criterion andtoday we see increasing concerns for return oninvestment or value received.

References

Adams, R. et al. (1993) Decision Support Systems andPerformance Assessment in Academic Libraries,Bowker Saur.

Bertot, J.C., McClure, C.R. and Ryan, J. (2001)Statistics and Performance Measures for PublicLibrary Networked Services, American Library As-sociation.

Bloor, I. (1991) Performance Indicators and DecisionSupport Systems for Libraries: A Practical Applica-tion of ‘Keys to Success’, British Library ResearchPaper 93, British Library Research and DevelopmentDepartment.

Chweh, S.S. (1981) ‘User criteria for evaluation oflibrary service’, Journal of Library Administration2(1): 35–46.

Clark, P.M. (1976) A Study to Refine and Test NewMeasures of Library Service and Train LibraryPersonnel in Their Use, Rutgers University, Bureauof Library and Information Science Research.

Crawford, J., Pickering, H. and McLelland, D. (1998)‘The stakeholder approach to the construction ofperformance measures’, Journal of Librarianship andInformation Science 30(2): 87–112.

D’Avigdor, R. (1997) ‘Indispensable or indifferent? Thereality of information service performance measure-ment at UNSW library’, AARL Australian Academicand Research Libraries 28(4): 264–80.

D’Elia, G. and Walsh, S. (1983) ‘User satisfaction withlibrary service – a measure of public library perfor-mance?’, Library Quarterly 53(2): 109–33.

deProspo, E.R. et al. (1973) Performance Measures forPublic Libraries, American Library Association.

Gilbert, C. (2000) ‘Problems with the electronic gen-eration of library statistics’, LASIE 31(1): 18–23.

Goodall, D.L. (1987) Twenty Years of PerformanceMeasurement, Loughborough University, Libraryand Information Statistics Unit.

Griffiths, J.-M. and King, D.W. (1993) Special Li-braries: Increasing the Information Edge, SpecialLibraries Association.

—— (1991) A Manual on the Evaluation of Informa-tion Centers and Services, NATO/AGARD.

—— (1990) Keys to Success: Performance Indicatorsfor Public Libraries, Office of Arts and Libraries.

Hannabuss, S. (1983) ‘Measuring the value and mar-keting the service: An approach to library benefit’,ASLIB Proceedings 35(10): 418–27.

ISO 11620 (1998) Information and Documentation –

Library Performance Indicators, International Orga-nization for Standardization (ISO).

Joint Funding Councils Library Review Group (1995)The Effective Academic Library: A Framework forEvaluating the Performance of UK Academic Li-braries, Higher Education Funding Council for Eng-land.

—— (1993) Report, Higher Education Funding Councilfor England (Follett Report).

Kantor, P.B. (1984) Objective Performance Measuresfor Academic and Research Libraries, Association ofResearch Libraries.

Kent, A. and Galvin, T.J. (1977) Library ResourceSharing. Proceedings of the 1976 Conference onResource Sharing in Libraries, Pittsburgh, Pennsyl-vania, Marcel Dekker, Inc.

King, D.W. and Bryant, E.C. (1971) The Evaluation ofInformation Services and Products, Information Re-sources Press.

Knightly, J.J. (1979) ‘Overcoming the criterion problemin the evaluation of library performance’, SpecialLibraries 70(4): 173–7.

Lancaster, F.W. (1977) The Measurement and Evalua-tion of Library Services, Information ResourcesPress.

McClure, C.R. et al. (1987) Planning and Role Settingfor Public Libraries. Prepared for the Public LibraryDevelopment Project, American Library Association.

McClure, C.R. and Lopata, C.L. (1996) Assessing theAcademic Networked Environment: Strategies andOptions, Coalition for Networked Information.

Moore, N. (1989)Measuring the Performance of PublicLibraries: A Draft Manual, UNESCO.

Morse, P.M. (1968) Library Effectiveness: A SystemsApproach, MIT Press.

NISO (2001) Forum on Performance Measures andStatistics (www.niso.org/stats.html).

—— (2001) Measure the Information Age Webography(www.niso.org/stats.html#webography).

Palmour, V.E. et al. (1980) A Planning Process forPublic Libraries. Prepared for the Public LibraryAssociation of the American Library Association,American Library Association.

Poll, R. and te Boekhorst, P. (1996) Measuring Quality:International Guidelines for Performance Measure-ment in Academic Libraries, IFLA publications 76,K.G. Saur.

Powell, R.R. (1976) ‘An investigation of the relation-ship between reference collection size and otherreference service factors and success in answeringreference questions’, Doctoral dissertation, Univer-sity of Illinois, Graduate School of Library Science.

Ramsden, M.J. (1978) Performance Measurement ofSome Melbourne Public Libraries, Library Councilof Victoria.

Revill, D.H. and Ford, G. (eds) (1994) Working Paperson Service Level Agreements, SCONUL.

Van House, N.A. et al. (1987) Output Measures forPublic Libraries. Prepared for the Public LibraryDevelopment Project, American Library Association.

Walter, V.A. (1995) Output Measures and More: Plan-ning and Evaluating Public Library Services forYoung Adults, American Library Association.

—— (1992) Output Measures for Public Library


Service to Children: A Manual of StandardizedProcedures, American Library Association.

Zweizig, D. and Rodger, E.J. (1982) Output Measuresfor Public Libraries: A Manual of StandardizedProcedures. Prepared for the Public Library Associa-tion of the American Library Association, AmericanLibrary Association.

Zweizig, D., Johnson, D.W., Robbins, J. with Besant,M. (1996) The TELL IT! Manual: The CompleteProgram for Evaluating Library Performance, Amer-ican Library Association.

SEE ALSO: academic libraries; libraries;management support systems; public libraries;quality in library and information services;statistics on libraries; strategic planning

JOSÉ-MARIE GRIFFITHS

PERIODICAL

A publication appearing at regular and fixedintervals of time under a distinctive title, whichthe publishers intend should continue so toappear, without any anticipated cessation. Itscontents are usually some mixture of articles,reviews, stories or other writings by severalcontributors. The magazine would be a classicexample of a periodical. Although some catalo-guers may not include the newspaper and thelearned journal under this heading, there is nological, as opposed to practical, reason not to doso. Serial is a slightly broader near-synonym thatis generally taken to include some regularlyappearing reference works that would not usuallybe included under the term periodical.


PERSONAL COMPUTER

A computer designed for individual use, ratherthan to be shared by a number of usersconcurrently. The term entered common usewhen IBM introduced its own best-selling pro-duct called by this name, and is often abbre-viated to PC. Microcomputer was the earliergeneric term used for computers of this descrip-tion, and is still used in this sense, althoughmicrocomputers appear in more forms than justpersonal computers. The term PC is often usedto distinguish an IBM-compatible microcompu-ter from an Apple Macintosh, often referred toas a Mac. The PC is normally understood to bea desktop device, although the term is also

applied to laptop and palmtop computers thathave similar functionality.


PHILOSOPHIES OF SCIENCE

Philosophy of science consists of epistemologicalproblems as well as other kinds of philosophicalproblems related to science. epistemology is animportant philosophical subdiscipline concernedwith the nature, sources and limits of knowl-edge. Because scientific knowledge is often takenas a model for knowledge in general the twoareas are strongly overlapping. A crude classifi-cation of basic epistemologies is:

. Rationalism stresses the role of a priori theo-rising.

. Empiricism (see empiricism and positivism)stresses observation.

. Historicism stresses the role of backgroundknowledge.

. Pragmatism stresses the role of analysingvalues and goals.

The difference between them is thus related tothe relative role they ascribe to those differentelements and methods in getting information andproducing knowledge. In this way they constitutethe basic theories about information seeking andthus information science. The two extremes inthe range of approaches are empiricism/positi-vism and hermeneutics.It is important to realize that each of the

epistemological positions mentioned above pro-duces very strong arguments against the otherpositions. The classical rationalist argumentagainst empiricism is that observation cannotplay the sole role (or even the major role) inacquiring knowledge because we cannot experi-ence anything that is not already anticipated inour in-born capacity to sense and form concepts.This argument is as strong today as ever. Ourknowledge about, for example, colours cannotcome from experience alone because the abilityto discriminate colours is a prerequisite toexperiencing them.The inherent weakness in the epistemological

positions may lead to scepticism or methodologi-cal anarchism. Our common sense shows us,however, that science is successful in producing

510 PERIODICAL

knowledge. Thus it is possible to produce valu-able knowledge, and some principles and meth-ods simply are better than others to describe howthis is done.Epistemology has been dominated by Plato’s

view of knowledge as ‘justified true belief’related to rationalism and empiricism. However,the pragmatic view is probably the most relevantto information science. This sees living andacting in the world as constituting the a prioriof human knowledge. Knowledge is constructedin such a way that an application of well-constructed knowledge will directly or indirectlyserve living and acting. When knowledge be-comes part of an acting system, it functions asan internal action determinant. There is a con-tinuous interaction between knowledge and ac-tion so that knowledge is created in and throughaction, and so that experiences that the actoracquires through action influence subsequentactions. Value-knowledge, factual knowledgeand procedural knowledge are three types ofknowledge connected to the three types of inter-nal action determinants. Having value-knowl-edge means knowing what fulfils the criteria ofgood values. Having factual knowledge meanshaving true beliefs about the three worlds inwhich one is living. Having procedural knowl-edge means knowing how to carry out a specificact or act sequence. Knowledge can be unarticu-lated or articulated. Unarticulated knowledge is,for instance, tacit knowledge, familiarity, knowl-edge by acquaintance. Knowledge can be articu-lated in everyday language, science and art.(Sarvimäki 1988: 58–9).One example of the pragmatic view is feminist

epistemology. The impact of feminism on episte-mology has been to move the question ‘Whoseknowledge are we talking about?’ to a centralplace in epistemological inquiry. Hence feministepistemologists are producing conceptions ofknowledge that are quite specifically contextua-lized and situated, and of socially responsibleepistemic agency (Code 1998). This can be seenas a specific case of the pragmatic epistemologyemphasizing goals and values, and regardingsocial aspects of knowledge. The pragmatic viewof knowledge is of special importance to Libraryand Information Science (LIS) because it isconnected to the societal role of LIS institutions,whether they are scientific or commercial, orpublic libraries serving democracy and enlight-enment.

Different views of knowledge underlie differ-ent approaches or paradigms in all fields ofknowledge (including LIS itself). Especially inthe social sciences there exist many differentapproaches or paradigms. Such approaches areultimately connected to different epistemologicalviews. Hjørland (1997) demonstrates how thefacet–analytic tradition in classification researchis connected to rationalism, while the experimen-tal information retrieval tradition and bib-liometrics have mainly been dominated byempiricism/positivism. He tries to base informa-tion science on activity theory that is related toboth pragmatism and (critical) forms of realism.Epistemology is not only important for LIS in

relation to the research methods adapted. Be-cause LIS is about communicating knowledge,LIS can essentially be seen as applied epistemol-ogy. Any kind of activity concerning selecting,organizing, seeking or communicating knowledgeis basically an epistemological activity.In LIS as in other social sciences our view of

knowledge tends to be dominated by empiricism/positivism. There are, however, attempts to in-form the field by, for example, activity theory,feminist epistemology, hermeneutics, post-mod-ernism and social constructionism. Such attemptsare very necessary. There is, however, a dangerthat they remain in a meta-theoretical positionwithout sufficient connection to specific LISproblems. Hjørland (1998) has suggested thatthe methods of classification inside and outsideLIS are basically connected to the above fourpresented epistemological positions, and thatepistemological knowledge helps us to identifystrengths and weaknesses in different approachesto classification. Other problems in LIS havesimilar relations to epistemology.

References

Code, L. (1998) ‘Feminist epistemology’, in RoutledgeEncyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London:Routledge

Hjørland, B. (1998) ‘The classification of psychology: Acase study in the classification of a knowledge field’,Knowledge Organization 24(4): 162–201.

—— (1997) Information Seeking and Subject Represen-tation. An Activity-Theoretical Approach to Infor-mation Science, Westport & London: GreenwoodPress.

Sarvimäki, A. (1988) Knowledge in Interactive PracticeDisciplines: An Analysis of Knowledge in Educationand Health Care, Helsinki: University of Helsinki,Department of Education.

PHILOSOPHIES OF SCIENCE 511

Further reading

Chalmers, A.F. (1999) What is This Thing CalledScience? An Assessment of the Nature and Status ofScience and Its Methods, 3rd edn, Cambridge,Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 1–10(1998) [also on CD-ROM], London: Routledge.[Many different articles on specific epistemologies.All articles have short ‘abstracts’ providing basicinformation and user-friendly annotated bibliogra-phies.]

SEE ALSO: research in library and informationscience; sociology of knowledge

BIRGER HJØRLAND

PHILOSOPHY OF LIBRARIANSHIP

The identification and articulation of the mainprinciples underlying the practical operationsof libraries and information services, in parti-cular those relating to collection policies, con-servation, access, functions and the role oflibraries in society. These principles haveevolved over a period of more than 2,500 yearsand fall broadly into three historical phases:early period, nineteenth century and twentiethcentury.

Early period

The earliest libraries were founded primarily onthe principle of systematic and comprehensiveacquisition, as exemplified by the great claytablet library in Nineveh created by Ashurbani-pal, king of Assyria, 668–624 bc, and theAlexandrian Library of papyrus rolls establishedby Ptolemy Soter around 300 bc. However,during the 1,000 years after the fall of theRoman Empire, collections (of writings on parch-ment in codex form) were typically small, butguarded and conserved with fervour. Even ascollections began to grow again with the adventof the printed book, the philosophy of accretionand retention remained dominant. In relation tosociety, libraries were associated with power,temporal or ecclesiastical, as shown by theirbeing housed either in palaces or in monasteriesand cathedrals.

Nineteenth century

The principle of systematic and comprehensiveacquisition persisted triumphantly throughoutthe nineteenth century, manifesting itself most

notably in the growth of national libraries, inparticular of the British Museum Library underthe direction of Antony panizzi from 1837, andof the library of congress under its first greatlibrarian, Ainsworth Rand Spofford. Both Panizziand Spofford sought to enforce legal deposit,and both concentrated on acquisition. However,the second priority, certainly for Panizzi, wasaccess for all who required it to the collections soamassed. An important part of access was theorganization of libraries for use rather thanprimarily for retention and conservation. Herethe great pioneers were American: Melvil dewey,Charles Ammi cutter and William FrederickPoole.The coming together of the era of the printed

book, the rise of democracy and the spread ofpopular education also resulted in the creation inthe second half of the nineteenth century ofpublic libraries in Britain and the USA, adevelopment which demonstrated that librariesare created by society, reflecting what societyrequires. Some of the founders of Americanlibrarianship – Dewey, John Cotton Dana, SamWalter Foss – saw the library as an extension ofthe public educational system and were chieflyconcerned about its administration as a publicinstitution (McCrimmon 1975).

Twentieth century

The principle of comprehensive acquisition fal-tered in the latter half of the twentieth century,as library collections of millions of volumes,particularly in university libraries, proliferated,and the resulting combination of economic,spatial and organizational problems broughtwith it the realization that such indefinitegrowth was no longer sustainable. Ironically,after a long period of neglect conservationwas revived as a curatorial issue, triggered by thewidespread and obvious deterioration of a largeproportion of library holdings. What, however,really came into its own in the twentieth centurywas the philosophical concept that librariescannot just be storehouses of knowledge, butmust also disseminate that knowledge and infor-mation. Hence emphasis increased on accessand use.Early in the century one of the most influential

thinkers in the field, S.R. ranganathan, formu-lated his Five Laws of Library Science, the veryfirst of which encapsulated this spirit of the time:

512 PHILOSOPHY OF LIBRARIANSHIP

‘Books are for use’ (Ranganathan 1931). Theemphasis on use and service was also reflected inthe development and refinement of the techni-ques and methods of library and informationwork: from the ‘library economy’ of the latenineteenth century to the ‘library science’ and‘information science’ of present times. Instru-mental in this respect, both in the matter of theprosecution of research and the education andtraining of information work personnel, havebeen the library schools, from that founded byMelvil Dewey in 1887 at Columbia Collegeonwards.Access to libraries as a principle is now taken

for granted, and has been further reinforced inthe closing decades of the century by the match-less possibilities of electronic access. What hasalso evolved is a clearer and fuller concept of thesocietal role of libraries. The simple recognitionin the late nineteenth century of the educationalfunction of libraries, along with a belief in thepower of education to promote general welfare,which in turn would ideally lead to socialstability and good citizenship (McCrimmon1975), was endorsed well into the twentiethcentury by outstanding public librarians such asLionel McColvin, who argued strongly thatlibraries ‘help in the making of whole indivi-duals’ able to ‘contribute to and benefit from theconstructive life of the community’ (McColvin1942). In the wake of the Second World War, andconditioned by international experience of awidespread variety of tyrannical regimes, evengreater value, however, was placed on the freeexchange of ideas, unhindered access and free-dom from censorship (Broadfield 1949). Insum, libraries are now perceived as sources ofpower, deriving initially from the fact that theyare the storehouses of knowledge, the reposi-tories of the records of mankind’s achievementsand discoveries. As a consequence they conserveand transmit culture; they underpin education,both individual and formal; they are importantto economic welfare; they are crucially related toall other intellectual, artistic and creative activ-ities; they are instruments of social and politicalchange; and they are the guardians of the free-dom of thought (Thompson 1974).

References

Broadfield, A. (1949) A Philosophy of Librarianship,Grafton.

McColvin, L.R. (1942) The Public Library System ofGreat Britain, Library Association.

McCrimmon, B. (ed.) (1975) American Library Philo-sophy: An Anthology, Shoe String Press.

Ranganathan, S.R. (1931) Five Laws of LibraryScience, Madras Library Association.

Thompson, J. (1974) Library Power, Bingley.

Further reading

De Beer, F. (1999) ‘A proposed philosophico-ethicalapproach to the information era’, Mousaion 17: 2–16.

McCook, K.P. (2001) ‘Social justice, personalism andthe practice of librarianship’, Catholic Library World72: 80–4.

Nitecki, J.E. (1998) ‘Conceptual aspects of bibliothecalcommunication: Philosophical legacy of twentiethcentury American librarianship’, Public LibraryQuarterly 17: 27–36.

Steinerova, J. (2001) ‘Human issues of library andinformation work’, Information Research 6(www.shef.ac.uk/is/publications/infres/6–2/paper95.html).

Thompson, J. (1977) A History of the Principles ofLibrarianship, Bingley.

SEE ALSO: history of libraries; informationprofessions; librarianship

JAMES THOMSON

PICTURE LIBRARIES

Though picture libraries, by definition, exist tohouse and to make available visual documents,they vary substantially in the relative importancethey assign to these functions. This results in adiversity of establishments that differ in theirmethods of acquisition (see acquisitions), clas-sification and retrieval, the conditions wherebythe pictures are made available, and the proce-dures whereby they are accessed. A collection ofmedieval manuscripts and a sports photo agencywill have little in common apart from the basicfact that they both hold pictures. The manu-scripts will be kept, in rigorously controlledconditions, hopefully forever; the majority ofsports photographs will lose their interest tomor-row. Students will pore over the manuscripts atleisure; the evening papers need their photos ofthis afternoon’s match in minutes rather thanhours. And between these extremes are picturesgathered into libraries of all sorts and sizes.Private picture libraries are, typically, in-house

collections serving the specific needs of aninstitution. Thus an art college will maintain itsown slide collection of art reference material,

PICTURE LIBRARIES 513

available to lecturers and students for studypurposes but not normally to outsiders. Suchcollections rarely hold original material, andwhat they hold will rarely be of reproductionquality. The needs of the users will dictate thescope of the collection and consequent acquisi-tion: access and retrieval will be planned tointegrate with other activities of the establish-ment. Perceived as providing a service, privatelibraries are not expected to be economically self-supporting.Public picture libraries are headed by the

major national archives – the British Library, thebibliothèque nationale de france and theirequivalents elsewhere. These are supplementedby specifically oriented collections such as theNational Maritime Museum, by regional librariesholding material relating to a specific area and bylibraries dedicated to a particular subject such asscience, transport, theatre or costume. Then thereare collections acquired by academic institutions,such as the John Johnson ephemera collectionacquired by the Bodleian Library, Oxford, orbuilt up by cultural institutions such as theShakespeare Centre at Stratford-on-Avon. Re-garded as a national heritage, such collectionsare maintained at public expense.public libraries and academic libraries,

while recognizing an obligation to make theirmaterial available to the public, are primarilyarchives so far as their picture collections areconcerned; their holdings constitute a uniquerecord whose safekeeping takes priority over anyother function. This concern affects procedures atevery stage: security (see security in libraries)may dictate that users comply with stringentrequirements before being allowed access, andthe material itself may be scattered in dozens ofseparate collections, each of which must beaccessed in its own right.Though modern technology has greatly en-

hanced the ability of public institutions to re-spond to the needs of individual users, their sheersize means that it is not practicable to anticipateevery user’s need by having every item immedi-ately available in borrowable form. However, thegrowing demand for visual material means thatthe picture holdings of these institutions consti-tute not only a valuable heritage but also a usefulsource of income, and increasingly museumssuch as the Natural History Museum are settingup their own picture libraries. What this gener-ally means in practice is that a library will make

copies of its most popular items, for hire orpurchase, while others must be ordered, with anunavoidable time-lag. Nevertheless, despite thepractical obstacles, the fact that they possessunique material of the highest quality ensuresthat public picture libraries remain a primarysource of visual documentation.Commercial picture libraries receive no insti-

tutional sponsorship or state patronage, and areconsequently dependent on such income as theycan generate from the use of their material,usually in the form of reproduction fees. Theyfall into three main categories:

. Agencies hold material supplied by contribut-ing photographers, whose work they handle inreturn for a percentage of the income derivedfrom marketing it. The most important are thePress Agencies, which deal in current affairs:they have little interest in building up a libraryas such, since their material will look old-fashioned within a year or two. However, themore far-sighted will transfer their out-of-datematerial to a ‘morgue’ to await rediscovery byposterity. General stock photo agencies, whichhave proliferated over recent decades, holdcontemporary photographs of subjects likelyto interest editors or advertisers – family andlifestyle scenes, evocative landscapes and thelike. These too can hardly be said to constitutelibraries per se, with the exception of those,such as Getty Images, created before WorldWar Two to service the needs of a publishinghouse, which possesses important archive ma-terial in addition to its current photo stock.While such libraries depend for survival onmaking their material commercially available,some are aware of constituting importantresources in their own right and may conceivetheir function in a wider sense than simplythat of short-term profitability.

. Individual photographers or associations ofphotographers who have accumulated a suffi-cient body of work may make it available in aformal library. Here again most are likely tobe ephemeral but a few will survive to achievearchive status along with ‘name’ photogra-phers of yesteryear such as Brassai or Cartier-Bresson.

. Collections are libraries holding material thatis their own property but the bulk of whichthey have not produced themselves, acquiringit by purchase, commission or donation. They

514 PICTURE LIBRARIES

are likely to be devoted to specific activities orparticular interests: thus important librariesare maintained by industrial companies suchas Shell, religious organizations such as theMormons or Shakers, social institutions suchas the Women’s Library, or professional bodiessuch as the Institution of Civil Engineers. Atthese libraries, with their strong incentive toencourage use, user convenience is a priority.

In addition, there are many hundreds ofsmaller, specialist collections. These range fromthe world-famous Mander and Mitchenson Thea-tre Collection, to Michael Ochs’s showbiz por-traits, the Advertising Archive, the DickensHouse Museum, or the Mary Evans PictureLibrary where history is documented by oldengravings and modern photographs, postcardsand other ephemera.Of the tens of thousands of picture libraries

that exist throughout the world, only some 1,400(those listed in Evans and Evans 2001) representsignificant resources readily accessible by thepublic or potential users. Distribution globally isuneven. While every country maintains a na-tional archive and press agencies are universal,specialist collections are comparatively rare out-side the USA and the UK. Stock photographagencies are international in scope and widelysyndicated, with the consequence that the sameimages are available worldwide from a variety ofsources: an agency in Portugal may possess nooriginal material of its own but act as local agentfor companies in the USA or Japan. Thanks tothe Internet, pictures can be transmitted instantlyround the globe, and the larger companies suchas Corbis and Getty make a growing proportionof their stock instantly available on searchablewebsites, where the customer can view, select anddownload what he or she wants without needingto have any direct contact with the company.Such establishments scarcely deserve to be classi-fied as picture libraries, yet some do indeedhouse collections of original material togetherwith their syndicated stock.Such procedures are already the norm for

clients who need their pictures immediately –libraries specializing in sports and current affairsneed to make their pictures instantly available tothe media. How soon this will come to be thenorm for users who are not in such a hurry it isimpossible to predict, but sooner or later it will

surely happen. At present, the enormous invest-ment involved in digitizing pictures and offeringthem online, especially in high resolution suitablefor reproduction, is affordable only to large andwealthy organizations, and the future of thesmall specialist library is at risk until the cost oftechnology drops substantially.That picture libraries will continue to exist is

certain, as the use of visual materials becomeswider. But the economics of the matter are suchthat those libraries that are dependent on revenuemay become non-viable unless subsidized ortaken over by a wealthier company. Even publicinstitutions may find that the revenue derivedfrom their picture library does not justify the costof maintaining it. It is ironic that the technologythat makes pictures so much more easily avail-able may have the effect of making it unecono-mical to do so.

References

Evans, H. and Evans, M. (2001) The Picture Research-er’s Handbook, 7th edn, Pira International [an inter-national guide to picture resources].

Further reading

Evans, H. (1992) Practical Picture Research, Blueprint.—— (1980) Picture Librarianship, K.G. Saur/CliveBingley [a guide to the practical aspects of planningand running a library].

SEE ALSO: image retrieval; multimedialibrarianship

HILARY EVANS

PIRACY

The systematic appropriation of intellectualproperty, whether in the form of print, disk, CDor other format with the intention of marketingunauthorized copies for profit. The practice iswidespread in all regions of the world, but thepublishing and related industries of a number ofcountries that have not acceded to the interna-tional intellectual property agreements havetraded in pirated products on a particularly largescale.

Further reading

Gleason, P. (2001) ‘Copyright and electronic publish-ing: Background and recent developments’, Acquisi-tions Librarian 26: 5–26.

Graybisch. A.J. (2001) ‘Bootlegs: Intellectual property

PIRACY 515

and popular culture’, Journal of Information Ethics10: 35–50.

SEE ALSO: copyright; knowledge industries

PIXEL

An approximate abbreviation for ‘picture ele-ment’, and originally meaning the elements thatare used to create a television picture. Now it isalso used to refer to the smallest element of abitmapped visual display, or a scanned image,which can be distinguished by a computer.


PORAT, MARC URI (1947–)

Communications technology entrepreneur whoseearly academic work put forward an immenselyinfluential redefinition of the information sectorin the US economy.Born Ramat Gan, Israel, he obtained a BA in

psychology and sociology from Columbia andturned to the economics of information for hisMA thesis at Stanford. His PhD, also fromStanford, in 1976, was the original statement ofhis views on the information economy. Hissubsequent career has involved the developmentand marketing of various communication systemprojects. From 1983–8 he was Chairman andCEO of Private Satellite Network, 1990–5 Chair-man and CEO of General Magic, and since 1998Chairman of Perfect Commerce Inc.His contribution to ideas on the information

society is set out in The Information Society(Washington: Government Printing Office,1977). This extended the argument that societyhas moved from an initial agricultural phase, firstto an industrial phase, then to an economy basedon services, to define the modern economy as aninformation economy. If, as Porat did, we add toemployment in the information professionsand the knowledge industries a host of otheroccupations that predominantly involve the col-lecting, processing and use of information, asopposed to working with more tangible productsand services, it becomes easy to see informationas the central focus of modern society. Hiscontribution is generally cited alongside that ofFritz machlup as a cornerstone of thinking onthe information society.

PORTABILITY

The ability of computer software, programminglanguages and operating systems to operateindependently of any one specific type of plat-form, and thus to be ‘carried’ over from one toanother. Portability is achieved by including thesoftware within a ‘shell’ that can easily bemodified to accommodate the peculiarities of thecomputer on which it is run. The distinction ismade between source portability, meaning thatthe source program must be recompiled on thereceiving computer, and binary portability, mean-ing that recompilation is unnecessary.

PORTALS AND GATEWAYS

Introduction

The terms ‘gateway’ and ‘portal’ tend to be usedinterchangeably and often in combination todenote a service providing browser-based accessto information resources and applications. Indata networking a gateway is a device thattranslates a data stream from one protocol toanother, without adding any additional value inthe translation process. More recently the termhas been used within the Common GatewayInterface (CGI) through which an HTML callcan be converted to a script that can access adatabase or other non-HTML resource. Theconcept of a portal is something more than asimple switch or exchange, and usually providesa higher level of integration and personalisation.A portal has been likened to a medieval fair(Stewart 1998).

Portal evolution

The earliest use of the term portal was probablyby Jerry Yang and David Filo, who foundedYahoo! in 1993 as a service that would organiseInternet sites into categories. Yahoo! is an acro-nym for Yet Another Hierarchical OfficiousOracle! (Schlender 2002). Yahoo! not onlybrought to the Web the concept of a hierarchicaldirectory structure for Web resources, but also abusiness model that used advertising to generatethe revenues needed to support the very substan-tial team of indexers that were required to indexwebsites. Strictly speaking this was not the firsthierarchical index to the Web, as the WWW

516 PIXEL

Virtual Library had been initiated at CERN in1993 under the direction of Arthur Secret.The competition was from search engine sites

such as Alta Vista, Lycos, Hotbot and others(see search engines). They also needed togenerate revenues, saw the benefits of the Yahoo!model and started to introduce advertising them-selves. However there were other consumerinformation services in existence, such as Amer-ica Online and The Source, using PC technologyinstead of Internet protocols at this stage. Thiswas the beginning of what are often referred toas the portal wars, as AOL, MSN (MicrosoftNetwork), Excite, Walt Disney and NBCamongst others added content and services totheir sites in order to be the first point of entryonto the Web.It was Yahoo! that made the next important

step in portal evolution, and that was theintroduction in 1996 of myYahoo!, which gaveusers the ability to create a personal homepageof links to the Web resources. In 1997 MichaelMcNulty, Michael Hagan and Mark Walsh,the founders of VerticalNet, developed the con-cept of the vertical portal. Sometimes thisconcept has been referred to as a vortal, thoughthe term has never really become established.VerticalNet established industry-specific web-sites, providing information resources, buyer’sguides, discussion forums and recruitment ser-vices, and also the ability to transact businesson the site.

The corporate world

In November 1998 two Merrill Lynch analystspublished a report (Shilakes and Tylman 1998)that identified a developing market for EnterpriseInformation Portal (EIP) software that enabledcompanies to ‘unlock internally and externallystored information and provide users a singlegateway to personalised information needed tomake informed business decisions’. In fact im-plicit in this definition is that an EIP providesaccess both to information resources and applica-tions, and this is a boundary (albeit a ratherfuzzy boundary) between a gateway and a portal.Over the period from 1998 to 2000 well over ahundred EIP vendors entered the market in theUSA and in Europe, using XML and Javaprogramming to provide companies with linksto internal databases and display them on amultiple-windowed screen. By 2001 the down-

turn in the business economy, and significantinvestment in product development by IBM,Microsoft, SAP and other major IT companies,was starting to catalyse a shakeout in the market(White 2001).

Gateways

The use of the term ‘gateway’ has tended to bepredominately amongst the academic and li-brary communities. The definition used by theSocial Science Information Gateway (SOSIG) isthat it is ‘[a] freely available Internet servicewhich aims to provide a trusted source ofselected, high quality Internet information forstudents, academics, researchers and practi-tioners in the social sciences, business and law’.SOSIG is part of the Resource Discovery Net-work, a co-operative network of Internet re-source catalogues providing access todescriptions of resources selected for their qual-ity and accuracy by subject specialists through-out the UK academic community.Gateways tend to be funded through grants

from the public sector, or as a spin-off of workbeing conducted by an academic institution, suchas the Legal Web Sites Library of the Universityof Dundee. Increasingly, gateway sites offerpersonal account facilities, so that a user can bealerted to new resources in their particular areaof interest.

Portal developments

The initial concept of the EIP has now beenfurther developed by both software vendors forthe purposes of product differentiation, and alsoby consulting companies (notably the GartnerGroup, the Delphi Group, Ovum and Interna-tional Data Corporation) trying to help theircustomers make sense of the portal marketplace.The use of ‘corporate portal’ as the top-levelgeneric term is starting to emerge, and beneaththat there are now knowledge portals, employeeportals, ERP’s (Enterprise Resource Portals)(notably mySAP) and many others. The com-mon features are that these applications providelinkages to existing and new corporate resourcesthrough a very flexible browser-based desktopthat usually enables users to customize thedesktop by a ‘drag and drop’ process. Thisis one significant difference between currentcorporate portal applications and gateways,as most gateways are designed to be used in

PORTALS AND GATEWAYS 517

low-technology environments worldwide whereasportals are optimized for the high-bandwidthenterprise sector.

References

Schlender, B. (2002) ‘How a virtuoso plays the Web’,Fortune (March): F29–F36.

Shilakes, C.C. and Tylman, J. (1998) Enterprise Infor-mation Portals, New York: Merrill Lynch & Co.

Stewart, T.A. (1998) ‘Internet portals: No one-stopshop’, Fortune (December): 121–2.

White, M. (2001) ‘Reality check for the EIP market’,EContent 24: 54–5.

Further reading

Collins, H. (2001) Corporate Portals, Amacom [adivision of American Management Association].

Dias, C. (2001) ‘Corporate portals: A literature reviewof a new concept in information management’,International Journal of Information Management21: 269–87.

White, M. (2000) ‘Corporate portals: Realising theirpromise, avoiding costly failure’, Business Informa-tion Review 17: 177–84.

SEE ALSO: electronic information resources;information management; online services; Webbrowser

MARTIN WHITE

POSITIVISM

Positivism refers to a broad attitude aboutscience and philosophy that in particular isascribed to Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and totwentieth-century logical positivism. In its purestform, positivism argues that there is a singlescientific method that can be applied to all formsof sciences and philosophy, and that all metaphy-sical claims are pseudoscientific. It thus opposesthe approach of empiricism (see empiricism andpositivism) that characterizes much researchin library and information science.

SEE ALSO: hermeneutics; information theory

POSTAL SERVICES

Systems, usually provided by government, whichenable people to send letters and parcels to otherpeople, whether within the country or abroad.Postal services have been, and still are, vitalinfrastructural elements of a modern society,despite the proliferation of alternative methodsof communication over distance. Effective busi-

ness and national administration could scarcelyoperate without the facilities they offer, and itsometimes seems to be forgotten that the aspectsof e-commerce that deal with the sale of goodscould not function without delivery services, alarge proportion of which are provided by postalservices. The removal of the monopoly status ofstate postal services has in many countriesproduced a proliferation of parcel delivery andcourier services in competition. State postalservices have frequently taken on extra, non-postal, functions. Their nationwide networks ofpost offices can, for instance, provide basicbanking services in areas in which it is uneco-nomic for commercial banks to operate. Thepayment of social security benefits or collectionof certain forms of taxation are also commonfunctions of post offices.

SEE ALSO: communication; PTT; rural libraryservices

PREPRINT

This can refer either to a portion of a work, mostcommonly a journal article, printed and issuedbefore the publication of the complete work, or apaper to be submitted at a conference that isprinted for circulation prior to the holding of theconference. The circulation of preprints amongstinterested persons is a common function of theinvisible college and is considerably facilitatedby use of the Internet, to the extent that it is nowcommon to talk of e-prints. This type of circula-tion of texts is important in disciplines where thecurrency of information is vital and the need toclaim priority of discovery is strong.


Further reading

Garner, J. et al (2001) ‘The place of eprints in scholarlyinformation delivery’, Online Information Review25: 250–6.

Harter, S.P. and Park, T.K. (2000) ‘Impact of priorelectronic publication on manuscript considerationpolicies of scholarly journals’, JASIS 51: 940–8.

PRESERVATION

The processes and activities that stabilize andprotect objects so that they will be permanentand durable, or as long-lasting as it is possible tomake them. For paper-based materials, preserva-

518 POSITIVISM

tion is achieved through appropriate selection,housing, care and handling, security, climatecontrol, repair and conservation treatment.Increasingly, libraries and archives must alsopreserve the far more fugitive digital materials.digital preservation refers to the processesand activities that stabilize and protect bothreformatted and ‘born digital’ electronic materi-als in forms that are retrievable, readable andusable over time. In order to achieve this, it isnecessary to begin preserving an item at the pointof its creation. This is accomplished by creatingpreservation metadata, and by regularly refresh-ing and reformatting information. Digital preser-vation entails a preventive rather than a remedialapproach. The longevity of the medium on whichinformation is stored is a combination of itsphysical make-up and the technology of itshardware and software.Preservation is an umbrella term that applies

to the overall responsibilities of caring for collec-tions. Regardless of the format – print, non-printor digital – all library and archival materialsrequire protection. In some institutions, preserva-tion is carried out as part of collection manage-ment responsibilities. Preservation is consideredfrom the point of accession to deaccession –when materials are discarded. In research li-braries materials are usually maintained untilthey are too fragile to be used or until they haveoutlived their usefulness. Fragile books andmanuscripts are often replaced with new copiesor surrogate copies such as reprints or micro-form (see microforms), or are duplicatedthrough other reformatting technologies. Some-times a hybrid approach is used. For example, abook may be microfilmed and later scanned, orelse a book may be filmed and scanned simulta-neously. In archives, there is usually a retentionschedule for records. Although digitizing paperor film may provide users with increased access,digitization is not a preservation measure.Decision-making for preservation is part of an

integrated programme. The first question on thepart of a preservation manager must be, ‘Shouldthis item be retained in the collection?’ Theanswer is usually determined by the criteria setforth in the library’s collection developmentpolicy. If the answer is ‘yes’, the next questionwill relate to the value of the item. If it hasartefactual or historical value, repair, extensivetreatment, rebinding or the use of protectivehousing might be appropriate solutions. If the

item is not deemed to have such value, thesolution might be to purchase a reprint ormicrofilm. There is no consensus in the librarycommunity as to what constitutes artefactual orhistorical value. Strategic preservation decision-making must take into account a number ofconsiderations. Each institution must evaluate itsown priorities and values.Preservation ensures that when an item has

been purchased and catalogued, it will be avail-able when users want to consult or examine it.Until the nineteenth century, much of the empha-sis in libraries was on preservation of materials.Patrons were not given access to library stacks,access was limited and so was wear-and-tear onthe books. Since books were not handled asmuch as they are today, deterioration took placeat a slower rate. With the development of themodern profession of librarianship in the latenineteenth century and an egalitarian emphasison access to collections, preserving collectionsbecame less of a concern.At the same time, librarians and archivists

began to realize that modern books and paperwere less stable than older materials. The Indus-trial Revolution led to poor air quality that inturn contributed to the decay of leather andpaper. The need to deal with the problem ofdeteriorating collections was recognized, but itwas not until the 1950s that serious investiga-tions into the causes of deterioration of paperand bindings began to take place in the USA andEurope. It was clear that many library collectionshad deteriorated and that drastic measuresneeded to be taken if these collections were tobe preserved for immediate as well as future use.Deterioration is inherent in all organic materi-

als; by the middle of the nineteenth centurymachine-made paper was manufactured withwood pulp containing lignin and other acidiccomponents that caused paper to deterioraterelatively quickly. The development and use ofalum rosin sizing compounded the problem.Leather also contained harmful acidic ingredientsthat caused deterioration. The deterioration ofbooks was hastened by environmental factorssuch as high temperature and relative humidity,exposure to light, air pollution and carelesshandling by increased numbers of users in open-access repositories. By the 1960s efforts wereunder way to identify causes of deterioration andto seek ways of retarding it.The flooding of the Arno River in Florence,

PRESERVATION 519

Italy, in November 1966 served as a catalyst, forit brought bookbinders and paper conservatorsto the city, first to salvage the books and manu-scripts from the Laurentian Library and othercollections, and later to develop new treatments.As the books and manuscripts were cleaned,repaired and, in many instances, rebound, con-servators learned a great deal about book,leather, vellum and paper structure and longevity.These conservators returned to their respectivecountries (or moved to other countries) with anew understanding of book and paper conserva-tion. The relationships fostered by the Florenceexperience led to further research and training,and the establishment of new conservation la-boratories in Europe and the USA.Preservation of library and archival materials

was not taught as a separate subject in schools oflibrary, information and archival science until theearly 1970s, but by the late 1960s librarians andarchivists began to specialize in the preservationof collections, learning through seminars andworkshops, often from conservators who hadbeen active in Florence. Today most schools ofinformation offer specific courses in preservation,and preservation issues and concerns are includedin courses on collection development, manage-ment and new media.Co-operation is the key to successful preserva-

tion initiatives. No one library or archive canpreserve everything. Through co-operation, masstreatment techniques, such as the de-acidificationof books and papers, are being developed. Co-operative programmes to preserve valued collec-tions on microfilm have been successful in NorthAmerica and Europe; today countries are work-ing together to preserve their documentary heri-tage through such efforts as the EuropeanRegister of Microfilm Masters (EROMM) andincreased bibliographic control, assisted by theInternet. At the same time, librarians and archi-vists around the world are developing principlesfor basic digital preservation strategies. Refresh-ing, migration, emulation, technology preserva-tion and digital archaeology are current strategiesin use. Though none of these can as yet beconsidered permanent solutions, with continuedinternational co-operation in the development ofprinciples, standards and techniques, solutionsmay be forthcoming.Preservation is necessary to ensure that people,

in the present and future, will have access to theinformation that constitutes our documentary

heritage. Increasingly in this new electronic age,the preservation of text and images will dependon the ongoing refreshing and migration of data.Soon preservation will be the responsibility notjust of librarians and archivists, but also ofordinary citizens who will need to becomecultural custodians if their own digital photo-graphs and documents are to become part of theoverall documentary heritage.

Further reading

Banks, P.N. and Pilette, R. (eds) (2000) Preservation:Issues and Planning, American Library Association.

Feather, J. (1996) Preservation and the Management ofLibrary Collections, 2nd edn, Library AssociationPublishing.

Jones, M. and Beagrie, N. (2002) Preservation Manage-ment of Digital Materials: A Handbook, The BritishLibrary.

Swartzburg, S.G. (1995) Preserving Library Materials:A Manual, 2nd edn, Scarecrow.

COnservation On Line website (COOL) (http//palimp-sest.stanford.edu). [An invaluable source of informa-tion about developments, recent and forthcomingevents, and people.]

SEE ALSO: digitization

SUSAN G. SWARTZBURG,

REVISED BY MICHÈLE VALERIE CLOONAN

PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARIES

The papers of each US President since HerbertHoover have been placed in separate researchlibraries operated and maintained by the na-tional archives of the united states. Fund-raising for the buildings and facilities, which tendto be on a lavish scale, is undertaken by friendsand admirers, and the libraries are a substantialset of monuments to the presidents.

Further reading

Hyland, P. (1996) Presidential Libraries and Museums:An Illustrated Guide, Congressional QuarterlyBooks.

‘Symposium on Presidential Libraries and Materials’(1994–5) Government Information Quarterly 11: 7–69; 12: 15–125.

PRIMARY LITERATURE

To the historian this means original manuscripts,contemporary records or documents that areused by an author in researching a book orarticle, which in its turn would form part of the

520 PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARIES

secondary literature. To the scientist and thelibrarian it means the monograph or journalliterature itself, as opposed to the bibliographicor secondary literature.

SEE ALSO: communication; economics ofinformation

PRIVACY

The quality of protection for aspects of the life,and information about the life, of an individual ora group, from the intervention or knowledge ofothers. Respect for the privacy of certain aspectsof information is a counterbalance to the principleof freedom of information. Not all societieshave a highly developed concept of privacy, andsocial, as opposed to private, life may be thedominant human mode. However, in industria-lized societies, a sense of the need for privacy forthe individual, and legitimate business secrecy forthe organization, is well established.

Constitutional and legal protection

International agreements, most notably the Uni-ted Nations’ Universal Declaration of HumanRights, 1948, invariably recognize privacy as aright. In the European Convention on HumanRights, Article 8 expresses it as: ‘Everyone hasthe right to respect for his private and family life,his home and his correspondence.’ The constitu-tions of many countries also offer protection forprivacy. The Constitution of Portugal that wasenacted in 1989, for instance, has an Article 35providing for the protection of information aboutindividuals. Some countries, such as France, haveprivacy laws designed to protect individuals frommedia intrusion into their private lives. Manycountries – Sweden, Germany and France, toname only a few – have specific legislation ondata protection. These govern access to, andprotect the integrity of, the information aboutindividuals that is legitimately collected by offi-cial and commercial bodies of all kinds. Generaldata protection laws are only one aspect of thisapproach to the protection of privacy. The USDriver’s Privacy Protection Act, 1993, is anexample dealing with a specific category ofinformation. Because in a few much-publicizedcases criminals had located their victims bylooking up their car registration details in thepublicly available records of state motor vehicle

agencies, such records were closed to access. TheUSA also has a Privacy Act of 1974, which isconcerned specifically with information gatheredby the federal government concerning indivi-duals.Rather in contrast to most industrialized coun-

tries, until recently there was little or no actualprivacy law in Britain. The tort law on breach ofconfidence did protect certain types of informa-tion, both within the domestic environment andthe workplace, from being divulged to thirdparties. Today this tends to be cited in the lawcourts mainly in relation to business confidenti-ality. Britain also passed Data Protection Acts in1984 and 1998. However, curbing the country’shighly intrusive media was avoided for variousreasons, including the fear that such law wouldhinder investigative journalism. With the inclu-sion of the European Convention on HumanRights into British law in 2000, as the HumanRights Act, this changed, and the principle of theprotection of privacy immediately began to becited in the courts.

Interception of communications

Electronic communication introduces a new di-mension into questions of the protection ofprivacy. It is particularly vulnerable to interfer-ence and penetration by those with the necessaryskills and equipment. It is often argued that theonly real means of protecting the privacy ofelectronic communications is to code messagesor, to use the more usual term, employ encryp-tion techniques. Within an organization it isvery easy for electronic mail to be read bypersons other than those to whom it was sent,particularly the system administrators who haveto have access to all parts of the system. Employ-ees have been dismissed from companies whenthe records of their e-mail have shown that theywere involved in disloyal communications orwere circulating pornography. The distinctivething about interference with electronic commu-nication, however, is that those who do it includepeople, usually referred to as hackers, or crack-ers, who do so for reasons of mischief. Theiractivities are usually described as computercrime. Official surveillance of networks hasemerged in response not only to the activities ofhackers, but also criminal gangs, politicalsubversives, terrorists (especially since 11 Sep-tember 2001) and even football hooligans.

PRIVACY 521

Privacy in libraries

Since libraries hold and have access to substantialquantities of information about their users as agroup, they need to be alert to privacy issues.Membership records are common to most typesof library and they offer obvious marketingopportunities (Estabrook 1996). This would alsobe attractive to companies wanting to targetadvertising at sectors of the reading public. Manytypes of library circulation systems, particu-larly computerized ones, result in a record oftransactions that is capable of being referred toat a later date. Some libraries choose not todevelop a fully fledged archiving facility in theirsystems because they do not wish to accumulaterecords that could be used for police surveillanceof library users. If the use of library files toinvestigate and take action against users seemspossible but unlikely in practice, the US ‘LibraryAwareness Programme’ is evidence that this is agenuine concern. In 1988 it was revealed that theFBI was in the habit of demanding that librariansreveal the names and reading habits of libraryusers who could be considered ‘hostile to theUSA’ (Foerstel 1991).

References

Estabrook, L. (1996) ‘Sacred trust or competitiveopportunity: Using patron records’, Library Journal121: 48–9.

Foerstel, H. (1991) Surveillance in the Stacks: The FBI’sLibrary Awareness Program, Greenwood Press.

Further reading

Branscomb, A.W. (1994) Who Owns Information?From Privacy to Public Access, Basic Books.

Reid, B.C. (1986) Confidentiality and Law, Waterlow.Sterling, B. (1992) The Hacker Crackdown, Viking.Sturges, P., Teng, V. and Iliffe, U. (2001) ‘User privacyin the digital library environment: A matter ofconcern for information professionals’, Library Man-agement 22: 364–70.

SEE ALSO: freedom of information; informationpolicy; official secrecy

PAUL STURGES

PRIVATE LIBRARIES

Collections of books accumulated by individualsfor their own use and enjoyment. The term canbe used to embrace both large and small collec-tions, and the books may be gathered for a

variety of reasons, such as use, display or merelyfor the pleasure of owning them. Private librariesdiffer from institutional ones in that they reflectthe interests of an individual rather than acommunity of users, but there is a long traditionof absorbing private libraries into public onesafter the death of the owner. Big private collec-tions have played a major part in shaping manynational and academic libraries: the manuscriptsof Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631) and the booksof Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) became founda-tion collections of the british library; thebequest of Martin Routh’s 15,000 books toDurham University Library in 1854 effectivelycreated an instant library for that recentlyfounded institution. Owners of major privatecollections have often allowed access to friendsand scholars, a privilege that was especiallyimportant in earlier centuries, before the devel-opment of a network of publicly funded libraries.

Importance

Private libraries offer important insights into thehistory of books and the development of taste,and they have been extensively documented andstudied. If we know the titles of the books on aperson’s shelves, we can go at least some waytowards knowing what they read and what textsare likely to have influenced their thinking. Whenthe books survive and can be identified, they maycontain marginalia or other annotations thatoffer first-hand evidence of the reaction of thereader to the ideas contained in the books.Volumes annotated by celebrated scholars havelong been valued, and various studies based onthe importance of such marginalia have beenpublished. By looking at the contents of privatelibraries of a particular period, we can discoverwhich books were considered important andworth owning, and which were not; interestschange over the centuries.

History

The history of private libraries is as old as that ofbooks. There are references to private collectionsin the writings of the ancient Greeks – Euripides,for example, is reputed to have had a fine bookcollection – and there is also plentiful evidence toshow that the Romans valued private libraries.The books have not often survived, but a collec-tion of about 800 papyrus rolls forming the

522 PRIVATE LIBRARIES

library of a villa in ad 79 was preserved in thevolcanic ruins of Herculaneum.The history of private book ownership in

Europe during the medieval period is not easy totrace in detail, as much of the evidence hasdisappeared. The significant book collectionswere generally attached to ecclesiastical institu-tions and the spread of books in private handswas restricted by their high cost, at a time whenthey all had to be individually written, and by thelimited extent of literacy. Studies of willssuggest that book ownership in medieval Eng-land, even among the educated classes, oftenamounted to no more than a few standardtheological or devotional texts, although thereare odd exceptions: a thirteenth-century Londonpriest, Geoffrey de Lawath, had a library of atleast forty-eight volumes. The big medieval pri-vate collections were usually associated withsenior ecclesiastics such as Archbishop SimonLangham, who bequeathed ninety-four books toWestminster Abbey in 1376, or Cardinal AdamEaston (d. 1398), whose books filled six barrelsafter his death. Most of these collections weremodest in size by post-Renaissance standards,with the notable exception of the library ofRichard de Bury, Bishop of Durham (d. 1345),comprising over 1,000 volumes.The introduction of printing in the second half

of the fifteenth century, combining mass-produc-tion techniques with a lowering of prices at atime of steadily increasing literacy, greatly facili-tated the development of private libraries. Bookownership became much more widespread, anddedicated collectors with appropriate meanscame to acquire bigger and bigger libraries.Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury(1489–1556), is thought to have had about 400books; fifty years later one of his successors,Archbishop Richard Bancroft (1544–1610), wasable to bequeath a collection of about 6,000volumes. In 1649 Richard Holdsworth, Masterof Emmanuel College, Cambridge, died leaving acollection of over 10,000 books; John Moore,Bishop of Ely (1646–1714), was able to build alibrary of nearly 30,000 volumes; Thomas Raw-linson (1681–1725) managed to amass over200,000 volumes in his short lifetime. Thesemen had the biggest private libraries of theirgenerations, but book ownership was no longerrestricted to a senior elite, and significant collec-tions could be formed by people of relativelymodest means who had the will to acquire them;

for example, Robert Burton (1577–1640), theauthor of The Anatomy of Melancholy, who leftabout 1,800 books when he died.

Motives for collecting

Private libraries have varied in character as wellas size, influenced by the motives for acquiringthem. Working scholars have always neededready access to a range of texts – more and moreas the centuries have passed – and this has longbeen a major driving force behind book buying.The development of antiquarian interests fromthe late sixteenth century onwards led men likeCotton to collect pre-Reformation manuscripts ina spirit of preserving that which would otherwisebe lost; Matthew Parker (1504–75), anothermanuscript collector, was further motivated by adesire to use early texts in political debate.Private collections have also been formed withthe deliberate intention of donating the endproduct to an institution, such as the library thatJohn Cosin built up to give to the diocese ofDurham on his death in 1672. Bibliophilia hasalso played a major part in the development ofprivate libraries – the wish to collect not so muchfor practical working needs, but because booksare desirable and interesting objects that reflectthe taste of the owner. Collecting for reasons ofconnoisseurship is often reckoned to have begunaround the beginning of the eighteenth century,when a number of British aristocrats developed apassion for buying incunabula.

Tracing information

Research into private libraries can be approachedfrom various angles. Many historic collectionsare preserved more or less intact, having passedinto institutional libraries. However, many morehave been dispersed and their history can only bepieced together from individual books carryinginscriptions or other marks of ownership. Somecollections were documented at the point ofdispersal through the compilation of a salecatalogue, and such catalogues offer invaluableinformation on the contents of private librariesfrom the late seventeenth century onwards (inBritain, the earliest book auction was in 1676).

Further reading

De Ricci, S. (1930) English Collectors of Books andManuscripts, Cambridge University Press [historical

PRIVATE LIBRARIES 523

survey of major English collectors from the sixteenthcentury onwards].

Pearson, D. (1994) Provenance Research in BookHistory: A Handbook, British Library [referencework with extensive guidance on further sources forthe history of private libraries].

SEE ALSO: bibliomania; history of libraries;provenance; rare-book libraries

DAVID PEARSON

PRIVATE PRESS

A range of printing and publishing activitiesdifferent from those in the commercial bookworld, used to categorize a subset of books andother publications produced outside conventionaltrade channels.Mallinckrodt’s De Ortu ac Progressu Artis

Typographicae (Cologne, 1639) celebrated theinvention of printing and discussed the work ofgreat scholar printers such as Aldus, Froben andPlantin. It also included notes on some indivi-duals ‘who had sometimes their hired printersand set up their peculiar and private presses’.Until the late eighteenth century, private

presses were usually controlled by the powerfuland wealthy, and used to print such documentsas they chose. Of these earlier private presses,some were used to:

. Facilitate private circulation of a book toscholars for their comment, in advance ofregular publication. In Elizabethan England,Archbishop Parker used the method for his DeAntiquitate Britannicae Ecclesiae; the Frenchtheologian Bossuet’s Exposition de la doctrinede l’église catholique was similarly circulated.

. Produce books to a higher standard of textualaccuracy than commercial publishers. Thework of early astronomers such as Regiomon-tanus, Tycho Brahe and Johann Hevelius wasissued in this way.

. Issue books to higher production standardsthan commercial printing/publication wouldallow; private printing permitted extensive useof mathematical illustrations and of volvellesin the Instrument Buch (1533) and otherbooks by Petrus Apianus.

. Print books in exotic languages. Much earlyprinting in Arabic types used types cast for andowned by Arabic scholars, not printers.

. Extend printing/book production into newareas. The earliest printing in Iceland, for

example, was procured through a patron’srecruitment of printers. The mission pressesthat introduced printing to many countries andtongues beyond Europe had a similar purpose,and many missionaries became amateur prin-ters.

. Maximize profits by excluding middlemen.Some authors have found they could makemore money by personalized production. Inthe eighteenth century profits from CharlesViner’s General Abridgement of Law andEquity helped endow an Oxford Professorship,and the eminent surgeon John Hunter madesubstantial profits from issuing his own medi-cal works.

. Get ‘unpublishable’ works into print, whenauthors unable to place a book with commer-cial printers/publishers produced it themselves(e.g. William Davy, a Devon clergyman, whoprinted his System of Divinity, in twenty-sixvolumes, 1795–1807).

Work unpublishable because it is politicallyunacceptable, blasphemous, libellous or (mostoften) pornographic has sometimes been printedby private presses. Private presses also contrib-uted powerfully to the resistance movements inFrance, Poland and the Netherlands during theSecond World War, but such illicit production isusually clandestine rather than private work.Adam Lackman’s Annalium Typographicorum

(Hamburg, 1740) recorded the work of manyprivate presses, but the eighteenth century sawnew growth. Portable presses were developed;nineteenth-century iron presses (some designedfor an amateur market) made the spread ofprinting easier.Many were negligible, but some presses use-

fully reprinted scarce early works: those issuedby the Lee Priory Press and the Auchinleck Presswere of this kind, anticipating the Early EnglishText Society – or today’s reprinters of rare booksin microfiche or CD-ROM form. But being out-side the book trade, private press books were(and are) difficult to procure; as many aretechnically not published, they are still often notcaught by legal deposit or included in nationalbibliographical records. The best bibliographicalcontrol is through the Private Libraries Associa-tion’s Private Press Books (1959–).Modern private presses developed at the end

of the nineteenth century as a reaction to

524 PRIVATE PRESS

technological innovations, because late Victorianbooks were markedly inferior in design andexecution to, for example, Italian books of1500. At his Kelmscott Press, William Morrissought to rediscover how to make books perfectreading machines; most later private presses inthe period up to the Second World War had asimilar idealism about them, seeking the form ofthe ideal book.

Kelmscott medievalized; the Doves Press usedone ‘ideal’ typeface and a severe unillustratedformat for all its work. Golden Cockerel Pressbooks provided vehicles for the revival of woodengraving and the integration of text and illus-tration; the Nonesuch Press had a more eclecticapproach, using a variety of designs and seekingthe best for a particular text. In the USA and inEurope there were similar experiments in finebook production. Private press books (publishedat prices often ten to fifteen times higher thantrade books) set a model of excellence. Theinfluence of the ‘private press movement’ oncommercial book design was marked.

Changes in printing technology have reducedthe connections between fine printing and com-mercial production. Contemporary privatepresses keep the old crafts of letterpress printingalive, as a form of industrial archaeology; withfew exceptions, they show little interest in thedesign possibilities presented by desktop pub-lishing. Their connection with commercial pro-duction is now very tenuous, though muchdesktop publishing work would be improved byconsulting their example. Aiming for perfectproduction, using the best materials on texts theyconsider worthy, private presses in Britain, Japan,Germany, the Netherlands and the USA stillprovide an effective (if expensive) alternativeaesthetic. Reviewed in such journals as PrivateLibrary, Bookways, Fine Print or Matrix, privatepresses will still continue to print traditionalbooks from metal types when other productionis entirely digitized.

Further reading

Cave, R. (2001) Fine Printing and Private Presses.Selected Papers, The British Library.

—— (1983) The Private Press, 2nd edn, Bowker.Franklin, C. (1969) The Private Presses, Studio Vista.Ransom, W. (1929) Private Presses and Their Books,Bowker.

Rodenberg, J. (1925) Deutsche Pressen, Harrasowitz.


RODERICK CAVE

PROFESSIONALISM

The combination of qualities and conduct thatdistinguish a particular profession. A process ofprofessionalization can be observed in process inmany occupations whereby the characteristicsexpected of a profession are identified andnurtured by practitioners, usually under theguidance of a society or association.

Professions and professionalism

Professionalism involves the exercising of profes-sional judgement to meet the needs of clients orusers. In some professions, such as medicine orlaw, the professional is dealing with the client onan individual basis, where there is a clear under-standing of what services are to be provided tomeet the needs of the individual. For the librar-ian/information scientist, meeting the needs ofusers may on occasion conflict with the policy ofthe organization that funds the library/informa-tion service. This may come about in variousways, for example through financial restrictionson the purchase of specialized materials orconstraints on use for particular groups of users.In some circumstances more serious difficulties

may arise, with issues such as censorship andlack of freedom of information that limitusers’ awareness of what is available relevant totheir needs. Librarians/information scientists maythen find that their professionalism brings theminto conflict with political or funding organiza-tions of considerable power and authority.The concepts of professions and professional-

ism form the basis of a substantial body ofliterature. There are arguments that the wordsare used too liberally and that too many occupa-tions claim to be professions. In relation to thelibrary and information professions it hasalso been argued that the traditional definition ofprofessionalism is too restrictive (Cronin andDavenport 1988).

Regulation of professions

Acquisition of an identifiable body of knowledgeand range of specific skills is generally regardedas essential for a profession. Individuals arerequired to demonstrate in some way to a peer

PROFESSIONALISM 525

group that they have reached the appropriatelevel of professional development and compe-tence required for practice.In most countries certain professions, such as

medicine and law, are subject to legislation.Other professions, including librarianship andinformation science, are, to a greater or lesserdegree, self-regulated through professional asso-ciations. The two kinds of regulation are referredto as being statutory and non-statutory.Whichever form of regulation applies, most

professions have some sort of professional codefor the guidance of their members. These codesare usually binding on members. There arenormally formal disciplinary proceedings towhich members of the profession may be subjectif they are in breach of the code.The american library association has had

a Code of Professional Ethics since 1939 (latestrevision 1981). The library association (Uni-ted Kingdom) adopted a Code of ProfessionalConduct in 1982. Both codes emphasize theresponsibility of the member to maintain profes-sional competence.


In the United Kingdom and elsewhere in theBritish Commonwealth it is an accepted role forprofessional associations to award professionalqualifications. These qualifications place empha-sis on the need for candidates to demonstrateprofessional competence and commitment as wellas provide proof of having acquired appropriateunderpinning knowledge through appropriateawards from academic institutions. For example,cilip (formerly the Library Association) and theAustralian Library and Information Associationboth require evidence of professional competenceand judgement for the award of their qualifica-tions. The qualifications of professional bodiesare dependent upon continuing personal member-ship of the awarding body.Outside the United Kingdom and British Com-

monwealth it is unusual for a professionalassociation to award qualifications. A notableexception to this generalization is the MedicalLibrary Association (USA), which introduced acode for the certification of medical librariansafter the Second World War. This was revised inthe 1970s and a system of compulsory re-certification every five years was introduced,

based on evidence of a minimum number ofhours of continuing professional development.

Continuing professional development

In the United Kingdom there has been a generalmove in recent years for professional bodies toplace increasing importance on the need for theirmembers to maintain the currency of theirqualifications through continuing professionaldevelopment (CPD). In a number of professionsthere is now as much emphasis on CPD as oninitial professional education. In some profes-sions CPD is compulsory for the retention of thequalifications needed to practice.Technological developments have made most

information professionals aware that professionalknowledge and practical skills are in need ofconstant updating. The arrival of the informa-tion society requires regular reconsideration ofissues surrounding the right of access to informa-tion. National and international legislation infields such as copyright and issues of personaland professional liability all increase the need forCPD to be taken seriously.The Library Association (United Kingdom)

drew up a Framework for Continuing ProfessionalDevelopment that was issued to all members andis designed to support and encourage CPD. TheFramework has been licensed to the AmericanLibrary Association for use in the USA. It has beenargued that this voluntary approach is no longersufficient and that CPD should become manda-tory for the profession (Roberts and Konn 1991).

References

Cronin, B. and Davenport, E. (1988) Post-Profession-alism: Transforming the Information Heartland,Taylor Graham.

Roberts, N. and Konn, T. (1991) Librarians andProfessional Status: Continuing Professional Devel-opment and Academic Libraries, Library Associa-tion.

SEE ALSO: library associations; library education

KATE WOOD

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

A language used to write programs, either forcomputer systems or for other types of program-mable machine: COBOL, BASIC, FORTRAN,etc. Computer languages evolved from basic

526 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

machine code, which was difficult to write in andhard to debug, into ‘high-level’ languages such asCþþ, Hyper Talk and Lingo.SEE ALSO: information and communicationtechnology; machine language

PROMOTION

Promotion is the fourth component of the mar-keting mix. The marketing mix is comprised ofproduct, price, place and promotion, often calledthe 4 Ps. While the mix is the most visible part ofthe marketing model, it is not exclusively themost important. Librarians historically partici-pate heavily in the promotion arm of the mix.More material is written on promotion (primar-ily publicity) than any other single aspect of themarketing mix. Promotion is often confused withpublic relations, which is often called the 5th P.Public relations is a two-way communicationdepending on feedback. Promotion is a targeted,planned information and persuasion campaignthat invites user action. To achieve the bestresults, the promotional plan must match themarket, the product, the media and the appeal tousers.

Promotion tools

There are two ways to activate the market –promotion, and professional assistance and ad-vice. Promotion is more than publicity and publicrelations. Promotion includes advertising, salespromotion, personal selling and publicity. Adver-tising is any paid form of communicationthrough web, print or broadcast by an identifiedsponsor. Sales promotion could be point ofpurchase displays, samples such as bookmarksor special library cards, prizes, coupons orlibrary website offers. Personal selling is bestencapsulated in staff communication, i.e. theresponsiveness of the reference librarian over thedesk or through e-reference via the Internet.Publicity is a non-paid-for presentation, gen-

erally via some medium (broadcast, print, inperson, online) that communicates informationabout the library or its services and materials.Publicity in concept is problematic for the libraryand information profession as it is often consid-ered synonymous with marketing. While publi-city is a very effective and powerful tool whenbased upon market research and targeted to a

particular audience, it is only one facet of themarketing process.

The most effective promotional tool

The most effective and flexible promotional toolavailable is the professional advice and assistancethat staff members can give users (personal sell-ing). It is somewhat analogous to salesmanship inbusiness in that it is instructive and shows theuser how the library product will benefit the user.In other words professional assistance tailors theproduct offered to the unique demand of theuser. When the need for assistance is low, helpcan be given by impersonal and relatively im-personal means – such as signs or displays. Whena more complex decision is necessary for the user,more personal assistance is required to help theuser make a selection. When detail is of ultimateimportance and extensive, authoritative informa-tion is necessary and valuable. This is where thelibrarian’s most important service, expertise, isrendered. This is the ultimate promotion tool.

Benefits of market-based promotion

The library needs to communicate actively withpotential users about the wealth of informationoffered from and stored there. To do less is tounder-utilize or waste organization or commu-nity resources. Most potential users are notaggressive in pursuit of such information. Usersmust be activated with continuous generationand dissemination of information, to explainwhat is available to them, how they can access itand – often – why they need it. This informationmust be communicated in terms that capture theuser’s interest and induce them to try and adoptthe products for regular use. The promotionalmessage must appeal to potential users’ needsand motives for using library resources. Success-ful promotion can boost market share andincrease use of the library’s resources. Everymaterial or service going unused costs the librarymoney in personnel, storage, facility and main-tenance expense, and creates no user satisfaction.

Further reading

Hart, K. (1999) Putting Marketing Ideas into Action,Library Association Publishing [this offers an intro-duction to promotion tools within the broadermarketing environment through exercises and inter-pretation of jargon].

CHRISTINE M. KOONTZ

PROMOTION 527

PROPAGANDA

A term, invariably used with pejorative intent, todescribe an organized programme for the dis-semination of information (true or false) anddoctrine, in order to change opinion, with theintention of bringing about political and socialchange. It is characteristic of propaganda that itconsciously selects methods and content to ma-nipulate the responses and subsequent actions ofits recipients. Public speaking was a traditionalmedium of propaganda, but the mass media areideally suited to this purpose.


PROTOCOL

A set of specifications that are used for commu-nication across a network between computersystems that may be dissimilar from each other.The most significant are the TCP/IP protocols(Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Proto-col) that are the means by which the variousnetworks that make up the internet are madetransparently accessible to users.

PROVENANCE

The history of the previous ownership andcustody of a document. The concept is particu-larly important in archive science, since theintegrity of a group of records, or fonds, froma particular source is a central principle in thecare of archives. Archive materials are orga-nized and described according to the principle ofprovenance; the way in which they were createdand originally used by an institution or indivi-dual is paramount. The originating entity of adocument and information concerning the suc-cessive changes of ownership or custody can bothbe referred to as its provenance. In rare booklibraries a special binding, book plate orinscription may be used to suggest a book’sprovenance.

SEE ALSO: private libraries

PTT

Originally an abbreviation of Post, Telephone,Telegraph and still frequently used in Europe torefer to the national telecommunications

authority, even though postal services andtelecommunications responsibilities have beenseparated in many countries. PTT is used to someextent to signify the concept, as opposed to thepracticality, of an institution that provides ser-vices and regulatory functions in this area. Theterm National Telecommunications Agency(NTA) is also sometimes used.

SEE ALSO: information and communicationtechnology; information policy

PUBLIC DOMAIN

Material for which copyright is not exercised,as when a state agency deliberately relinquishescopyright to make information more widelyavailable; or which falls outside the realm ofcopyright, by virtue of being too commonplaceor trivial for authorship to be claimed; or forwhich copyright has expired.

SEE ALSO: intellectual property

PUBLIC LENDING RIGHT

Public Lending Right (PLR) is a right thatenables authors to receive payment for the useof their works in publicly funded libraries.The most usual form relates to the free lending

of books by public libraries, but PLR canextend to loans of other works (e.g. audio-cassettes and videos) and to the use of authors’works in academic libraries and schoollibraries.In practice the right is largely supported by

legislation, or is recognized as part of widercopyright law. For example the United King-dom has its own Public Lending Right Act(1979) that recognizes PLR as a separate in-tellectual property right; in other countries(e.g. Germany and the Netherlands) PLR oper-ates as part of the wider copyright system.There are also a few instances (e.g. NewZealand and Canada) where PLR systems haveno basis in statute, but operate under adminis-trative subsidy arrangements similar to artists’grant awards.


By the end of the nineteenth century authorswere making the case for some form of monetarycompensation for the lending out of their books

528 PROPAGANDA

by libraries. But it was not until the end of theSecond World War that the first lending rightsystem – in Denmark – was established. This wasfollowed by Norway (1947), Sweden (1954) andFinland (1963). More recently PLR systems havebeen established in Australia (1974), Israel(1986) and Canada (1988).In the UK, the 1979 Public Lending Right Act

gave authors a legal right to receive payment forthe loan of their books by public libraries. TheAct came after a thirty-year struggle by authors.Early campaigners like John Brophy and A.P.Herbert established the legitimacy of the PLRcase, but it fell to the authors Maureen Duffyand Brigid Brophy, supported by the Writers’Action Group, to carry the day in 1979. The PLRAct recognized the legal right of authors to beremunerated for library loans of their books, andmade provision for the appointment of a Regis-trar to manage the new lending right system withfunding from central government. Secondarylegislation (the PLR Scheme) in 1982 providedmore detailed rules for loans data collection,payment calculation and author and book elig-ibility.Currently fifteen countries have working PLR

systems; a further twelve (mainly European) havepassed legislation recognizing lending rights inprinciple, but have yet to set up PLR systems.Differences in approach characterize the existingPLR systems, but in terms of ‘philosophy’ theycan be divided broadly into two categories:

‘CULTURAL’ SCHEMES

In these cases PLR forms part of the state’ssupport for the arts and culture where theprimary aim is to provide financial support forthe country’s writers and to help protect minoritylanguages. In Sweden, Denmark and Norwayeligibility for PLR is restricted to authors writingin each country’s national language(s). Thisensures that PLR payments go on the whole tonative writers while ensuring that the eligibilitycriteria of each scheme do not discriminateagainst other European Union (EU) citizens ongrounds of nationality.

‘EQUITY’ SCHEMES

These aim to relate payment directly to use, and,in principle at least, are open to authors regard-less of nationality or linguistic background. Themost developed systems are in Germany and theUnited Kingdom. Both systems make provision

for payment to authors from other Europeancountries. The EU’s 1992 Lending and RentalRight Directive adopted the ‘equity’ approach atEuropean level by recognizing a copyright-basedlending right.

Although the Directive includes a number offlexibilities to take account of the variety ofapproach in existing PLR systems, it provides atemplate particularly for countries in centraland eastern europe seeking to develop newPLR systems as part of their preparations formembership of the EU.

PLR features

In addition to writers, PLR can be paid totranslators, illustrators and (literary) editors.The EU’s Lending Right Directive extended toall categories of loaned material, including audioand music cassettes, and as a result composersand performers are increasingly qualifying forpayment. Generally books qualify for PLR ifthey appear in national bibliographies or carryan ISBN. Deciding relative shares between jointauthors, editors and illustrators can be a com-plex and difficult task. Having established whichauthors and which books qualify, there is thenthe task of assessing payment. For this taskstatistical sampling is generally used. It can bebased on a count of stock, loans or acquisitions,or conceptually on more than one of thesefactors. Counts of bookstock or loans are themost common. The UK system is based on thelatter, and since the 1980s loans samplingthrough automated public library circulationsystems has been technically feasible. In the UKthe clever manipulation of software and a closeworking relationship between the Registrar andpublic libraries has enabled coverage of the PLRsample to be increased to 15 per cent ofnational loans.

There is usually a maximum limit set for anyauthor’s annual payment (£6,000 in the UK) andfrequently payment systems are weighted tofavour the less prolific author. There are variousarrangements to determine whether paymentscontinue after an author’s death, and someschemes fund pensions. Apart from the financialrewards, which for most authors are quite small,there is a sense of just reward and satisfactionfelt from the evidence of readership that isgenuinely appreciated by many authors.

PUBLIC LENDING RIGHT 529

Further reading

Brophy, B. (1983) A Guide to Public Lending Right,Gower [detail now outdated, but an excellent livelyaccount of the historical perspective and politicalarguments in the UK and in Europe].

International PLR Network website (www.plrinterna-tional.com).

Parker, J. (ed.) (1999) Whose Loan is it Anyway?Essays in Celebration of PLR’s Twentieth Anniver-sary, Registrar of Public Lending Right [entertainingaccounts by prominent British authors and politi-cians of their contribution to the achievement of PLRin 1979].

Sumsion, J. (1991) PLR in Practice, 2nd edn, Registrarof Public Lending Right.

3rd International Public Lending Right Conference: TheRight to Culture and a Culture of Rights, Ottawa,1–4 October 1999, [Canadian] Public Lending RightCommission.

SEE ALSO: book trade; cultural industries;European Union information policies;information policy

JIM PARKER

PUBLIC LIBRARIES

Libraries that are provided through public fund-ing for public use and the public good. Publiclibraries make use of materials in printed, audio-visual and electronic formats in order to collect,preserve, organize, retrieve, disseminate andcommunicate information, ideas and the creativeproduct of the human imagination.

History

Many libraries in Britain and elsewhere wereopen to the public in the seventeenth and eight-eenth centuries, but the first truly public librarieswere established in the USA and Britain in themiddle of the nineteenth century with the aim ofintroducing education, culture and, according tosome, morality to working people. According toKelly, the term public library:

[F]irst appeared in its Latin form (bibliothecapublica) as a technical term to distinguish thegeneral university libraries of Oxford andCambridge from those of the colleges, [but]was frequently used in its more modern sensewith reference to endowed libraries from theseventeenth century onwards.

(Kelly 1973: 4)

For many years public libraries had a working-class image, but in the 1930s this began to

change as they increasingly attracted members ofthe middle class. In the 1960s and 1970s manywithin the profession felt that the service wasfailing to respond to the social issues of the time.They set about changing this by introducingcommunity-based policies and services for dis-advantaged and minority groups. This approachwas modified in the 1980s and 1990s by a muchgreater emphasis on market forces and the finan-cing and costing of services. Since then, in manyparts of the world, and at varying rates ofprogress, library authorities have invested timeand money to provide access to informationand communication technology. At the sametime there has been a renewal of interest inreading and reader development. Research hasshown public libraries to be one of the mosthighly regarded and heavily used of local publicservices. Although the figures vary from place toplace it is estimated that about 60 per cent ofBritons and 53 per cent of Americans use apublic library at some time.

Functions

Most modern statements of purpose suggest thatthe public library makes an essential contributionto democracy and citizenship. It is also vital to anation’s literacy and productivity. There havebeen many successful literacy schemes based onpublic libraries in both the more and the less-developed world, and business information (seebusiness information service) and other ser-vices have made a significant contribution toeconomic development at both the local andnational levels. In addition, public libraries pro-vide the opportunity for personal and communitydevelopment and artistic and scientific achieve-ment through the selection, preservation anddissemination of materials for education, lifelonglearning, research, leisure and recreation. Theemphasis given to any one of these roles willvary according to the place and time.Public library services include lending and

reference collections. Services may be housed indedicated buildings, in the premises of otherorganizations such as prisons and social carehomes, and/or taken to rural and other commu-nities by mobile library and outreach servicesof various kinds. Increasingly services are alsoavailable via the Internet. Services to childrenand young people are regarded as especiallyimportant. In principle all libraries, including

530 PUBLIC LIBRARIES

mobile libraries, should provide access for dis-abled people, including those with wheelchairs.All services should reflect the needs of thecommunities they serve. The local library shouldalso provide access to national and internationalcollections by participating in co-operativeschemes and networking activities. It is increas-ingly recognized that public libraries ‘are fre-quently the only point of access to informationand learning that is available to the deprived, theexcluded or the disaffected’ (Re:source 2001).

Finance and control

In some countries, but not all, the public libraryis a statutory service. For example, in Englandand Wales the Public Libraries and MuseumsAct, 1964, places a statutory obligation on localauthorities to provide ‘a comprehensive andefficient service for all persons desiring to makeuse thereof’. On the other hand there is no suchnational legislation in the USA.The service is financed and controlled by local

and/or national governments. However, in thewake of the new models of management, whichhave been adopted by or imposed on the publicsector, there have been moves to enter intoalliances with the private and voluntary sectors.In some countries partnerships with other ‘mem-ory institutions’ such as museums, archives andgalleries are being encouraged.An increased emphasis on the managerial

accountability of public services has resulted in avariety of official statements that make explicitwhat users can expect from a modern publiclibrary. For example, government-backed publiclibrary standards for England were published in2001 while, at an international level, the revisedifla (2001) Guidelines, endorsed by unesco,were officially launched at the IFLA conferenceof the same year. These identify the key roles forthe public library as education, information andpersonal development.The core functions should be provided free of

direct charge for the user. This principle is centralto the public service values of professionals in thefield, and is emphasized in legislative documentsacross the world. It has been criticized by theNew Right (White 1983; Adam Smith Institute1986), but calls for the introduction of chargeshave received little public or political support.Indeed their introduction would seem to runcontrary to the spirit of the UNESCO Public

Library Manifesto, which states that ‘the publiclibrary shall in principle be free of charge’ andthat services ‘should be provided on the basis ofequality of access for all regardless of age, race,gender, religion, nationality, language or socialstatus’ (UNESCO 1995).

The spread of information and communica-tions technology together with changing socialpriorities have led some to question the future ofpublic libraries. Opportunities and dangers areon the horizon but the service will survive, andthrive, if it continues to meet the needs ofindividuals and communities, and maintains thevalues that distinguish it from much of the massmedia, and some electronic providers of infotain-ment.

References

Adam Smith Institute (1986) Ex Libris.IFLA/UNESCO (2001) Guidelines for Development.The Public Library Service, prepared by a workinggroup chaired by Philip Gill, on behalf of the Sectionof Public Libraries, IFLA Publications vol. 97, K.G.Saur.

Kelly, T. (1973) A History of Public Libraries in GreatBritain 1845–1965, Library Association.

Re:source (2001) Building on Success. An Action Planfor Libraries (draft for consultation) (www.resource.gov.uk/information/bosucc.pdf) [accessed 13 August2001].

UNESCO (1995) ‘Public library manifesto 1994’, IFLAPublic Library News, Newsletter of the Section ofPublic Libraries (January), no. 12.

White, L.J. (1983) The Public Library in the 1980s,Lexington Books.

Further reading

Building the New Library Network (1998) A Report toGovernment, Library and Information Commission(www. lic .gov.uk /publications /policyreports /building/).

Comprehensive, Efficient and Modern Public Libraries– Standards and Assessment (2001) Department forCulture, Media and Support.

Kinnell, M. and Sturges, P. (eds) (1996) Continuity andInnovation in the Public Library, Library AssociationPublishing.

Usherwood, B. (1996) Rediscovering Public LibraryManagement, Library Association Publishing.

SEE ALSO: children’s libraries; informationpolicy; lending libraries; libraries; Public LendingRight; reference libraries; rural library services;social exclusion and libraries

BOB USHERWOOD

PUBLIC LIBRARIES 531

PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE

The Public Record Office (PRO), which housesthe national archives of the United Kingdom,is the official repository of the records of theBritish Crown. It was established in 1838 as adepartment of state, and became an executiveagency in 1992. In 2001 its holdings amountedto some 100 shelf-miles of records.The archive is exceptionally rich, reflecting the

operations of the central government, first ofEngland and then of the United Kingdom, bothat home and abroad. Its contents derive exclu-sively from the routine of public administration,but they contain much matter of unexpectedkinds, including an accumulation of more than500,000 original photographs.The Public Records Act of 1838 (1 & 2 Vict.,

c. 94) followed upon six Royal Commissions(1800–37) and a long debate on the security ofthe records. The Act placed the public records inthe charge and superintendence of the Master ofthe Rolls, the judge who was titular guardian ofthe records of the Court of Chancery. At thattime the ancient records of the Crown were heldin some fifty separate repositories in London andWestminster, including the Tower of London, thechapter house of Westminster Abbey and thechapel of Rolls House, in Chancery Lane, theMaster’s official residence.It was decided to concentrate the records in a

new repository, in the grounds of Rolls House.The first director of the Office, styled the DeputyKeeper because he was subordinate to the Masterof the Rolls, was Sir Francis Palgrave (1788–1861), formerly keeper of the records in thechapter house at Westminster. The new reposi-tory, designed by James Pennethorne and openedto the public in 1860, was subsequently extendedto provide some twenty miles of shelving in 120fireproof strong-rooms. It remained the principalhome of the records until the opening of therepository at Kew in 1977.The PRO owes much to the self-inculcated

professionalism of Palgrave, a historical scholarwith a natural sense of the value of archives.His first care was for the physical safety of therecords, and the Chancery Lane repository wasbuilt to the highest standards of the day. He also,however, appreciated the historical potential ofmodern papers, and in 1851 he moved to securethe enumerators’ books from the decennial cen-sus, a decision that might seem to their many

later users to be his principal achievement. Oneof his last actions in office was to sanction thephotographing of the Domesday Book by theOrdnance Survey, to make a facsimile editionpublished in 1861–3.The contents of the PRO, ranging over nine

centuries, exemplify the principle that archivesare accumulated for the sake of the informationwhich they record and that the archivist’s busi-ness is both to preserve them and to facilitateaccess to them. Until the PRO was establishedthe various departments of state kept their ownrecords, which in the Exchequer began withDomesday Book (1086). From the sixteenthcentury the multifarious business of the secre-taries of state and the sovereign’s council wasrecorded in the state papers, which had their ownkeeper until 1783, when the secretaries’ functionswere formally divided between foreign and do-mestic affairs. The newly designated Foreign andHome Offices were the first modern departmentsof government, which in turn accumulated ar-chives of their own.It was the government’s decision in 1861 to

demolish the State Paper Office in Whitehall andlodge its extensive holdings in the PRO thatproduced the first crisis of accommodation inthe new central archives. By the end of thenineteenth century the Chancery Lane buildingwas full, despite two extensions, and the Officewas seeking space in ancillary repositories. It hadalso established, under two Acts (40 & 41 Vict.,c. 55, 1877; and 61 & 62 Vict., c. 12, 1898),routines for the selective destruction of depart-mental records, from which only material earlierthan 1660 was exempt.In the meantime, however, the volume of

contemporary records continued to grow. It wasthen vastly increased by the First and SecondWorld Wars, which extended the concerns ofgovernment into every aspect of life, and againby the legislation attendant upon social andeconomic change after 1945. Eventually themanagement and preservation of departmentalrecords was discussed by a ministerial committeechaired by Sir James Grigg, and the committee’sreport, published in 1954, was followed by thePublic Records Act of 1958 (6 & 7 Eliz. 2, c. 51).The Act placed the PRO under the direction of

a Keeper of Public Records, answerable to theLord Chancellor as minister. It placed all publicrecords within the PRO’s purview, ordering thatany record chosen for permanent preservation

532 PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE

should be made available to the public fifty yearsafter its creation. That rule was immediatelywaived to allow the early release of recordsrelating to the First World War, and thenreplaced by a thirty-year rule under the PublicRecords Act of 1967 (1967, c. 44).

The range and intensity of public interest inarchives has grown with the records themselves,but it would clearly be impossible to preserve the100 shelf-miles of documents that the 200departments of government generate every year(a figure that excludes machine-readable records,in magnetic storage). Since 1958 departmentshave been free to destroy only ephemeral papers:those dispensable within five years of theircreation. All others are then retained for aconsultative review after twenty years, whenapproximately 1 per cent (comprising some2,000 yards of boxed documents) are selectedfor permanent preservation. Accessions to thePRO have been listed by computer since the1960s, and the older means of reference, whichinclude manuscript lists several centuries old, arebeing incorporated into a single automated sys-tem and made accessible on the Internet.

A new repository for modern records wasopened at Kew in 1977, and in the 1990s wasextended to receive the contents of the buildingin Chancery Lane. The enlarged Office is still, asit was in the nineteenth century, a notable focusof traditional scholarship, but one-fifth of the560,000 documents consulted there each year areproduced at the request of government depart-ments. A great number of readers pursue genea-logical and allied inquiries, both at Kew and atthe Family Records Centre in Finsbury. TheCentre, opened in 1997, contains the indexes tothe Registrar General’s records of births, mar-riages and deaths, and the returns of the decen-nial census of population from 1841 to 1901. Itis used annually by almost 170,000 readers.Those are changes familiar to archivists in allindustrialized countries. What distinguishes thePRO is the antiquity of its oldest holdings andthe continuity of the institutions that it reflects.

Further reading

Cantwell, J.D. (1991) The Public Record Office, 1838–1958, HMSO.

Galbraith, V.H. (1934) An Introduction to the Use ofthe Public Records, Oxford University Press.

Kitching, C.J. (1988) ‘The history of record keeping in

the United Kingdom to 1939: A select bibliography’,Journal of the Society of Archivists 9: 8–100.

Martin, G.H. and Spufford, P. (eds) (1990) TheRecords of the Nation: The Public Record Office,1838–1988; The British Record Society, 1888–1988,Boydell Press.

PRO website (www.pro.gov.uk).Report of the Committee on Departmental Records(1954) (Cmd 9163 of 1954), HMSO.

Report of the Keeper of Public Records on the Work ofthe Public Record Office, HMSO (annual).

SEE ALSO: information policy; recordsmanagement

GEOFFREY MARTIN

PUBLICITY

The process of making the services of a libraryknown to its clients and potential clients, as akey aspect of the marketing of its services.Publicity is effected by the use of all types ofmedia: printed material, the World Wide Web,audiovisual materials, display, signing andguiding (see guiding and signs), user educa-tion, point of use instruction and the press. Itinvolves all staff, not just those with specificresponsibility for their organization. Each formof promotion identifies the organization andmakes a statement about its attitude.


Once given a low priority, publicity is now anessential part of any modern library service. Thischange has been manifested by two factors. First,the public has become accustomed to sophisti-cated forms of commercial promotion and, sec-ond, there is a real need for libraries to promotethe value of their service. The public rightlyexpects quality, and librarians as professionalinformation providers should complement ser-vices with quality support and promotionalmaterial.Before the mid-1970s there was a reluctance to

promote library services. This was viewed assomething relevant to the commercial world thatcould be left to the large advertising agencies.(Indeed there are great benefits to be gained byobserving closely commercial practice in promo-tional work.) The majority of library materialwas produced by staff with artistic flair givenlimited resources. The result was a quality thatranged from average to unacceptable, rarely

PUBLICITY 533

matching the professionalism of the services thatit aimed to promote.

Improving standards

The trend towards effective publicity and publicrelations was led by public libraries, withspecial and academic libraries slow to follow.The need to ‘sell’ services became apparent whenlibraries began to fight against other services fora share of budgets. During the 1980s some of thelarger authorities began to employ staff withspecific responsibility for library promotion.Gradually the standard of design could be seento improve, demonstrating the benefits of invest-ment in specialist staff.Well-planned programmes bring together ex-

pertise from a range of industries: design, print,display, photography, the mass media, copywriting and marketing, to name but a few.Contacts within these industries should be ac-knowledged as professionals in their own right.The time spent talking with them to gain a basicinsight into their industry is a sound investmentthat will lead to a better end-product.The availability of word processing and gra-

phic packages on personal computers and desk-top publishing (DTP) provides the opportunityto develop creativity. Unfortunately, technologydoes not always bring benefits. Operated bytrained staff, DTP is a powerful design tool;operated by untrained staff, the results can bedisastrous. It should be remembered that therange and scope of facilities offered by DTP donot give the librarian the skills of a designer ortypesetter. The expedience of technology becomesapparent only when equipment is operated byskilled staff. Increasingly, a well-designed andinformative website is seen as the key to effectivepromotion and publicity.The statement of attitude that promotion

makes about the organization, coupled with thecreativity which is enabled by technology, canlead to inconsistent representation of an organi-zation’s image. Industry and commerce have longrecognized the value of corporate identity as amethod of ensuring consistency of image, andwithout exception library authorities have fol-lowed this trend. A well-organized authority willpublish a style manual that will give specificinstructions in the use of colour, typefaces andthe representation of the logo on a variety of

formats. On face value this may seem restrictivebut the advantages are realized in a standardapproach to professional presentation. Librariesmust follow their authority’s manual but mayneed to negotiate the development of sectionsspecific to their needs.

A cost-effective approach

The investment in staff resources and productionis considerable. It is therefore wise to considermethods of production that are both cost-effec-tive and flexible. The use of standard ranges ofstationery for overprinting, quality photocopyingfor short print runs and devising flexible systemsfor signing and guiding are practices that ensureexpedient use of budget and resources. Similarcare should be exercised when selecting serviceproviders. Librarians may be encouraged to usein-house departments as opposed to commercialenterprise to deliver the service or product. It isimportant to assess the advantages and disadvan-tages of each. Ultimately, a quality product orservice delivered on schedule is the measure ofvalue for money.

Planning

Irrespective of investment and an informed selec-tion of service providers, publicity programmeswill only meet their stated aims if the approach isresearched, planned and sustained. A clear profileof the needs, interests and levels of users and non-users is the foundation on which effective promo-tion rests. Project leaders must be clear aboutwhat they are saying, why they are saying it, towhom, where and when. These questions must beanswered if publicity is to attract the attentionand interest of its defined audience effectively.

As discussed earlier, promotional projectsdraw on a wide range of services and thereforerequire careful management. The relationshipbetween conventional publicity media and theuse of the world wide web now takes animportant place in the planning process. Sche-dules need to be planned bearing in mind thatwhen a range of contributors are involved thingscan go wrong. An allowance for slippage has tobe built in to any schedule. It is considered bestpractice that the person responsible for planningthe schedule assumes responsibility for ensuringthat deadlines are met.

534 PUBLICITY

Professional organizations

Staff with specific responsibility for library pro-motion represent a small percentage of theprofession. In Britain, they were served by thePublicity and Public Relations Group (PPRG) ofthe library association, which will continue tofunction in cilip. The PPRG encourages theraising of standards in library promotion andprovides a forum for the exchange of ideasthrough its courses and its newsletter PublicEye. It also takes an active role in the organiza-tion and judging of the Library Association/T.C.Farries Public Relations and Publicity Awards,which have made a great impact on standards oflibrary promotion.Publicity and public relations have been slow

to evolve within library and information services,and there is an urgent need to develop this aspectof professional work. The technology exists tofacilitate creativity and impact with ease. Theonus is on librarians to make a strong case foradequate resources to exploit its use to the full.

Further reading

Ashcroft, L. and Hoey, C. (2001) ‘PR, marketing andthe Internet: Implications for information profes-sionals’, Library Management 22: 68–74.

Dworkin, K.D. (2001) ‘Library marketing: Eight waysto get unconventionally creative’, Online 25: 52–4.

Jacso, P. (2001) ‘Promoting the library by usingtechnology’, Computers in Libraries 21: 58–60.

Kinnell, M. (ed.) (1989) Planned Public Relations forLibraries – A PPRG Handbook, Taylor Graham.

Quinn, P. (1992) Effective Copy Writing for Librarians,PPRG.

SEE ALSO: strategic planning

LINDA M. SMITH, REVISED BY THE EDITORS

PUBLISHING

The trade of making and selling books, and otherknowledge products such as music, art reproduc-tions, photographs and maps. It includes com-missioning manuscripts, negotiations withauthors or their agents, design of books, bookproduction, publicity, and sales through bookwholesalers and retailers. Electronic publishingis in the process not merely of changing the

production of print products (through the sub-mission, editing and printing of books fromdisk), but also of vastly extending the range of‘non-print’ publishing, to include multimediaand database publishing on CD-ROM and disk,and online and networked publishing.Publishing is a global industry, increasingly

dominated by multinational media companies(such as News Corporation and Vivendi) thatalso have interests in broadcasting, the crea-tion of audiovisual products (such as film andmusic on video), newspapers and magazines, andInternet Service Providers.

Further reading

Feather, J. (2002) Publishing: Communicating Knowl-edge in the 21st Century. K.G. Saur.

SEE ALSO: book trade; economics ofinformation; information policy; knowledgeindustries; licences

PUSH TECHNOLOGY

Updating systems by which users of the inter-net, or intranets, can receive news and otherinformation through periodic and unobtrusivetransmissions. Also referred to more specificallyas webcasting, or netcasting, push technologyinforms users about material relevant to theirinterests before any specific request is made, onthe basis of pre-selected topics. The websitesselected are referred to as channels, and thischoice of terminology suggests the way in whichpush technology imposes more order on the flowof information than can be obtained throughindividual searches. Although push technology isaimed strongly at the corporate market, indivi-dual users can also benefit. Looked at in thecontext of information science, it adds a newtechnical dimension to the practice of dissemi-nation of information.

Further reading

Herther, N. (1998) ‘Push and the politics of theInternet’, Electronic Library 16: 109–16.

Pedley, P. (1999) Intranets and Push Technology:Creating an Information Sharing Environment, Lon-don: ASLIB.

PUSH TECHNOLOGY 535

Q

QUALITY ASSURANCE

Quality assurance is an approach to the entiremanufacturing or service provision effort, whichfocuses upon the potential suppliers’ capabilitiesand reliability. Through quality assurance theorganization seeks to reduce human error in themanufacture of a product or provision of aservice. It is now widely applied to library andinformation service provision, as well as to theproduction of knowledge products such as booksand software.

Further reading

St. Clair, G. (2000) Total Quality Management, BowkerSaur.

SEE ALSO: performance measurement inlibraries; quality in library and informationservices

QUALITY IN LIBRARY ANDINFORMATION SERVICES

‘Conformance to the requirements of the user’and ‘fitness for the user’s purpose’ are the classicdefinitions of quality found in the literature ofquality management. Work by ‘quality gurus’such as Deming (1986), Juran (1989), Crosby(1986) and Feigenbaum (1983) has demonstratedthe importance of quality management in a widevariety of fields. Although the initial work tookplace in the industrial sector, quality managementhas spread to services, including those in thepublic sector, and is now widely applied inalmost every field. Libraries and informationservices are no exception.Earlier approaches that emphasized quality

control, usually involving the inspection of pro-ducts and services to see that they conform to aspecification and then rejecting those which donot, have largely given way to quality assur-ance, with a much greater emphasis on usingquality failures as opportunities to improve theunderlying processes so that the same fault doesnot occur again. Systematic approaches to qualityassurance include the International Standard ISO9000, known in the UK prior to 1995 as BS5750.Its applications to libraries have been documen-ted (Ellis and Norton 1993; Brophy 1993).Total Quality Management (TQM) emphasizes

that quality is a holistic concept that, if it is tosucceed, must be applied to every aspect of anorganization’s activities. TQM is concerned withcultural change, so that every individual in theorganization becomes fully committed to provid-ing quality products and services: some writersgo so far as to call for an ‘obsession’ with quality.Barnard (1993) describes a model for TQM inlibraries developed by the US Association ofResearch Libraries’ Office of Management Ser-vices and involving a ten-stage process of im-plementation.Quality chains, consisting of sequences of

internal customer–supplier relationships betweenindividuals, sections and departments, are asimportant as the final relationship with the end-user, external customer or client. The cost ofquality, perhaps more accurately termed the costof quality failure, has been found to be verysignificant in every type of organization, leadingas it does to reworking, lost customers and poorcustomer perceptions of the product or service.Yet quality failures can be prevented, providingthey are seen as the responsibility of managers,who can tackle them through the systematic

introduction of better procedures, better training,empowerment of ‘front-of-house’ workers andclarity of purpose.An important distinction must be made be-

tween quality and grade. Customers will often bewilling to pay extra for a higher-grade service –such as a first-class seat in an aircraft or train – butthe quality issues are the same for all grades: good,efficient, relevant services and products that meetor exceed the specification that has been agreed,implicitly or explicitly, with the customer.In librarianship and information science qual-

ity issues have come to the fore partly as a resultof earlier and continuing emphasis on perfor-mance measurement in libraries, partlythrough the influence of writers on generalmanagement issues such as Peters and Waterman(1982) and Garvin (1988), and partly in responseto external pressures. This last influence includesthe adoption of TQM or other quality ap-proaches by parent bodies such as corporationsor universities, and external audit of public-sector services by bodies such as the UK AuditCommission, which has a statutory role in over-seeing public library services and their quality.The influence of the ‘Customer’s Charter’ in theUK has been very significant, and has included asystem of Charter Marks for what are judged tobe quality services.Key concepts of quality for services, including

libraries and information services, have emergedfrom work by Zeithaml et al. (1990), whosuggest that attention needs to be paid to fiveaspects of service, the RATER categories:

1 Reliability: does the service meet set orimplied standards consistently?

2 Assurance: do staff give the impression ofbeing knowledgeable about their jobs, ofbeing trustworthy and confident? Are theycourteous to each customer?

3 Tangibles: do the premises appear tidy, welldesigned, suitable for their purpose? Doesequipment work? Are staff appropriatelydressed? Do leaflets communicate informa-tion that is needed?

4 Empathy: do customers get individual atten-tion that meets their needs? Do staff appearto care about customers’ real needs?

5 Responsiveness: is the service prompt? Arestaff willing to go out of their way to helpcustomers?

Within the RATER categories can be foundthose ‘softer’ aspects of service that are so oftenignored by management and review processesthat rely on hard, statistical evidence. The libraryassistant who greets each user with eye contactand a smile projects far more quality to mostusers than the dry, efficient yet impersonalservice that older approaches to managementhave so often suggested.Perhaps it is in the pursuit of excellence in

these soft attributes of service that quality man-agement has most to offer library and informa-tion science. At the end of the day, customersatisfaction, and hence quality, is more oftenachieved through these personal touches than inany other way.

References

Barnard, S.B. (1993) ‘Implementing total quality man-agement: A model for research libraries’, Journal ofLibrary Administration 18(1/2): 57–70.

Brophy, P. (1993) ‘Towards BS5750 in a universitylibrary’, in M. Ashcroft and D. Barton (eds) QualityManagement: Towards BS5750: Proceedings of aSeminar Held in Stamford, Lincolnshire, on 21stApril 1993, Capital Planning Information, pp. 3–11.

Crosby, P.B. (1986) Running Things: The Art ofMaking Things Happen, McGraw-Hill.

Deming, W.E. (1986) Out of the Crisis: Quality,Productivity and Competitive Position, MIT Press.

Ellis, D. and Norton, B. (1993) Implementing BS5750/ISO 9000 in Libraries, ASLIB.

Feigenbaum, A.V. (1983) Total Quality Control, 3rd

edn, McGraw-Hill.Garvin, D.A. (1988) Managing Quality, Free Press.Juran, J.M. (1989) Juran on Leadership for Quality: AnExecutive Handbook, Free Press.

Peters, T. and Waterman, R.J. (1982) In Search ofExcellence: Lessons from America’s Best Run Com-panies, Warner Bros.

Zeithaml, V.A., Parasuraman, A. and Berry, L.L. (1990)Delivering Quality Service: Balancing CustomerPerceptions and Expectations, Collier Macmillan.

Further reading

Brophy, P. and Coulling, K. (1996) Quality Manage-ment for Information and Library Managers, Gower.

Masters, D.G. (1996) ‘Total quality management inlibraries: ERIC Digest’ (www.ed.gov/datanases/ERIC_digests/ed396759.html).

Nitecki, D.A. (1997) ‘SERVQUAL: Measuring servicequality in academic libraries’ (www.arl.org/newsltr/191/servqual.html).

SEE ALSO: libraries

PETER BROPHY

QUALITY IN LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SERVICES 537

R

RANDOM-ACCESS MEMORY

Random-access memory (RAM) is memory in acomputer organized so that every location used isgiven a unique address and can be accessed in thesame amount of time. It is the most widely usedmemory technology for computing.


RANGANATHAN, SHIYALIRAMAMRITA (1892–1972)

Librarian, creator of the colon classificationand of the Five Laws of Library Science.Born in Madras State, India, he studied

Mathematics at Madras Christian College. In1924 he was appointed as the first Librarian ofthe University of Madras, and then studiedLibrarianship at University College, London. Healso served as University Librarian and Professorof Library Science at Benares Hindu University(1945–7), Professor of Library Science at theUniversity of Delhi (1947–54) and HonoraryProfessor and Head of the Documentation Re-search and Training Centre, Bangalore. In 1965the Indian government appointed him NationalResearch Professor in Library Science.The colon classification, although not

much used outside India, has had a very wideinfluence on the development of other classifi-cation and indexing systems. Ranganathan alsocontributed to cataloguing through his codes ofrules for dictionary and classified catalogues. Hisvision extended beyond the cataloguing room,and he proposed a national library network forIndia and outlined a thirty-year programme for

libraries. His Five Laws still provide a good basisfor discussion of the principles behind the man-agement and organization of libraries. He wasrevered as a guru in India and his work wongreat respect throughout the world. He wasPresident of the Indian Library Association(1944–53) and of the Madras Library Associa-tion (1958–67), Vice-President of FID (1953–6and 1958–61) and an Honorary Vice-President ofthe UK Library Association.

SEE ALSO: library education; philosophy oflibrarianship; organization of knowledge; SouthAsia

RARE BOOK

Literally, a book of which copies are scarce andhard to obtain. The term has various secondaryimplications concerning the age, research con-tent, production values and financial value of abook. The term originates in the book trade,where there are rare-book dealers, but carriesover into librarianship, where rare book li-braries, departments and librarians are some-times identified. special collections and thearchival library are naturally extensivelystocked with rare books.

Further reading

Lieberman, R. (1995) ‘What makes a rare book rare? Aprimer for the enthusiastic but hesitant librarian’,College and Undergraduate Libraries 2: 139–45.

RARE BOOK LIBRARIES

Rare book libraries exist for the same reasonsand have the same functions as other libraries.

They acquire, preserve, describe and providereference and access to the materials – in thiscase, ‘rare books’ – for which they care. Howeverrare books are defined – and their definition iscomplex, uncertain and changing – they requireunusually intensive attention in their use andstorage. The closed stacks and supervised readingrooms characteristic of rare book libraries arethought to encourage such attention, whereas thelooser conditions that characterize general refer-ence or circulating collections do not.

Contents

At one time, a widely held consensus about thedefinition of ‘rare books’ may have made rarebook libraries appear to be more similar in theirholdings than the subsequent spread of rare booklibraries and growing uncertainties about rarityand value now permit. In general, the contents ofrare book libraries in that earlier (perhaps some-what mythical) period would have consisted,first, primarily of older imprints that, second,would most often have been the product ofwriters widely agreed to possess some distinction,and that were, third, demonstrably ‘rare’ (as, forexample, in the case of books printed in limitedruns by a private press).Even so vague a consensus about the nature

and definition of rare books is no longer possible.Librarians and scholars recognize that it concealsa multitude of unconscious biases. ‘Old’ inBuenos Aires, Perth or Winnipeg is not the sameas ‘old’ in Manchester, Padua or Seville. Notionsof literary or other forms of distinction areincreasingly under interrogation in many disci-plines. The supposed rarity of any individualpublication may matter less, for some purposes,than the agglomeration of large collections inwhich books, common or rare, function tosupport pedagogy and research in new ways. Inthis environment, the institutional administratorsof rare book libraries – in the USA morecommonly called ‘special collections’ – increas-ingly regard them as repositories for any primarymaterials that, if collected in depth, can be usedby researchers in the historical humanities. Theselibraries have a function similar to that of manu-script libraries – in fact, they are oftenorganizationally related to or identical withthem.The increasing complication of and uncer-

tainty about what constitutes a rare book affects

rare book librarians whether they work in de-partments that are part of large general libraries,independent institutions responsible for whatevermaterials or subjects they make their speciality orinstitutions that collect manuscripts as well asprinted books. Formerly concerned with materi-als primarily ‘old’, ‘distinguished’ or ‘rare’, rarebook librarians now acquire, preserve, describeand make accessible materials that may be old ornew, distinguished in an almost incalculablevariety of ways or merely constitutive of a vastcollection devoted to a special author, subject,chronological era or geographical region.Rare book libraries collect printed books in a

variety of forms and for a variety of reasons. Age(date of imprint) has always been, as it continuesto be, a major criterion, but is now a relativerather than an absolute criterion. incunabula(that is, books printed in Europe between thebeginning of printing from movable type, whichoccurred c. 1455 in Mainz, and the end of theyear 1500) are almost always located in a rare-book library. With a frequency that tends todecrease the more recently they were produced,sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuryimprints are also placed in rare book libraries.Even nineteenth-century imprints now seem morehistorical than was true earlier in the twentiethcentury, when they still seemed ‘recent’, and areconsidered for inclusion in rare book libraries.Exemplars of early printing from Asia, whereprinting long antedated its development in Eur-ope, are also normally located in rare booklibraries.First or early editions of great or influential

works in the history of literature or thought,good or bad, old or new, are commonly placed inrare book libraries. But many institutions nowdisregard ‘greatness’ or ‘influence’ altogether.They move to rare book libraries all printedbooks whose imprints antedate a certain arbitra-rily selected year. The arbitrariness of this criter-ion is indicated by a lack of consensus aboutdates: for example, in some libraries many eight-eenth-century imprints remain in circulation,while in others they are housed with the rarebooks.Early imprints from a specific place – for

instance, eighteenth-century British printing inIndia; evangelical printing from mission pressesin the Pacific during the mid-nineteenth century;the first imprints of Alberta – are often located inrare book libraries. Here, too, consensus is not

RARE BOOK LIBRARIES 539

general: thus libraries in Alberta specifically andCanada generally are more likely to notice earlyAlberta imprints than libraries in other areas ofthe world.Many other criteria influence the decision to

locate a book in a rare book collection. Itscurrent market price, if known, may be adeterminant: no one wants to have to replace anexpensive book that a reader has inadvertentlydamaged, so exceptionally expensive books arelocated where their use can be supervised. Thesame is true of books that can be demonstratedto be absolutely rare (no other copies arereported anywhere at all, or only a limitednumber of copies was issued). Because a replace-ment copy may be simply unavailable, no matterwhat one is willing to pay for it, such books alsorequire supervised use. What might be called the‘iconic’ value of some books also apparentlyjustifies locating them in rare book libraries,whether they are common or rare (e.g. the 1611King James Bible or the 1623 Folio of Shake-speare’s plays, neither one especially uncommonalthough each is expensive). Books illustrated byfamous artists; covered in spectacularly beautifulor historically significant bindings; with a famousprovenance; presented by their author to a closerelative, friend or lover; signed, annotated orcorrected by an author, a friend, a contemporaryor a later person of some note: all such books aretypically located in rare book libraries. The sheerphysical fragility of a book thought to have somepermanent merit as an intellectual entity in itsoriginal condition can justify its inclusion in arare book library. Sometimes the presence of adust-wrapper, or of a map, will justify thatlocation. Any of these factors can work to locatein a rare book library an imprint of the 1990s aswell as one from the 1490s.In addition, rare book libraries also often

collect broadsides, playbills, promptbooks,drawings, prints, maps or photographs. Undersome circumstances, they may even hold micro-forms or other reproductions, as well as refer-ence books and secondary sources thatenumerate, define, describe or otherwise illumi-nate the library’s specialities. They may alsohouse objects (for example, a portrait of a writeror person represented in the collections; a lock ofa poet’s hair; a writer’s desk or grandfather clock;the gun with which a political leader wasassassinated).

Rationale

Like all libraries, rare book libraries exist inorder to provide access to sources of informationand knowledge. To this overarching goal, how-ever, they add a second imperative. Regardingtheir collections as essential to teaching andresearch in, and advancement of, the historicalhumanities, rare book libraries concern them-selves to an unusual degree with the conserva-tion and preservation of the materialembodiments of the subjects in which theyspecialize. Collections, far from being ephemeral,are acquired in the belief that they cannot be‘used up’; decisions to acquire are thus decisionsto retain, so far as possible, for posterity. Theeffort to achieve an appropriate balance betweenthe two values of access and preservation – oftenharmonious but occasionally in conflict – is, inone sense, the story of rare book librarianship.Rare book libraries gather materials for use

under supervision, a first line of defence topreserve the books in such collections. For manyWestern librarians, the concept of ‘supervision’conflicts with another ingrained professionalvalue: respect for readers’ privacy. Library mate-rials ordinarily circulate without supervision out-side a library’s physical premises to any readerwith permission to use that library; or, in non-circulating reference libraries, they are consulted,with a minimum of staff mediation, in largereading rooms that permit at best only marginalinvigilation. Most of the time, when books areactually in use, neither they nor their usersreceive any supervision at all. A principledaversion to any oversight over readers and theirinterest is one of the profession’s cherished meansof ensuring free inquiry and thought. By contrast,rare book libraries require readers to consultbooks within the precincts of their own readingrooms where staff can observe them at will. Theypermit readers to use only pencils (or laptopcomputers) for notes; photography, photocopy-ing, tracing, scanning or chemical testing of rarebook materials without curatorial interventionare not allowed. Records of the books’ readers’use are carefully maintained.Such supervision is justified, despite consider-

able aversion to it from both readers andlibrarians, on several grounds. Basic is a concep-tion of the primacy of the objects that rare-booklibraries collect and of the desirability ofprolonging their physical existences as long as

540 RARE BOOK LIBRARIES

possible. The convenience of today’s reader is lessimportant than the continued existence of theobject for tomorrow’s reader. Without some suchconception, rare book libraries would not havebeen called into existence in the first place.In addition, the sheer age of some materials,

their uniqueness and virtual irreplaceability atany price or projected replacement cost, all arethought to justify supervising readers who userare books. It really makes no difference, forinstance, that the 1623 Shakespeare Folio –whose location in rare book libraries is also afunction of its iconic value, mentioned above, asan embodiment of ‘English literature’ – is notespecially rare. Its price (measured in US dollars)hovers in the high six figures and is pushing atseven. Most librarians would feel it an abandon-ment of their fiduciary responsibilities to theirinstitutions were the book to circulate like amodern novel.Fragility – often associated, of course, with age

– may also require supervision of the use ofmaterials. Bindings may be on the verge of oralready disintegrating; paper may be inherentlyweak or assaulted by acidic inks; illustrationsmay be vulnerable to illicit removal or damagefrom over-exposure to light. A host of relatedproblems may require that materials be used onlywith great care – if they can be used at all. Inaddition, a binding may be not only fragile, butalso fine; illustrators may be collectible in theirown right; a famous person may have signed abook or, better yet, annotated it in some way; anunfamous person may have left extensive hand-written commentary in the text of an importantwriter; a playscript may be marked up fortheatrical presentation. Unchecked reader care-lessness is felt likely to prove more dangerous tothe survival of objects possessing such character-istics than deliberate malice. Moreover, all of theprimary materials in rare book libraries may atsome time require, and presumably have beenjudged to deserve, conservatorial attention. Tightsupervision as they are used improves thechances that they will receive such attentionwhile they can still benefit from it.Even ordinary reference books or modern

books supplemental to a special subject, authoror other collection, or the ordinary books fromthe library of a writer or scientist whose literaryremains constitute a special collection, may func-tion in a rare book library environment. Clearly,the number of reasons for locating books in such

a place is almost without limit. All boil down toa judgement that the objects merit preservation.Materials are placed in rare book libraries for

more than increased supervision of their use andan eye on their preservation. To such protectivegoals, rare book libraries add the expansive goalof trying to make their holdings more accessiblethan the ordinary author, title and – in moderncataloguing – subject access points that mostlibraries regard as sufficient actually permit.Some forms of research may require, for exam-ple, access to all books known to have been insomebody’s library, printed in a certain citybetween 1675 and 1701, written by a Latin poetwith marginal annotations by a seventeenth-century Italian classicist, or bound in a specificshop or with metal clasps or foredge paintings.Many rare book libraries attempt to provide suchspecialized forms of access by creating files forprovenance, imprint, chronology or bindings.They may also produce internal or publishedguides to large and complex collections, orannotate published reference tools to indicatetheir own holdings of particular authors orsubjects. These services attempt to promote easyaccess through non-standard as well as standardapproaches, compensating for the fact that rarebook libraries normally disallow browsing instack or storage areas. Provision of numerousaccess points in addition to author, title andsubject seems essential if such departments areto be fully usable by the readers they hope toserve.

Institutional contexts

All of these generalizations are complicated bythe varied natures not only of the materials thatrare book libraries collect but also of the institu-tional contexts in which they exist. In one place,rare books may be collected and serviced by arare book library that also includes commonplacematerials not brought together elsewhere in sucha unified way. In another, rare books may behoused with general (perhaps even circulating)collections and nonetheless include materialsrarely found anywhere else in the country. Bothextremes, and most conceivable variations onthem, are exemplified in practice somewhere atthe present time.Rare books are found in national libraries,

university libraries, school libraries, pub-lic libraries, governmental, independent and


even some special libraries, each with distinc-tive missions and programmes. They may them-selves be libraries of enormous or small size, orpart of big or little libraries. Generalizationsmust always be qualified by exceptions. Prac-tices, institutional contexts and histories are nottruly congruent even within type of library; theydiffer from country to country as well. Thepattern of royal libraries eventually passing tostate control and becoming either the basis for orpart of major rare book collections – a pattern,for example, varyingly characteristic of bothFrance and the United Kingdom – can have noanalogue in countries without indigenous royalcollectors, such as Canada, New Zealand or theUSA. The vastly different histories of the growthof rare book collections at the british libraryand the library of congress reflect nationalstyles that differ far more than libraries alone.Within a centralizing British context it is, forinstance, almost unimaginable to suppose thatthe national library would not be the repositoryof record for the vast bulk of English imprints. Inthe decentralized USA, by contrast, the de factonational library does not have that role. It wasceded long ago (at least for the period up to theend of the American Civil War) to an entirelyindependent, non-federal – indeed, non-state andnon-copyright deposit – library in a small city ineastern Massachusetts (the American AntiquarianSociety in Worcester).Despite this caveat about generalizations, it

remains fair to say, in general, that rare booklibraries developed historically from ‘reserve’collections of materials moved for safekeepingwithin an institution away from locations permit-ting public access or from collections that origi-nated in private hands. Over time, suchcollections, assisted by private philanthropy –especially donations of collections created byindividuals – formed the basis upon whichmodern rare book libraries, both within largerinstitutions and as independent institutions intheir own right, developed and flourished.In the early history of rare book libraries,

closets in library directors’ offices often figure:these were the places where rare books werekept. As the contents and interest in themincreased, libraries found it useful to displaythem to potential benefactors. ‘Treasure rooms’housing these books became the first departmen-tal administrative structures devoted to theircare. Particularly in institutions that began to

ape Germanic research-supporting models, treas-ure rooms were gradually transformed into rare-book libraries. Major growth followed the end ofthe Second World War, when university andother research-supporting institutions underwentvast expansion in many North American andEuropean, and some South American, Asian andPacific, countries. As the definition of topics onwhich research could profitably be undertakenexpanded to include more recent as well as oldersubjects and authors, large and comprehensivecollections of materials not intrinsically rarebegan to seem of sufficient intellectual (andsometimes monetary) value to warrant locationin departments charged to facilitate research andto preserve its material basis. Rare book libraries,in fact if not in title, often expanded to become‘special collections’ – that is, congeries of oldbooks, rare books, new books and various moreor less distinct author, subject and referencecollections that could include any combinationof printed books, periodicals and related, orseparate, codices and archival collections ofmodern manuscripts.Individuals had long gathered their own col-

lections, whether to support their curiosity, scho-larship, vanity or sense of public need. Thesecollections tended over time to gravitate towardsor become the basis of public institutions. SirRobert Cotton’s collection already served aquasi-public function in seventeenth-century Eng-land; it is now one of the older constituents ofthe British Library. This trend quickened duringthe eighteenth century and received an additionalimpetus following the French Revolution. Uni-versity and other libraries similarly benefitedfrom the work of collectors and philanthropists.Some established independent libraries based ontheir own holdings (e.g. the Folger ShakespeareLibrary in Washington, DC) or endowed librarieswith funds sufficient to allow them to createmajor rare book resources ex nihilo (e.g. theNewberry Library in Chicago, Illinois). Othersfounded research libraries to augment the pro-grammes of already extant libraries (e.g. MrsKenneth Spencer’s gift establishing the Universityof Kansas’s Kenneth Spencer Research Library).Others still gave materials they possessed ascreators of or participants in the subjects of theircollections. Harriet Monroe’s gift of her modernpoetry collection to the University of Chicagoand H.L. Mencken’s gifts from his manuscriptsand books to Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Library

542 RARE BOOK LIBRARIES

and the New York Public Library exemplify thiskind of gift. Many collectors simply gave theircollections to an institution; thus the BodleianLibrary at Oxford University acquired the JohnJohnson Collection of printed ephemera.Undirected and unco-ordinated, these patterns

of growth yielded many different kinds ofinstitutions with rare book libraries. Universitiesand colleges, independent research libraries,great public institutions, historical societies,local, state, county or provincial and nationallibraries, some business and foundation libraries,art, history and natural history museums, genea-logical societies: all sorts of institutions activelycollect and make accessible materials throughrare book departments. Some, although not all,are use- and programme-driven: they exist solelyto support teaching and research. Others, view-ing themselves as repositories only, restrictaccess unless specifically directed to grant it bysome authority. Still others must balance indivi-dual research needs against broad educationalobjectives. They may, for example, periodicallydisplay selections from their collections in publicexhibitions that prevent materials from beingused. Some, although they may tolerate re-search, regard special collections as merelyancillary to their main collecting needs, assum-ing that most of their readers require modernbooks and periodicals to support their teachingand studies. Rare book libraries in such institu-tions may function only for exhibition or toimpress visiting dignitaries. Some institutionsmay make almost no use of such materials atall, keeping them as necessary to their institu-tion’s self-image or prestige, because their reten-tion is mandated by some authority or other, orbecause divestiture seems legally impossible,intimidatingly difficult or bad public relations.How an institution defines its mission is centralto the use it makes of its rare books. Indeed,redefinition of that mission may occasionallylead to the dispersal of all or parts of suchcollections.In general, and admitting the variability of the

institutional contexts in which special collectionsfunction, the promotion of research, broadlyconceived, and the preservation of its primarytools in a condition as close as possible to thecondition in which they were issued, are thefundamental justifications for creating and main-taining rare book libraries. Normally expensiveto operate, they need justification: not only do

they require substantial expenditures for environ-mental and physical security of their contents;they are in addition staff-intensive, especiallyrelative to the number of users they normallyreceive. A large library may receive more readerson a single day than its rare book department oranalogue may serve in an entire year. Yet the staffof such a department may need to include, interalia, specialists in reader services, preservationand conservation, exhibitions, early printedbooks, modern and privately printed books,original cataloguing of rare books and, perhaps,staff for any number of conceivable subspecial-ities significant to the collections for which thedepartment cares. Language skills are an obviousprerequisite; so, too, is familiarity with a marketgeared to serve the needs of specialists. Inaddition, reading room supervisory staff must beprovided.As the kinds of materials collected by such

departments become increasingly specialized,staff with correspondingly specialized educa-tional backgrounds become necessary in order tointerpret collections to their potential users andbuild them knowledgeably. Such staff tend tocommand somewhat higher salaries than staff inother departments, a sign not only of the com-plexity of special collections but also of thegrowing professionalism of the field itself. Ori-ginally handled by private collectors, with orwithout hired librarians, or by librarians whocared for them with their left hand, so to speak,while reserving their right hands for their ‘real’work, special collections then often became thepurview of the gentlemen librarians – the gen-dered word is used deliberately here – able totreat institutional collections as extensions of oranalogues to their own. Now, with research apredominant if not a universal value in the worldmost libraries exist to support, staffing in specialcollections reflects a growing emphasis on bothlibrarianship and subject expertise. Professionaldegrees in librarianship and advanced degrees inacademic subject fields relevant to those repre-sented in the collections are now commonlydemanded of those aspiring to work in rare booklibraries. This emphasis on credentials is comple-mented, as creation of this professional subspeci-ality proceeds, by the institutionalization ofspecialized professional organizations and theestablishment of professional journals. Thesedevelopments are typical of the self-definitionmodern professions undergo.


As the century and the millennium drew to aclose, electronic and other high-technologyforms of communication complemented theonce-dominant printed book. Simultaneously,libraries and higher education have both entereda period of significant change. Speculation aboutthe future of rare book libraries in such times ishazardous. Preservation of significant monu-ments from the printed records of the present isnonetheless likely to continue to appeal to manypeople, including scholars and collectors. Anti-quarian and historical research may becomeless significant than they have been but, barringlarge-scale reversals in both research practicesand the institutional base of the university itself,rare book libraries seem an entrenched partof the academic and library landscape. Someinstitutions that entered the field relativelylate, which are uncertain in their commitmentsor that lack sufficient financial resources, willleave the field or retrench. Tradition andbureaucratic inertia, on the one hand, anda persistent interest in charting the past ofmost forms of human endeavour and creation,on the other, will likely provide for the growth,perhaps even the strengthening, of rare booklibraries despite the intellectual changes andeconomic difficulties that persistently character-ize intellectual and academic life in the modernera.

Further reading

Belanger, T. (ed.) (1983) ‘Rare book librarianship: Aspecial intensity’, Wilson Library Bulletin 58: 96–119.

Cave, R. (1982) Rare Book Librarianship, 2nd edn,Library Association.

Cloonan, M.V. (ed.) (1987) ‘Recent trends in rare booklibrarianship’, Library Trends 36 (special issue).

‘Guidelines for the security of rare books, manuscriptsand other special collections’ (1999) College andResearch Library News 60: 741–8.

Ryan, M.T. (1991) ‘Developing special collections inthe ’90s: A fin-de-siècle perspective’, Journal ofAcademic Librarianship 17: 288–93.

Traister, E.D. (1992) ‘What good is an old book?’, RareBooks and Manuscripts Librarianship 7: 26–42.

Wendorf, R. (ed.) (1993) Rare Book and ManuscriptLibraries in the Twenty-first Century, Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Library.

SEE ALSO: history of libraries; private libraries;provenance; research libraries

DANIEL TRAISTER

READ-ONLY MEMORY

Read-only memory (ROM) is a computer mem-ory facility from which data can be retrieved, butwhich cannot be erased, altered or updated.

READING ROOM

A room set aside for the reading of books,periodicals and other materials in a library orinformation centre. Such facilities are necessarilyprovided in closed-access libraries, but inpractice reading rooms, or analogous study areas,exist in almost all libraries. The term is also usedfor a community facility independent of a libraryin which, whilst little or no reading material isprovided, people may use their own study mate-rials. Such facilities are particularly valuable inless developed countries, where a space withtables, chairs and artificial light in which stu-dents can work may be of very high communityvalue.

READING RESEARCH

Research into the acquisition of reading skillsand the reading habits of both young people andadults.Reading is a key area of research in the field of

education, and in other disciplines such aspsychology, linguistics and the social sciences,including librarianship. The US National Read-ing Panel (1999) estimated that 100,000 researchstudies on reading had been published in theEnglish language between 1996 and 1999. Teach-ing methods and the role of the new technologieswere predominant research themes across thesedisciplines in the 1990s.

Teaching methods

Within the pedagogy of reading, research fre-quently focuses on initial reading instruction, andon the learning methods known as code emphasis(systematic instruction of alphabetic ‘code’ usingphonics) and meaning emphasis (reading instruc-tion that stresses comprehension and teachesskills as part of students’ reading for meaning).Such research has indicated that systematic pho-nics instruction is a successful method of readinginstruction, provided that it is embedded in aprogramme that provides meaningful encounterswith text (US National Reading Panel 1999).

544 READ-ONLY MEMORY

The role of the new technologies

Although the implications of electronic resourceson reading have been the subject of considerableresearch and debate in the UK, this topic seems lessprevalent in other countries. A consistent finding,however, is that information and communica-tion technology is no substitute for the teacheror the librarian in person (Hawes 1998).Reading research is not only concerned with

the acquisition of reading skills and the cognitiveprocesses underlying the process of reading, butalso with the sociology of reading. This incorpo-rates the investigation of the reading habits ofboth adults and young people, and their prefer-ences and attitudes towards reading.

The reading public

Statistical evidence collected within the libraryprofession indicates that the public library servicemakes a major contribution to the reading habitsof the general public. In the UK, 501,000,000books are loaned each year, 260,000,000 (52 percent) of which are fiction (Davidson et al.1998). In 2001, Euromonitor (2001) reportedthat, at any given moment, over 40 per cent ofBritish adults are in the process of reading abook, with 78 per cent of adults purchasing newbooks in 2000.

There has been a growth of research providingnew evidence of the impact of imaginativeliterature on individuals and groups in society.Library service users, whatever their literacylevel, are increasingly expecting the library toact as intermediary in the reading experience.

(Toyne and Usherwood 2001)

Two major strands of sociological research arefamily literacy and reader development. Thesignificant growth of these areas took place inthe UK as a direct consequence of governmentinitiatives since the beginning of the Labouradministration in 1997. A large proportion ofgovernment funds has been allocated both toraising literacy standards in schools, via theNational Literacy Strategy, and to promotingreading as a leisure activity, via public libraries(DCMS 2001).

A key aim of the National Year of Reading inthe UK (September 1998–August 1999) was toraise the reading standards of both adults andyoung people, by involving the whole of

society in a wide-ranging campaign to encou-rage and promote reading.

(National Literacy Trust 2000)

Research in this area is also conducted indeveloping countries: for example, unesco re-search into improving reading skills in Ugandaexamined how the home environment affects thereading capabilities of children in primaryschools. The findings revealed that attitudes ofparents affected children’s reading, and thatchildren from homes where parents were literatewere more likely to enjoy reading and to beencouraged to read than in homes where parentswere illiterate. In addition, the language used as amedium of instruction and the availability ofreading materials in the local language wereidentified as factors influencing students’ futureinterest in reading (Obua-otua 1997).

Reader development

Reader development, and adult readers in parti-cular, experienced a dramatic growth in the UKat the turn of the twenty-first century, yetdefinitions of the term are sometimes unclear.Whereas reading development focuses on theacquisition of reading skills, reader developmentfocuses on the reading experience itself. Forrest(2001) defines the concept in terms of audiencedevelopment.Because of the essentially practical nature of

reader development, research within this area hasbeen largely reported in non-refereed, profes-sional documentation rather than through aca-demic literature. The majority of texts areintended to be read by practitioners (librarians,booksellers and teachers), to provide transferablemodels of good practice in reading promotion.

Research methodologies

It has been illustrated that reading research ismoving outwards from literacy learning in aformal, educational context to broader, society-based settings. Inevitably, this paradigm shift hasaffected research methodologies. For example,there has been a movement away from smaller-scale, controlled experimental studies of readingskills acquisition to more broadly conceivedinvestigations of reading habits, adopting anethnographic approach to document the roles ofreading and writing in people’s lives (Barton andHamilton 1998).

READING RESEARCH 545

Although it has generally been the case thatpolicy makers placed a greater reliance onquantitative as opposed to qualitative data, theremay be indications that they are starting to bemore willing to use qualitative data in order toinform political decisions. Research conductedfor programmes such as the National Year ofReading and the three-year Branching Out in-itiative (1998–2001) has provided data withwhich to link key initiatives on the governmentagenda, such as lifelong learning and socialinclusion (Train and Elkin 2001).It seems inevitable that research into the social

aspects of literacy and reading will continue to bean area of significant future growth.

References

Barton, D. and Hamilton, M. (1998) Local Literacies:Reading and Writing in One Community, Routledge.

Davidson, J., Hicks, D. and McKearney, M. (1998) TheNext Issue: Reading Partnerships for Libraries, TheArts Council of England and the Library Association.

DCMS (2001) DCMS/Wolfson Public Libraries Chal-lenge Fund: Annual Report 1999–2000, The Depart-ment for Culture, Media and Sport (www.culture.gov.uk/heritage/index).

Euromonitor (2001) Books in the UK 2001, Euromo-nitor International.

Forrest, T. (2001) ‘Who’s afraid of those declining adultissues?’, Library Association Record 103(3): 168–9.

Hawes, K. (1998) ‘Reading the Internet’, Journal ofAdolescent and Adult Literacy 41(7): 563–5.

National Literacy Trust (2000) Building a Nation ofReaders: A Review of the National Year of Reading,National Literacy Trust for the Department forEducation and Employment.

Obua-otua, Y. (1997) Improving Reading Skills inPrimary Schools in Uganda, UNESCO.

Toyne, J. and Usherwood, B. (2001) Checking theBooks: The Value and Impact of Public LibraryBook Reading, University of Sheffield.

Train, B. and Elkin, J. (2001) Branching Out: Over-view of Evaluative Findings, University of CentralEngland in Birmingham.

US National Reading Panel (1999) Teaching Childrento Read, US Department of Education.

Further reading

Book Marketing Limited (2000) Reading the Situation:Book Reading, Buying and Borrowing Habits inBritain, Book Marketing Limited, Library and In-formation Commission Report 34.

Eco, U. (1984) The Role of the Reader – Explorationsin the Semiotics of Texts, Indiana University Press.

Hatt, F. (1976) The Reading Process: A Framework forAnalysis and Description, Bingley.

McKearney, M. (1990) Well Worth Reading, WellWorth Reading.

Van Riel, R. and Fowler, O. (1996) Opening the Book,Bradford Libraries.

SEE ALSO: book trade; research in library andinformation science

BRIONY TRAIN

RECOMMENDER SYSTEMS

Electronic systems that are, in spirit, the same aspublished consumer reports. They draw togetherinput from people with experience of particularproducts or services so as to help other potentialbuyers. An electronic recommender system canhelp people select internet content by gatheringrecommendations that users supply, or, alterna-tively, by gathering the implicit recommendationsin people’s use of content (in the form ofreferences to URLs in Usenet postings, personalfavourites lists or the amount of time peoplespend with a site). The software can take intoaccount factors such as past agreement betweenrecommenders, or combine evaluations and con-tent analysis to produce a recommendation.

Further reading

Resnick, P. and Varian, H. (eds.) (1997) ‘Recommendersystems’, Communications of the ACM 40: 56–89,special section.

RECORD

Has a number of quite distinct and importantmeanings in LIS. In archives and recordsmanagement it chiefly refers to a documentarising from some transaction that preserves anaccount of the fact of the matter in permanentand discrete form. In a catalogue (see catalo-gues) it is the data relating to a document thatforms the substance of a catalogue or other entry.In computing it means a collection of relateditems of data, which for the purposes of operat-ing systems is treated as representing a unit ofinformation. In popular parlance, it can mean agramophone record: a sound recording made ona vinyl disc.


RECORD OFFICE

A repository for the safekeeping of archives andthe deposit of contemporary official records. The

546 RECOMMENDER SYSTEMS

record office, sometimes known as the ‘archives’or archive office, cares for the preservation of thematerial deposited there, and organizes it forintellectual and physical access by administra-tors, researchers and interested members of thepublic.


RECORDS MANAGEMENT

A record is a discrete item of transactionalinformation captured on a recording medium andmaintained by an organization for current andfuture need. Records management represents asystematic, ongoing, organization-wide manage-rial effort to control all records – regardless ofmedium – created or received in the normalcourse of an organization’s affairs. These nor-mally unpublished documents include correspon-dence, reports, printed forms, memoranda anddirectives. Sometimes called records and informa-tion management, records management – likearchives management and corporate librarianship– is a discipline within the larger domain ofinformation management. However, unlikethe educational, research and cultural values oftraditional librarianship and archives manage-ment, the records management paradigm focuseson managerial issues, such as cost reduction andavoidance, improving productivity in informationhandling and the reduction of obsolete andunnecessary records.Records management applies management

principles and information technology techniquesto the various stages of an information life cycle:creation, storage, retrieval, maintenance (for theamount of time required by a retention schedule)and final disposition (either transfer to an institu-tional archive – c. 5 per cent – or destruction – c.95 per cent). A variation on the life cycle conceptis the records continuum, which is gaining wideacceptance in Commonwealth countries. Thisprecept takes a higher-order intellectual view ofrecords, follows an integrated model rather thanone made up of stages and stresses the need forrecords professionals to be more involved in theearliest planning stage of information systems.

History

Historically, the impetus to create records pre-cedes the emergence of documents of literary

value. For 10,000 years, in fact, records have beencreated as the information necessary for day-to-day operations of all organizations. As early as8,000 bce in the Tigris–Euphrates Valley, claytokens of various shapes and sizes were created,organized and used to record complex businessand administrative transactions. In fact, 90 percent of all clay-based documents as yet recoveredare administrative or commercial in nature.In the modern period, the life cycle concept

and the occupational title ‘records manager’ firstemerged at the national archives of theunited states. An archivist, Emmett J. Leahy(1910–64), applied records management prac-tices on a large scale for the US Navy during thepaperwork explosion of the Second World Warand created the first records centres used to storeinactive records. Leahy tirelessly promoted ex-pansion of the field and made a successful careerof records management.

Objectives of records management

Records management programmes have numer-ous objectives; among them are:

. Cost reduction and avoidance in operatingexpenses (e.g. space, equipment, personneltime).

. Reduction of obsolete records.

. Improved efficiency and productivity by quickaccess to needed records.

. Protection of vital records, those needed forresumption of business in case of disaster.

. Reduction of incidents of lost information.

. Assimilation of information technologies ap-propriate to specific business processes.

. Protection of sensitive records from inap-propriate access or use.

. Preservation of the organization’s archivaldocuments (those having permanent value forresearch, supporting legal requirements, long-term financial accountability and informa-tional purposes).

. Enhanced litigation avoidance and support.

. Increased audit compliance.

. Protection of the rights of customers, staff andthe organization as a whole.

PRIMARY FUNCTIONS

Records inventory

Upon completion of a needs assessment survey,an inventory or information audit of all

RECORDS MANAGEMENT 547

records created and stored by an organization isthe necessary first step in instituting recordsmanagement. From the inventory is learned, forexample, the locations of all information re-sources, the volume of inactive records to betransferred to a records centre each year and theidentity of records needing special treatment (e.g.conversion to other media such as microform(see microforms) or optical disk). Data fromthe inventory is the foundation for the organiza-tion’s records retention schedules.

Records retention schedulesThere are legal and economic reasons not to retainrecords any longer than necessary, and recordsretention policies and practices are central to anyrecords management programme. Just as manyother expensive resources have schedules foracquisition, maintenance and disposition, recordsare appraised for their retention value. Recordsmanagement software applies the retention sche-dules and generates lists of inactive records forcontinuous removal from expensive office spaceto low-cost, high-volume records centres. In addi-tion to managing the period of retention, theschedules spell out other features of each recordstype; e.g. whether the records are vital in character(needing special protection in the event of disas-ter), archival (having permanent value for histor-ical, legal, financial or information purposes) orconfidential and thus requiring special handling.

Electronic records

The principles of records management apply toaudiovisual materials, multimedia and otherforms of electronic records. Records managers,however, have been challenged by the mercurialnature of electronic records (e.g. electronicmail, database records) and the difficulty intreating these records in groups rather than asdiscrete items. Records managers sometimes findtheir values at odds with those of informationtechnologists. The records manager, for example,is concerned about the timely application ofretention schedules to electronic records wherethe technology specialist sees little point indeleting records when digital media is so widelyand inexpensively available.

Records standards

Two international standards – ISO 9000 and ISO15489 – have drawn the attention of senior

managers to the importance of effective recordssystems. ISO 9000 focuses on issues of quality; itsets numerous requirements for the creation andmaintenance of records, particularly those relatedto maintaining standards of quality in manufac-turing and services. ISO 15489 brings togetherthe best practices in records management on aninternational level and adds greater credibility torecords management as a global managementdiscipline.

Further reading

Penn, I.A., Pennix, G.B. and Coulson, J. (1994)Records Management Handbook, 2nd edn, Gower.

Robek, M.F., Brown, G.F. and Stephens, D.O. (1995)Information and Records Management: Document-Based Systems, 4th edn, Glencoe-McGraw-Hill.

SEE ALSO: archives; information management;information professions; microforms; opticaldisk; preservation

J. MICHAEL PEMBERTON

REFERENCE BOOK

Defined in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)as the type of book ‘intended to be or suitable forbeing, referred to or consulted’. People whoregularly go to libraries are inclined to define areference book as any that cannot be checked outof the library. Today the internet is a ubiqui-tous, unruly digital type of reference book thatoffers answers found previously only in print.In the crush of some 1,400 to 1,600 reference

works published each year in the USA, andapproximately the same number in each Westerncountry, the tradition is to include in the assem-blage well-known forms. The generic ‘referencebook’, designed to be consulted for bits ofinformation rather than to be read consecutively,normally includes almanacs, bibliographies, bio-graphical sources, dictionaries, directories, ency-clopedias, geographical sources, handbooks,indexes, manuals and yearbooks. Governmentdocuments may cover all of these types.Reference books, in print or on the Internet,

are a means to the end of accurate, usuallysuccinct responses to trivial or earth-shakingqueries. Unquestionably, from South Africa toAlaska, from 3000 bc to the present, there havebeen people with questions and reference worksin which to find the answers. Organization,format and certainly audiences have changed

548 REFERENCE BOOK

drastically, yet the need for either superficial orphilosophical absolutes in response to questionsremains the same.What is different is the revolutionary change

in format. Few librarians in the Western worldtoday rely only on print. They turn to theInternet, as does a good portion of the popula-tion. Here can be found traditional referenceworks, from abstracting and indexing ser-vices to encyclopedias and directories. Whatonly a few years ago was available exclusively inprint may now be only online, particularlyindexes and current information sources. Indeed,it is likely that within the next decade or so allbasic reference books will be in digital form.Only the more popular and heavily used (such asdictionaries and ready reference titles) will stillbe available in print. Ironically, the early, pio-neering cd-rom digital format has rapidly beenreplaced by its online junior. In the future, CDreference works will be less popular than print.The implications of all this for reference services,more or less reference books, is not clear. What iscertain, though, is that online questions andanswers are now a major part of today’s refer-ence world, both inside and outside the library.The cuneiform tablet and the online database

afford a seamless reminder of the orderly, laud-able and durable nature of reference titles. Onemay turn to the standard bibliographies ofprimarily English-language reference books (e.g.the latest editions of Guide to Reference Books,Guide to Reference Materials or Gale Directoryof Databases) for what title to buy, lease ordesire. The latter bibliography will, if onlyindirectly, spell out the delights of sitting at acomputer keyboard and punching in questionsthat will search scores of indexes and otherreference works for answers.The migration from print to digital is justified

by simple economics. It costs less to put areference work online. Paper, binding, distribu-tion and similar traditional business expensesassociated with the reference book all disappear.More important, the format switch and the floodof information that this made available havealtered the role of the reference librarian. He orshe must now, as never before, be a mediatorbetween the masses of data and the needs of theindividual, and particularly of the person unableto discriminate the good from the poor, the bestfrom the better.In the whirlwind of argument about future

reference books, there remain some constants.Librarian or layperson must decide whether tobuy or not to buy a title. Here one calls uptraditional judgements suitable for a home with adozen or so titles, to a library with 20,000 ormore reference works, as well as access tohundreds of thousands of online sources, espe-cially those dealing with current affairs, consu-mer queries and celebrated individuals fromMaradona to Madonna. The evaluation, whilediffering in particulars, holds for both print andnew technological formats. Essentially, one mustask: (1) ‘What is the purpose of the work, andhas the compiler, author or editorial boardfulfilled that purpose?’ The table of contents,introduction, preface or index will indicate, forexample, whether or not a reference work ongeneral environment actually is about that, orlimited to political arguments concerning globalwarming. (2) ‘Is the work authoritative andobjective?’ Here one looks to the publisher andto the qualifications of the person(s) who wrotethe book by checking accuracy of facts, handlingof minorities, debatable theories, discussions ofquestionable historical data and the like. (3)‘What does/doesn’t the book cover?’ This isimportant for libraries, where the scope of areference work may do little more than duplicatesimilar titles on the shelves. Is there somethingnew, different or added that gives this work anedge over earlier titles? (4) ‘For whom is thework intended – the amateur, expert; youngperson, adult; or a combination?’ This should beevident by reading a paragraph or two atrandom. (5) Other deciding points include cost,ease of use, illustrations, indexes, paper, size oftype and related items.Much of the aforementioned evaluation map is

also employed to chart the success or failure ofonline services, CD-ROMs and new media.Obviously, there are added considerations, suchas: the success or failure of the software; howoften the material is updated; and how much orhow little of the printed version is found in thenew format. Authority and accuracy of dataonline are especially important to evaluate.The reference book demands a disproportion-

ate degree of evaluation because it is such animportant source of information. Regardless ofits future form, readers will turn to it for answersto questions and valuable insights in the choresof everyday living. In the realm of the personal orthe public library, the reference book is an

REFERENCE BOOK 549

intellectual triumph that can take one fromweighty matters of human fate to trivia. So ithas been, and so it will be tomorrow.

References

Balay, R. (1996) Guide to Reference Books, AmericanLibrary Association.

Gale Group (2000) Gale Directory of Databases, Gale.Walford, A.J. (2000) Guide to Reference Material, 8thedn, Facet Publishing.

Further reading

Katz, W.A. (2001) Introduction to Reference Work, 2vols, 8th edn, McGraw Hill (available online atwww.mhhe.com/primis; also updated at www.mhhe.-com/katz).

—— (1998) Cuneiform to Computer: A History ofReference Sources, Scarecrow Press.

W.A. KATZ

REFERENCE INTERVIEW

The dialogue between user and informationworker that is intended to refine an originalenquiry to the point at which potential sourcesof an answer can be identified. It is at this pointof contact that the effect of a complex ofpreparatory activities, such as collection develop-ment and cataloguing, can be achieved, but thequality of the reference interview largely governsthe extent of their effect. The reference interviewwas memorably described to his students by RoyStokes (of the Loughborough Library School andthe University of British Columbia) as ‘sheerlibrarianship’.

Further reading

Jennerich, E.Z. and Jennerich, E.J. (1998) The Refer-ence Interview as Creative Art, Englewood, NJ:Libraries Unlimited.

REFERENCE LIBRARIES

Traditionally, the providers of books meant to bereferred to rather than read continuously, aselection of newspapers and periodicals, a localcollection, quiet accommodation for privatestudy and a specialist staff.Reference libraries mainly developed in the

nineteenth century. In the United Kingdom,following the adoption of the 1850 Public Li-braries Act, a small number of public referencelibraries were established. These libraries initially

struggled for resources but in time some of thosebased in the larger cities such as Manchester andBirmingham became outstanding examples oftheir type, serving as regional as well as localcentres. Many smaller local authorities alsodeveloped reference services, often separatedfrom lending departments or as special sectionswithin a single room, as space allowed.Ideally, the modern reference library should

provide an easily accessible, up-to-date, regularlyedited stock supported by an adequate, if notgenerous, budget. The collection, for quick re-ference and for more in-depth study, should beavailable in varied formats, including all types ofprinted sources, such as books, periodicals, sec-ondary services, grey literature, ephemeraand audiovisual materials. There should beaccess to online services, cd-rom publicationsand the internet, resources much more commonin libraries in the USA than in the United King-dom. All subjects should be encompassed, withan emphasis on local specialist needs such asthose of the business community or local studiesresearchers (see local studies collections).The staff should consist of well-trained, well-

established personnel, numerous enough to pro-vide continuous availability of service and ade-quate supervision of trainee staff. They should beskilled in negotiating reference enquiries andfamiliar with the resources. The reference processshould be efficiently and professionally under-taken using well-established procedures. Theanswers to enquiries should be provided speedilyand, above all, accurately.The accommodation should be appropriate

both in layout and size, providing space for studyand a clearly signed and continuously staffedenquiry point.Although many excellent libraries strive to

meet these standards, in reality a compromiseusually has to be accepted. Few reference li-braries can afford to be the embodiment ofWalford’s Guide to Reference Material. Few havea budget that supports the constant updating ofstock necessary for an efficient service, and fewdo not experience the frustrations of limitedaccess to outside resources because of financialrestraints.Staffing is rarely totally satisfactory. It is far

from easy to keep together a team of trained,experienced professionals to provide continuityof service to the public. Too often, untrainedclerical personnel are required to staff enquiry

550 REFERENCE INTERVIEW

points. Even in reference libraries staffed byprofessionals, a patron may only have a 55 percent chance of receiving a correct answer to anenquiry, according to the findings of a number ofunobtrusive studies (Hernon and McClure 1986).With appropriate training this figure can beincreased considerably although few librariesseem able or willing to invest in the time andexpense of this practice.One of the most significant developments in

the 1990s was the trend towards integrating thereference and lending services into a singledepartment or into subject departments such asbusiness or commercial services. A major surveywas carried out in 1992 by the library associa-tion Information Services Group (1993) on theprovision of information services in British publiclibraries. The results showed that only one in tenlibraries reported having a separate and sepa-rately staffed reference library or department.The integrated department may possess a

separate section for reference material, usuallyconcentrating on quick-reference sources. Alter-natively the reference and lending stock may beshelved together. The other most notable featureis that the reference librarian’s desk would bereplaced by a central enquiry point. The ‘En-quiry’ or ‘Information desk’ would normally bestaffed by professional librarians, who may haveto provide various services as well as assistancein subject and bibliographical enquiries, fromboth lending and reference stock, and, morecommonly, provide community information.The change of emphasis from reference work

to ‘information’ work has not passed without itscritics. Although commendable in assuming aservice of better quality and efficiency, it moreprobably results from a desire to reduce staffinglevels and save money in many instances.There can be no doubt that technological

developments, such as the advent of onlineservices, have enhanced the quality of referencework in providing information from local data-bases and services from the major internationalhosts. Print-based stock, although still the mainsource of reference answers, has major weak-nesses, such as its lack of currency. This isparticularly exacerbated when financial resourcesdo not allow the latest annual volume or editionof a quick reference book to be purchased toreplace out-of-date stock. Electronic publicationsare able to complement the printed works,providing access to an enormous store of infor-

mation previously inaccessible to most librariesand often far more up to date than that in theprinted equivalents.Online services, where direct costs can be

measured, and political influences have been thetwin catalysts for a further threat to the referencelibrary, which has traditionally provided freeservice to its patrons. The 1980s saw the start ofa contentious ‘free versus fee’ debate, with theimplication that a possible two-tier type ofservice be created with a higher-quality refer-ence/information service provided to those withthe resources to pay for it. The business commu-nity and genealogical researchers have been themain targets of this policy where it has beenimplemented.The future role of the reference library is

brought into question with the advent of theInformation Superhighway, which gives access tomany traditional published information sources(e.g. Encyclopaedia Britannica) as well as pre-viously unpublished information, much of spur-ious origins. The growth of the Internet,accessible from home computers, is signallingchanges in the publishing infrastructure of theways information is communicated. Although thetechnology for the ‘virtual library’ is alreadyin existence, the pace at which reference librarieswill be connected to networked informationsources will inevitably be cautiously slow. Refer-ence librarians and library users have been slowto move from print to electronic information,which suggests that total dependency on a‘virtual library’ is a far-off reality.

References

Library Association Information Services Group (1993)Information Matters, Library Association.

Walford, A.J. Guide to Reference Material (2000), 8th

edn, Facet Publishing.

Further reading

Hernon, P. and McClure, C.R. (1986) ‘Unobtrusivereference testing: The 55 percent rule’, LibraryJournal 111: 37–41.

Koutnik, C. (1997) ‘The World Wide Web is here: Isthe end of printed reference sources near?’, RQ 36:422–9.

Lea, P.W. and Day, A.E. (1996) Reference InformationSources, Library Association.

Norton, B. (1988) Charging for Library and Informa-tion Services, Library Association.

Whittaker, K.A. (1990) ‘Unobtrusive testing of refer-ence enquiry work’, Library Review 39: 50–4.

REFERENCE LIBRARIES 551

SEE ALSO: fee-based services; literature search;public libraries; reference book

PETER W. LEA

REFERRAL SERVICE

A service that directs enquirers to an appropriatesource for the information or data that theyrequire. Referral may be to libraries and docu-mentation centres, or to appropriate agencies andindividuals. A referral centre, as such, does notsupply data or documents, but most commonlythis area is referred to as information andreferral, rather than referral alone.

RELATIONAL DATABASE

A database that uses the mathematical theory ofrelations and is structured as a series of two-dimensional tables. These can be manipulated bymathematical and algebraic operations, the latterusing boolean logic. Each record or entry inthe database is made up of a list of connecteditems (such as a person’s name, address, age,gender, etc.), and any subset of these can beeasily retrieved.

REMOTE SENSING

The use of a variety of satellite-borne sensors,operating in the visible and infrared areas of theelectromagnetic spectrum, to collect data aboutthe earth’s surface and transmit it to a hostcomputer. This data is used in a considerablevariety of applications, from weather and agri-cultural forecasting to land use, mineral survey-ing and pollution monitoring. Remote sensinghas proved to be a powerful tool for accuraterecording and forecasting of weather. The currentmapping work of agencies such as the UKOrdnance Survey is now heavily dependent onremote sensing, the results of which are fed intodatabases of map information, from which var-ious geographical information products, such asprinted maps, can be produced.

SEE ALSO: Geographic Information Systems

RENTAL RIGHT

An intellectual property right, introduced inthe UK 1988 Copyright Act, by which any rental

to the public of copyright materials, such assound recordings or software, is restricted to thecopyright owner. In practice, rental rights tend tobe enforced through licence agreements (see li-cences).

REPORT LITERATURE

Reports are identified as a distinct form ofdocumentation because of their volume andsignificance in scientific and technical fields.This classic form of grey literature containsinformation that may or may not eventuallyappear in some conventionally published form,but that, because of its currency, must be avail-able to practitioners in the field. The definitionadopted by a library or information service mayinclude technical notes and memoranda, pre-prints, conference proceedings and papers, andresearch and development reports. Increasingly,report literature is also to be found on theworld wide web.

Further reading

Moody, M.K. (1996) ‘Technical report literature on theWorld Wide Web’, Internet Reference Services Quar-terly 1: 7–21.

REPROGRAPHY

Reprography is an all-embracing term coined inthe early 1960s to describe, according to theOxford English Dictionary, ‘The branch of tech-nology concerned with the copying and repro-duction of documentary and graphic material’. Asuccinct yet comprehensive definition was cre-ated by the Institute of Reprographic Technology(established in 1961 and later subsumed into theInstitute for Administrative Management): ‘Thetechnology of producing and reproducing two-dimensional visual communication media in busi-ness and administrative operations.’ The spec-trum of reprography ranges from limited-volumefacsimile copying (or photocopying), throughquantity duplication, to small-scale print produc-tion. The ubiquity of information and com-munication technology (ICT) has not servedto reduce the importance of reprography, asorganizations and individuals continue to requireimmense volumes of photocopies and documentreproduction in other forms. Indeed, becausereprography plays a part in capturing and trans-

552 REFERRAL SERVICE

forming the output of ICT operations, its impor-tance has arguably been enhanced.Several different types of technical methods for

facsimile copying have been developed in the pastand some, though not all, are now relegated tohistory. Modern copiers embody clean, speedy,flexible, economical and easy operation with veryhigh copy quality. Selected technologies aredescribed briefly below. They may be dividedinto camera methods, incorporating optical de-vices for imaging, and non-camera methods, orcontact methods, where document and copymaterial are placed together for imaging. Cameramethods include electrophotographic and photo-stat processes.The electrophotographic transfer technique

(featured, for example, in Xerox machines) relieson the photosensitive properties of certain mate-rials, selenium being the most usual, althoughsome organic materials exhibit the same ten-dency. The document to be copied is scannedand its image projected on to a photosensitivedrum that has already been electrostaticallycharged. Where white light falls on the drum thecharge is dispersed; the dark areas representingthe print remain charged. Toner in the form offine black powder is introduced on to the drumand adheres to the charged (print) areas. Thepowder is then transferred on to plain paper bypressure and is subsequently ‘fused’ or fixed tothe paper by heat. The finished copy on plainpaper emerges instantly usable and permanent.Some machines employ liquid toners, which

are colloidal suspensions of toner material in adispersant or solvent, to perform the print‘developing’ function. Recent developments in-clude machines that employ a laser to describethe image on the drum and scanners that digitizedocument images, thus enabling them to beextensively manipulated and the output relayedto different machines. Colour copiers are alsoavailable.Less frequently encountered now is the elec-

trophotographic direct technique, which usesspecial coated paper that is electrostaticallysensitive. The copy image is projected directlyon to the coated paper, which has already beencharged. The charge on the paper is dispersedwhere light falls and is retained in the dark(print) areas. The paper is fed through a tonerbath, where the ‘developer’ adheres to thecharged areas. The solvent or dispersant quicklyevaporates – sometimes with the aid of a heated

air current – to leave the toner image on thepaper. Coated paper has a characteristic ‘feel’and appearance, and is less acceptable than plainpaper for many applications. The process there-fore has fewer supporters.Far less widely used nowadays is the once

popular photostat process, which employed acamera containing sensitized paper instead offilm to ‘photograph’ the material to be copied.The paper received chemical processing usingconventional photographic developing methods.As a true photographic process it offered thefacility of enabling variable-sized copies of origi-nals to be made long before rival processes wereavailable.Examples of non-camera methods include the

dyeline or diazo process and the thermographicprocess.The dyeline process relies on the translucency

of the original to be copied and is not thereforesuitable for material printed on both sides. It usesspecial copying paper coated with diazoniumsalts. The original is placed over the copy paperand exposed to ultraviolet light, which breaksdown the salts in the areas subjected to light.Where print has shielded the light the saltsremain. The copy is ‘developed’ by exposure toammonia vapour or heat, which renders the saltsvisible. The image has the characteristic mauveappearance. The dyeline process was a commonmethod for copying plans, charts and drawings,as well as documents. The hazards and specialhandling required for ammonia developers havegreatly reduced the convenience and appeal ofthis process.The thermographic process uses special copy-

ing material that is heat-sensitive. The originaland copy material are placed together andexposed to infrared radiation, which strikes thecarbon in the print, producing heat that is thenabsorbed by the copy material to form an image.This is frequently encountered in copiers formaking overhead transparency acetates, as wellas in document copiers. The copy materialremains heat-sensitive and copies can be da-maged by careless storage near heat sources.Not all original material can be copied by thisprocess because some inks and colours do notcontain sufficient carbon.There are several duplicating technologies and

they vary considerably in sophistication, com-plexity, cost and quality of output. Some arebriefly outlined below.

REPROGRAPHY 553

Electrophotographic photocopiers, though pri-marily regarded as machines for creating indivi-dual facsimile copies of documents, have,because of their reliability and convenience,encroached into copy duplicating. They are cap-able of producing very high-quality work in arange of quantities economically and without theneed for specialist and skilled operation.The spirit duplicating or hectographic process

involves the creation of a master by writing ortyping on a sheet placed against a wax-coatedbacking card. The master, once prepared, isattached to a roller in a machine that has amechanism for introducing alcohol spirit on tothe master from a reservoir. Copy paper is fedthrough the machine. For each copy, a smallamount of spirit dissolves a little wax on themaster and the image is transferred on to thecopy paper. The process is suitable for a fairlylimited number of copies (up to 300 perhaps)before the wax is exhausted. Copies are generallyof indifferent quality and appearance. A varietyof copy colours can be achieved by usingdifferent wax backings.Stencil duplicating – also eponymously termed

Roneo or Gestetner duplicating, after two promi-nent equipment suppliers in the field – is anothertechnique. The duplicating master is formed froma sheet or membrane that is coated to resist ink.The text or image to be duplicated is ‘cut’ on tothe sheet with a typewriter set on the ‘stencil’setting or with a scratching tool or stylus.Electronically cut stencil masters can also becreated from existing typescript or similar copy.The cut portions in the master will allow ink topermeate through on to copy paper.The master is attached to a roller in a machine

with an ink reservoir. Paper is fed through themachine. For each copy a small amount of ink is‘squeezed’ through the master on to the copypaper. Fairly porous paper is normally used toabsorb the ink rapidly. Copy quality is tolerableand the process can produce moderate quantities(several hundreds) of copies. The whole opera-tion is quite messy, however, especially for theinexperienced.Small offset is a highly refined process that

employs as its basis the art of lithography.Lithography is dependent upon the various prop-erties of water, grease and ink. A printing platehas an image created on it in a greasy medium. Itis then ‘washed’ with water. Water stays on theplain areas of the plate, but is repelled by the

‘greasy’ parts. Ink is now introduced and adheresto the greasy parts but not to the ‘wet’ areas.Paper is placed on the plate and a print taken off.In a small offset machine this basic process is

embodied in a rotary machine for speed andeconomy. A printing plate is prepared photogra-phically from camera-ready copy. The platecontains a right-reading positive image and canbe easily proof-checked. The plate is placed on aroller in the machine that has fluid and inkreservoirs. Ink on the plate is transferred (offset)to an intermediate roller to reverse the image andsubsequently to paper. Printing plates can bemetal, plastic or even paper.The process allows for very high-quality print

production and is economic from about 30copies to upwards of 5,000. It is also speedyonce the plate has been prepared. A variety oftext and images can be copied. The capital costfor equipping a small offset operation is, how-ever, relatively high and it requires skilled opera-tion.To conclude, modern reprographic technology

has greatly assisted the management and deliveryof library and information services, and hasfacilitated fundamental improvements in thenature of services offered, ranging from speedyon-demand facsimile copying to quality news-letter production. Alongside electrocopying itis a key technology for modern informationwork.


J.E. DAVIES

RESEARCH IN LIBRARY ANDINFORMATION SCIENCE

Goldhor defines research as ‘any investigationwhich seeks to increase one’s knowledge of agiven situation’ (1972: 7) and in these changingtimes for library and information science (LIS), abroad spectrum of research continues. There is ahealthy tension between what Brophy (2001: 15)highlights as a predominance of ‘practice-based(LIS) research in the UK’ and the more theore-tical approaches, and there is activity in bothareas. The conjunction of consultancy (e.g. theUK group Comedia) and research is demon-strated in some of the work in the UK andAustralia on public libraries.

554 RESEARCH IN LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE

Methodologies

Williamson’s (2000) text outlines many of themethodologies and techniques in use, though byits own admission omits the important researchfacets of bibliometrics, content analysis andethics. Bibliometrics and its subsets, includingcitation analysis, continue to draw activityand debate. Some international trends in LISresearch are reported by Rochester and Vakkariwho found, in their examination of LIS researchup until 1994/5 in Scandinavia, Australia,China, Spain, Turkey and the UK, ‘a remarkabledegree of variation of emphases and trends inresearch in the countries examined’ (in prep.:22). They found conceptual method and surveysamongst the popular methodologies, with histor-ical method following; experimental and quali-tative methods were little used. Other analysesof LIS research confirm the diversity, a rise inqualitative methodologies, the popularity of thesurvey and the multidisciplinarity in methodsused. Quantitative analyses, although not ascommon, are seen in work on transaction andWeb log analyses, cost-effectiveness studies, andcost–benefit analyses. The use of the electronicdomain to assist in research projects brings withit ethical monitoring of the validity of the datasought and received. The reflections of editorsHernon and Schwartz in the journal Libraryand Information Science Research provide auseful commentary on the validity of somemethods.

Topics

Research topics discussed at the Library Theoryand Research Section’s contributions to the lasteight ifla conferences could be seen as indicativeof the work underway worldwide. They cover awide range: teaching research methods, LISresearch for social development, bibliometrics,digital libraries (see digital library), profes-sional communication, LIS research in Asia andthe EU, library history, LIS research itself, codesof ethics, multicultural library service provisionand collaboration between theory and practice.Research into issues of scholarly communicationand the sub-issues of copyright and publicationlicensing have occupied the more practical re-search projects of large research libraries aroundthe world. The public library’s role in society hasunderpinned the research in that area.

Communication

The major ways of communicating LIS researchare through conferences, journals, websites andtheses, of which there are many. As examples, the8th International Conference on Scientometricsand Informetrics held in Sydney, Australia, in July2001 drew an international collection of seventy-two full and twenty-six poster papers. Researchinto information-seeking and its context withininformation retrieval is closely followed by theelectronic journal Information Research (http://informationr.net/ir/) and the conference seriesISIC (Information Seeking in Context). Journalsfrom various parts of the world should not beforgotten, even though much of the LIS journalliterature is paper, English-language and UK- andUSA-based, and some content analyses of LISresearch have shown a heavy reliance on theliterature from the USA and UK. The rise of theelectronic journal as a research publication med-ium is recognised in LIS, with the journalsLIBRES (http://libres.curtin.edu.au) and Informa-tion Research being two of the longer standingpublications. The steady production of Master’sand Doctoral theses is captured by services likeCurrent Research in Library and InformationScience and Dissertation Abstracts. They are alsolisted on some LIS School Web pages. Research-in-progress and more substantial work can alsobe found on many information-oriented Webpages (e.g. the EC’s Information Society Webpage: http://europa.eu.int/information_society/services/sitemap/index_en.htm).

Funding

There have been some significant funding initia-tives including the European Commission’s re-search projects on the information society, andthe Follett Committee’s Report inspired a numberof research initiatives in the UK: the ElectronicLibraries Programme (eLib) being one. UK fund-ing for LIS research was mainly through theBritish Library’s Research and Development De-partment (and its successor the British LibraryResearch and Innovation Centre) whose role, in1999, was taken over by the Library and Infor-mation Commission (LIC), that being subsumedin 2000 by Re:source – a merger of LIC and theMuseums and Galleries Commission. This couldbe the end of a ‘long and distinguished historyfor. . .library R&D’ (Brophy 2001: 17). Fundingin the USA is various and includes government

RESEARCH IN LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE 555

funding, and consortia-based and grant initia-tives. The recent interest in public library re-search, e.g. in the UK and Australia, has oftenbeen funded at the local government level.

References

Brophy, P. (2001) ‘The historical context of eLib:Practice-based library research in the UK’, LibraryManagement 22(1/2): 15–18.

Goldhor, H. (1972) An Introduction to ScientificResearch in Librarianship, University of IllinoisGraduate School of Library Science.

Rochester, M.K. and Vakkari, P. (in prep.) InternationalLibrary and Information Science Research: A Com-parison of National Trends, IFLA ProfessionalReport.

Williamson, K. (2000) Research Methods for Studentsand Professionals: Information Management andSystems, Centre for Information Studies, CharlesSturt University. [Textbooks on library researchappear infrequently. This is the latest.]

Further reading

Goodall, D. (1996) ‘It ain’t what you do, it’s the waythat you do it’, Public Library Journal 11(3): 69–76.

Hamilton, J.C. (1999) ‘The ethics of conducting social-science research on the Internet’, The Chronicle ofHigher Education XLVI: B6–B7.

Klasson, M. (1997) ‘Public library research in Sweden’,Scandinavian Public Library Quarterly 3: 29–33.

Pettigrew, K.E. and McKechnie, L.E.F. (2001) ‘The useof theory in information science research’, Journal ofthe American Society for Information Science andTechnology 52(1): 62–73.

Powell, R.R. (1999) ‘Recent trends in research: Amethodological essay’, Library and InformationScience Research 21(1): 91–119.

SEE ALSO: code of professional conduct;electronic journals; European Union informationpolicies; information ethics

KERRY SMITH

RESEARCH LIBRARIES GROUP

Research Libraries Group (RLG) is a consortiumof major universities and research institutions inthe USA. Its members collaborate on a number ofprojects and ongoing programmes, of whichRLG’s automated information network, RLIN,is probably the most generally known. It com-bines databases and computer systems to servethe materials-processing and public-service re-quirements of RLG’s members and of many non-member institutions.

RESEARCH LIBRARIES

Libraries that provide materials and facilities forresearch, usually in the humanities. The words‘research’ and ‘library’ have become tightlylinked in a commonly used phrase only since theformation of the Association of Research Li-braries in 1932. The goal of that organizationwas to provide a framework for co-operationamong large libraries that were seen as beingsimilar even though sources of support – uni-versity, municipality or nation – differed. ‘Re-search libraries’ began, therefore, as an umbrellaterm of practical utility rather than as a concept,and it has so continued in the USA.The phrase has also been used in the UK,

though not in the name of an organization. Onthe European continent the term ‘research li-brary’ has rarely been used, though there areexceptions, as in the Swedish catalogue of acces-sions of foreign works in Swedish researchlibraries (Accessionskatalog over utländsk litter-atur i svenska forsknings-bibliotek), begun in1956, as well as in the name or description oftwo German libraries. In the name of theEuropean Consortium of Research Libraries,which was formed in 1992 to create a catalogueof early printed books, we see the same patternas in the USA.The word ‘research’ has had such positive

connotations in US society that institutions otherthan the very largest libraries have wished todwell under its reflected light. Thus, even beforethe decade of the 1930s was out – in 1939 – thejournal College and Research Libraries beganpublication, even though its parent body wasthen the College and Reference Section, onlylater renamed the Association of College andResearch Libraries. Later, in 1952, that associa-tion published a monograph about staffing in a‘small research library’. Examples of grosslyinflationary usage exist.College libraries, as well as specialized but

small libraries, are, of course, employed byresearchers, but in them the scholar cannot carryout the type of investigations that merit use ofthe term ‘research library’. Those libraries towhich the phrase can justly be applied have beenbest described by Fabian (1983).The research library, writes Fabian, is the

humanist’s laboratory, a place where the scholar,beginning with a thesis or with a question, canpursue it wherever it leads, among both primary

556 RESEARCH LIBRARIES GROUP

and secondary materials. At the same time that thehumanist’s laboratory allows the researcher tofollow – with efficiency – an idea that sponta-neously arises, it also permits accidental discovery,as, for instance, through exploring on the spot alarge body of material in search of the relevant.More than a large stock of books is, as Fabian

notes, ideally part of the research library. Thisbegan to be explicitly recognized in the USA inthe 1920s and 1930s. Herbert Putnam, Librarianof Congress, pioneered in delivering a paper onAmerican Libraries in Relation to ScholarlyStudies and Research (1929); Louis Round Wil-son, in his ‘The service of libraries in promotingscholarship and research’ (Wilson 1933), de-scribed in considerable detail the direction inwhich many US libraries would move. Wilson’spaper was stimulated by the dedication in 1932of two libraries devoted exclusively to scholar-ship and research: the Furness Memorial Libraryof Shakespeareana of the University of Pennsyl-vania and the Folger Shakespeare Library, thelatter one of the independent research librariesthat became ever more active in fostering scholar-ship – and ever more influential as models.Wilson, besides emphasizing the accumulation

of materials, wrote of making them available:through the organization of space for readers, bymeans of catalogues, by provision for inter-library lending and for reproduction. Under‘Personal assistance to scholars’, Wilson wrote ofthe need for availability of specialists who couldassist researchers, and he also commented on therole of the librarian as preserver. For Wilson thelibrarian also had the role of teacher, as well asthat of compiler, editor and publisher. Wilson’slast section was devoted to international co-operation, through international associationsand by means of exchanges and internationalloans. He concluded by mentioning the functionof libraries as stimulators of ‘scholarly interestsand attitudes’ (Wilson 1933).What Wilson in 1933 described and advocated

has recently been noted as characteristic of a trueresearch library, by Fabian as well as by Knoche(1993) in his ‘Die Forschungsbibliothek: Umrisseeines in Deutschland neuen Bibliothekstyps’.Knoche’s twelve characteristics include a moreor less independent large library devoted tohumanistic scholarship that uses historical mate-rials and is capable of supplying from its ownresources significant quantities of primary as wellas secondary literature; a good catalogue; work-

places for scholars and fellowships to aid in theirsupport, conservation and preservation activities;scholarship on the history of the library itself;headquarters for large scholarly projects; andsponsorship of symposia and conferences.Fabian carried the key elements of the concept

of research library one step further – universalcollections and access to them – when heproposed to create complete collections of Ger-man imprints, in the original and in microform.This is being done in Germany, as it has been inthe Anglo-American world, with short-title cata-logues and the microfilming based on them.digitization may further foster comprehensive-ness, though no one knows to what extent themass of millions of early printed materials willever actually be available as an electronic re-search collection.The concept of the research library, based as it

is on the way scholars work (or ideally should beable to work), has continuing utility in an era ofnetworked libraries and information. It remindsus that large numbers of researchers continue toneed access to quantities of physical objects fromthe past, not merely to texts. Even more impor-tantly, it holds up the ideal of universality – thatis, of the desired work being immediately to handrather than being obtainable only with delayfrom a distributed national research collection.

References

Fabian, B. (1983) Buch, Bibliothek und geisteswis-senschaftliche Forschung, Vandenhoeck and Ru-precht.

Knoche, M. (1993) ‘Die Forschungsbibliothek: Umrisseeines in Deutschland neuen Bibliothekstyps’, Bib-liothek. Forschung und Praxis 17: 291–300.

Wilson, L.W. (1933) ‘The service of libraries in promot-ing scholarship and research’, Library Quarterly 3:127–45.

Further reading

Kyrillidou, M. (2000) ‘Research library trends: ARLstatistics’, Journal of Academic Librarianship 26:427–36.

SEE ALSO: academic libraries; rare-book libraries

KENNETH E. CARPENTER

RESERVE COLLECTION

Has two quite contradictory meanings. It is usedeither to refer to library materials for which there

RESERVE COLLECTION 557

is infrequent demand and which consequently arenot kept on open shelves. Alternatively it canmean material in academic libraries for whichthere is great demand, because of being placed onreading lists, which is therefore held in a separateshort-loan collection.


REVIEW ARTICLE

A substantial article, usually published in aperiodical, which reviews the literature on aparticular topic, evaluating an extensive range ofmaterials and drawing attention to the mostsignificant publications. As such, it is distinctfrom a book review or a review of any othersingle document.

SEE ALSO: dissemination of information;scholarly communication

RIDER, ARTHUR FREMONT (1885–1962)

University librarian and innovator in librarian-ship.Born in Trenton, New Jersey, he spent his

earlier years as a writer and editor. In 1933 hebecame Librarian of Wesleyan University’s OlinLibrary. The collections more than doubled innumber while he was librarian, and he took theopportunity to experiment with catalogues, co-operative arrangements and the shelving of thebooks. His compact shelving programme forlittle-used books was new and controversial.Amongst his many writings, The Scholar and theFuture of the Research Library: A Problem andits Solution (1944) very clearly reveals both hisachievement and his failure. The book analysedresearch library growth and concluded thatcollections doubled in size approximately everysixteen years. This, coupled with the observationthat most research materials were infrequentlyused, led Rider to advocate the use of microcardsas a cost-effective means of information storage.Although his solution has been overtaken bytechnological developments, and some of hispronouncements about the future of microform(see microforms) now seem slightly ridiculous,his analysis of the problem is still a significantcontribution to the literature of informationscience. Appropriately, the National Microfilm

Association awarded him its annual medal in1961.

SEE ALSO: research libraries

ROYALTY

Payment made to an author, or other creator,by the publisher of a book or other knowledgeproduct, normally calculated as a percentage ofthe retail price of the copies sold. It can alsomean the fee paid in respect of a licence for theuse of copyright material (see licences).

SEE ALSO: intellectual property

RURAL LIBRARY SERVICES

Rural library services operate in an environmentof geographical remoteness, characterized bysmall population units and consequent modestfinancial support. The first public librarieswere established in urban areas, where largepopulations are concentrated into relatively smallareas. Rural communities live in areas of lowpopulation density: definitions of ‘rural’ varyfrom areas with less than 100 persons (NewZealand), to those with less than 500 persons(Canada) or 10,000 persons (USA).Whereas all rural communities tend to be

dispersed, agricultural-based and relatively un-sophisticated, a great disparity also exists be-tween such societies from country to country,according to political, administrative, historicaland cultural factors. In the Third World, ruralcommunities have the added problems of lowlevels of literacy, multiplicity of languages andlack of a communications infrastructure. Thepercentage of the population living in rural areasof developed countries is decreasing and can beas low as below 10 per cent. On the other hand,sub-Saharan africa has the most rural of theworld’s populations, with an estimate of over 80per cent living in rural areas. The nature of arural library service differs between countries, soas to be able to satisfy different informationneeds.

Origins and development of rural libraryservices

Public library services were already a well-estab-lished feature of urban local government whenthe reading needs of rural populations in the USA

558 REVIEW ARTICLE

were first addressed at the beginning of thetwentieth century. This interest was part of abroader concern for improving the conditions ofrural life. The chosen solution was to set upcounty libraries, i.e. large-area public libraryservices. The first county library was establishedin 1898 in Ohio, and subsequently two ap-proaches were used: either an existing city librarywas contracted to serve the county or a libraryservice was set up that was directly responsible tothe county government. Enabling legislation wasat the state level. By 1914, fifty-seven suchlibraries had been established. In Great Britain itwas not until 1919 that legislation was passedpermitting county councils to set up libraries. By1931 there were county libraries in all countiesof Great Britain. The basic components of acounty library service were a central library,branch libraries and mobile libraries (see mobilelibrary). In both countries, the system wasstrengthened in post-war years by federal andnational legislation (the Library Services Act of1956 in the USA and the Public Libraries Act of1964 in the UK) encouraging consolidation ofsmaller independent libraries into the large-unitservices and incorporating the rural library ser-vices into national public library services throughresource- and system-sharing.Similar systems became the pattern for rural

library services in those countries that were partof the Anglo-American library tradition, e.g. thenordic countries, Canada, South Africa, Aus-tralia, New Zealand. Even in the USSR, it was aUS county library organizer who visited Russia in1920 to advise the new government on rurallibrary service. The Carnegie Corporation wasparticularly instrumental in the setting up ofrural library services. It was a report of theCarnegie United Kingdom Trust that led to the1919 legislation in the UK and it was theCarnegie Corporation that provided the impetusfor rural library services in the southern Domin-ions during the 1930s. New Zealand in 1938 setup community libraries with regular loans ofbooks through the County Library Service. InSouth Africa and the former Rhodesia, similarservices were financed for both white and non-white populations. In Kenya a circulating libraryscheme for Europeans was started in 1931 andthe African Library Service in 1950. The nationallibrary services set up in the newly independentcountries of Africa and Asia aimed to serve ruralareas in much the same way, through a central

library, branch libraries, book boxes, mobilelibraries and books by mail.

New directions

COMMUNITY INFORMATION

In the second half of the 1970s, in the UK andother developed countries, there were severalreviews of information services in general whichrevealed that rural areas were inadequately cov-ered and that libraries played little part in therural information system. There was a rediscov-ery of the role of the library as a communityinformation centre. Rural library services nowlook beyond traditional book-based referenceand loan services.

INFORMATION FOR RURAL DEVELOPMENT

In the developing world, it was obvious by the1980s that there had been little progress in ruraldevelopment and that the centralized nationallibrary services (see national libraries) set upat independence had failed to establish services torural areas. Since the mid-1980s research hasbeen carried out into the identification of infor-mation needs for rural development and into themost appropriate channels of communication,including the role of indigenous informationsystems. There has been renewed activity withinthe library sector. Many national library systemshave set up rural library projects aimed at meet-ing community needs and advancing literacy in amore dynamic way. Communities have also beenhelped to start their own resource centres or setup an information service aimed at satisfying aspecific need.

INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY

In the 1990s, the potential of information andcommunication technology (ICT) to provideaccess to information in rural communities hasbeen recognized. Multipurpose community tele-centres have been established in both the devel-oped and developing world, not only providingaccess to ICT-based services but also includinglibraries, training facilities and seminar rooms.Evaluation of ownership and operating models isin progress.

SOURCES OF INFORMATION

In developed countries, many national libraries,public libraries and library associations haveundertaken projects on rural information

RURAL LIBRARY SERVICES 559

services. In the developing world, UNESCO,ifla, IDRC and the Commonwealth Secretariathave financed initiatives in rural library servicessince the early 1990s, and information can befound in their publications.

Further reading

Rural Libraries. (1980–) Vol. 1–. Center for RuralLibrary Services, Department of Library Science,Clarion University of Pennsylvania [a semi-annualjournal].

SEE ALSO: Russia and the former Soviet Union;social exclusion and libraries; telecentres

DIANA ROSENBERG

RUSSIA AND THE FORMER SOVIETUNION

With the collapse of the USSR, the vast librarysystem established by the Soviet state facedtremendous challenges. Indeed, the problemsand successes of the Russian library system canbe understood only in the context of the Sovietpast.

The Soviet system

One of the most cherished clichés of the Sovietera was to call the USSR ‘the world’s foremostnation of readers’. Indeed, the country’s booktrade had few rivals worldwide either in thenumber of titles published or in their print runs.Thanks to a planned and co-ordinated develop-ment of librarianship, a state-run network wasformed that included 326,000 libraries of alltypes with an aggregate stock of more than 5.6billion volumes. (These are summarized data forthe fifteen republics of the former Soviet Union.)The Soviet library network was one of theworld’s biggest and played a crucial part in theprogress of Soviet culture, research and educa-tion. More than half of the population werelibrary users. Library services were provided torural populations; millions of first-generationreaders gained access to books. Under Sovietrule, illiteracy was eradicated throughout thecountry, while dozens of smaller ethnic groupswere granted books in their own languages.The network of mass libraries accounted for

over one-third of the total libraries and heldabout 40 per cent of the country’s aggregatebook stock. The mass-library concept was used

by the Soviet state as an instrument of ideologicaleducation. This type of library, while displayingall the external features of Western-style publiclibraries, differed from them in essence. Per-haps the one principle that these mass librarieshad in common with their Western counterpartswas that of service which is free at the point ofuse. Most of the other universally recognizedprinciples either proved to be empty declarations(such as general availability, maximum satisfac-tion of users’ interests, etc.) or were not recog-nized at all (freedom of reading, or freedom ofexchange of information).Fundamental documents that determined li-

braries’ activities started with their basic task –the education of Soviet people in the spirit ofMarxist-Leninist ideas. Access to information,especially social, political, economic and huma-nitarian information, was limited and strictlycontrolled by Soviet ideologists. Thus there were‘special storage departments’, actually librarieswithin libraries holding ‘closed’ literature (ideo-logically suspect titles in the main) accessible to aselect few, censorship in book publishing and inbook selection, and compilation of so-calledrecommendatory bibliographies. Reading gui-dance theory constituted the leading dogma oflibrary service. The underlying assumption wasthat the librarians were in a position to ‘teach’users because of their superior knowledge ofwhat was good for them, and librarians wereaccountable to the state rather than to the public.The library was regarded as a state-run produc-tion unit and was required to fulfil plannedassignments for numbers of users and book issues(most importantly, for the loan of socio-politicalliterature). According to different surveys, thesatisfaction rate averaged 50 to 60 per cent.

The post-Soviet changes

With the disintegration of the Soviet Union andthe breakdown of the former socio-economicorder, libraries found themselves free of theideological diktat of the state and for the firsttime were able to determine the content of theirwork.The last decade of the twentieth century was a

period of considerable change and developmentin the Russian library scene. Inevitable tensionsand losses in some areas were set off by realachievements in others. Library funding sufferedsevere cuts (the funds provided by the state were

560 RUSSIA AND THE FORMER SOVIET UNION

barely enough to cover salary costs); librariesfound it increasingly difficult to cover the costsof acquisition, preservation and access. As thecountry went through the hard times of politicaland economic reforms, progressing from totali-tarian state towards democracy and open society,the demand was growing for books on law,economics, management, ecology, electronics,computers, for textbooks and language courses.The change in reading requirements influencedthe publishing trade; new publishers emerged,while the established houses revised their prio-rities. In 1990 censorship was abolished. Li-braries opened up their ‘special storagedepartments’ and patrons were free to accesspreviously banned books. Thus, a religious lit-erature reading room has been in operation forseveral years in the Library for Foreign Litera-ture, as have two reading rooms devoted tooverseas Russian authors in that library and inthe Russian State Library.The number of new publications accessioned

by the Russian Ministry of Culture libraries in1995 was less than half of the 1990 figure. Thesituation in libraries of other affiliations (aca-demic, school and research) was even worse,with village libraries the most adversely affected.Since the old book trade infrastructure haseffectively collapsed and the new one is still inthe making, as many as 90 per cent of newlyprinted publications never find their way intobookstores in many regions of the country.Decentralization of administration and gov-

ernment, and increasing regionalization of allspheres of life, resulted in great disparities in thefunding of libraries from region to region, broad-ening the divide between the possibilities andlevel of access to information locally and cen-trally. In 1995 the acquisition expenditures ofgeneral research libraries in the constituent mem-bers of the Russian Federation differed greatly,some being fifteen times the size of others.‘Information poor’ areas appeared, another ob-stacle to the stabilization of society.

POSITIVE TRENDS

For the vast majority of the Russian population,public libraries remained the main resource tomeet growing information requirements. Use ofstate-supported public libraries, primarily thelarger ones, rose appreciably, mostly due toyoung patrons. Although the number of publiclibraries was down 15 per cent from 1985, their

use was up by the same 15 per cent. The rates ofuse of central universal libraries in the constitu-ent members of the Russian Federation went upmore than 30 per cent since 1993.The total number of libraries decreased

slightly over the years of economic reform inRussia. Numerous Communist Party librariesand trade-union reading rooms ceased to exist.Some small rural and municipal libraries wereclosed and their holdings turned over to largerregional libraries. At the same time, new librariesappeared that were affiliated to new governmentbodies, e.g. presidential administration, parlia-ment, etc. In addition, libraries were set up byvarious foundations, movements and organiza-tions. A unique library of Russian literature fromabroad was established in Moscow in 1996.Some Russian regions, with their industry almostat a standstill, saw the construction of largemodern facilities (e.g. in such cities as Rostov-on-Don, Omsk, Krasnoyarsk, Ryazan). Thereforethe overall number of libraries remains large.

THE PATTERN OF PROVISION

As of 1 January 1999, there were approximately150,000 libraries in Russia, including more than54,000 public libraries (down from over 62,000in 1990). The biggest libraries in the country arethe two national libraries: the Russian StateLibrary in Moscow (formerly the V.I. Lenin StateLibrary), with a collection of 42 million items,and the National Library of Russia in St Peters-burg, with a collection of 32 million; and also theLibrary of the Russian Academy of Sciences, witha collection of 20 million. The network of publiclibraries is the most diverse and extensive. Theyhave 60 million users who annually borrownearly 1.5 billion items. Nationwide, there isone fixed-point library for every 3,000 people.The great majority of libraries serving the

general public are part of a network subordi-nated to the Ministry of Culture of the RussianFederation. They include nine federal libraries,282 central libraries in all the eighty-nine con-stituent members of the Russian Federation (gen-eral research libraries, children’s and youthlibraries, and libraries for the blind) and 49,700public municipal libraries, with 39,400 librariesin rural communities and 10,300 in towns andcities. In the 1970s such libraries were incorpo-rated into centralized library networks headed bythe central libraries of cities, districts and ruralareas.

RUSSIA AND THE FORMER SOVIET UNION 561

The system of higher and vocational educationoperates approximately 3,000 libraries of univer-sities, academies, institutes and colleges. Thegeneral education system runs over 63,000school libraries. The Russian Academy ofSciences has a large network of 375 researchlibraries. There are also numerous speciallibraries set up by the ministries during theSoviet period. For example, there are over 3,500sci-tech libraries in industry and in the transpor-tation and communication sectors; more than700 special libraries in agriculture; nearly 1,500libraries in healthcare and medicine.Modern Russian librarianship has retained

some characteristics of the Soviet library system.Library services and information resources ofRussian libraries are organized on the basis oftwo main principles, territorial and disciplinary.In practically every sector of the national econ-omy there is a federal-level central library servingas the main library of the special libraries net-work and funded by the parent ministry. Inaddition, a central regional library with a com-prehensive collection that also includes scientificliterature is in operation in each of the constitu-ent members that make up the Russian Federa-tion. These libraries are financed from regionalbudgets and serve as centres of methodology forall public libraries of their respective area (re-public, territory or region).A special bibliographic utility – the Russian

Book Chamber – is responsible for nationalbibliographic control of Russian publica-tions, which represents a different model fromother countries, where national bibliographiesare usually handled by national libraries.Radical political and economic reforms in

Russia caused sweeping changes in governmentinformation and cultural policies that had a greatinfluence on libraries. Two federal laws wereenacted in 1994: Library Law and Legal DepositCopy Law. Statutory force was given to theprinciples of library work, guaranteeing the rightof individuals, public organizations, nations andethnic groups to have free access to information,free spiritual development, access to the values ofnational and global culture, and to cultural,scientific and educational activities. Never beforehad this conception of the role and tasks oflibraries been stated at a government level.Federal professional laws fostered the enact-

ment of respective regional laws by constituentmembers of the Russian Federation. At present

almost all of them have already adopted or areelaborating local legislation on libraries and locallegal deposit, which develops the respectivefederal acts.By 1995 priorities had been defined for the

national policy of modernization of librarianshippursued by the Ministry of Culture of theRussian Federation. Automation of library ser-vices topped the list. In 1995 another relevantfederal law was passed – On Information,Informatization, and Information Protection.This law identifies library holdings and informa-tion products as universally accessible nationalinformation resources so as to enable libraries tobe responsible for the satisfaction of publicinformation needs as fully as possible.

AUTOMATION

library automation began in the majority ofRussian libraries in the late 1980s and early1990s. Over the past ten years, many Russianlibraries automated cataloguing procedures andstarted building electronic catalogues. They haveaccumulated some experience in electronicdocument delivery. Some of the larger re-search libraries developed high-capacity OnlinePublic-Access Catalogues (opacs) and data-bases, which are in wide use. Hundreds oflibraries (many federal and over half of theregional libraries) have gained access to theInternet via dial-up and dedicated lines, andmade themselves known in the informationworld by their own Web servers. The merging oflibrary catalogues into co-operative systems andthe development of digital libraries (see digitallibrary) is on the agenda today.LIBNET, the programme to develop Russia’s

national information and library computer net-work, addresses a major social problem – provid-ing Russian citizens with free access to thedistributed information resources of Russian andforeign libraries. The development and imple-mentation of this federal library networkingprogramme has been supervised by the Inter-departmental Board of Experts on the Informati-zation of Russian Libraries under the Ministry ofCulture of the Russian Federation. Board mem-bers include leaders and library automationprofessionals from some of the largest Russianlibraries of different affiliations. The LIBNETprogramme plans to develop, between 1998 and2001, the core component of the national libraryand computer network incorporating 150 li-


braries – all the larger libraries of Russia as wellas the central research libraries of the RussianFederation constituent members. However, eco-nomic instability in the country hampers imple-mentation of both library laws and the LIBNETprogramme.

FUNDING

Many accomplishments in the last ten years weremade possible by the active efforts of top- andmedium-level managers of libraries, rather thangovernment policy. Fundraising became one oftheir primary concerns. The easiest way out forsome libraries is to rent their premises to privatebusinesses. Many others have extended theassortment of fee-based services by usingtechnology (photocopying, scanning, modelling)and providing some complex information ser-vices that go beyond the scope of conventionalfree services. Some libraries also offer printing,photographic and microfilming services; bind andrestore books; teach foreign languages; and pre-pare and hold conferences, seminars and exposi-tions. Organizations take an active interest inthese services. It should be emphasized that freelibrary service, as guaranteed by the law, remainsunchanged. The paid services usually provideonly a small income and represent a smallcontribution to libraries’ budgets.Therefore, the main source of funding to

support many library projects has become theprogrammes and projects of different charitablefoundations and organizations, such as the OpenSociety Institute, the Russian Foundation forBasic Research and others. The megaprojectnamed ‘Pushkin Library’ is an example of thiskind of initiative. The project, planned for threeyears, obtained support of $100 million from theOpen Society Institute. Under the project, 3,500Russian libraries can purchase up to 1,000 booksevery year on preferential terms.

NEW IDEAS

In the new Russia, the social role of libraries isevolving. In seeking a new identity for itself thelibrary profession is increasingly turning to inter-national librarianship for concepts and values,trying to develop a new world outlook and a newservice model. In addition to their traditionalfunctions of education, preservation and exten-sion of the cultural heritage, libraries are acquir-ing new roles as information centres that providepublic access to national and global information

networks and databases. The librarian’s role isbeing revised: no longer the user’s teacher, but anintermediary between user and information. Theconcept of reading guidance, long established inthe Soviet librarianship, is fast losing adherents.Traditional technologies change inside libraries,as do the forms of public library services and thepatterns of interaction with ruling bodies.Libraries in today’s Russia – and by no means

only the largest and richest ones, but alsoordinary municipal and district libraries – canno longer imagine living without an extensiveexhibition area, a linguistics reading room, amediatheque and an Internet class.

THE PROFESSION

Liberation from the ideological diktat and thecentralized control of the state furthered devel-opment of a professional movement amonglibrarians and other members of the informa-tion professions. In the late 1980s and early1990s several library associations wereformed. The first ones appeared in Moscow andSt Petersburg – the Moscow Library Associationand the St Petersburg Library Society (1989).They were followed by more than thirty regionalassociations and societies. In October 1994 theRussian Library Association (RLA) was formallyconstituted in Moscow. It is the largest libraryassociation in Russia, which unites more than130 institutional members, including libraries ofdifferent levels and departments, regional libraryassociations and societies. In 1995 the RLA wasadmitted to ifla as a national associated mem-ber. The number of Russian institutional IFLAmembers is steadily growing as Russian librariesstrive to become active members of the interna-tional library community.In conclusion, during the ten years since the

break-up of the Soviet system tremendouschanges have taken place in Russian librarian-ship. Libraries have assumed a totally newideological orientation. They have completelyrevised their professional activities and are build-ing a new model of the library: a genuineinstitution of culture, education and information.

Further reading

A variety of material on the subject is to be found inRussia’s three leading library journals, Bibliotekove-denie (until 1993 Sovetskoe bibliotekovedenie), Bib-liografiya (until 1992 Sovetskaya bibliografiya) andBiblioteka (until 1992 Bibliotekar).

RUSSIA AND THE FORMER SOVIET UNION 563

Chubaryan, O.S. (1976) Obshchee bibliotekovedenie[General library science], 3rd edn, Kniga, pp. 47 –9.

Genieva, E.Yu. (2000) ‘Kuda dvizhets’a Rossija? Rol’bibliotek v transformatsii gosudarstva’ [Which direc-tion is Russia going? The role of libraries intransforming the state], Biblioteka 8: 6 –9.

Kuzmin, E.I. (1999) Bibliotechnaja Rossija na rubezhetis’acheletij [Library Russia at the turn of themillennium], Libereja, p. 224.

EKATERINA GENIEVA


S

SCHELLENBERG, THEODORE R.(1903–70)

Widely regarded as responsible for defining thecontent of modern archival knowledge and prac-tice (along with Hilary jenkinson).Born to a Mennonite family in Kansas, he

took his AB in 1928 and his MA in 1930 at theUniversity of Kansas, and a PhD in History at theUniversity of Pennsylvania. He was appointed toa post at the National Archives in 1935, andreturned there in 1948 after war service andother archival employment, retiring in 1963. Hiscareer at the National Archives was one ofturbulent relationships with colleagues, but out-standing professional success.Arguably Schellenberg’s greatest specific con-

tribution to archive science was his systematicstatement of appraisal principles, criteria andguidelines. He wrote his Modern Archives:Principles and Techniques (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1956) as a replacement forJenkinson’s Manual of Archive Administration,then the most authoritative work, but regardedby Schellenberg as outdated and unreadable. Hissecond major work was the controversial Man-agement of Archives (Washington, DC: NationalArchives, 1965), which was the fruit of aretirement in which he taught and advised allover the world. The most contentious proposi-tion in the book was that archive science shouldbe taught in library schools, both because theschools were concerned with methodologicaltraining, and because librarians were responsiblefor the care of so much archive material.Together the books are still consistently cited,and are read as basic texts for programmes ofarchival studies.

Further reading

Smith, Jane F. (1981) ‘Schellenberg: Americanizer andpopularizer’, American Archivist 44: 313–26.

SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

The word ‘scholarly’ is generally used of activ-ities that entail research or investigation, espe-cially in an academic environment. As such,it covers any topic that appears in the higher-education curriculum, from science, throughthe social sciences, to the humanities. Scholarlycommunication typically occurs betweenresearchers, but can also involve communica-tion between a researcher and someone whowishes to apply the research (e.g. in an industrialprocess, in the production of a play), or betweena researcher and a general audience.

The growth of scholarly communication

Down the centuries, research has typically beencommunicated in parallel by speech and writing.Such scholarly communication originated withthe Greeks in the last few centuries bc. So‘academic discussions’ hark back to the Academyin Athens, while the works of Greek scholars,especially those of Aristotle, established thetradition of written research. The appearance ofmodern research depended particularly on devel-opments in Western Europe during the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries. By the nineteenthcentury, the volume of research being producedwas such that individual researchers were forcedto become more and more specialized in theirinterests. Correspondingly, the communication ofresearch became concentrated on a series of morerestricted audiences. This has been reflected in

the growth of both specialized societies andspecialized journals over the past century and ahalf. Nowadays, most research is done by profes-sionals (i.e. people who are paid to do research),though amateur contributions continue to bevaluable in some disciplines, especially in thehumanities. The main motivation for doingresearch is to aid the development of the subjectand to obtain personal recognition. (For profes-sionals, the latter point is connected with ad-vancement in their career.) Both of these entailthe communication of research, especially viaprint.

Quality control

The ways in which research is communicatednaturally tend to follow the course of theresearch itself. While the research is still underway, most communication about it is informal.This may involve discussions with colleagues, or,later, presentation at a departmental seminar. Asthe research nears completion, it may be pre-sented at national or international conferences.Finally, when complete, the research is sub-mitted for formal publication. For scholarlyresearch, most publication is via journals orbooks, though reports are also favoured in someresearch fields.One of the key questions in this publication

process is whether the research is of acceptablequality. The mechanism for deciding this is mostclearly defined for journals. Journal editors typi-cally rely on external referees for assistance inassessing submitted material. Their suggestionsfrequently make recommendations for improvingsubmissions, rather than for immediate accep-tance or rejection. Assessing the quality of booksis less well organized. Although publishers em-ploy expert readers to vet submitted manuscripts,much of the quality assessment occurs afterpublication in the form of book reviews. Thereis no standard system for evaluating reports.Research appearing in these is, however, oftensummarized for submission to journals, or ex-tended into books.

Differences between subjects

The nature of scholarly communication oftendepends on the subject concerned. One externalfactor that can affect communication is thefinancial status of the research discipline.Many science subjects are of major importance

in industry and for defence, so they attractconsiderable funding. Many humanities subjectsdo not. More money is therefore available tosupport the publication and dissemination ofresearch in the sciences than in the humanities.Expectations regarding communication also dif-fer. Science is generally expected to attract aglobal audience, both within universities andoutside; the same is not always true of huma-nities research. Scientists often expect their re-search to be published rapidly, whereas there isusually less urgency in the need to publishhumanities research. Factors such as these leadto differing communication emphases in differentsubjects.A comparison of journals in the sciences and in

the humanities reveals that the former, on average,contain more material, appear more frequentlyand have a larger and/or wider circulation thanthe latter. Less obviously, the rejection rate forarticles submitted to humanities journals isusually appreciably higher than for science jour-nals. This difference in success rate can be relatedto economic factors – a lack of finance to supporthumanities journals – and the nature of thesubject, not least the greater ease of reachingagreement between referees in the sciences. Thesefactors tend to favour journal publishing in thesciences; conversely, they favour book publishingin the humanities. It follows that interaction withpublishers differs. For much of its history, scien-tific research has typically been publicized inlearned society journals. Commercial publishersnow compete successfully with these, but manyhigh-prestige journals continue to be produced bylearned societies. Although some learned societiesin the humanities publish research monographs ofconsiderable excellence, many of the most impor-tant books in the humanities have been producedby independent publishers (including, under thisheading, university presses).

Electronic communication

The continual growth in research publication,especially via journals, has led to problems ofaccess. The proportion of the research literaturethat a university library, for example, can affordto acquire is continually decreasing. The growthof electronic publishing has been seen as one wayof alleviating this problem. How it might best dothis is currently unclear, not least because ofuncertainties regarding copyright. However,

566 SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

significant progress has been made in somesubjects. In physics, for example, where speed ofpublication is important, a highly organizedsystem of rapid electronic publication of researchalready exists. This bypasses the normal processof quality control, but, like much science, physicsresearch is typically a team effort. In conse-quence, informal refereeing usually occurs withinthe group.Electronic communication actually introduces

some generic differences as compared with print-based communication. Two aspects, in particular,may affect scholarly communication. The first isthat networking blurs the traditional dividingline between formal and informal communica-tion. Though, say, electronic mail and elec-tronic journals may appear to be two separateactivities, it is actually possible to create acontinuum of communication possibilities be-tween the two. The second point is that network-ing evens out the communication opportunitiesbetween disciplines. The same subsidized net-works are available to all academics, and re-searchers in the humanities seem to be usingthem with almost as much enthusiasm as scien-tists. Overall, all disciplines are likely to developa new flexibility as regards scholarly communica-tion in the future.

Further reading

Harnad, S. (www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/harnad) [presentsan ongoing discussion of possible changes due to theelectronic publishing of research].

Meadows, A.J. (1998) Communicating Research, Aca-demic Press [looks in detail at the points raised here].

Tenopir, C. and King, D.W. (2000) Towards ElectronicJournals, Special Libraries Association Publishing [isparticularly good on usage and economics].

Weller, A.C. (2001) Editorial Peer Review, AmericanSociety for Information Science and Technology[provides a detailed discussion of quality control].

SEE ALSO: communication; digital library;electronic-journal archives; hybrid libraries

JACK MEADOWS

SCHOOL LIBRARIES

The school library, perhaps known as the schoollibrary media centre or the school library re-source centre, is found in schools at all educa-tional phases. It supports the needs of teachers,other school staff and pupils in all areas of thecurriculum – literacy and reading; information

skills and independent learning – and givesequality of opportunity for all.

The role of the school library

The IFLA/UNESCO manifesto for school li-braries (IFLA 2000), defines the role and goalsas follows:

The school library provides information andideas that are fundamental to functioningsuccessfully in today’s society, which is increas-ingly information and knowledge-based. Theschool library equips students with lifelonglearning skills and develops the imagination,enabling them to live as responsible citizens.

Goals of the school library

The school library is integral to the educationalprocess.The following are essential to the development

of literacy, information literacy, teaching, learn-ing and culture, and are core school libraryservices:

. Supporting and enhancing educational goals asoutlined in the school’s mission and curricu-lum.

. Developing and sustaining in children thehabit and enjoyment of reading and learning,and the use of libraries throughout their lives.

. Offering opportunities for experiences increating and using information for knowledge,understanding, imagination and enjoyment.

. Supporting all students in learning and practis-ing skills for evaluating and using information,regardless of form, format or medium, includ-ing sensitivity to the modes of communicationwithin the community.

. Providing access to local, regional, nationaland global resources and opportunities thatexpose learners to diverse ideas, experiencesand opinions.

. Organizing activities that encourage culturaland social awareness and sensitivity.

. Working with students, teachers, administra-tors and parents to achieve the mission of theschool.

. Proclaiming the concept that intellectual free-dom and access to information are essential toeffective and responsible citizenship and parti-cipation in a democracy.

. Promoting reading and the resources and

SCHOOL LIBRARIES 567

services of the school library to the wholeschool community and beyond.

. The school library fulfils these functions bydeveloping policies and services, selecting andacquiring resources, providing physical andintellectual access to appropriate sources ofinformation, providing instructional facilitiesand employing trained staff.

In order to achieve these goals school librariesneed certain attributes:

. Sufficient resources to support the curriculumand pupils’ reading for pleasure, wide-rangingin format, print, non-print and electronic, andsubject matter to cater for all tastes andinterests.

. Accommodation that is attractive, suitable,accessible with adequate study, reading anddisplay areas, appropriately furnished; a pro-gramme of promotional activities; access tothe library at all times; adequate and appro-priate staffing; good partnerships and relation-ships with other facilities and organizations,including public libraries.

All of this should be within a well thought out,published policy ensuring effective library man-agement

School libraries around the world

There is an inequality of library provision inschools between countries and within countries,and there are school libraries everywhere that aregreatly in need of improvement.Issues, which affect the development of good

school libraries universally, are the inadequatetraining programmes for school librarians; theemployment of non-qualified staff in schoollibraries; and the low status of the schoollibrarian within the school and the wider librarycommunity. And yet there is evidence fromresearch in several places, but particularly in theUSA, which links good-quality library provisionwith higher levels of pupil achievement. Theimportance of appropriate staffing is illustratedby the studies. However, even in countries whereschool library provision is good, there are pro-blems in relation to the recruitment and retentionof school library personnel.There are excellent school libraries, fully

staffed with professionally qualified librarians

and support personnel, which are well resourced,but there are many that give an inadequateservice to the teachers and pupils. They have toofew books and other materials, and those thatthey have are poor, in terms of physical condi-tion, being outdated and irrelevant to the curri-culum and needs of the children. In somecountries the lack of available quality resourcesand/or insufficient funding means that this situa-tion cannot be improved. The development ofschool libraries is often hampered by a poorunderstanding by a school’s senior managementand teaching staff of the part the library can playin school life, especially in the delivery of thecurriculum. This does not lead to good co-operation and partnership between teacher andlibrarian. The lack of national policies, standardsand guidelines in many countries stifles improve-ment.School libraries all over the world are being

transformed by the technological developmentsthat are enabling global communication andtransforming learning opportunities. The needfor learners to be information literate, as well asliterate in a traditional sense, is self-evident.School libraries have the potential to give allchildren and young people equal access toelectronic resources and print, visual and auralsources. Some schools do not recognize the needfor the library to be integral to information andcommunication technology developments in theschool, so the school library cannot fulfil thatpotential. In some countries, the technology isnot available in many schools, and there is anincreasing gap between those who have andthose who have not.Despite all of these drawbacks, there is a

widespread belief in the efficacy of schoollibraries throughout formal education, and guide-lines and standards are being produced andshared. There is an awareness that the role ofthe library in the educational process and provid-ing a foundation for using libraries throughoutlife will need to be promulgated at all levels,from Ministries of Education to schools them-selves, continuously.The dissemination of the IFLA/UNESCO

School Library Manifesto provides the tools toundertake this promotion.

References

IFLA/UNESCO (2000) The School Library in Teaching

568 SCHOOL LIBRARIES

and Learning for All: The School Library Manifesto,International Federation of Library Associations andInstitutions.

Further reading

Bernhard, P. (ed.) (1997) Resource Book for SchoolLibraries and Resource Centres, IFLA Publication79, K.G. Saur.

Information Power: Building Partnerships for Learning(1998) American Library Association.

Primary School Library Guidelines (2000) The LibraryAssociation.

Tilke, A. (ed.) (1998) Library Association Guidelinesfor Secondary School Libraries, The Library Associa-tion.

Williams, D. and Wavell, C. (2001) The Impact of theSchool Library Resource Centre on Learning, Li-brary and Information Commission research report112, Robert Gordon University for Re:source: TheCouncil for Museums, Archives and Libraries.

GLENYS WILLARS

SCIENTOMETRICS

This term achieved prominence with the founda-tion of the journal Scientometrics in 1977.Scientometrics forms part of the sociologyof science and is often applied to issues ofscience policy-making. It involves quantitativestudies of scientific activities including, signifi-cantly, publication. For this reason, it overlapswith bibliometrics. It aims, through the reve-lation of objective quantitative regularities, todetermine the stage reached by an intellectualdomain and suggest possible lines of futuredevelopment.

SEE ALSO: informetrics

SCRIPT

A means of expressing language in graphic form,whether it be alphabetic, syllabic or ideographic.It usually refers to handwritten rather thanprinted characters. The term also has other morespecialized meanings, such as the text of a play,film or broadcast. In computing, a script indi-cates a section of program code associated with aparticular event or condition and which, whenthe event or condition occurs, is executed so thatan appropriate reaction takes place.


SEARCH

The act of a user, an information worker on theuser’s behalf, or an automated system activatedby the user or the intermediary, in making asystematic investigation to obtain data or infor-mation. Information professionals will be ex-pected to devise a coherent search strategy forthis purpose. In database software, the process ofseeking out an entry, keyword or phrase is calledthe search and may, for instance, use severalkeywords strung together and qualified by boo-lean logic operators such as ‘AND’, ‘OR’ and‘NOT’.

SEARCH ENGINES

A search engine is a computer program thatallows the user to search the internet and findparticular terms or phrases. The software allowsthis search to be made at very high speed, so thatsearch engines have become an essential tool inInternet usage, and particularly in searching theworld wide web.The current Internet search engines evolved in

the early 1990s along with the use of the suite ofInternet protocols enabling communication, usingpublic domain software (freeware), betweencomputers across the globe. The emergence ofthe World Wide Web, has led to the creation of avast number of documents, for the most partcoded with HyperText mark-up language(HTML), stored on computers around the world.Search engines are very much a part of thisdistributed and dynamic information environ-ment and are designed to help people locateinformation. The information that they locate iscontained in the form of Web pages and acollection of these located at a uniform re-source locator (URL) is referred to as a‘website’. Currently, there are several hundredsearch engines: some are specific to particularregions or countries, others claim to be interna-tional and some help to retrieve specific subjectmatter or media or cater to a particular age groupsuch as children. There are three main types ofsearch engine: single search engines, metasearchengines and subject indexes. Lastly it is alsonecessary to discuss intelligent agents briefly.

SINGLE SEARCH ENGINES

The single search engines are also known as ‘keyword indexes’. These search engines are the most

SEARCH ENGINES 569

common. One element to the search engine is the‘crawler’ software (also known as ‘bots’, ‘robot’or ‘spiders’). The crawler automatically navigatesthe Internet identifying websites. Once it finds asite it will retrieve enough data to index that sitewithin its central database. When using a searchengine it is the index that is searched. The extentof the indexing varies between search engines. Inaddition the extent a search engine explores thelinks and indexes the various levels of a websitealso varies. This is known as the ‘depth of thecrawl’. Search engines will often retrieve infor-mation by retrieving the terms held within keyportions of a HTML document. These may bemetadata stored within a certain part of thedocument. The frequency with which the crawlerupdates the search engine’s index also varies.Hence the data stored on one search engine’sdatabase may not be as up to date as on others.Search engines also vary in terms of theirgeographic coverage and the number of websitesthat they index. Search engines also tend toconcentrate on different types of material. Some,for example, will explicitly index files that con-tain images. Others will index newsgroup mate-rial, for example, ‘Google Groups’. The numberof sites indexed, material indexed, depth ofindexing, frequency of update and depth ofcrawl, therefore, all form key evaluation criteria.It should be noted, however, that not all websitesindexed by search engines will have been foundby the crawler software. In some cases peoplewill have alerted the search engine organizationto a particular site and may have paid to get theirsite indexed by the search engine. Search enginesthat accept this alerting method include AltaVista, Google, Fast and Lycos. The players,however, keep changing as search engines com-pete with each other by developing algorithmsthat improve relevance of retrieved items (‘hits’),indexing new material and adding output andinformation management features. New arrivalsas from 2001 include Wisenut, Teoma and Day-pop.A key aspect of the single search engine is its

search functionality. The amount of functionalityvaries between search engines and often a basicand advanced search interface is provided. Theadvanced search interface allows the user to bemore specific and use a wider range of criteria toconstruct his or her search. Most single searchengines allow Boolean searching, that is, to beable to combine terms using AND, OR and

NOT. In addition they may offer proximitysearching, where terms must be within a definednumber of words of each other. They also offertruncation and various forms of stemming eitherat the beginning of, end of or within the term.Field searching is enabled by some search en-gines, and searchers can limit their search toparticular parts of the document, such as thetitle, the URL and hypertext links to and froma website. In addition the language, geographicarea and file type (examples include graphic files(JPEG, GIF), portable document format (PDF)and HTML) can be specified.Once the search engine has conducted a search

it will prioritize the ‘hits’ using algorithms torank the output, hopefully putting the morerelevant hits at the top of the list. As mentionedabove, one of the ways search engines competewith each other is the relevance of the items theuser sees within the first two screens of hits.Generally users do not browse more than twoscreens of hits and it is therefore important to getthe most relevant first. The ranking of hits isachieved through ‘best-match’ algorithms. In thepast databases worked on ‘exact-match’ algo-rithms, that is, if the terms that were requestedwere in the text it was considered relevant. Singlesearch engines use the ‘best-match’ principlewhere they use the terms in the search toprioritize hits using statistical calculations. Com-monly these are based on the frequency of searchterms occurring in the item, the frequency ofterms occurring next or near each other andwhere those terms occur. If, for example, thesearch terms appear near the beginning of thedocument or in the title then that document willbe ranked highly and displayed near the start ofthe list. Other criteria may also be used. Thefrequency of a search term appearing in theentire index can also be a factor. A term that iscommon across the index, in other words foundin many items, may be given a low weightingsince it is not discriminatory. Recently searchengines have incorporated other criteria in theirrelevance judgements. For example some searchengines, such as Google and Lycos, rank morehighly those sites that have many hypertext linkspointing to them from other sites. The assump-tion here is that, if a site has been ‘pointed to’ byothers, people are recommending that site.The presentation of the hits on the screen will

vary between search engines. Search engines willprovide varying amounts of data. In general they

570 SEARCH ENGINES

will show the URL and portions of text thatcontain the search terms. Web pages from thesame site may be clustered together and in somecases search engines, such as Wisenut, will clusterretrieved hits under broad subjects. Features suchas this have increased over the years along withfunctionality, and are designed to help the user tofind material that is related to their needs. Otherfeatures utilize relevance feedback technologywhere users can indicate that they want to searchfor more items similar to a particular hit. Thesearch engine will then reformulate the searchalgorithm based on the original query andcharacteristics of the hit that the user hasindicated as relevant.Single search engines have evolved over the

years, gradually catering to the needs of differ-ent users. When they were first developed thesearch entry box and ranking algorithms wereseen as a searcher’s panacea. However thisperception was largely that of the technicaldevelopers who were relatively new to large-scale information retrieval and had not experi-enced the development of online databases andcd-rom technologies. This was apparent fromthe lack of help systems, limited functionalityand the ‘one solution for all’.

METASEARCH ENGINES

The metasearch engines are similar to the singlesearch engines. They enable the user, however, tosearch the index of more than one single searchengine. For example, Dogpile, Mamma or Surf-wax enable the user to search in the commonsingle search engines simultaneously. The advan-tage of this is that the user only has to learn thefunctionality of one search engine and does nothave to repeat the search in more than one searchengine. The disadvantage is that the metasearchengine will only use the functionality that appliesto all the single search engines and the uniquecharacteristics of individual search engines willbe lost. Metasearch engines will vary in terms ofthe number of search engines they search, thefunctionality offered and the output. Certainmetasearch engines, for example Surfwax, givesummaries of websites retrieved, enabling one todecide whether or not it is worth further investi-gation. Generally metasearch engines will de-duplicate the hits retrieved from the varioussearch engines.

SUBJECT INDEX SEARCH ENGINES

The third main type of search engine is the‘subject index’, also known as ‘subject direc-tories’. Subject indexes evolved because peoplewanted to bring order to the Internet and helpothers find good information. These search toolsare, in a sense, portals (see portals and gate-ways) in that they gather material together fromthe Web and make it available to the user in oneplace. Subject indexes, such as Yahoo!, tend touse both search engines and people to search theWeb, and then organize what has been foundunder subject headings. Yahoo!, for example,uses universal decimal classification toorganize the websites that it has found. Theadvantage of the subject index is that the initialsearch has been done for the user and sites foundon topics. This process generally involves somekind of review process that implies that thewebsites in a subject index are of good quality.However fewer items will be found via thesubject search engine than via a single searchengine. Users can either browse the site, clickingon subject headings, and eventually will beprovided with a list of websites, or they can usethe search engine to search the subject index site.In the event of no items being retrieved, eitherusers will be asked if they wish the search to bebroadened, or the system will automaticallysearch the index of a search engine that indexesthe wider Web.Again, as with single search engines, the

purpose, the subject content, geographic cover-age, number of items indexed, functionality andoutput will vary between subject indexes. Somesubject indexes focus on specific subject areas.These tend to be called portals. However, portalstend to provide access to a wider range of datathan a subject index. They give, for example,access to software or subject-specific discussionlists or collections of primary data. These distinc-tions are becoming increasingly blurred. Vortalsare a variation of the portal. These tend toprovide access to data concerning a verticalmarket and usually offer opportunities for e-commerce and recruitment.

INTELLIGENT AGENTS

Lastly a new development, but compared to theabove three categories of search engine of rela-tively minor significance, are what have beentermed ‘intelligent agents’. These are a form of

SEARCH ENGINES 571

crawler but cater to the individual. An intelligentagent enables the user to set up a search strategyand then this will be automatically run on aregular basis so that when the user opens up theire-mail account, if the agent has found new items,they will be shown. Agents can be general orconcentrate on a specific media such as news.The latter are known as ‘newsbots’. Crayon, forexample, will create your own newspaper de-pending on your profile and what it has found.These agents need to be ‘trained’, that is, aprofile needs to be set up. Some, such asAutonomy Knowledge Update, can be modifiedover time so that depending on the headlines onereads the search algorithm will change. In addi-tion it is possible for the user to indicate itemsthat they want more of using relevance feedbacktechnology.

Further reading

Internet.com (2002) Search engine watch (http://search-enginewatch.com/).

Search Engine Showdown (2002) (http://searchengine-showdown.com/).

Search Tools Consulting (2002) (www.searchtools.com/) [search tools for websites and intranets].

MARK HEPWORTH AND IAN MURRAY

SECONDARY LITERATURE

For the librarian this refers to the bibliographicsources in which books, articles and other pri-mary literature are listed. However, for thehistorian it refers to the books and articles thatare written using historical record material assources, these sources being regarded as theprimary literature.

SECURITY IN LIBRARIES

Ensuring security in libraries depends on design-ing out or minimizing the potential for crime anddisruptive activity.The security of library users, staff and re-

sources is a crucially important considerationthat demands close attention, yet has received,and generally continues to receive, little systema-tic treatment from library managers worldwide.Security measures have been enforced erraticallyand neglected in varying degrees. The raisond’être of libraries is to collect, promote andencourage access to resources, but in doing so

they can create a milieu in which crime canreadily flourish and security be compromised.The trend towards crime in libraries is risingand it is no longer wise to conclude that librariescan be exempted from these global considera-tions. Librarians and information managers arehaving to come to terms with the uncomfortablereality that security is a paramount considerationthat cannot be ignored if resources are to beprotected.The key to success has been the raising of

security consciousness through the creation of asecurity plan or policy within the context of thestrategic planning process. In this way, secur-ity consciousness becomes integral to, ratherthan being grafted on to, an existing framework.The most successful adoption and implementa-tion of security plans seem to have been wherestaff have been closely involved in the audit andproposal mechanisms. Each library organizationwill place its own unique emphasis on the leveland nature of security to be adopted and thesewill be related to local circumstances. Examplesand guidelines are contained in Chaney andMacDougall (1992), Lund (1993), Chavez(1993) and Ewing (1994). The subject of secur-ity is typically considered under the headings ofstaff, materials (including equipment) and build-ings.Security of staff includes the issues of verbal

abuse and threats, violence and assault. Anincreasing number of organizations are takingthese issues into account in their security plan-ning procedures. Various organizations perceive,and some have identified through a securityaudit, that there is a need to establish trainingprogrammes which help staff to handle conflictsituations, even to the extent of giving advice onself-defence (Bahr 1989; Chaney and MacDou-gall 1992). Others, however, prefer to keep thematter low-key, on the basis that giving thesubject undue attention might instil more fear,when in practice the likelihood of assault isremote in many libraries. Nonetheless, generalcourses on customer care increasingly introducethe subject and are useful channels for a discus-sion of the problem. However, the need for moretangible assistance in the form of back-up facil-ities is being acknowledged and introduced intolibraries, including the installation of additionaltelephone lines and panic button alarms at thecounter, regular patrols inside and outside thebuilding, and employment of attendants at entry

572 SECONDARY LITERATURE

points. All these methods give a degree ofreassurance. There is also evidence to suggest(Chaney and MacDougall 1992) that the com-munity rather than an individual library ap-proach to the problem of abuse, assault andviolence can be of positive assistance. Thisprocess would normally involve discussion be-tween customers, library staff and local commu-nity people (for example, social workers,community workers and police) to evolve anagreed course of action (Hinks 1989).The second general heading associated with

security is that of materials. It is one that hasbeen of concern from the early days of manu-scripts, when volumes were chained to thelibrary shelf. Numerous articles in the profes-sional literature attest to the fact that theftand mutilation continue to be a major problem.It has become necessary to install detectiondevices to protect material. These devices areno more than deterrents and mainly remindthe forgetful; they catch the careless user, ratherthan the determined thief. Indeed, the view hasbeen advanced that these devices only encouragethe most determined thief to attempt to beatthe system by removing pages of text thatare less likely to have security tags. This addsto the increase in mutilated material left in thelibrary.The most calculating criminal intent on build-

ing collections or obtaining rare items for perso-nal gain is much harder to deter unless verysystematic, stringent and restrictive security po-licies are put into place (Huntsberry 1992). Thedeployment of closed-circuit television (CCTV) isbeing used on a more regular basis in libraries,especially where it is demonstrated to be cost-effective. The acquisition of increasing amountsof expensive technology, such as cd-rom equip-ment and workstations, begins to make CCTVmore attractive, although physically securingequipment to work surfaces is often used as asimple form of deterrent.In recent times there has also been the added

complication of ensuring the security of infor-mation stored in electronic form. computersecurity is a subject that will be of everincreasing concern as more and more data arestored both in-house and remotely but need to beaccessible to the library clientele. This calls intoquestion the ability to protect files of electronicinformation from unauthorized use, whether it bein the form of obtaining confidential informa-

tion, altering existing files or implanting virusesinto software (Riley 1992; Wilkinson 1992). Inmany countries there is also an additional legalresponsibility to ensure confidentiality of compu-ter-stored information about an individual’s per-sonal details under data protection acts(Chaney and MacDougall 1992). The need forlibrary policy and plans about such matterscannot be overemphasized; it is not just a matterof cost-effective protection but of possible prose-cution.The third major heading associated with

security is that of the building, in terms both ofthe protection of users from assault or threatand of the protection of the materials andequipment. Attention is now being given todesigning out, or at least minimizing, criminalacts (Jones and Larkin 1993). One inherentproblem is that the larger the building, thegreater the problem of attempting to minimizeor design out crime. Certain principles need tobe considered, such as the need to have goodsightlines from staff vantage points and, byimplication, to reduce hidden corners and,where feasible, to integrate office and otheradministrative areas into public areas so as toencourage random surveillance by staff. It isoften suggested that a high level of staff pre-sence in the library, where finance permits, willreduce the level of crime. Many libraries haveemployed attendants at the front desk or havedeployed card access machines to enable en-trance to the buildings. Better lighting levelsboth inside and outside are also being deployed.Toilets, also, have been singled out as a possiblesecurity threat and are now being sited outsidethe library entrance rather than inside it.The need for concerted action to ensure that

the resources continue to be kept available forusers is one of the biggest challenges to libraryand information managers. The requirement foravailability and accessibility, the feasibility ofapplying legal sanction, and economics have tobe balanced and assessed. More control couldlead to a fortress mentality and to an attendantreduction in use (one public library in the UK hasalready had to close over crime issues). Thisnotwithstanding, the library manager cannotafford the luxury of ignorance; a coherent secur-ity strategy and plan is a sine qua non forprotecting resources for continued use in thetwenty-first century.

SECURITY IN LIBRARIES 573

References

Bahr, A.H. (1989) ‘Library, security, training, sources’,Library and Archival Security (US) 9(1): 37–44.

Chaney, M. and MacDougall, A.F. (eds) (1992) Securityand Crime Prevention in Libraries, Ashgate Publish-ing Co.

Chavez, A.M. (1993) ‘Library crime and security inacademic libraries in Texas’, Library and ArchivalSecurity (US) 12(1): 55–78.

Ewing, D. (1994) ‘Library security in the UK. Are ourlibraries safe?’, Library Management 15(2): 18–26.

Hinks, J. (1989) ‘Behaviour problems: The youthworker option’, Assistant Librarian 82(2): 29–31.

Huntsberry, J.S. (1992) ‘Library security’, Journal ofInformation Ethics 1: 46–50.

Jones, D. and Larkin, G. (1993) ‘Securing a gooddesign: A library building consultant and an architectconsider library security’, Australasian Public Li-braries and Information Services 6(4): 164–70.

Lund, R. (1993) ‘Library security’, CAPE Librarian37(6): 34–6.

Riley, G. (1992) ‘Managing microcomputer security’,Library and Archival Security (US) 11(2): 1–22.

Wilkinson, D.W. (1992) ‘CD-ROM workstation secur-ity: Context of risk and appropriate responses’, CD-ROM Librarian 7(1): 20–5.

Further reading

Arndt, D.A. (2001) ‘Problem patrons and librarysecurity’, Legal Reference Services Quarterly 19:19–40.

Lincoln, A.J. and Lincoln, C.Z. (1987) Library Crimeand Security: An International Perspective, HaworthPress.

Quinsee, A.G. and McDonald A.C. (1991) Security inAcademic and Research Libraries, proceedings ofthree seminars organised by SCONUL and theBritish Library, held at the British Library 1989–90,Newcastle upon Tyne University Library.

SEE ALSO: crime in libraries

ALAN MACDOUGALL

SEMANTIC WEB

A project designed to make the world wideweb more capable of being ‘understood’ bycomputers so as to deliver up relevant, process-able material to users. The idea was originallyproposed by Tim berners-lee, who was respon-sible for the creation of the Web itself. Heoutlines it as follows: ‘The Semantic Web is anextension of the current web, in which informa-tion is given well-defined meaning, better en-abling computers and people to work incooperation’ (Berners-Lee et al. 2001: 31). Thetechnologies behind this are XML (eXtensibleMark-up Language), which allow descriptive tags

to be attached to content, and the RDF (Re-source Description Framework), which providesmetadata platforms that can use XML tags intriple-based structures to represent data. Links tospecified ontologies (see ontology) will providethe means by which this is interpreted bycomputers.

References

Berners-Lee, T. et al. (2001) ‘The Semantic Web’,Scientific American (May): 29–37.


SEMIOTICS

The science of signs and sign systems; it is builtround the distinction between the signifier, thesign and the signified. The discipline is oftendivided into three main subdivisions: semantics,syntactics and pragmatics, each of which can bepure, descriptive or applied. The significance ofsemiotics for information theory is its abilityto provide an analytic framework for formsof documentation and modes of communica-tion.

SERENDIPITY

Described as the knack of making unexpecteddiscoveries by accident, it really refers to theability to perceive the potential or immediateutility of information encountered whilst notactively being sought at that time. browsingpermits serendipity and is a traditional (andsometimes very effective) way of using a library.

SEE ALSO: search

SERIAL

The broadest term, and the one favoured in USusage, to describe a publication issued in succes-sive parts and intended to be continued indefi-nitely. It includes periodicals, annuals,numbered monographic series and other cate-gories of this description. serials librarianshipis frequently recognized as a distinct professionalspecialization.

SEE ALSO: collection development

574 SEMANTIC WEB

SERIALS LIBRARIANSHIP

Serials librarianship is concerned with the overallmanagement and administration of a serialscollection regardless of the format of the itemswithin it. The range is wide, because a serial isany publication that is published on a continuingbasis, either regularly or irregularly. The termthus encompasses a wide range of printed mate-rials, for example periodicals, newspapers,annuals, society proceedings and transactions,and national and international government pub-lications. The term also covers material in audio-visual format, for example microforms andaudio tapes, and increasingly importantly elec-tronic journals, delivered for example on cd-rom or via the internet (Woodward 1990).

The importance of serials

Because of the nature and role of serials ascarriers of scholarly communication, mostmedium to large serials collections are located inacademic and research libraries, governmentand national libraries, and larger commercialand industrial libraries. For many academics andresearchers, the serials to which a library sub-scribes are the most important and useful ele-ments of its stock. Articles in serials arepublished much more rapidly than books andthus serials constitute a vital flow of up-to-dateinformation. This is particularly important inrapidly developing areas of science and technol-ogy. Furthermore, articles in serials frequentlydiscuss in-depth, highly specialized topics andinclude information that may never appear inbook form.

Problems of serials management

Three major problems confront the librarian inthe management of serials collections. The first isthe extent, diversity and growth of the serialsliterature. The 1993/4 edition of Ulrich’s Inter-national Periodicals Directory contains informa-tion on over 140,000 titles. Davinson (1978)estimates that between 1 and 5 million serialtitles have been published. Newspapers, too, area category of serial and it has been estimated thatover 300,000 newspapers are recorded as havingbeen published at one time or another in the USAalone. Moreover, new serial titles are regularlybeing launched and old titles are dying, whileothers are merging and splitting. By nature,

serials are far from static and as a result thosestatistics that do exist can only be approximate.The second problem is that of serial prices, whichfor a number of decades have increased annuallyfar in excess of the general rate of inflation. Theproblem of serial pricing is a complex one.Publishers claim that price increases are due tothe increased cost of production, an increase inthe total number of articles published and fallingsubscriptions. Whilst acknowledging the truth ofsome of these claims, the librarian is nonethelessfaced with the dilemma of how to continueacquiring important research-related serials thatare constantly escalating in price. As this iscombined with the third major problem of staticor declining library budgets, there are only twopossible courses of action: either cancel serials oracquire fewer monographs. In reality most li-braries have been forced to do both, and assubscription cancellations lead to higher pricesthis downward spiral looks set to continue untilviable alternatives to serials as carriers of scho-larly information become widely accepted(Woodward and Pilling 1993).

The role of the serials librarian

Managing a serials collection differs in significantrespects from managing a monographs collection.The nature of the material is voluminous anddiverse, and decisions regarding selection andretention need to be made on a regular basis.Receipt and claiming missing issues are complex,and detailed and accurate financial control andbudgeting are difficult and time-consuming. Themain objectives of the serials librarian are toensure the collection is, and remains, relevant tothe needs of the user community, by acquiring anappropriate range of print and electronic jour-nals; to ensure prompt and uninterrupted receiptof serial issues; to conserve and preserve materi-als; to facilitate access to up-to-date informationabout the range, scope and location of materialswithin the collection; to facilitate access tocurrent and back issues of serials; to exploit thecollection by alerting users to the range of serialacquisitions (Woodward 1991).

HOUSEKEEPING

Such objectives translate into a major aspect ofthe serials librarian’s job, namely the establish-ment and maintenance of effective and efficienthousekeeping routines. This is of fundamental

SERIALS LIBRARIANSHIP 575

importance: if basic housekeeping activities arenot carried out well, then the collection will notmeet the needs of library users to maximumeffect. Thus, procedures for the accurate andtimely ordering and checking in of serial partsmust be devised, introduced and supervised,together with routines for claiming missingissues, binding completed volumes and reshelvingand tidying the collection.

FINANCIAL CONTROL

Financial control and budgeting are also ofparamount importance. Most medium to largelibraries purchase the bulk of their serialsthrough subscription agents. A major advantageof using an agent (as opposed to purchasing titlesdirectly from publishers) is the reduction in thenumber of invoices requiring checking and pay-ment, and the standardization of layout andcontent of invoices in a library-determined for-mat. Other benefits can also accrue from the useof agents, for example discounts for co-operativepurchasing and/or early payment of invoices,access to bibliographical and pricing data fromthe agent’s database, discounts on automatedsystems and detailed local management andfinancial reports. Unlike books, which are paidfor as and when published, serials are paid forwell in advance of publication. Budget formula-tion takes place even earlier, thus most serialbudgets in the past have been derived from theprevious year’s figures, with an amount added onfor inflation. More recently this dilemma haseased somewhat with the commitment of majorjournal publishers to guaranteeing firm prices ata much earlier date and the efforts of subscrip-tion agents (working closely with publishers) toforecast future price trends.

AUTOMATION

Automation can play a major part in serialsmanagement. Once installed, a serials manage-ment system can materially advance the librar-ian’s control of the serials collection throughsuperior public access to information, improvedclaiming of missing issues, circulation facilities,enhanced binding control and a far wider rangeof financial and management reports. Automatedlinks between libraries and suppliers can alsosignificantly enhance the efficiency of a serialsdepartment by providing faster receipt of ordersand claims, facilities for feedback and databaseconnections.

The future of serials librarianship

The tremendous growth in the volume of scho-larly information, escalating journal prices andcuts in library acquisition budgets are beginningto change the nature of serials collections inlibraries. Although currently collections remaindominated by printed journals, many librariansare now looking towards electronic informationas an alternative to print. Significant develop-ments are taking place in the area of electronicdocument supply – article provision rather thanjournal provision. Many mainstream publishersare now either investigating or providing electro-nic versions of their printed journals and thenumber of electronic journals (both free andsubscription-based) on the Internet is growingrapidly. The impact of this trend towards electro-nic information provision on libraries is stilluncertain; more certain is that it will continueunabated.

References

Davinson, D. (1978) The Periodicals Collection, rev.edn, Westview Press, p. 4.

Woodward, H.M. (1991) ‘Management of serials col-lections’, in C. Jenkins and M. Morley (eds) Collec-tion Management in Academic Libraries, Gower, pp.163–84.

—— (1990) ‘Periodicals’, in P.W. Lea (ed.) PrintedReference Material, 3rd edn, Library Association,pp. 159–82.

Woodward, H. and Pilling, S. (1993) ‘The internationalserials industry: An overview’, in H. Woodward andS. Pilling (eds) The International Serials Industry,Gower, pp. 1–22.

Further reading

Graham, M.E. and Buettel, F. (eds) (1990) SerialsManagement: A Practical Handbook, ASLIB/UnitedKingdom Serials Group.

HAZEL WOODWARD

SERVER

A computer attached to a network, whether theinternet or an intranet, so as to manageresources and services. The term may be mademore specific by the addition of a qualifyingadjective. Thus, a file server will store files onbehalf of any user of the particular network andserve them to users, a print server will manage aprinter or printers, a network server will managenetwork traffic, and a database server will

576 SERVER

provide access to a database. Servers are oftendedicated wholly to their server tasks, but it isalso possible for a multiprocessing computer toperform the function of a server alongside othertasks. In this case, ‘server’ would refer to theprogram that is managing resources rather thanthe entire computer.

SERVICES FOR VISUALLYIMPAIRED PEOPLE

Visually impaired people (VIP), whether blind orwith some residual sight, require library servicesadapted to meet their need for information andreading material that they find difficult to accessin traditional print formats. This includes joiningprocedures that can be accomplished indepen-dently, and staff with a commitment to meetingneeds and trained in visual awareness, as well asthe provision of accessible reading materials andspecialist equipment. The overwhelming majorityof VIP are elderly, and may be housebound, orhave other age-related impairments, which affecttheir use of library services. Further, there arewide variations in the degree of impairment, sothat some VIP can read very effectively usinglarge print or a simple magnifier, while othersrequire tactile formats or recordings. Amongyounger VIP in particular, the use of informa-tion and communication technology, withappropriate software, is growing. As the propor-tion of people with access to ICT and appropriateskills increases in the population at large, it islikely that the proportion of VIP wishing to useadapted technologies will also grow. This hasimplications for the future development of li-brary and information services for VIP.A range of alternative information formats,

and adaptive technologies, are available, includ-ing large-print materials, Braille and other tactileformats, talking books, reading machines andspecialist software. There is also a wide range ofproviders of library services to VIP, with differentarrangements in various countries. In the UK, theDisability Discrimination Act (1995) requiredthat public library (see public libraries) ser-vices be made fully accessible to all disabledpeople, including VIP. The Royal National In-stitute for the Blind Talking Books service isavailable to anyone who cannot read standardtype comfortably, with the best possible specta-cles. Books are recorded, unabridged, onto multi-

track cassettes, and played on machines speciallyadapted for people with sight loss. The CalibreCassette Library provides a postal lending serviceusing standard cassettes and commercially avail-able audio books. The National Library for theBlind provides a postal lending service of mate-rial transcribed into Braille and Moon, and hasan extensive website providing an array ofelectronic services. The Talking Newspaper Asso-ciation of the UK provides national newspapersand magazines on audio tape, computer disk, e-mail or CD-ROM, and is the umbrella group forlocal talking newspapers. The Share the Visionprogramme, funded by Re:source: the Councilfor Museums, Archives and Libraries, has beeninstrumental in developing services, and hasproduced a manual of best practice.In the USA library services for VIP are

delivered through an extensive library networkheaded by the library of congress NationalLibrary Service for the Blind and PhysicallyHandicapped. As well as directly producingaround 2,000 titles each year in alternativeformats, it is responsible for developing anddisseminating policies at national level, and aimsto support a uniform quality of service. Themajority of the nordic countries providestate-funded services for VIP, delivered throughspecial libraries, responsible for both productionand delivery of alternative format materials.Public libraries are generally seen as a majorlocal access point to these services.While the majority of library services to VIP

are concentrated on provision of general servicesthrough public libraries and/or specialist agen-cies, similar considerations apply to academiclibraries. All respondents to a recent survey ofhigher-education libraries in the UK offered somelevel of support to students and staff with visualimpairment, although the levels of service avail-able varied considerably between institutions.Almost half the respondents had plans to furtherdevelop their services and one-fifth were keepingthe situation under review (Brophy and Craven,1999: 38–9).

VIP as users of library services

A survey of VIP in the UK (Davies et al. 2001)carried out in 1999–2000 looked at the views ofusers of a range of services for VIP. This foundthat VIP preferred different formats for differenttypes of information – magnifiers or someone

SERVICES FOR VISUALLY IMPAIRED PEOPLE 577

reading aloud was preferred for informationseeking, for example from small items such asleaflets, and for non-fiction materials, whilesound recordings were most popular for ‘recrea-tional’ reading – fiction, magazines and news-papers. Use of tactile formats such as Braille andMoon was often restricted by insufficiently sensi-tive fingers to learn and maintain the skillsrequired.The overwhelming majority of VIP surveyed

had used a public library at some time, but lessthan one-third had used the service within theprevious six months. There was a lack of aware-ness of the range of facilities and services avail-able. Most users visited their local branch library,or made use of the housebound service. Whilelarge-print and spoken-word materials werewidely available throughout the branch network,specialist equipment was more likely to be foundat central libraries (Kinnell et al. 2000: 41).Thirty per cent of respondents to the survey

did not use any of the primary library servicesavailable. More than half used other sources ofinformation and reading material, most com-monly small collections held locally at drop-incentres and social services departments. A keyfinding of the report was that many VIP wereunaware of the services available to them, whichleads to the conclusion that appropriately tar-geted promotion is necessary. All service provi-ders attracted very positive responses in terms ofcustomer satisfaction with the services used,although there were issues of communicationand consultation that remain to be addressed.

References

Brophy, P. and Craven, J. (1999) The IntegratedAccessible Library: A Model of Service Developmentfor the 21st Century, Centre for Research in Libraryand Information Management.

Davies, J.E., Wisdom, S. and Creaser, C. (2001) Out ofSight but Not out of Mind: Visually ImpairedPeople’s Perspectives of Library and InformationServices, Library and Information Statistics Unit.

Kinnell, M., Yu, L. and Creaser, C. (2000) PublicLibrary Services for Visually Impaired People, Li-brary and Information Statistics Unit.

Further reading

A number of these publications contain further exten-sive bibliographies relevant to this topic.

Craddock, P. (1997) ‘Share the vision’, paper presentedat the 63rd IFLA General Conference (www.ifla.org/IV/ifla63/63crap.htm).

Machell, J. (1996) Library and Information Services for

Visually Impaired People: National Guidelines, Li-brary Association Publishing.

Re:source (2000) Library Services for Visually ImpairedPeople: A Manual of Best Practice (www.nlbuk.org/bpm/index.html).

CLAIRE CREASER

SHANNON, CLAUDE ELWOOD(1916–2001)

The originator of information theory, the mathe-matical theory of communication.Born in Gaylord, Michigan, and a graduate

of Michigan University and of MIT. He was astudent of Vannevar bush. He worked first atBell Laboratories and held a chair at MIT. Histheory was announced in the article ‘The math-ematical theory of communication’ in the BellSystem Technical Journal (1948). He took in-formation to include the messages occurring incommunications media, in information technol-ogy systems and in the nerve networks ofhumans and other animals. He analysed acommunication system in terms of an informa-tion source, a transmitter, a communicationchannel, a receiver and a destination. He thensought to discover mathematical laws governingsuch systems. Whilst his results have been ofmost interest to communication engineers, someof the concepts have been adapted in such fieldsas psychology and linguistics. Information the-ory overlaps to a considerable extent withcommunication theory but is most concernedwith limits to the processing and communica-tion of information.

SEE ALSO: communication; economics ofinformation; informatics; information andcommunication technology; information theory

SHAREWARE

copyright software that is offered to users infinished or evaluation versions so that they canassess whether it meets their needs before buying.If users try software offered by this method anddecide to continue using it, they are expected toregister as users and pay for the licence to do so(see licences). The ways in which the developersof shareware handle the process vary greatly.Some merely request that users register whileothers require it. What is offered with registra-

578 SHANNON, CLAUDE ELWOOD

tion varies from the simple right to continueusing the product to an updated program with amanual and support facilities. Because the share-ware sector is comparatively informal and thedeveloper’s costs are low, the prices asked arealso low. Although developers of sharewareintend to profit from their creations, their ethosis quite distinct from that of the major softwarecorporations and much more akin to that of thesuppliers of freeware, and the open-sourcemovement.

SHELL

In computer science, a program providing aninterface between a user and an operating sys-tem; in artificial intelligence, an expertsystems package that can be used in conjunctionwith a knowledge base produced by a user.

SHERA, JESSE HAUK (1903–82)

Philosopher and theoretician of librarianship.Born in Oxford, Ohio, and studied at Miami

University, Yale and the University of Chicago.In 1944 he became Associate Director ofthe University of Chicago Libraries and beganto teach in the Graduate Library School. In1952 he was appointed Dean of WesternReserve’s School of Library Science, where heset up the Center for Documentation and Com-munication Research (CDCR) to develop aprogramme of teaching and research in informa-tion retrieval. In his teaching and writing,he consistently upheld the position that docu-mentation and information science are anintegral part of librarianship. In his view,information science contributes a theoreticaland intellectual underpinning for the work ofthe librarian. Perhaps his major achievementwas his work on the theoretical and practicalbasis for education for librarianship. This re-ceived funding from the Carnegie Corporationand appeared in 1972 as Foundations of Educa-tion for Librarianship.

SEE ALSO: library education

SOCIAL EXCLUSION ANDLIBRARIES

Combating social exclusion has been one of the

main policy drivers of social democratic govern-ments in Europe since the 1980s. In Britain theNew Labour government established a SocialExclusion Unit within the Cabinet Office in1997.Social exclusion encompasses concepts such as

class, poverty, discrimination, equal opportu-nities and racism. Many initiatives to tacklesocial exclusion have been focused on combatingpoverty. While poverty is a key underlying causeof social exclusion, some individuals and groupsare affluent, but can still experience social exclu-sion. Gay, lesbian and transgendered people fallinto this category. Most of the governmentinitiatives to tackle social exclusion are targetedon getting unemployed people into jobs. Thisfocus has both economic and moral motivations.However, a job alone does not guarantee socialinclusion. Low-paid and casual work may not besufficient to overcome economic exclusion, forexample. Black people in jobs still experienceother forms of exclusion, including prejudice anddiscrimination. Social exclusion, therefore, has amixture of social, economic and political dimen-sions.Political exclusion is to do with the lack of

power among working-class, black and othercommunities. In a capitalist market economysocial exclusion cannot be eradicated, because itis based on differences of power and class.However, social exclusion can be ameliorated,and this has been the main thrust of governmentpolicy. While each socially excluded communityis different, a number of generic causes, effects,and solutions can be identified for all excludedcommunities. This paper will focus on the socialexclusion from library and information servicesof black communities, by reasons of ethnicityand language. Examples are drawn mostly fromthe UK and from public libraries.

Historical review, 1978–98

The Assistant Librarian carried a number ofradical articles on racism and libraries in the1970s. Topics included social class and racerelations (Jordan, March 1972), black studies(Martin, August 1972) and libraries, culture andblacks (Dawes, July 1973). Black images alsoappeared in the Assistant Librarian, includingtwo covers featuring photographs of leaders ofthe Black Panther Party: Angela Davis andEldridge Cleaver. The key text to emerge from

SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND LIBRARIES 579

the 1970s was Clough and Quarmby (1978).This was the first major research project to studypublic libraries and ethnic minorities nationally.Clough and Quarmby had only partial success ininfluencing the profession.During the 1980s race had a high profile in the

national press (for example, the Brixton andToxteth riots) but was mostly absent fromprofessional journals, with the exception of Rait(1984), Elliott (1984) and a seminar organised bythe Community Services Group of the LibraryAssociation, September 1984, on Library andRace. Elliott’s research focused on the relation-ship between public libraries and ethnic commu-nities. Few of Elliott’s recommendations wereimplemented by library services.The situation remained bleak through much of

the 1990s until New Labour came to power in1997 and established the Social Exclusion Unit.This opened the floodgates to a great deal ofresearch into the causes and effects of, andapproaches to, tackling, social exclusion. Thisactivity was reflected in the library world viaRoach and Morrison (1998a, 1998b). Roach andMorrison’s key findings were that the publiclibrary service had not engaged with blackcommunities and that a social distance existedbetween libraries and black communities. Therewas a lack of vision and leadership on blackissues and there were no strategies to identify andtrack the changing needs of black communities.The public library was not central to or suppor-tive of black communities and the structure,culture and ethnic profile of public librariesexcluded black people. The public library servicehad failed to account for lack of progress in raceequality, and the resource pressure on the publiclibrary service would present further challengesto black engagement and exclusion.

Institutional racism

Many of the points made by Roach and Morri-son had been expressed twenty years earlier byClough and Quarmby. Nothing had changed interms of library services to black communities,and nothing changed as a result of Roach andMorrison – their recommendations were ignoredand their baseline for good practice (Roach andMorrison 1998b) was not implemented. Thisprompted a statement by Durrani that: ‘In LIS itis the White middle class that holds the stickwhich is used to marginalise Black and working

class people and their information, education,and cultural services’ (1999).The catalyst for change with regard to race

and libraries was the publication of the report onthe inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence(Macpherson 1999). This report, which definedinstitutional racism, made recommendations fora wide range of public services. These recom-mendations were placed in the public librarycontext by Libraries for All – Social Inclusion inPublic Libraries (DCMS 1999). This policyguidance included a six-point plan for tacklingsocial exclusion, which can be applied to blackcommunities or any other excluded group:

. Identify the people who are socially excludedand their geographical distribution.

. Engage them to establish their needs.

. Assess and review current practice; develop astrategy and prioritise resources.

. Develop the services, and train the library staffto provide them.

. Implement the services and publicise them.

. Evaluate success, review and improve.

Libraries for All was combined with Centresfor Social Change (DCMS 2000), a social inclu-sion policy for museums, galleries and archives,to produce Libraries, Museums, Galleries andArchives for All – co-operating across the sectorsto tackle social exclusion (DCMS 2001). Themain recommendations were that social inclusionshould be mainstreamed as a policy priority, andthere should be library policy objectives withregard to access, outreach and libraries as agentsof social change.

Open to all?

Muddiman (2000) suggested that, if libraries areto become agents of social change, they need to betransformed by the mainstreaming of provisionfor socially excluded groups and communities,and the establishment of standards of service andtheir monitoring. Resourcing strategies need to beadopted that prioritise the needs of excludedpeople and communities. A recasting of the roleof library staff is required to encompass a moresocially responsive and educative approach. Staff-ing policies and practices should be developed toaddress exclusion, discrimination and prejudice.Excluded social groups and communities shouldbe targeted, alongside the development of com-munity-based approaches to library provision,

580 SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND LIBRARIES

which incorporate consultation and partnershipwith local communities. information and com-munication technology (ICT) and networkingdevelopments should actively focus on the needsof excluded people. A recasting of the image andidentity of the public library is needed to link itmore closely with the cultures of excluded com-munities and social groups.The Open to All? research project produced a

series of working papers on aspects of socialexclusion. Durrani (2000) suggested that a part-nership of black communities, black library work-ers, senior librarianship and information science(LIS) managers and other stakeholders is neededto prepare a vision of a library service that is atease with diversity. A Charter of Rights for blacklibrary workers and service users should bedeveloped to move the question of equality fromthe realm of desire and goodwill to a legalrequirement. A National Race Council is requiredto address race issues, conduct formal investiga-tions and secure legally enforceable agreements toend discrimination. A DCMS Black LIS RightsAgency should be set up to ensure that LISpolicies respond to the needs of black commu-nities and that they are put into practice. Anaffirmative/positive action policy frameworkshould ensure that black LIS staffing and servicesreflect the black community. Black WorkersGroups at workplace and national levels areneeded so that black LIS workers can articulatetheir concerns and make policy recommendations.Black communities should be empowered to

ensure that there is a meaningful involvement ofblack communities in library service policy andpractice. Roach and Morrison, Libraries for All,Open to All? and the Stephen Lawrence reportshould be fully implemented. Library manage-ment must create an environment that reflectscommitment to change so that black commu-nities and workers receive fair and equal services.CILIP must ensure that issues and concerns ofblack LIS workers and communities are properlyaddressed. Libraries must respond to a multi-cultural Britain through recruitment and devel-opment of black staff, changes in organisationalculture, funding and management commitment.Research into the needs of black communitiesand recruitment of black LIS workers should becarried out within the Best Value Framework. Inthe final analysis, elimination of racism is amatter of human rights.

Change at last

There is evidence to suggest that some of therecommendations made by Libraries for All,Open to All? and Struggle against Racial Exclu-sion are being implemented. This evidence in-cludes Best Value inspection reports, AnnualLibrary Plans, Public Library Standards, theLibrary Association Policy Action Group onSocial Exclusion, the Diversity Council, theSocial Exclusion Action Planning Network andthe Quality Leaders Programme for black libraryworkers.Best Value, a key New Labour vehicle to

reform local Government, requires a review andexternal inspection of all council services everyfive years. The published Best Value inspectionreports of public library reviews suggest thatracial equality is being taken seriously by somelibrary authorities. Further evidence of this canbe found in Annual Library Plans, which requirelibrary services to plan their services to blackcommunities. A key element of Annual LibraryPlans are Public Library Standards, whichstrongly encourage library authorities to adoptand implement the principles contained in Li-braries for All. The library association estab-lished a Policy Action Group on SocialExclusion, which made recommendations regard-ing racial diversity. CILIP now also intends toestablish a Diversity Council to consider issuessuch as racial exclusion.Two key outcomes of the Open to All?

research were the Social Exclusion Action Plan-ning Network (a network of library authoritiescommitted to tackling social exclusion) and theQuality Leaders Programme for black libraryworkers. This latter programme seeks to simulta-neously develop black library workers and createnew or improved library services to black com-munities. The programme was developed andtested by Merton and Birmingham library ser-vices, and the management school at the Uni-versity of North London.There is now a real momentum building

within the UK public library movement for socialchange and to address issues such as racialdiversity. However, these efforts remain patchyand very few library authorities have the appro-priate strategies, structures and cultures in placefor effectively tackling social exclusion. In thelast resort, this is the responsibility of individuallibrary workers. As Durrani has said:

SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND LIBRARIES 581

The struggle against racial exclusion shouldbe waged in every workplace, every policyforum, every community meeting, everylibrary shelf. It is a struggle not only forthose excluded, but also for those whobenefit, knowingly or unknowingly, fromthe exclusion of some people, some commu-nities, some countries. Just as slaveryis unacceptable to us today, so should beracism and all the exploitation and socialoppression that goes under its name. Thechallenge to eliminate racism is for each oneof us.

(Durrani 2000)

References

Clough, E and Quarmby, J. (1978) A Public LibraryService for Ethnic Minorities in Great Britain,Library Association.

Dawes, L. (1973) ‘Libraries, culture and blacks’,Assistant Librarian July 66: 106–9.

DCMS (2001) Libraries, Museums, Galleries and Ar-chives for All, Department of Culture, Media andSport.

—— (2000) Centres for Social Change, Department ofCulture, Media and Sport.

—— (1999) Libraries for All – Social Inclusion inPublic Libraries, Department of Culture, Media andSport.

Durrani, S. (2000) Struggle against Racial Exclusion inPublic Libraries, Leeds Metropolitan University.

—— (1999) ‘Black communities and information work-ers in search of social justice’, New Library World100: 265–78.

Elliott, P. (1984) Public Libraries and Self Help EthnicMinority Organisations, Polytechnic of NorthLondon.

Jordan, P. (1972) ‘Social class, race relations and thepublic library’, Assistant Librarian, March.

Macpherson, Sir W. (1999) Stephen Lawrence Inquiry,The Home Office.

Martin, W.J. (1972) ‘Black studies and the Britishlibrarian’, Assistant Librarian, August: 122–4.

Muddiman, D. (2000) Open to All?, Leeds Metropoli-tan University.

Rait, S.K. (1984) ‘Public libraries and racism’, AssistantLibrarian (October): 123.

Roach, P. and Morrison, M. (1998a) Public Libraries,Ethnic Diversity and Citizenship, University of War-wick.

—— (1998b) Public Libraries and Ethnic Diversity: ABaseline for Good Practice, University of Warwick.

SEE ALSO: digital library; lesbigay librarians;telecentres

JOHN PATEMAN

SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE

A branch of sociology that is concerned with thestudy of the influence of social factors on theevolution of knowledge. Its programme is tocorrelate ideas, theories and intellectual productsin general with the social locations of theirproducers. It is a basic hypothesis of the sociol-ogy of knowledge that all knowledge is sociallyconstructed.

Concepts

Three questions have traditionally been raised inthe field, showing that three different conceptsare present. First, can knowledge be considereduniversally valid if it is subject to social condi-tions of production? Second, should all types ofknowledge be studied (i.e. ideology, myth, philo-sophy, belief, political doctrines, theologicalthought, science and commonsense ideas) or onlyideology – that is, the part of knowledge which isimplied by social life and human relations?Third, what should be studied: the social condi-tions of knowledge construction, acquisition,organization, communication, popularizationand use?In the field of library and information

science the third concept of the sociology ofknowledge is important because it concernselements that help us to understand fundamentalphenomena.

Origins

At the beginning of the seventeenth century,Francis Bacon, looking for the origin of falsenotions and of obstacles to true knowledge,which both depend on social factors, outlinedthe general territory of the relations betweensociety and thought. Then, Condorcet enquiredabout the social preconditions for different typesof knowledge. Saint-Simon, asserting the exis-tence of a necessary relation between feudalsystems and theological thought, and betweenindustrial systems and positive and socialistthought, sketched the problematics developedfurther by Auguste Comte, the founder of sociol-ogy, in his ‘law of three stages’ (theological,metaphysical and positive) and then by Marxand Durkheim. But knowledge in Marx’s viewand in the view of Mannheim, who defined in1929 the programme of the sociology of knowl-

582 SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE

edge, was restricted to ideology, that is philoso-phy, religion, politics: the sociology of knowledgewas a theory of ideologies. Mathematics and thenatural sciences were considered exempt fromthe direct influence of the social structures. So,sociology of knowledge and epistemology wereconsidered as complementary disciplines.In the European tradition, attention tended to

be centred upon the construction of ideas; USresearch was more concerned with the use ofideas. The empirical Anglo-Saxon pragmatismtried to define concrete and precise problems,and to study them with the help of statisticalmethods.

Trends

The present field of the sociology of knowledge isno longer limited to the traditional studies ofreligion and political ideologies. Three orienta-tions have extended the field of investigations toinclude sociology of science and technology,sociology of education, and sociology of massmedia and public opinion. Mead (1974) insistedon the importance of communication in thedevelopment of thought: the progress of knowl-edge is only conceivable through social relations.Znaniecki’s (1940) work seems an excellentexample of contributions to the study of thecommunication of messages through social struc-tures, where the role of ‘men of knowledge’ andsocial circles appear to shape audiences andpublics. Important notions such as opinion lea-ders in communication science and gatekeepersin information science are direct applications ofthese results. The last notion is important in thestrategic information sector of science and tech-nology monitoring.

Sociology of science and technology

Starting in 1940 with Merton (1973), the sociol-ogy of science and technology, on account of thedevelopment of scientific and technical knowl-edge, and its impact on social and culturalchanges, has become a part of the sociology ofknowledge and is for library and informationscience a priority domain. The main objectives ofresearch in this sector are better understanding ofthe social conditions of intellectual innovationand the social structure of science institutions.The effects of research communication on socialand economic structures are also studied.Sciences (including social sciences) are considered

as social realities. So, scientific work is studied:scientists as social actors participate in co-opera-tive activities, but in the pursuit of professionalrecognition, and pressed by the motto ‘publish orperish’, often engage in bitter quarrels overclaims for priority. First Bernal (1939) and thenPrice (1963) insisted on the possibility of anexcess of information due to the exponentialgrowth rates for different aspects of science.Research on the relations between science, tech-nology and society (STS) has dealt with the socialconsequences, as yet not fully understood, of themassive and continuing changes induced byscientific and technological progress. And re-cently, whilst Merton refused to analyse scientificcontents, the social mechanisms determiningthese contents have been analysed.

Sociology of scientific and technologicalknowledge

This new orientation started during the 1970sand implies extending the sociology of knowl-edge to include scientific and technologicalknowledge. It is considered as the ‘maximalist’form of the sociology of knowledge because itstates that no intellectual product can be ex-cluded from social influences. The core of the‘constructivist’ programme is based on the pos-tulate that scientific facts do not result from theobservation of nature but are social constructions(Bloor 1976). Although somewhat excessive, thisprogramme has allowed the study of ‘science inaction’ (Latour 1987) and renewed the study ofknowledge construction. Scientific creativity(Feeney and Merry 1990), controversies andsocial interaction processes have been studied tobetter understand how scientists elaborate onscientific facts. It results in a better understand-ing of the qualitative and quantitative (biblio-metrics and informetrics) aspects of the socialprocesses of construction, communication anduse of scientific and technological knowledgethat are basic for information science and tech-nology.

References

Bernal, J.D. (1939) The Social Function of Science,Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Bloor, D. (1976) Knowledge and Social Imagery,Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Feeney, M. and Merry, K. (eds) (1990) InformationTechnology and the Research Process, Bowker Saur.

SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE 583

Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action, Open UniversityPress.

Mead, G.H. (1974) Mind, Self and Society: From theStandpoint of a Social Behaviourist, ed. C.W. Mor-ris, University of Chicago Press.

Merton, R. (1973) The Sociology of Science, Universityof Chicago Press.

Price, D.J. de Solla (1963) Little Science, Big Science,Columbia University Press.

Znaniecki, F. (1940) The Social Role of the Man ofKnowledge, Columbia University Press.

Further reading

Kuhn, T.S. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolu-tions, University of Chicago Press.

Machlup, F. (1962) The Production and Distribution ofKnowledge in the United States, Princeton UniversityPress.

Mendelssohn, E., Weingart, P. and Withley, R. (eds)(1997) The Social Production of Scientific Knowl-edge, D. Reidel Publishing Company.


YVES F. LE COADIC

SOFT SYSTEMS METHODOLOGY

Soft systems methodology (SSM) is an approachaimed at helping its users to uncover and resolvethe deep ‘soft’ issues, which are embedded inpurposeful action in real-world (often organiza-tional) situations. SSM was developed atLancaster University (UK) in a thirty-year pro-gramme of action research in real situationsconducted by Professor Peter Checkland and hiscolleagues in many different settings in organiza-tions large and small, in both public and privatesectors. It is widely used in relation to the studyof information systems.SSM derived from the failure of the systems

engineering (SE) approach to cope with thesubtleties of human situations of the kind withwhich managers, of all kinds and at all levels,have to cope. SSM takes as central the fact thatany perceived ‘problem’ in the world is alwayssubjective. This means that it does not focuson the problem or the system that needs to befixed. Rather, its focus is on the worldviews,which cause people to see some aspects of theirsituations as problematical, and on a processto enable coherent purposeful action to be taken.SSM is best used participatively. It creates a

well-structured discussion/debate in which world-views are surfaced and examined in the histor-ical, political and cultural context of the problem

situation. The aim is to tease out the accommo-dations between conflicting views that will en-able purposeful ‘action to improve’ to be taken.Thus the methodology does not seek to ‘solve’problems whose existence is taken as given, butto achieve action through better understanding ofthe situation in which issues and problems areperceived.A significant benefit of using SSM is the

learning which participants can derive from theirengagement in the methodological process. Forthis reason SSM can also be described as alearning system: it learns its way to the ‘actionto improve’.The methodology can be expressed as the

four stages depicted in Figure 19: the situationin which problems are perceived; the creationof models of pure purposeful activity con-structed on the basis of declared worldviews;the use of the models to structure debate aboutthe situation by questioning the perceived ‘realworld’; and the accommodations that enableaction to be taken. Progress through the stagesis iterative as insight is gained, and muchrecycling will normally occur with willing parti-cipants.The essential ideas that underlie this process

are: the construction of human (purposeful)activity models, not as would-be descriptions ofreal-world action, but as devices to structuredebate, and the use of these devices in anorganized process of learning. These ideas wereillustrated in the first version of the methodology,which was expressed as the seven-stage processshown in Figure 20. This is the form in whichmost people learn the methodology and it will beuseful for explanatory purposes to describe thosestages here.

Stages 1 and 2: expression

These are stages where SSM user(s) are engagedin the discovery of the richest possible insightsinto the situation and are articulating theseperceptions in the most useful form – richpictures. These are called rich pictures becauseSSM users are free to use any technique, method,tool or format in order to give rise to the bestexpression of the understanding gained. This isnot a one-off exercise, and it may go through anumber of revisions, if necessary based on con-tinuous deepening of knowledge gained from thesituation. There is a deliberate attempt to dis-

584 SOFT SYSTEMS METHODOLOGY

Figure 19 The inquiring/learning cycle of SSM

Figure 20 Seven-stage process (Checkland, 1999)

courage SSM users from identifying the systemsor the problems here in order to free up theirthinking.

Stages 3 and 4: root definitions ofrelevant systems and making models

Users select some purposeful activities thought‘relevant’ to gaining insight into the problemsituation and build human activity system modelsthat consist of linked activities connected tomake a purposeful whole, together with a mon-itoring and control system. The models representpure activity from the viewpoint of a declaredworldview. For example, the purposeful actioninstitutionalised in a real-world prison could bemodelled as punishment, or rehabilitation, orprotecting society, or training criminals (the‘university of crime’ worldview). Each worldviewwould yield a different activity model. Of course,whether any particular model turns out actuallyto be relevant will emerge when the models areused in the next stage.

Stage 5: comparing models with reality –structuring debate

In this stage the models are used as a source ofquestions, which are addressed to the real situa-tion. Answering these questions will increaseinsights into the real situation and also drawattention to the previously unexamined world-views held by participants in the process. It willalso lead to new ideas for more relevant ‘relevantsystems’. The models are thus a device forenabling a deeper discussion to occur thannormally takes place in the everyday hurly-burly.

Stages 6 and 7: defining andimplementing ‘feasible and desirable’changes

In the course of Stage 5 ideas for change willemerge. The craft skill involved at this stage ofthe methodological process is to move thediscussion from the comparison of model activ-ities with real-world action to a discussion ofchanges, which would constitute improvementsto the real situation. Such changes might bestructural, procedural or attitudinal – often acombination of all three – and of course whatcounts as ‘improvement’ will depend upon theworldviews surfaced in the course of the debate.What is sought is possible change, which meets

two criteria simultaneously. It must be ‘desir-able’, given this debate based on these relevantmodels, and also ‘feasible’ for these particularpeople in their particular situation with itsparticular history; that is to say it must beculturally feasible. Hence the focus is on findingaccommodations that will enable ‘action toimprove’ to be taken.Introducing change will of course modify or

transform the problem situation and so the wholemethodological cycle can in principle beginagain. In this sense SSM is a methodology formanaging change.

Refinements

Although the methodology was first expressed inthe seven-stage form of Figure 20, and this ishow most people learn about it and begin to useit, experienced users soon internalize the ap-proach and do not follow a sequence of stagesmechanically. Rather they engage with a problemsituation on its terms (and using its language)while retaining Figure 19 as a sense-makingdevice as the intervention unfolds. This providesa map that enables the intervention to bestructured, a means of ensuring that the interven-tion remains coherent as the full complexity of ahuman situation is explored.Checkland’s books describe many applications

of the use of SSM in different situations, andtheir ‘family resemblances’ all stem from theprinciples that underpin Figure 19.Although SSM emerged from the failure of

the SE approach in management (rather thantechnical) situations, in fact in its mature formit subsumes SE as an occasional special case.Experience has shown that in a particularsituation it may well be appropriate to takesome part of the real world to be ‘a system’ andto engineer it to achieve its objectives using allthe techniques of SE. This demonstrates that the‘hard’ systems thinking of SE is itself a specialcase of the ‘soft’ systems thinking of SSM inwhich the focus is on the process of inquiry setup as a learning system.The thirty-year action research programme

that produced SSM has generated a methodologyof great practicality, as is shown by its use inorganizations around the world and by its beingtaught in colleges and universities in manydifferent countries. That is the measure ofCheckland’s contribution.

586 SOFT SYSTEMS METHODOLOGY

Further reading

Checkland, P. (1981 and 1999) Systems Thinking,Systems Practice, J Wiley and Sons. [Note that the1999 version also contains Checkland’s 30-yearretrospective on the development of SSM.]

Checkland, P. and Holwell, S. (1988) Information,Systems and Information Systems.

Checkland, P. and Scholes, J. (1990 and 1999) SoftSystems Methodology in Action, J. Wiley and Sons.

NIMAL JAYARATNA

SOFTWARE

The components of a computer system that areprogrammed rather than manufactured. It is theprogrammable elements of computer systems thatenable computers to be matched to particular setsof user requirements. There are three main cate-gories: the operating software (in the past invari-ably provided by the computer systemmanufacturer, but not necessarily so today) thatcontrols the operation of the hardware and of theother software components that the system runs;applications programmes and applicationspackages that do the particular work required ofa system; the system building tools and compilersthat are used to help build the applicationsprograms and packages. In popular usage, theterm is much more likely to be used in relation tooff-the-shelf applications packages than to theother two categories, or even to custom-madeapplications systems.

SEE ALSO: informatics; information andcommunication technology; informationmanagement; information technology

SOUND ARCHIVES

Collections of sound recordings held in li-braries, by broadcasting and record companies,and in specialist organizations created for thatpurpose.

Definitions and scope

Sound recordings are collected for three discretebut overlapping reasons: first, they providearchival material for future research and play-back; second, sound recordings provide supportfor teaching in both formal academic and non-academic studies; and, third, sound recordings

can be of recreational interest for the generalpublic. Collections of recordings are found inthe full range of libraries, though the contentof collections will differ. public librariesgenerally limit their collections to popular musicand spoken-word recordings. academiclibraries face the dual task of providingmaterials for both teaching and research whilstcollecting and preserving archival sound record-ings. Special collections are limited to collectingmaterials for one specific content area or genre.For example, record companies generally keeparchives of all their own releases. Someacademic libraries specialize in a particulargenre; notable examples include the Universityof Exeter’s collection of US jazz and bluesrecordings.

Sound recording archives andtechnological advances

Sound archives have been kept since Edison’s firstsuccessful experiments with the ‘Phonograph’ in1877. One of the first archives to provide analmost comprehensive collection of sound record-ings was set up by the British BroadcastingCorporation (BBC) in 1900. Sound archives avail-able to the public became commonplace in the1920s and 1930s following advances in soundrecording techniques. Sound recordings wereviewed as being supplementary resources tobooks, and charges were made for individualplayback. The development of different recordingformats after the Second World War and the riseof popular music from the 1950s onwards havepresented both advantages and problems for thedevelopment of sound archives. New methods ofsound recording, notably the compact cassette(early 1960s) and the compact disc (1983), haveallowed easier and better-quality recordings. No-table copyright problems faced by archives haveincluded pirated recordings (commonly from themiddle east and southeast asia) and the illegalrecording of master copies. Collection and pre-servation of sound recordings has also presentedchallenges. Deterioration of early recordings onwax cylinders, magnetic tape and shellac hasmade controlled environments and careful hand-ling necessary. It is becoming apparent that digitalrecordings are also subject to deterioration overtime, presenting further problems for archivecollections.

SOUND ARCHIVES 587

Access to sound archives

Unlike the complete printed collections of na-tional deposit libraries, there has never been alegal deposit requirement for sound recordingsin many countries; the USA is an importantexception. Accordingly, sound archives have gen-erally developed in a piecemeal fashion duringthe twentieth century. One of the most compre-hensive archives of recorded material includes theBBC sound archive. Developments following theSecond World War include the setting up of theBritish Institute of Recorded Sound (BIRS) in1948, which concentrated on collecting classicalrecordings. The Institute first received publicfunding in the early 1960s to establish a national(but not a legal deposit) archive of sound record-ings. BIRS became a department of the BritishLibrary in April 1983, its name being changed tothe National Sound Archive (NSA). The NSAprovides the most comprehensive collection inthe UK of Western art music, internationalmusic, jazz, popular music, wildlife recordingsand spoken-word collections. International re-cognition of sound archives has officially existedsince 1969, when the unesco-affiliated Interna-tional Association of Sound Archives (IASA) wasfounded. Members of IASA include most of thenational sound archives in the world, includingthe NSA, the Association for Recorded SoundCollections (USA) (ARSC) and the French Asso-ciation for Sound Archives (AFAS).

Further reading

Johansen, T. (2001) ‘Preservation of AVA heritage:Strategies of development and audiovisual archives’,Library Review 50: 417–20.

Ward, A. (1990) A Manual of Sound Archive Adminis-tration, Gower.

SEE ALSO: audiovisual materials; multimedialibrarianship

JAMES DEARNLEY

SOUND RECORDINGS

The process of transcribing vibrations perceptibleas sound on to a storage medium. Sound repro-duction reverses this process by converting thestored vibrations into sound waves.Sound recording has, historically, used a vari-

ety of storage media for recording and reproduc-tion. Three media have been particularly

successful: mechanical (phonograph); magnetic(recorded tape); and digital (compact disc, MP3).

Mechanical and electrical soundrecording

A photograph disc stores a replica (or analogue)of sound waves as a series of undulations in agroove. The first successful demonstration ofsound recording and reproduction is attributedto Thomas Edison’s ‘Phonograph’ in 1877. Hisanalogue system stored sounds on indentedtinfoil wrapped around a cylinder, played backvia a stylus. Other methods of sound recordingwere experimented with at this time, mostnotably Bell and Sumner-Tainter’s Wax CylinderPhonograph in 1885. The first attempt at produ-cing flat phonographic discs is credited to EmilBerliner in the early 1890s. Berliner’s hand-cranked, flat disc ‘Gramophone’ eventually be-came the standard format for mechanical soundrecording and reproduction.By the 1920s, flat discs had virtually replaced

cylinders, and records were made from naturalthermoplastic (‘shellac’). The introduction ofelectrical recording in 1925 by Western Electricallowed better sound recording and reproduc-tion. The year 1948 saw the introduction of 33rpm (revolutions per minute) long-playing re-cords (LPs) by Columbia and the 45 rpm‘single’ by RCA-Victor. Both these new formatsused vinylite. This was later complemented bythe development of multichannel recording inBritain and the USA. Multichannel recordingallowed two separate channels of information tobe recorded in the same groove and could thenreproduce sound with spatial perspective.‘Stereophonic’ records (as opposed to single-channel ‘Monophonic’ records) were eventuallymass-produced in 1958. The introduction ofstereophonic records and improvements insound quality and systems quickly consignedthe shellac 78 rpm disc format to obsolescence.In the 1980s, sales of magnetic and digitalsound recordings overtook sales of phonographrecords.

Magnetic sound recording

Audio tape decks electromagnetically impose ordetect various magnetic patterns that correspondto sound waves on a moving magnetizable sur-face. As with mechanical recording, magneticrecording is an analogue system aiming to

588 SOUND RECORDINGS

preserve an accurate correspondence betweenvariations of sound waves and storing replicasof original sounds. Unlike compact disc, mag-netic systems both allow playback and arerecordable.The first successful device to store information

magnetically by magnetizing areas of steel wirewas Poulsen’s ‘Telegraphone’ of 1898. Majordevelopments took place in the 1930s. Magneticsystems were developed to help synchronizesound and film; in 1936, the German Magneto-phon Company demonstrated the uses of its‘Magnetophon’ tape recorder by recording aperformance of the London Philharmonic Or-chestra. Commercial developments of tape re-cording remained limited until the developmentof the compact cassette by Philips in 1963. Thecompact cassette (universally known simply as‘cassette’) was designed originally as a dictationdevice for business. The cassette allowed high-fidelity recording and playback. Its commercialsuccess meant that the format effectively replacedreel-to-reel tape recorders during the 1970s. By1983, sales of pre-recorded music cassettes ex-ceeded those of phonograph records.

Digital sound recording

Digital sound recording samples sound waves atset intervals; the value of each sampled soundwave is a series of pulses. The main vehicle fordigital recording is still the read-only compactdisc (CD), but compression formats (notablyMP3, see below) have proved successful, ifcontroversial, since the late 1990s. CDs weredeveloped jointly by Philips and Sony in the1970s, and introduced commercially in 1983.Data is stored on a disc protected by a plasticcover. A laser beam optically converts a digitalrecording for playback. By 1988, unit sales ofCDs exceeded those of records. Other formatsintroduced in the late 1980s and early 1990s fordigital recording (apart from digital recordingsavailable on analogue systems) proved less suc-cessful. Digital Audio Tape (DAT) was intro-duced commercially in 1988, allowing digitalplayback and offering a recording facility. DigitalCompact Cassette (DCC) and MiniDisc (MD),both introduced commercially in 1992, failed tocomplement or replace CDs as the primarydigital medium.The success of CDs paved the way for the

introduction of another optical disk format – theDigital Video Disc (DVD, now more commonlyreferred to as Digital Versatile Disc). DVDapplications were introduced commercially in1996, and offered superior data capacity to theCD. They have proved particularly successful forfilm (DVD-Video), and also for computer-basedmultimedia applications (DVD-ROM). TheDVD-Audio format was introduced commer-cially in 2000, allowing high-quality sound re-production and surround sound. DVDapplications have proved commercially successfulsince 1996, though it remains to be seen whetherDVD-Audio will supplant the CD.Although CD and DVD represent the primary

digital media for commercial sound recordings,the growth of Internet usage since 1993has had impacts on sound recording and copy-right holders. Compression formats, such as theMoving Picture Experts Group Audio LayerIII (commonly referred to as MP3), allow soundrecordings to be compacted for fast downloadtimes. The success of MP3 was due to the readyavailability of playback devices, both ashardware and software. Additionally, ShawnFanning’s Napster software (introduced commer-cially in 1999) allowed straightforward down-loading of MP3 recordings from users’computers around the world. The MP3 phenom-enon has raised serious questions regardingcopyright, with computers and the Internetgiving the ability to copy and distribute digitalsound recordings easily. Napster and MP3 canbe seen as the beginnings of a peer to peer(P2P) movement in which intellectual property,including recorded sound, is exchanged betweenindividuals over the Internet in preference topurchase within the commercial system.

Further reading

Eargle, J.M. (1990) Music, Sound and Technology, VanNostrand Reinhold [a good introduction to allaspects of sound recording].

Pierce, J.R. (1992) The Science of Musical Sound, rev.edn, W.H. Freeman & Company.

Schoenherr, S.E. (2002) Recording Technology History(http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/recording/notes.html)[accessed 10 May 2002].

SEE ALSO: copyright; informatics; informationsociety; Internet; World Wide Web

JAMES DEARNLEY

SOUND RECORDINGS 589

SOUTH AMERICA

South American countries show a wide range oflevels of development in library and informationservice. On the one hand, there are libraries thatare totally automated, connected to internationalinformation databanks and which use the mostmodern electronic information systems; on theother hand, there is the great majority of librariesof the continent, still at the most rudimentarylevel of development, in which the minimalservices are totally manual.Many factors contribute to the almost general

failure of information services in South America:high illiteracy rates, geographical environment,communication difficulties and political instabil-ity. But most of all, the general underestimationof the value of libraries, both by the authoritiesand by society itself, can be seen as the mainreason for libraries not receiving adequate sup-port in the region. Nevertheless, it is importantto acknowledge that since the 1970s library andinformation centres have been generally increas-ing their services on the South American con-tinent, although this development varies fromcountry to country and between sectors. Theimpact of technological advances is bringingmany improvements to the field, accelerating theprocess of change.

University libraries

university libraries have achieved great pro-gress, but much still remains to be done. Ingeneral, they have reached a higher level ofdevelopment than other libraries, incorporatingnew information technology. Most countrieshave undertaken activities in favour of universitylibraries, encouraging the creation of networksas well as concentrating and co-ordinating activ-ities and processes within each university. Thishas been evident in Brazil since the UniversityReform Act of 1972 and the establishment of theNational Plan for University Libraries, which hasgreatly increased the systematization and use ofinformation in higher education. In Venezuela,university libraries are co-ordinated by the Na-tional System of Library Information (SINASBI).In Argentina a National Network of UniversityLibraries (RENBU) has been established and inColombia the Colombian Institute for the Devel-opment of Higher Education (ICFES) is respon-sible for the co-ordination of university libraries.In recent years, many consortia directed to

rationalizing the acquisitions and use of informa-tion products in university libraries have beendeveloped in different countries in South Amer-ica, as, for example, the Consortium of Univer-sity Libraries in Chile and The ProgramElectronic Library (PROBE) in Brazil. Consortiainitiatives involving university libraries in severalcountries at the same time have also beenestablished in South America, as the AgriculturalInformation and Documentation System forAmerica (SIDALC), the Consortium for theDevelopment of the Andes Eco-region (CONDE-SAN) and the Ibero-American Science and Tech-nology Education Consortium (ISTEC).

School and public libraries

school libraries have not developed effectivelyin South America. Schools that can count oneffective library services are exceptions on thecontinent. Most education institutions do nothave libraries: students are supposed to usepublic libraries to complete their formal edu-cation. This peculiar environment has forcedpublic libraries to develop in a particular way.In many countries, public libraries have a doublerole, functioning at the same time both as publicand school libraries.The lack of effective policy and a permanent

lack of financial resources constitute seriousproblems for library managers. Although there isgreat demand for materials in public libraries, alarge percentage of their customers are primaryand secondary school students who use libraryservices in order to obtain support for theirformal education. These students come princi-pally from state schools, where the quality ofeducation is poorer than in private ones.Financial limitations have normally obliged

public libraries to concentrate their stocks onbasic learning materials and to restrict theirservices to those related to educational purposes,thus limiting the library’s ability to maintain adiverse collection. Leisure materials, even whenrepresenting a significant percentage of stock,have been relegated to passive use. In general,public libraries are seen as places where youngpeople go to study because they do not have asuitable room at home. Figures for loans ofbooks and for the relationship between the sizeof the community and the number of volumes inpublic libraries are very poor when compared toother regions of the world. Colombia, Venezuela,

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Argentina and Brazil have developed relativelyefficient public libraries, but the other countrieshave not yet managed to provide adequateservices. Public libraries have improved notice-ably in Brazil, where the activities of the PublicLibrary System and the National Library Foun-dation have given special support to them. Theyare also increasing their services in Venezuela dueto co-ordination by the Autonomous System ofLibrary Services. In Colombia the growth ofpublic libraries has received push with theorganization of the National Network of PublicLibraries, created in 1997, and the activities ofthe Foundation for the Support to Reading, aprivate institution founded by the Colombiangraphic industry.

Special libraries and information centres

Advancements of science and technology impera-tives have made special libraries in SouthAmerica expand greatly. In order to give supportto social and economic development, countrieshave generally established systems to co-ordinatethe supply of scientific and technological infor-mation, trying to link together the efforts of alltheir libraries and information centres. TheCentre of Scientific Documentation in Argentina,the National Bolivian Centre of Scientific andTechnological Documentation, the Brazilian In-stitute for Information in Science and Technology(IBICT) and the National Centre for Informationand Documentation (CENID) in Chile are just afew examples of national organizations with theobjective of incorporating all information re-sources in the worldwide network. It is alsoimportant to mention that many South Americanspecial libraries, principally those in the fields ofmedicine, agriculture, electricity and nuclear en-ergy, can sometimes equal their counterparts inmore developed countries, using all the resourcestechnological progress provides, like cd-rom,electronic communication and access to interna-tional databases, to provide their users withaccess to countless scientific and technologicalproducts and services.

Status of the librarian

The number of librarians has grown in SouthAmerica, but the status of the profession isimproving only slowly. Librarians’ salaries arenormally not very high, especially when com-pared with those received by other professionals.

There has always been a predominance of wo-men in librarianship, which is probably re-sponsible for the low salaries. Cultural prejudicesare still found, with a tendency to see librariansas a negative stereotype. The majority of coun-tries in South America have legislation that triesto provide recognition for the profession. Incountries such as Colombia and Brazil the libraryprofession is regulated by a special law, givingsupport to professionals who attended libraryschools. Although the status of librarians hasbeen improving in several countries where theprofessional image is slowly changing, it must beadmitted that there is still a long way to gobefore it can be considered satisfactory.


The need to increase their status is a principalreason why almost all countries have organizedtheir professionals into associations. Althoughcultural attitudes and an unfavourable economicenvironment can threaten their survival, SouthAmerican professional associations organize con-gresses, seminars, continuing education courses,publish professional literature, encourage theexchange of ideas and promote unity. Again,Brazil and Argentina, with twenty-five and eigh-teen library associations, respectively, are out-standing examples of countries that havepresented greater development in the field. ManySouth American associations are affiliated toifla.

Information science education

The development of human resources for li-braries has received reasonable attention in SouthAmerica. The great majority of countries have atleast one library school, with several of themproviding postgraduate courses. Brazil, withthirty-two Bachelor’s courses, six courses forMaster’s degrees and three for the Doctorate,followed by Argentina, with seven Bachelor’scourses, are the countries where library educa-tion and information science education are mostdeveloped. Bachelor’s courses normally take fouryears to complete. The Master’s degree, generallycovering both library and information sciences,takes about three years to complete. The scarcityof professional literature in native languages andthe scarce number of full-time teachers areprobably the worst problems faced by libraryschools.

SOUTH AMERICA 591

Prospects for the future

The emergence of a global market economy inthe beginning of the twenty-first century ismaking countries look for a means of reducingthe gap between developed and less-developedcountries. Looking at what library professionalsin South America have achieved, it seems clearthey are trying to contribute to that objective bymaking their best efforts to improve the servicesthey provide to their communities. Additionally,in spite of having to acknowledge the limitationsof libraries and information centres, the speed atwhich they have been upgrading their infrastruc-ture and activities may be an indication thatSouth American national policy formulators havebecome aware of the importance of informationin an increasingly technological world. In Brazilin 2000, for example, the federal governmentlaunched the Information Society Programme,which aims to guarantee the benefits of theinformation technology to all the Brazilian popu-lation.

Further reading

Fernandez de Zamora, R.M. (1991) ‘Library resourcesin Latin America: A general panorama’, IFLAJournal 17: 45–54.

WALDOMIRO VERGUEIRO

SOUTH ASIA

The Indian subcontinent, with its history datingback to 4000 bc, was divided into India (Bharat)and Pakistan on 14 August 1947 when theBritish left India. The erstwhile East Pakistan,separated by 1,000 miles of Indian territory,became an independent country, in 1971, withthe name of Bangladesh. The subcontinent thussplit into three separate and independent coun-tries.

Libraries in India

EARLIER DAYS TO TRANSFER OF POWER

India has a rich library heritage. Libraries atTaxila (558–30 bc; Punjab, now in Pakistan) andNalanda University (Middle Ages; Bihar, India)attracted foreign travellers. The Muslim rulers of1290–1707 had established libraries but theirmodernization began during British rule (1757–1947) with the arrival of British and US librar-ians in India after the Mutiny of 1857. First came

John Macfarlane, of the British Museum Library,in 1903, who served until his death in 1906 asLibrarian of the Imperial Library, Calcutta (nowKolkata founded in 1902) on the nucleus of theCalcutta Public Library (1836), one of a numberof such libraries established by the mid-1850sthroughout the country. The next arrival wasWilliam Alanson Borden, who was selected byMaharaja Sajirao Gaekwad III on his US tour in1910. He had been impressed by the US publiclibraries and wanted to establish a free publiclibrary system in Baroda, as a part of primaryeducation provision. The third librarian, AsaDon Dickinson, a former student of Melvildewey at New York State Library School(1903), was appointed University Librarian ofthe Punjab University, Lahore, which was one ofthe eight early universities of the country. Thepost was advertised in the USA by the Vice-Chancellor, Dr C.R. Ewing, who was originally aUS missionary.The influence of the British Museum Library

through Macfarlane was confined to the ImperialLibrary, but that of Borden’s free public librarysystem, established in Baroda between 1910 and1913, with a supporting journal and trainingprogramme, had a wider impact. The librarysystem progressed so well that Borden’s depar-ture (1913) and even the death of the ruler(1939) did not deter it. The collection hadincreased to 1 million volumes by 1941 andlibrary services were available to 83 per cent ofthe population of the state. Its influence on theIndian library movement – from the All-IndiaConference in the post-1918 period to the found-ing of the Indian Library Association (ILA) in1933, aimed at dispelling British influence onlibraries – and Baroda’s echo abroad has beenfully documented by Nagar (1969).By contrast, Dickinson was uncertain about

his success in the British setting in which he wasto work. But on arrival in Lahore he was able toadjust, and started work with the missionary zealof his teacher, Dewey, both at the Library and inthe library education class, which like that ofBorden included (besides graduates) some non-graduate practising librarians. This practice ofundergraduate admission continued from 1918to 1928, when the course was suspended for twoyears. From 1935 to 1945 the course was held onalternate years to make room for the ImperialLibrary’s undergraduate Diploma course at Cal-cutta (Kolkata). In 1923 the book-based lectures

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by experts increased from twenty-two to seventy-six.Dickinson wrote an easy-to-understand text-

book for students that was published by PunjabUniversity (1916). Based on Dewey’s classnotes,this was the type of textbook that C.C. William-son wanted for library schools (Kaser 1992). Thetwo earlier books by Borden (1911) and hisassociate B.H. Mehta (1913), published fromBaroda, are no match. The spread of the deweydecimal classification in India was his othercontribution, which he hoped, in his letter toDewey (1931), would increase with the appoint-ment of his student, K.M. Asadullah, as Librar-ian of the Imperial Library (Comaromi and Satija1985).S.R. ranganathan’s return, as Madras Uni-

versity Librarian (1925), after London training,changed the library situation much faster. Hefounded the Madras Library Association(MALA) and started a certificate course that hisuniversity later took over (1931) and changed toa full-time postgraduate Diploma course (1937).Of his sixty books, Colon Classification (1933)produced the greatest impact. He became a one-man library movement (Shera 1962). His influ-ence on the subcontinent is apparent from theinstitutions founded by him. After 1945 Ranga-nathan prepared a library development plan atthe government’s request. The Congress Minis-tries formed in various provinces (1937) openedvillage and travelling libraries as a follow-up tothe Baroda experiment and Fyzee Committeerecommendations for Bombay (now Mumbai)State. The ifla New Delhi Conference (1992),to synchronize with the centenary of his birth, isa good example of his global impact.The Calcutta University Commission (1917–

19) also had its impact on university libraries.Libraries were opened where they had notexisted. Librarians were appointed in teacher’sgrades, as recommended by the Commission.Madras University was a good example of thischange.

India, Republic of (Bharat)

India gained independence in 1947, but withoutthe Muslim majority states, three of which weredivided to make them part of India. Massmigration and riots resulted, which affectedlibraries and the ILA. The Association’s journal(1942–) was suspended from 1946–9. India has a

population of 944 million (1996 estimate), 52.1per cent of whom are literate, and is over3,165,596 sq. km in size, divided into twenty-five states and seven union territories.

NATIONAL LIBRARIES

The Imperial Library became the country’s na-tional library (see national libraries) by anAct (1948), as a subordinate institution under theDepartment of Culture in the Ministry of HumanResources Development. This 600-seat Library(collection: over 2 million volumes, 17,650 cur-rent periodicals and 800 newspapers, 1992) withfree lending facilities for Calcutta (Kolkata) wasopened in 1958. The Library receives all-lan-guage Indian publications including newspapersand periodicals (along with three other libraries)by legal deposit under the Book Delivery Acts,1954 and 1956, and publishes the Indian Na-tional Bibliography.There are two other national libraries, located

in New Delhi. The Central Medical Library(1961) was raised to the status of NationalMedical Library (NML) in 1966. Holding acollection of 250,000 books/reports and 2,300current serials, the NML serves as a nationalfocal point for MEDLARS ON-LINE (MED-LINE), publishes a quarterly bibliography ofmedical literature and updates a union catalogueof medical journals. The National Science Li-brary (NSL) was founded in 1964 as part of theIndian National Scientific Documentation Centre(INSDOC), which had been founded in 1952.The Library holds 200,000 volumes and sub-scribes to 5,000 current periodicals.

PUBLIC LIBRARIES

The Madras (now Tamil Nadu) State enactedRanganathan’s draft bill in 1948, with someamendments, to support its public library system(see public libraries). The Delhi Public Library(1951), a unesco demonstration pilot library,developed into a viable network for free publiclibrary services to the city, but without anyenabling act. This Library now has a bookstockof 1,484,000 volumes, with five mobile vans andnineteen deposit stations. The Sinha Report(1957) also recommended legislative support forits proposed library system for the country. Thesedevelopments resulted in the enactment of libraryacts in nine states, by 1989, to support theirpublic libraries. Some 7,180 public libraries,including twenty-six central libraries, hold a

SOUTH ASIA 593

collection of 35.9 million volumes. Kaula (1985)points out anomalies in various public librarysystems. The Raja Ram Mohan Roy Foundation(RRMRF) (1972) also helps to develop publiclibrary networks. The Punchayet Raj Bodies(PRB) were created to promote rural librariesunder a constitutional amendment in 1992. Amodel public library act for this purpose wasapproved in a national seminar organized by ILAand RRMRF in New Delhi (1990). Some 44,200further libraries are estimated (1993) to exist inIndia. The fund’s outlay in the Eighth Plan(1992–7) has also been increased (Jambhekar1995; Raju 1997).

ACADEMIC LIBRARIES

At the time of independence, academic li-braries were deficient; the library allocation wasonly 1.8 per cent of the higher education budget.The Radhakrishnan Commission report (1948)recommended 6.25 per cent of university budgetshould be for this purpose, but by 1955 most ofthe university libraries were spending less than 1per cent. The $5 million grant to the UniversityGrants Commission (UGC), India (1953), fromthe US Wheat Loan, made a real difference.Library budgets and bookstocks increased; newbuildings were constructed. More importantly,librarians were sent to the USA for study toursand on their return workshops were organized.The twenty universities in 1947 have increased to200 universities, and twenty-two institutes andlearned bodies with university status, with collec-tions varying from 1,029,700 (Delhi University, f.1922) to 10,000 volumes (Bundelkhand Univer-sity, f. 1975). In all 7,112 academic libraries andtheir constituent branches hold 188,200,000 vo-lumes (1989). The Agricultural Research Institute,New Delhi (600,000 vols and 5,000 currentserials), publishes a monthly bibliography as well.Resource sharing in academic and research li-braries gradually increased in India in 1991 withthe establishment of UGC-supported NationalInformation Network (INFLIBNET) with its basein Ahmedabad. As a result eight metropolitanareas and university towns started working to-gether until 1995 to establish a local-area net-work (LAN). Delhi started DELNET in 1991.Now 190 local libraries are participating in itwith online catalogue access. The opening ofCALINET at Calcutta (Kolkata), 1993, with thepresent participation of thirty-eight science andtechnology libraries, a ‘high-tech’ database and

co-operation with DELNET for global searchinghas changed the automation scenario in Indiaaltogether (Vyas 1997; Kar 1999).INFLIBNET has brought this about with the

help of the National Information System forScience and Technology (NISSAT), the NationalInformation Centre (NICNET), ILA and theIndian Association of Special Libraries and In-formation Centres (IASLIC), among others. TheConvention of Automation in Libraries (CALI-BER) has been held annually since 1994. TheNinth Plan proposes to computerize the rest ofthe university libraries in the country.

SPECIAL LIBRARIES

The industrialization of the country, the estab-lishment of Institutes (1950–61) and the found-ing of INSDOC (1952) with centres atBangalore, Calcutta (Kolkata) and Madras(Chinnoy), with supportive and commendableservices, speeded up the growth of speciallibraries; 2,500 special libraries (collection: 50million volumes in 2,000 libraries; 1989) in thecountry, mostly in science, are supported by NSLwith INSDOC’s depository report collection andbibliographic access to India’s science literatureand its periodical holdings. Social science li-braries (600 in number) also receive back-upservices from the Indian Council of Social ScienceCentre, New Delhi, and its documentation cen-tre. NISSAT co-ordinates with other systems inthe country. Computer access in libraries isincreasing. Inputs from India are also made toforeign databases.

SCHOOL LIBRARIES

The Secondary Education Commission (1952–3)noted the lack of urgency in developing schoollibraries in India and recommended well-equipped libraries with a yearly intake of twobooks per student in the library collection and atrained librarian paid as a teacher to look after it.A 1981 survey found these libraries in a very poorcondition. There are 62,240 school libraries in thecountry, with a total bookstock of 64,240,000volumes (1989), manned by 25,000 librarianswith certificates of library training etc. Some highschools, however, possess good libraries.

LIBRARY EDUCATION

Delhi University, under Ranganathan’s direction,started the Commonwealth’s first degree course inLibrary Science (BLibSc, 1948, changed later to

594 SOUTH ASIA

MLibSc, 1949). The PhD programme began in1952, with the degree first awarded in 1957. In1947 four universities offered Diploma courses.The Government of India Libraries Association(1951–60) and Women’s Polytechnics (1961–)also started similar courses; the latter was of two-years duration. The Aligrah Muslim Universitystarted a shorter certificate course (1959) butreplaced it with BLibSc. By 1995 seventy-fiveuniversities offered one-year Bachelor degreecourses; fifty-five also offered a one-year MLibSc/MLIS programme. Only two had a two-yearMaster’s programme. Two or three universitieshad anMPhil programme, while twenty-five had aDoctoral programme. Five universities offered aninformal distance-education programme inBLibSc/Diploma, while two of them had similarMaster’s programmes. Satija (1992) gives an out-put of 100 PhDs by the early 1990s, with anannual output of ten, but the research is rarelycited. Mangla (1997) reports more than sixtyPhDs by 1997. INSDOC and the DocumentationResearch and Training Centre (DRTC) offer anAssociateship in Documentation and in Informa-tion Science, respectively, recognized by the gov-ernment as a Master’s degree. A number ofassociations, institutes and organizations offercertificate courses. IASLIC and other documenta-tion centres offer short-term special courses too.In addition, Information Science and Technologycourses are presently included in the curricula ofBombay, Delhi and Nagpur Universities. Thedegrees are badged as Library and InformationScience.


ILA is the largest association that holds itsconference every year and has published proceed-ings and a journal regularly since 1955. IASLICis the second largest association and publishestwo journals, including Indian Science Abstracts(1967). Almost all the states/territories have theirlocal library associations; some offer coursesand publish journals. The oldest association isAndhra Pradesh Library Association (1914),which has published its Telgu-language journalsince 1915, with a few gaps.

Pakistan, Islamic Republic of

LIBRARIES IN THE EARLY YEARS

Pakistan was carved out of British India but EastBengal/East Pakistan was separated from West

Pakistan by 1,000 miles of Indian territory.Pakistan has a population of 130.6 million(1998), of whom 26 per cent were literate in1985; the country extends over 796,096 sq. kmdivided into four provinces. Riots in 1947–8damaged libraries in Lahore, known for theirrich resources. In East Pakistan, Dacca (Dhaka)University, founded as a model for pre-partitionIndia, had an edge over the others because of thelibrary’s rich holdings on ancient history. Massmigration dislocated educational activities andthose of libraries. The Punjab Library Associa-tion of pre-partition days was suspended. Itsjournal was discontinued in 1946. Dickinson’sSchool was closed. The homecoming of Asadul-lah, a dynamic library leader in India, also couldnot save the declining situation of libraries in thisnew country. He died in 1949 without havingmade any impact on Pakistan. Indian librarieswere not divided because of bureaucratic indif-ference, while Pakistan had to start from scratchand problems abounded; no clear-cut policy oneducation and libraries could be developed. ThePakistan Education Conference (1947), however,made some decisions. Consequently, the Directo-rate of Archives and Libraries was established(1951) with a national library under its control,which changed name and status from time totime. The Pakistan Bibliographical WorkingGroup (PBWG) was formed in 1950. Locallibrary associations were also organized in La-hore (1948); Karachi (1949); and in East Paki-stan EPLA was founded in Dhaka in 1956. EPLAwas well organized and published a journal,Eastern Librarian, until 1978. The ModernLibrarian was revived in 1949 by the Associationin Lahore, which called itself a national body,but the journal was discontinued in 1950. Acertificate course was started by Punjab Univer-sity (1950) but without book-based technicallectures. The arrival of foreign consultants after1950, and L.C. Key’s four-year plan for thirty-sixmodel libraries of almost all types and twolibrary schools, resulted in brisk activitiesalthough the plan itself remained shelved. Thecountry’s first postgraduate library course was atKarachi University in 1956, before the KeyReport. The establishment of the Pakistan Na-tional Scientific and Technical DocumentationCentre (PANSDOC) in 1956 in Karachi and,more importantly, the founding of the PakistanLibrary Association (PLA) in 1957 and theinauguration of its first Conference by the

SOUTH ASIA 595

then-President of Pakistan (1958), made a greatdifference.

NATIONAL LIBRARY

The national library – called Liaquat MemorialLibrary (LML) – eventually only performed adhoc functions of that role. The Central Library ofPakistan rented premises in Dhaka (1968) andstarted collecting local publications, under theDelivery of Books and Newspapers Ordinance,1962. Another library of the LML type wasdemanded for Dhaka in 1971, but the separationof East Pakistan closed that chapter. As a resultof separation, the Department of Libraries wasalso divided in 1974, and it was transferred toIslamabad in 1981. The Pakistan National Bib-liography (PNB; 1962–; annual/irregular), pub-lished since 1966 by LML, was taken over by theDepartment. The LML itself was transferred tothe Sindh provincial government in 1986. In1993 the 500-seat National Library of Pakistanwas formally opened to the public in its grandnew building in Islamabad with 130,000 volumesand 600 manuscripts. A computer centre hasbeen established for automation of its services.The latest PNB was published in 1996 but thelast fascicule of the retrospective Bibliography(1947–61) for subjects 500–900 compiled byPBWG was at long last published in 1999.Revised according to dewey decimal classifi-cation (19th edn) and AACR2 (see anglo-american cataloguing rules) and ISBD rules,this bibliography is of more than 560 pages,with an index.

ACADEMIC LIBRARIES

The growth in the number of libraries from threein 1947 to twenty-three (with collections of2,899,400 volumes) in 1990 made up the gapcaused by the loss of six libraries to EastPakistan. The Education Policy (1992) proposedto designate the Quaid-e-Azam University, Isla-mabad, as a Science University, and its Library(collection: 155,000 volumes, 1994) as the Na-tional Science Library, but political change madeit otherwise. The President’s Ordinance, 1994,established the National University of Scienceand Technology as a decentralized multicampuscomplex comprising the military colleges andinstitutes of Rawalpindi and Riasalpur. Somelibraries have automated their operations andhave Internet access. The Aga Khan Universityof Health Sciences Library (AKUHSL) started a

resource-sharing consortium of eleven local med-ical libraries. This facility is extended abroad toArab Gulf Co-operation Council Medical Li-braries (AGCCML). AKUHSL College of Physi-cians and Surgeons of Pakistan Library, Karachi,and Lahore University of Management Sciences(LUMS) provide access to CD-ROM databases.The College is also a national focal point forMEDLINE. Lahore Business and EconomicsLibraries Network (LABELNET) was establishedby LUMS with a union catalogue/list of thebooks and periodicals of participating libraries.During 1980–7, UGC and the British Council

organized seminars/workshops in the countryand follow-up training at Loughborough Univer-sity, to remedy manpower deficiencies in aca-demic libraries. Smith (1991) documents thegood results of the programme. The NetherlandsLibrary Development Project-Pakistan (NLDP)started orientation and training in Holland in1991, but unlike the earlier programme it wasnot confined to academic librarians. There werefifty-eight universities and degree-awarding insti-tutions in the country (thirty-seven public andtwenty-one private universities in 2001). In 1994their main and constituent libraries held a collec-tion of 3,296,500 vols (Fazil Khan 1996). Col-lege libraries are poor in resources and services:435 colleges (out of 680, 1988) reported (1990)3,640,000 volumes, ranging from 35,000 vo-lumes at DJ Science College, Karachi (foundedin 1887) to 115,000 volumes at GovernmentCollege, Lahore (founded in 1864). The latter isthe only college in the country to reach sixfigures in its collection.

PUBLIC LIBRARIES

The 229 public libraries of Pakistan (1970)included 116 libraries, along with three citylibraries of the Key Report, in East Pakistan. By1989 the number of libraries in Pakistan hadincreased to 281 (collection: over 2.1 millionvolumes), along with 4,373 box libraries invillages, with over 1 million books, distributedby the Ministry of Local Self-Government andRural Development as a joint partner of theproposed Technical Working Group (TWG) sys-tem. This was a result of continued campaigningby the PLA and the Society for the Promotionand Improvement of Libraries, founded in 1960.Free public library services are provided bycommittees and the country’s oldest library, FrereHall Public Library (opened 1951), now under

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Karachi Metropolitan Corporation; collection:48,600 vols (total collection in the City 300,000vols). Fifty-one Karachi Municipal CommitteeLibraries under Zonal Committees are also dueto their efforts. The TWG’s report to the govern-ment (1984/published 1985), the establishmentof the Public Libraries Directorate in Punjab(1981) and the Punjab Library Foundation(1985) have their share too in development. TheTWG report, however, does not reflect anybodyelse’s opinion but those of the public and theprofessional librarians with whom they madecontact during their sittings in various cities andinterviews, and questionnaires answered by thosewho influence public opinion in this regard. Thishas fully been explained in the summary of thereport published in Anis Khurshid (2000). Thus,while its draft recommendations were discussedin a two-day National Seminar, Karachi, inSeptember 1993 and slightly modified, the sys-tem did not materialize due to political change.

SPECIAL LIBRARIES

The Scientific Commission (1960) and PANS-DOC’s Symposium (1963) promoted the need forbetter organized science libraries in the country.Herman H. Henkle’s recommendation for ascience library in each part to support thecountry’s documentation services was examinedby experts in 1972–6. PANSDOC was shifted toIslamabad to become an Information Centreattached to Pakistan Science Foundation in1973. PASTIC, as it is now called, with branchesin various cities, produced a computerized unioncatalogue of the science periodicals of locallibraries in 1987. In 1989 there were 331 speciallibraries, with 2.5 million volumes.

SCHOOL LIBRARIES

School libraries are, however, somewhat better. AGallup Pakistan survey in 1987 reported theexistence of school libraries in 60 per cent ofvillages, with an average of 600 books in each.Students do use these books. Efforts were madeby various associations and the Hamdard Foun-dation to improve their condition, with no result.Even a government-appointed subcommittee’srecommendation (1981) did not produce anyresults. A school library system for the cityschools in Karachi, Hyderabad and Quetta(forty-six libraries, the largest number in Kara-chi) has been computerized in a central cataloguein the Head Office at Karachi.

LIBRARY EDUCATION

Punjab University was a trendsetter on the sub-continent but its academic indifference to raisingits certificate course to a higher level continuedeven after the foundation of Pakistan. A break-through was made in 1956 by Karachi Univer-sity, when it started a postgraduate Diplomacourse, first as an evening programme but later,after availability of trained manpower, as a full-time Master’s programme in 1962, with a PhDprogramme in 1967. Karachi University alsohelped Dhaka University, to some extent, ininstituting a Master’s programme in 1962. Sevenuniversities offer a full-time Postgraduate Di-ploma in Library Science (PG DLIS). The BLISis a separate degree course at Karachi Universityalong with a one-year MLIS course. PunjabUniversity also offers it as an evening pro-gramme. AIOU is the seventh university to starta one-year MLIS in its distance education pro-gramme, with ten papers spread over four seme-sters. Its earlier BLIS is an undergraduateprogramme of four courses in Urdu spread overtwo semesters. It also offers a certificate course inUrdu consisting of two papers that are alsoincluded in BLIS. The Air Force College is theonly college in Karachi to teach BLIS degreecourses with affiliation to Karachi University.Sindh University was the first to start an

MPhil programme and award a degree in 1980.Starting a direct PhD programme as early as1969, the university has been able to award aPhD to two candidates. Islamia Universityawarded a PhD degree in 1984. An MPhilprogramme based on a year’s seminar courseswas approved in 1985 with a thesis in the secondyear or thereafter. However, it did not progressbecause of the indifference of senior teachers. Itwas never intended to be a substitute for the PhDprogramme nor has it abolished it, as it wouldappear from the award of a PhD in 1995.Information science teaching is supported byaccess to computers.Intermediate and BA (Minor) optional courses

have also been taught or approved in variouscities in the country but largely as the use ofbooks and libraries. Universities have begun togive preference to students seeking admission inlibrary courses who had taken such courses intheir undergraduate programme. Sindh Univer-sity has approved such a minor course of BSc andBCom (Hons) as well.There are still differences between DLIS papers

SOUTH ASIA 597

in various universities. There are as many asfifteen papers in Islamia University, which has acombined two-year MLIS programme to twelvepapers and an eight-week Practicum in a selectedLahore library as a compulsory requirement,while some other universities following a two-year programme have just ten or twelve papers.This disparity has resulted from various curricu-lum revisions commissioned by UGC in the post-1980 period that were not uniformly adopted inthe country as the UGC first revision (1980) hadbeen. The last National Revision Committee metin Karachi (October 2001) to finalize the 4th or5th draft revision, which has not been madepublic. Some criticism was made recently in theliterature. Khalid Mahmood (1997) says that the1991 revision for the first time recognized theimportance of Information Technology, which isnot true. He does not, however, mention thedropping of one paper, although this had notbeen demanded. The fact that expansion thattook place in the subject of Information Scienceand its technology, which was made a compul-sory paper in the 1980 syllabus, meant that farmore time was now required to cover develop-ments in the subject. Another critic, after relin-quishing an important responsibility in auniversity, finds faults in the library educationprogramme itself but he does not say why thosedeficiencies highlighted were not removed.


PLA and PBWG are the two national associa-tions that are active. The former has zonalbranches, some of which established computertraining centres with the assistance of NLDP (butit has now discontinued this programme) andnone of the centres have funds to maintain theirequipment. PLA holds conferences and publishesthe proceedings, and also publishes a journalirregularly. It rotates its headquarters every twoor more years to zonal headquarters. The PunjabUniversity Library Science Alumni Associationrevived its activities by holding two conferencesin the early 1990s.

Bangladesh, People’s Republic of

East Pakistan separated in 1971, and Bangladeshbecame an independent country. New institutionswere established; some old ones were upgraded.Migration started once again. The EPLA becamethe Library Association of Bangladesh (LAB).

Eastern Librarian, which was its organ, wasdiscontinued in 1978. Bangladesh (area 143,998sq. km) has a population of 125 million (1997),with 38.9 per cent adult literacy (1997). Thereare five administrative divisions.

NATIONAL LIBRARIES

The CPL (collection: 112,400 volumes, 1968)became the National Library of Bangladesh(NLB) in 1975, under the Directorate of Archivesand Libraries. The Education Commission (1974)had recommended this status for CPL and aseparate directorate to look after libraries. TheNLB (collection: 2,000,000 volumes, 1999) re-ceives the country’s publications under a newlegal deposit act, and has published the Ban-gladesh National Bibliography annually since1979. Funds, however, delayed the publicationof the Bibliography from 1990.Ahmed (1985) names three more national

libraries located in Dhaka: (1) National HealthLibrary and Documentation Centre, under theDirectorate General of Health Services (collec-tion: 14,000 volumes and 300 current period-icals), with national focal point for MEDLINEetc.; (2) National Science Library, established in1981 by merging with the National BangladeshScientific Documentation Centre (BANSDOC;1963 as a branch, 1972); and (3) NationalAgricultural Library and Documentation Centre(present collection: 12,000), under the Bangla-desh Agricultural Research Council (BARC).

ACADEMIC LIBRARIES

No new university has been opened since inde-pendence. Six university libraries hold a book-stock of over 1.1 million volumes (1990). DhakaUniversity Library is the country’s oldest andrichest library (collection: 651,200 volumes and30,000 manuscripts, 1994). The latest edition ofWorld of Learning lists nine university libraries,whereas Rahman (1997) gives eleven in additionto eighteen private university libraries. Half-a-dozen such libraries are foreign-sponsored spe-cialized subject libraries mostly opened (1992) inDhaka, in business, engineering and computerscience, with relatively small collections com-pared to public universities. They, however,provide specialized reference services and evenoutside access to much larger databases andInternet services (Foote 1995). There were 600colleges in 1978, with collections ranging from35,000 to 58,300 volumes in 1981.

598 SOUTH ASIA

PUBLIC LIBRARIES

The CPL (collection: 112,400 volumes) is thecountry’s major public library; it administers fourdivisional libraries, with collections of 32,100 to69,100 volumes in each (originally opened asmodel city libraries), and sixty-three districtlibraries, with a bookstock of 4,000 volumeseach. These libraries do not lend books. ThePublic Libraries Department (1983) supervisesthem. Rahman (1997) mentions about fifty-sevennon-government district libraries, 245 librariesand sixty-four small libraries but no librarylegislation exists in the country. The NationalBook Policy has recommended such legislationfor public libraries.The Centre for Integrated Rural Development

for Asia and the Pacific (CIRDAP), an inter-government organization of eleven countries withthe headquarters in Bangladesh, established theInformation Network on Rural Development(INRD). Some forty libraries in the area partici-pate in this and exchange information. LAB hasprepared a format for the Network. ‘It enjoysmaterials and working conditions which most ofthe colleagues can only dream of’ (Wanasundera1994).

SPECIAL LIBRARIES

Fifty-seven special libraries (in 1970), with col-lections ranging from 750 to 37,500 volumes,have increased to 125 libraries since the estab-lishment of Bangladesh (Rahman 1997). Theirresources and services, in some cases, are aheadof other libraries in the country. Most librariesare part of scientific, research and governmentalorganizations. The libraries of BARC and theInternational Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Re-search, Bangladesh (collection: 34,500 volumesand 525 periodicals), represent the most sophis-ticated operations in the country. They arespecialized libraries opened by foreign agencieswith ample funds and access to foreign experts,the latest journals, online and offline databases,and CD-ROM facilities (Foote 1995).

SCHOOL LIBRARIES

The Education Commission (1974) found schoollibraries in bad condition. Where they exist theyare locked in the headteachers’ offices or tea-chers’ common rooms. In the mid-1980s aprogramme of training for librarians and supplyof audiovisual materials to schools was un-dertaken.

LIBRARY EDUCATION

Dhaka University has offered MPhil and PhDprogrammes since 1976 and 1979, respectively,in addition to MA (LIS) (1962) a two-year MAin LS in 1975–6 and a three-year BA Honours inLIS (1988). Its Diploma course has been takenover by the LAB (1989), which already offers afour-month certificate course twice a year with asecond centre in Rajshahi (1973). Rajshahi Uni-versity also started a Diploma course in 1991and a three-year BA (Hons) in 1993.


The LAB has restarted publication of EasternLibrarian. There are three more separate associa-tions for college/medical librarians and informa-tion specialists.

References

Ahmed, Z. (1985) ‘The national libraries of Bangla-desh: Their present status and future role’, EasternLibrarian 11: 36–50.

Comaromi, J.P. and Satija, M.P. (1985) ‘History ofIndianization of the Dewey Decimal Classification’,Libri 35: 7–11.

Fazil Khan, M. (1996) ‘Information society and itsstatus in Pakistan’, Pakistan Library Bulletin 27: 1–9.

Foote, J.B. (1995) Third World Libraries [now WorldLibraries] 5: 58–66 [on Bangladesh].

Jambhekar, N. (1995) ‘National policy on publiclibraries in India’, Third World Libraries [nowWorldLibraries] 5: 8–21

Kar, P. (1999) ‘XML: towards efficient searching’, inP.S.G. Kumar and C.P. Vashisth (eds), CALIBER1999: Academic Libraries in the Internet Era.Proceedings of the Sixth National Convention forAutomation of Libraries in Education and Research,Nagpur, India, 18–20 February 1999, pp. 451–8

Kaser, D. (1992) ‘Asa Don Dickinson’, in Sajjad-ur-Rehman et al. (eds), Library Education in Pakistan,Punjab University Library Science Alumni Associa-tion, pp. 3–10.

Kaula, P.N. (1985) ‘Librarianship – a career’, Herald ofLibrary Science 24: 312–16.

Khurshid, A. (2000) Planning and Management ofLibrary and Information Services in Pakistan, Kar-achi: Library and Information Services Group.

Mahmood, K. (1997) ‘Information technology andlibrary education in Pakistan: recent developmentsin the curriculum’, Education for Information 15:197–205.

Mangla, P.B. (1997) ‘National policies on libraries,information systems and services in India: an over-view’, New Review of Library and InformationResearch 3: 155–74.

Nagar, M. (1969) ‘Public library movement in Baroda’,unpublished PhD dissertation, Columbia University.

Rahman, Afifa (1997) ‘Library development in Bangla-desh’, Herald Lib. Sc. 36: 52–9.

SOUTH ASIA 599

Raju, K.A. (1997) ‘Decentralised development and therole of public libraries in India’, Public LibraryQuarterly 16: 39–57.

Satija, M.P. (1992) ‘Library science research in India’,Indo-US Conference of Library and InformationProfessionals, pre-IFLA Conference, New Delhi, 27–28 August 1992, unpublished paper.

Shera, J.H. (1962) ‘S.R. Ranganathan; One Americanview’, Pakistan Library Review 4: 6–8.

Smith, I.A. (1991) ‘International co-operation in pro-fessional development of academic librarians: APakistan–British Council success story’, in N. Qure-shi et al. (eds) Trends in International Librarianship,Royal Book Co., pp. 105–32.

Vyas, S.D. (1997) ‘Management of backlog cataloguingin university libraries in Rajasthan’, Annals ofLibrary Science and Documentation 44: 1–17.

Wanasundera, L. (1994) ‘The information network onrural development, Bangladesh’, Third World Li-braries 5: 11–16.

Further reading

Banerjee, D.N. (1997) ‘India’s National Library’, Her-ald of Library Science 33: 230–8.

Khurshid, Anis (1969) Standards for Library Educationin Burma, Ceylon, India, and Pakistan, University ofPittsburgh [describes library development from theearly days to 1969].

SEE ALSO: distance learning; library education

ANIS KHURSHID

SOUTHEAST ASIA

Southeast Asia, or ASEAN as it is more popu-larly known in the international arena, is aregion comprising Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia,PDR Lao (Laos), Malaysia, Myanmar (formerlyBurma), the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand andVietnam. All ten nations are now members ofASEAN (Association of Southeast Asia Nations)and comprise some 500 million residents. Theeconomies of these countries are quite disparate,but, through the ASEAN mechanism, they colla-borate on a variety of socio-economic pro-grammes and initiatives including reading,culture and librarianship to ensure that theregion as a whole makes progress. A strongalliance and a collaborative spirit has also beenforged among libraries and librarians in thisregion. They work closely through a parallelmechanism – the Congress of Southeast AsianLibraries or CONSAL.CONSAL was founded in Singapore in 1970

in response to a growing sense of a SoutheastAsian identity. The initiative in forming CON-

SAL was taken by the Library Associations ofSingapore and Malaysia, due to their commonorigin and long history of close co-operation.Representatives from the library associationsof Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philip-pines, Singapore, Thailand and South Vietnamratified the constitution and became the foundingmembers of CONSAL. CONSAL focuses onpromoting co-operation in the fields of librarian-ship, bibliography, documentation and relatedactivities. Membership is open to national libraryassociations, national libraries and other re-lated organizations in the region. CONSAL holdsa conference once every three years with eachmember country taking turns to host the event.CONSAL XI was held in Singapore in April

(Yit and Foo 2002). This was a landmark eventas it resulted in the admission of the tworemaining ASEAN countries, Myanmar andPDR Lao, as CONSAL members and the forma-tion of the CONSAL Secretariat. Singapore wasappointed to host the Secretariat for a period ofthree years and manage the collaborative projectsthat were endorsed. Among the projects ap-proved at CONSAL XI were resource sharingand legal deposit to facilitate access to na-tional bibliographic resources including acquisi-tions and exchange; copyright to explore theguidelines for fair use of various types of materi-als, especially digital transmission and to exploresetting up a rights management system; preser-vation and conservation of library materialsfor member countries; translation of materials forthe main purpose of making available the cul-tural heritage of each country; and a training anddevelopment plan to co-ordinate training oflibrarians in the region.

Investing in libraries

There is a growing demand for more sophisti-cated library and information services in theregion, propelled by technological advances, en-vironmental changes and a more technologicallyaware and affluent user community. As a result,governments in the region have been reviewingand investing in the public libraries to pro-mote reading, info-literacy, learning and innova-tion among the people, and to providecommunity-based institutions. The region sharesthe common goal of promoting social inclusionand bridging the divide by ensuring equal accessto content and services available at the libraries

600 SOUTHEAST ASIA

as well as through the internet. The missionstatements of the national libraries or authoritiesoverseeing libraries reflect the scope of mostlibraries in the region. The roles of libraries seemto revolve around the twin strategies of support-ing lifelong learning through access to informa-tion and preserving the nation’s intellectualcapital. To illustrate, the mission of the NationalLibrary Board, the government agency spear-heading public library development in Singapore,is ‘to expand the learning capacity of the nationso as to enhance national competitiveness and topromote a gracious society’, and the corporatephilosophy of the National Library of Malaysia,which is ‘ensuring that Malaysia’s intellectualheritage [is] collected for the. . .reference of pre-sent and future generations’. These are reflectiveof the ambitious goals of the nation’s publiclyfunded libraries.A review of developments in the ASEAN

libraries revealed the quantum changes occur-ring, especially in Malaysia, Singapore and Thai-land, and the newer economies such as Vietnam.Vast improvements have been seen in the collec-tions with an increase also in digital collections,library education, automation and going digital,co-operative projects, manpower training andservice improvements. The newly emergingeconomies of Cambodia, PDR Lao, Myanmarand Vietnam are slowly making attempts, insome cases with foreign aid, to restore much ofwhat was destroyed through years of war andneglect.

Overview of libraries in ASEAN

The information needs of the citizens are collec-tively served by a constellation of national,public, academic and special libraries. Theyprovide the same basic services as those in themore developed world. However, these librariesmay lack depth and comprehensiveness becauseof budgetary and other resource constraints. Thepublicly funded libraries are managed by theappropriate government agencies; for instance,academic libraries are usually under the edu-cation agency and public libraries are underculture or information-related agencies. Thelaunch of Library 2000: Investing in a LearningNation by the Singapore Ministry of Informationand the Arts in April 1994 spurred other coun-tries in the region and the world to reinvent andposition libraries as key pillars supporting life-

long learning. Many are developing their ownstrategic plans and/or revamping library andinformation services (see Quick tour, below).Emphasis has also been placed on libraryautomation, linking the libraries and creatingdigital content so that the users can seamlesslyaccess the nation’s information resources.The national libraries in the region have the

usual functions of providing a reference andinformation service, and acting as the legaldeposit libraries in their respective countries. Assuch, most of the national libraries have em-barked on digitization programmes to makeavailable their treasures online. They are also theinternational standard book number agen-cies. The National Library of the Philippines actsas the Copyright Office while Singapore hasplans to take on this role. The major develop-ments in the last decade include the move, in1992, of the National Library of Malaysia to itsnew expanded premises with enhanced servicesincluding catering to the disadvantaged, and themajor renovation of Singapore’s National Li-brary, in 1997, to include multimedia facilitiesand a café. Singapore has commenced work on abrand new National Library building that will beat least five times larger than the existing facility.The new library has been named NationalLibrary SINGAPORE and will open its doors in2004. The national libraries typically provide theleadership in library matters in most ASEANcountries, except Brunei (where there is nonational library) and Singapore where the Na-tional Library Board was set up in 1995 tospearhead public library development.The public libraries in the region focus on the

provision of lending and basic reference servicesto the public at large. A typical configuration ofthe public library system is one comprising anetwork of state and local public libraries sup-ported by mobile libraries (see mobile library)and a wide array of user education and out-reach programmes. Countries such as Indonesia,Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam place emphasison providing rural library services, and con-duct various library programmes such as story-telling and reading. The developments inSingapore demonstrate the vast improvementsmade in the region. Public libraries in Singaporehave been transformed into lifestyle experiences.This transformation resulted in the doubling andtripling of loans and visitors at the libraries, withsome 25 million loans and 21 million visitors a

SOUTHEAST ASIA 601

year in 2000 compared to 14 million loans and7.3 million visitors in 1995. The Library 2000Report had recommended an adaptive three-tierpublic library system with quality servicesthrough market orientation to reach out to thetarget communities and raise usage. Libraries inSingapore have adopted new merchandising tech-niques and technology to improve both businessoperations and service quality. Borrowing andreturning books has been simplified through theimplementation of the RFID-enabled self-checksystem for borrowing and returning stations.Fines can be paid using cashcards at the bor-rower enquiry stations. RFID-enabled systemsallow for immediate cancellation of loans uponreturn at book drops at the libraries. The firstremote book drop (perhaps in the world) islocated at the premises of a bank in the busycentral business district, allowing library usersworking in the area to drop off books in the city.Public libraries in Singapore are now not just

stand-alone libraries in residential neighbour-hoods but are brought to where the people are,and hence are located in shopping malls and civicand community centres. To reach out to youngadults, the largest population group that is notusing libraries, a trendy new library was openedat a busy shopping mall in the heart of the city.Called the ‘Library Orchard’, it has proven to bea crowd puller and also stimulated Ngee AnnPolytechnic to design a ‘lifestyle library’ and playits part in inculcating reading habits in the youngadult student population at the polytechnic. Inaddition to general lending libraries, Singapore isalso beginning to roll out thematic libraries,while the performing arts library (‘Library Es-planade’) will open at the new Theatres at theBay Performing Arts Centre in late 2002. Singa-pore may make another first when it opens its‘Library Sengkang’, a community library in thenortheast of the island, which will be unstaffed.It will be a self-help library, with no librarianson-site but in touch through a ‘cybrarian’ service.Vast changes have been made or are being

made at the public libraries, but the develop-ments in the academic libraries have been some-what less colourful. These libraries continue toplace priority on serving the needs of the aca-demic community and in some cases extendingtheir services to industry. Through the collabora-tions between the academic institutions and over-seas partners, the academic libraries are forginglinks with overseas academic libraries. This is

particularly the case in Singapore. In academiclibraries collection development, informa-tion technology, involvement in the academiccurriculum, co-operation and responding to thenational aspirations are common themes. Theselibraries also recognize the implicit role of theacademic and research library in supporting thetransformation of the economy and human re-source development.The academic libraries of Malaysia, the Phi-

lippines, Singapore and Thailand seem compara-tively more developed in terms of the collectionsand services offered to the user. Many aremoving towards adopting the digital path todelivery of services by creating digital libraries(see digital library) as part of the campus-wide e-strategy. In the less developed ASEANcountries, such as Myanmar, Cambodia, PDRLao and Vietnam, budgetary constraints hamperdevelopments. Many are seeking assistance frominternational agencies to assist them in thedevelopment of collections and exploitation oftechnology.Some interesting developments in the region

can be seen in Singapore at Nanyang Technolo-gical University, Ngee Ann Polytechnic and thenewly formed third university, the SingaporeManagement University. Nanyang TechnologicalUniversity transformed its main library into an e-library with some 450 computers allowing stu-dents to access a vast variety of informationservices and resources. The Ngee Ann Polytech-nic introduced a ‘lifestyle library’ with a café tocomplement its academic library, and the Singa-pore Management University decided to out-source the development and operations of itslibrary to the National Library Board. This, theSMU said, allows for it to focus on its corebusiness of teaching and research while leavingthe non-core business to partners who have thecore competencies. It also addressed the issue ofcareer development of library staff, as the uni-versity did not have to worry about the specia-lized team’s career development needs.

School libraries

The development of school libraries in theregion is still at an early stage. For example, inBrunei Darussalam, the school library is a recentsocial phenomenon. However, all newly builtschools now have libraries or resource centres. Inmost of the ASEAN countries, teachers manage

602 SOUTHEAST ASIA

the school libraries as an added responsibility tothe teaching load. Student librarians then assistthe teacher in running the library. The nationallibraries and the library associations assist byorganizing training programmes for teachers. Ithas been recognized in Malaysia and Singaporethat there is a need for integration of the resourcecentre into the educational process and profes-sional involvement in developing generic informa-tion handling skills and information literacy.The Ministry of Education in Singapore is explor-ing working with the National Library Board toset in place school media resource centres. TheNational Library Board’s Student Virtual Com-munity supports the needs of students. It en-courages continuous learning and sharing ofideas among students. Malaysia has explored BillGates’s concept of a Connected Learning Com-munity (CLC) Project. It provides a three-wayconnectivity between schools, libraries/learningresources and parents, and facilitates equal accessand opportunity for the students and communityto learn. The project involves the NLM, fourteenstate libraries and others.

Special libraries

The majority of special libraries in the regionare in the government sector. In Indonesia, forexample, it is estimated that there are 620 speciallibraries of which 81 per cent are in governmentorganizations. Malaysia, although it has fewerspecial libraries than Indonesia, has a broaderselection of different types of special library withsome offering substantial services; the situation issimilar in Thailand. Singapore has some 200special libraries with the government librariesbeing managed by librarians or library officersseconded from the National Library. Most spe-cial libraries offer a range of services customizedto meet the needs of their clientele and they wereamong the early adopters of electronic informa-tion services. Another emerging trend beingwitnessed is the expanded role the special li-braries play in knowledge management, withthe librarian playing the role of the knowledgesteward or officer, especially in Singapore andMalaysia.An innovative special library service can be

seen at the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange(KLSE) Library in Malaysia. The KLSE Libraryoffers a comprehensive and consolidated secu-rities information service both through its main

library at the exchange, and also through itsbranches and the world wide web. The servicesuite includes daily alerts, information searches,creating digital library and CD-ROM products,electronic publishing and running the Publica-tions Unit and a shop. It also boasts of a state-of-the-art ‘Info Gallery’ showcasing various ser-vices such as access to securities databases, asimulation room allowing users to try theirhands at investment and a gallery on the historyof the KLSE. The library staff also conduct usereducation programmes including travelling road-shows across the states of Malaysia to promoteawareness of KLSE and securities investment.The Singapore Press Holding’s Library is an-other state-of-the-art special newspaper librarythat has come a long way. It has unique andvast historical archives that date back to 1845,when The Straits Times was first published. Thenewspaper collection from 1989 is now avail-able through the Newslink database. Unlikeother libraries, it houses a precious collectionof 20 million photographic negatives and 5million photographs, which are available inhard copy and in online databases, some ofwhich were never published. These collectionsrival even those in the National Archives. Whatis interesting is that with its move to brand newmodern premises, these massive historical infor-mation sources are being made available foranyone and everyone, from the inquisitive sec-ondary school student to the serious doctoralresearcher.

Quick tour

BRUNEI

One of the newer CONSAL members, it openedits first library in 1953, which was operated bythe information services department with only anattendant to run it. Brunei has since come a longway and now has a network of public librariesand special libraries in government agencies.Brunei does not have a national library but theDewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP), established in1963 (opened in 1970), serves as the main sourceof information for the public and researcherswith lending, reference and enquiry services. TheDBP comprises a network of four branch li-braries and forty-three mobile library servicepoints. The library plays a leadership role inpublishing the Directory of Libraries in BruneiDarussalam and Directory of Librarians.

SOUTHEAST ASIA 603

CAMBODIA

Though war-torn for years, the country nowboasts some seventy libraries, with the NationalLibrary of Cambodia (NLC) playing a pivotalrole. The NLC is managed by the Department ofBooks and Reading of the Ministry of Culture andthe Fine Arts, and acts as the legal deposit librarymaintaining the national filing and documenta-tion centre. Various international organizationssuch as the UNDP, unesco and UNICEF have setup libraries in Cambodia. It has a unique collec-tion of national written heritage documentspublished in French between 1925–70 and thosein the Khmer language between 1955–75, and acollection of works written on palm leaves.

INDONESIA

Indonesia is prolific in provision, with some 157public libraries serving 314 districts, 500 aca-demic libraries, 1,600 special libraries and219,000 school libraries. The National Library’sIndonesiana collection provides a wealth ofinformation on the history and culture of eachregion including rare manuscripts written in avariety of formats – palm leaves, barks, bambooand so on, and mainly in the Dutch language. Toreach the dispersed communities living in isolatedareas, there is a need for mobile libraries. Toencourage reading and library use, the librarieshave proclaimed the month of September as the‘Reading Habit Month’ and ‘Visit Library Day’.

PDR LAO

Traditional libraries were found in, for instance,the Laotian Buddhist temples, which wereusually small and windowless. There are some1,700 such libraries in the seventeen provinces.The collections date back to the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries ce, many on palm leavesand stored in beautifully lacquered woodenmanuscript caskets. These precious materialswere saved from damage and loss by the gener-osity of a German foundation that funded apreservation project in 1992–2002. The NationalLibrary of Lao (NLL) is being rebuilt andreceives book donations from other countries,including, in the past, the Soviet Union. It alsohouses national manuscript collections. The NLLco-ordinates library development throughoutLaos. The public libraries are branches of theNLL. Bookmobiles serve regions without alibrary. School libraries are widely distributedand largely supported by the Ecoles Sans Fron-

tières (ESC); bookcases containing children’sbooks circulate between libraries. NLL is tryingits best to get connected to the world and tomake available Internet and online services.

MALAYSIA

Malaysia’s Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia (Na-tional Library Malaysia, NLM) was establishedas a unit of the National Archives in 1966.However, in 1972, the National Library Act waspassed and the National Library was separatedfrom the National Archives, becoming a federalgovernment department. The Deposit of LibraryMaterial Act was passed in 1986 and theNational Library Act amended in 1987. It alsohosts a virtual exhibition of Malaysia’s history,culture and heritage. The Library moved to itscurrent premises in 1992 and the building is acultural landmark known for its unique architec-ture; the architectural concept is that of aTengkolok, the customary Malay headgear usedby royalty and commoners on special occasionsto cover the head, reflecting the country’s in-tellectual and cultural achievements. The Na-tional Policy for Library and InformationServices was approved in 1989. NLM aspires tobe a world-class library in the provision ofexcellent information services, and it contributesto the realization of Malaysia’s vision of becom-ing an industrialized and developed nation by2020 in line with the national Vision 2020. It isalso developing a strategic plan and setting inplace a competency development plan for allprofessional staff. It places emphasis on adminis-trative reforms for better quality services and isISO 9000 certified.

THE PHILIPPINES

The origin of the National Library of thePhilippines (NLP) dates back to 1900 whenMuseo Bibliotheca de Filipinas was established.The practice of librarianship did not start till1901 when the American Circulating Librarywas donated and that formed the nucleus ofNLP, which comes under the jurisdiction of theNational Commission of Culture and the Arts(NCCA) in the Office of the President. NLP hasthe dual function of being both the nationallibrary and central node for the public librarysystem. The public libraries operate under theaegis of the NLP. The Philippines has some 861public libraries and fourteen bookmobiles. It alsoprovides assistance to local government units in

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the establishment, development and maintenanceof libraries in provinces, with the goal of narrow-ing social and economic divides, especially in therural communities. Library Day and NationalBook Week are held on 9 March and 24–30November annually. The NLP carries a rich arrayof printed material in various Filippina dialectssuch as Tagalog, Cebuano and Bikol. Historicalmaterials from the Spanish to the Japaneseperiods, and the precious manuscripts of thenational hero José P. Rizal’s novels Noli MeTangere and El Filibusterismo. The NLP alsotakes on the additional role of a copyrightregistration office and administers the registra-tion of copyright by authors.

SINGAPORE

The National Library, established in 1958, servesas the national and public library of Singapore.Its roots, however, go back in time to theestablishment of the Singapore Institution (Raf-fles Institution, as it is known today) in 1823, bySingapore’s founder – Sir Stamford Raffles. TheNational Library was officially opened by theYang di Pertuan Negara Inche Yusoff bin Ishakon 12 November 1960. However, in 1992 thegovernment carried out a major library reviewresulting in the formation of the National Li-brary Board (NLB) on 1 September 1995. Itsservice philosophy is to provide a convenient,accessible, affordable and usable service to thepublic. It has innovatively exploited technologyto enhance its services and operations, therebycreating an enriching experience for the user. TheBoard oversees the management of the NationalLibrary itself, two regional libraries, eighteencommunity libraries and forty-six communitychildren’s libraries. Through these libraries andthose of its partners, the NLB ensures that usershave access to a rich array of informationservices to support lifelong learning. Its publiclibrary services include loans, community infor-mation services, reference and information ser-vices, audiovisual services and the organizing oftalks and programmes for adults, young peopleand children. The academic and special librariescomplement the public library services. All theselibraries work closely together to meet thenation’s information needs. The libraries in Sin-gapore have become an integral part of thenational learning infrastructure, having beenpositioned as key pillars to support learning,discovery and exploration. Through its numerous

programmes, the Library helps to contributetremendously in creating the ‘digital dividend’.For instance, mass training is carried out atthe One Learning Place (OLP) to inculcate newinformation technology and information literacyskills in young and old alike, in both English andother languages. The NLB was appointed to co-ordinate the National IT Literacy Training Pro-gramme in Singapore. In addition, some 800computers in the libraries are a boon to thosewho do not own a computer, offering them agreat opportunity to experience life on theInformation Highway and access virtual re-sources at nominal, affordable rates. The NLBhas made available a rich array of informationsources in print and digital media in the librariesand contributed in bridging the digital divide.

THAILAND

The National Library of Thailand (NLT) wasestablished in 1905 by the amalgamation of threeolder royal libraries, though in reality the library’shistory dates back to the fourteenth century ce. Itmoved to its current premises in 1966, within theprecinct of the Grand Palace in Bangkok. Abouteighteen branches located in various provincessupport the main library. It was Internet-enabledin 1999. Two major policy documents haveinfluenced developments. These are the NationalInformation Policy and the National IT Policy.Both policies place emphasis on developing infor-mation as an integral part of national and eco-nomic development. A wide network of publicand academic libraries supports the nationallibrary. The academic libraries are quite welldeveloped and offer a good range of services.Two official government agencies, the Non-For-mal Education Department and the BangkokMetropolitan Administration, also play their partin the library arena by managing mobile libraryservices. The mobile libraries take many formsdepending on the specific sites they have to reach.For instance, in one case the mobile library was abook basket. There are also motorboat mobilesand book packages. The future plans for mobilelibraries include reaching out to the disadvantagedand including electronic services. The Thai Na-tional Information System project (Thai NATIS)was initiated in the late 1980s and the Library actsas the Secretariat. There are also a number ofother dedicated specialized networks for medi-cine, the humanities, economics, and scienceand technology, amongst others. Chulalongkorn

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University offers a digital library service. Thegovernment-funded university libraries have es-tablished an Inter-University Network (Uni-Net)for sharing of library databases. The Thai Aca-demic Libraries Network and the Thai LibraryIntegrated System have moved to the secondphase, with emphasis on digital content andelectronic document delivery services.

VIETNAM

Vietnam is a small country; two-thirds of itsarea is mountainous and its economy is rankedamong the poorest in the world. The librarylandscape of Vietnam consists of the NationalLibrary of Vietnam (NLV), sixty-one provinciallibraries, 540 district libraries, 7,500 communeand village libraries, 250 academic libraries,13,500 school libraries, 300 special librariesand 1,000 military libraries. Vietnam does nothave a library association but the NLV isrequired by the Ordinance of Librarianship toact as the Central Library with several respon-sibilities. These include exploiting domestic andforeign resources to meet readers’ needs; collect-ing publications under legal deposit; preservingthe National Collection; compiling the nationaland general bibliographies; providing libraryservices; co-operating, and exchanging materials,with foreign libraries and agencies; and improv-ing competencies. In recent years, some 1,500new libraries have been established. These takethe shape of Cultural Village Bookcases andBookcases of Commune Cultural Post Offices.Though the Vietnamese government has madegreat efforts, millions of people in the moun-tains and other remote areas do not have accessto books and newspapers because of economicand geographical difficulties. With encourage-ment from IFLA and the support of the govern-ment, more than 150 mobile libraries have beenestablished in the past decade. The mobilelibraries have been adapted to suit differentareas and include models such as Libraries onCultural Boats; Book Bags of Border Guards;Bookcases of Commune Cultural Post Offices.Vietnam foresees that, in the twenty-first cen-tury, it will continue to face difficulties, and itwill have great problems in overcoming povertyand backwardness. Mobile libraries have beenan effective means of promoting culture andinformation in the poor regions Thus, thegovernment continues to advocate the develop-ment of mobile libraries as a strategic move to

improve the cultural life of the population. It isalso interesting to note that, in December 2000,the Vietnam National Assembly issued an ordi-nance on libraries and approved support for theprogramme of district libraries and school li-braries in the 2001–5 plan. The ordinance,which consists of seven chapters and thirty-onearticles, covers provisions to develop libraryresources and to increase efficiency in manage-ment of library activities such as the rights andresponsibilities of organizations and individualsin library activities; library organization andoperation; library investment and development;state management on library development; re-ward and handling violation in library activities;and other implementation provisions.

The library’s e-strategies

Despite being seen as a developing region,ASEAN has made a great deal of progress inembracing technology and launching digital li-brary initiatives. The proliferation of the Internethas propelled the libraries in the region to placeequal emphasis on evolving the virtual libraries(see virtual library), and other online provi-sion. These take the form of a variety of digitallibraries, portals (see portals and gateways)and virtual communities, all sharing the commongoal of increasing access round-the-clock tocontent and services in a more personalized andcustomized manner.The adoption of technology can be traced

back to the 1970s when countries like Malaysiamade modest beginnings in exploiting technologyto improve business operations. Malaysia’s MAL-MARC project that simplified and promotedshared cataloguing was initiated in 1970, andSingapore libraries tapped this service. MAL-MARC now forms the core of the MalaysianBibliographic Network. In the 1980s, Singaporedeveloped its equivalent of MALMARC, calledSILAS (Singapore Integrated Library AutomationService), which promotes shared cataloguing aswell as maintaining the national union catalogue.The Singapore National Bibliography (SNB) isnow available in CD-ROM format with plans tobe made available on the Internet.From the early 1980s, libraries started looking

into library automation with academic li-braries taking the lead. Since then, computeriza-tion has taken on a number of forms, includingthe automation of catalogues and circulation

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systems, the installation of CD-ROMs as stand-alones or on a network, access to overseas onlinedatabases such as dialog, Reuters and somespecialized databases (but often controlled), thedevelopment of local databases, informationretrieval systems (often initially developed in-house) and use of the Internet. Library automa-tion itself has taken place to a greater or lesserextent throughout the region, varying frommicro/mini-based solutions for staff use, running,for example, CDS/ISIS provided by UNESCO, tomini/mainframe solutions with end-user opacsaccess, running, for example, DRA, Innopac,URICA, CARL, V-LIB and more recently Ex-Libris systems.Other developments include the Thai Compu-

ter Network Project that links all the science andtechnology databases created by eleven universi-ties. THAIPOPIN is a national population infor-mation network linking eighteen institutes. Thereis also the Provincial University Library Network(PULINET), as well as the Documentation Cen-tre of the Asian Institute of Technology, whichhas created the Thailand Inter-University Net-work (ATUNET) and seventeen other databases.These developments are also reflected in themore recent implementation of Internet applica-tions.Developments in Malaysia, Singapore and

ASEAN as a unified entity articulate well withthe huge steps being taken to make the region apresence in the new Net Economy. Singapore’s IT2000 Masterplan is transforming the countryinto an Intelligent Island where informationand communication technology is exploitedto the fullest to enhance the quality of life of thepopulation at home, work and play. SingaporeONE is a major milestone in the realization ofthis vision. Singapore ONE is one of the world’spioneering national multimedia, broadbandnetworks that delivers a new level of interactivemultimedia applications and services to homes,schools and businesses. The implementation of IT2000 and Singapore ONE has enabled Singaporeto lay a solid foundation in ICT and paves theway for the Infocomm 21 strategic plan, whichwill guide ICT development over the next tenyears. Infocomm 21, launched in 2000, articu-lates various strategies aimed at creating avibrant ICT industry – which will transformSingapore into a dynamic and vibrant globalICT capital with a thriving and prosperous neteconomy by the year 2010.

The IT 2000 initiative laid the foundation andinfrastructure upon which various applicationscould be built. The Digital Library Initiative wasone such application aimed at bringing informa-tion to the people of Singapore. It was cham-pioned by two government agencies with theinvolvement of the major academic and speciallibraries. In 1996, Singapore was among thepioneering nations to launch their first nation-wide digital library service. Christened TIARA(Timely Information for All, Relevant and Af-fordable), it offered a suite of services includingseamless access to the catalogues of libraries inSingapore, a reference enquiry service called AskTIARA and access to major information data-bases such as DIALOG, Gartner Group, Cam-bridge Scientific Abstracts and EngineeringIndex, among others. Singapore had then success-fully negotiated ‘national’ licences so thatcitizens could gain access to these reservoirs ofinformation in a more cost-effective manner. Italso acted as a co-ordinated gateway to Internetresources that were organized to facilitate easierretrieval. Since then, Singapore libraries havedabbled in a variety of e-library initiatives suchas the creation of portals, virtual communitiesfor students, ethnic communities and so on.The most recent iteration of the digital library is

the eLibraryHub. Launched in September 2001,the eLibraryHub is a one-stop integrated digitallibrary that offers users a ‘personalized’ experi-ence of having a library of their own. An initiativeby the National Library Board, eLibraryHubprovides immediate reach to vast informationresources from the world’s leading libraries andcontent providers – via a single point of access,anywhere and at any time. The eLibraryHuballows the individual, or a community orcorporation, to create a personalized library.Using personal e-tools, e-mails, discussion for-ums, online chats, photo albums, bookshelvesand research rooms can be organized for effec-tive retrieval. The eLibraryHub will also alertthe user to book recommendations from peersbased on his/her reading habits. It will alsoserve as a portable learning companion that isaccessible using any appliance (personal compu-ters, mobile communications devices and soon). It includes a cybrarian service (remotelibrarians online to assist users) and an electronicpayment system. The eLibraryHub hopes to serveeach user as ‘MY LIBRARY’ and ‘MY LEARN-ING COMPANION’, and support personal and

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professional as well as learning and leisureinformation needs.Similarly, the academic libraries have devel-

oped their own versions of the digital library toserve the needs of staff and students. TheNational University of Singapore, for instance,placed emphasis on developing digital contentand the delivery of personalized services. ItsLibrary InfoGate – a document management andretrieval system that provides access to examina-tion papers and a periodicals index to articles onSingapore, Malaysia, Brunei and ASEAN(PERIND) – and Video-On-Demand serviceswere launched campus-wide in 1995 and there-after it developed at a much faster pace toinclude access to electronic journals anddatabases. In 1999, the Nanyang TechnologicalUniversity Library launched the i-Gateway toEducational and Media Services (iGEMS), aportal offering a rich array of personalized,timely and relevant information for each indivi-dual user. In addition, the NLB’s libraries and thenumber of academic libraries are embracing theRFID technologies to make borrowing and returnof books easy.Malaysia, the other more advanced nation in

ASEAN, also has plans that are just as ambitiousand aligned to that of its Multimedia SuperCorridor (MSC). The Malaysian National DigitalLibrary, or PERDANA as it is popularly known,is a major MSC project aimed at catalysing theplanned transformation of Malaysia into aknowledge-based society. The objectives of theproject include establishing a platform to encou-rage local online services and content as part ofthe MSC initiative; accelerating the local infor-mation content industry; and providing afford-able online information services to the wholenation. A pilot digital library project (MyLib)was launched in June 2000. MyLib is aimed atpromoting the economical and efficient deliveryof information and knowledge, especially data-bases and local content, on the Net to all levelsof the Malaysian society. MyLib is a collabora-tive project involving the NLM, the MultimediaDevelopment Corporation, government librariesand state public libraries, among others. Alllibraries were encouraged to share their publicdomain databases and digitize their institutions’publications (such as theses, annual reports,directories, cultural and intellectual heritagedocuments, and so on). Libraries are also encour-aged to make their bibliographic records, in-

dexes, abstracts, bibliographies, tables ofcontents and so on accessible. MyLib is seen asa logical extension of the Jaringan Ilmu (JI)project that was launched in January 1994. JIwas a strategic alliance between the NLM andMIMOS, a government agency. Amongst itsobjectives were to establish a national networkof libraries; to encourage libraries to createdatabases containing text, graphics and biblio-graphic information; and to encourage the crea-tion of local public-domain databases. The JIproject has enabled special libraries and statelibraries to be linked via the Internet, madepossible by NLM funding, which provided thehardware, software and training. The academiclibraries were not directly involved in the pilotproject.The other ASEAN countries, eager not to be

left behind, are making modest attempts toembark on the digital journey. Indonesia, forinstance, is beginning to develop the IndonesianDigital Library Network. The Indonesian govern-ment, through the Ministry of Technology andResearch, is building the national informationtechnology framework, IPTEKNET (Science andTechnology Information Networking), a nation-wide network connected to the Internet. ThePetra Christian University is also developing itsown digital library system. The software will beinstalled at the Christian universities that havejoined the Indonesian Christian Universities Vir-tual Library (InCU-VL). The Philippine LibraryInformation Network (PHILIN) is an integratedlibrary management and information system. InVietnam, the government has approved the Na-tional Library’s ICT development project, whichincludes a library management system, scanners,servers and so on, and the creation of a website.The French government is also working with theNLV to set up a digital laboratory to digitize rarecollections of the NLV.Recognizing the gap amongst the more devel-

oped and less developed ASEAN member coun-tries, the ASEAN governments initiated the e-ASEAN strategy to ensure that ASEAN as awhole can get the socio-economic benefits ofnetworking. One such initiative is that of theproposed ASEAN Information Network (AINet).AINet aims to bridge the information gap amongASEAN member countries by establishing a richshared information resource base. It is an out-come of the growing interest among ASEANmember countries in sharing information, not

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just for business and research but also to build agreater understanding of the diverse culturalheritage among its citizens. AINet will link awide spectrum of socio-economic and culturalresources in the region to enable libraries, gov-ernments, businesses and citizens to access andexchange a wide-range of information andknowledge. The successful implementation ofAINet will allow the 500 million residents ofASEAN nations to access some 40 million titlesavailable in the national libraries, and Web-basedand multimedia resources. The information pro-vided will be in English and the indigenouslanguages. Four CONSAL member countries(Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore)have taken the lead to develop digital content forAINet. The remaining six countries will bephased into the project over the next few years.In March 2001, the lead countries deliberated oncollaborative digitization strategies to presentSoutheast Asian digital content online as a show-case for the region. This project is the secondphase of the Resource Sharing and Legal Depositinitiative approved by the CONSAL ExecutiveBoard in April 2000. Ultimately, it is envisagedthat the disparate digitization efforts in theASEAN countries can be consolidated and madeavailable through AINet in a more concertedmanner.Dramatic changes are taking place to make

available cultural heritage and memories. Li-braries are beginning to invest in preserving thepast so that future generations can experience thepast, live the present and explore the future.Emphasis is placed by the national libraries onthe preservation of these treasures, and manyare embarking on digitizing their more importantcollections. Funding is a major constraint andmany try to collaborate with industry and seekvarious sources of funding to preserve thesefragile treasures. For instance, the Philippineswas awarded US$10,000 for the ‘Philippine-American Project on Historic Photograph Collec-tion’ from the Ambassador’s Fund for CulturalPreservation 2001 Award. Cambodia wasawarded US$15,000 for the project on ‘Preserva-tion of Ancient Books and Manuscripts’ from theAmbassador’s Fund for Cultural Preservation2001 Award. Laos was awarded US$10,000 forthe project ‘A Stonehenge in Laos: Mapping,Archiving, Exhibiting’ from the Ambassador’sFund for Cultural Preservation 2001 Award.

In Singapore, the National Archives is themajor content provider for Singapore history,and has made its content accessible via theInternet. Its information portal Archives andArtefacts Online (a2o) allows for a seamlesssearch across various databases for social, eco-nomic, cultural and political developmentswithin the country. This includes various inde-pendent databases and selected photographs,maps and plans, oral history interview samplersand snippets of audiovisual recordings. In addi-tion, a2o also provides information on materialsrecently acquired by NAS, online exhibitions andstudent programmes. Other heritage services in-clude: Picture Archives Singapore (PICAS), a textand image retrieval system on the Web;Knowledge Net: Singapore, a multimedia con-tent-rich website on Singapore history to foster acommunity that understands the significance oftheir past by the sharing of knowledge; and 1942– Battlefield Singapore, which reminds Singapor-eans of the past and honours those who foughtfor the country. This last site exploits the latestvirtual-reality technology to allow users to ex-perience the 1942 battle and provides compre-hensive information on the Second World Warand the Japanese occupation.

Copyright

Many historical factors have influenced thedevelopment of copyright in Asia. British legaltraditions influenced the copyright system of anumber of ASEAN countries, notably Singapore,Malaysia, Brunei and Myanmar, while the Dutchand Americans exerted influence on the system inIndonesia and the Philippines respectively. Thesecolonial influences are reflected in current legisla-tion. International agreements such as TRIPS(Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual PropertyRights) have also had an impact on laws in theregion.For instance, the explanatory note to the Bill

introducing amendments to the Singapore Copy-right Act of 1998 highlighted that the ‘bill seeksto amend the Copyright Act (cap 63), primarilyto enable Singapore to meet its obligations inregard to copyright under the Agreement onTrade Related aspects of Intellectual PropertyRights (TRIPS)’. Subsequently, the Act was onceagain amended to extend protection to works incyberspace. The explanatory note states that theamendments were inter alia to give full effect to

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the TRIPS agreement. Malaysia’s 1997 amend-ments were a move towards the standards of theWIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT). Thus the inser-tion of a new definition of ‘communication topublic’ to mean:

[T]he transmission of a work through wire orwireless means to the public, including themaking available of a work to the public insuch a way that members of the public mayaccess the work from a place and at a timeindividually chosen by them.

The general view was that these changes weretimely as Malaysia was at that time attractinginvestments into the MSC Project.Indonesia was the first ASEAN country to

accede to the WCT and made the appropriatechanges in 1997 but it is not yet TRIPS-compli-ant. Thailand amended its law in 1995 and thePhilippines in 1998; both are TRIPS-compliant.Thailand also enacted a law to establish anIntellectual Property and International TradeCourt with the hope of speeding up the imple-mentation and enforcement of copyright laws.Brunei has developed a Copyright Act andVietnam has the most recent copyright law butit is also not TRIPS-compliant yet. Cambodiaand Laos have yet to enact any copyright legisla-tion, while Myanmar still uses the 1911 UKImperial Copyright Act but is working on a newlaw.The challenge that libraries face is in main-

taining a balance between protecting the interestsof the copyright owners while allowing fair usein the interests of social, economic, educationaland cultural good, including preservation of theliterary works for posterity.

Training and education

Historically, in the early years of developmentand even into the early 1990s, the region reliedon overseas institutions and programmes totrain its librarians. These included sending staffto overseas universities and distance education.With the emphasis placed on libraries askey pillars supporting lifelong learning, there isa need for more trained and competent staffespecially equipped with new and emergingskills such as digital libraries, organizationof information, information searching andpackaging, digitization, preservation and knowl-edge management. The staff also need to en-

hance their planning, negotiation and marketingskills.A multipronged approach has been used to

develop the professional talent pool throughformal and professional development shortcourses, certification programmes and even in-service training programmes to ensure librariansare equipped with new skills and remain relevantin the knowledge economy. Formal training atcertificate, diploma and degree levels is nowavailable at the universities and polytechnics butthey still send a small number overseas onscholarships. Many programmes are found inIndonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. Malay-sia and Singapore have more focused training.Singapore recently launched a Master’s pro-gramme in knowledge management. Informaltraining and continuing-education programmeshave been organized by the educational institu-tions, libraries and library associations, at local,regional and international levels. Libraries alsosend their staff overseas on knowledge acquisi-tion trips.With the formation of the CONSAL Secretar-

iat, the region has identified the need for a co-ordinated training plan as a priority. CONSALconducts various training programmes. For in-stance, CONSAL librarians attend training inSingapore under the Singapore Co-operationProgramme twice a year. CONSAL has alsoexperimented by hosting two online conferencesvia the CONSAL Web and plans to host morevirtually. One discussed ‘Librarianship in theNew Millennium’ and the other ‘Consultationon Higher Library Education’. Under the aus-pices of ASEAN, the ASEAN COCI initiatesvarious exchange programmes that allow librar-ians in the region to meet and learn from eachother. One such programme, hosted in Bangkok,looked at library education in the region. TheNLB, Singapore, has also invested in setting upan NLB Institute that looks into the trainingneeds of its staff and extends these to librariansin Singapore and the region. The Institute placesemphasis on inculcating information and IT skillsin librarians and works with local and interna-tional experts to conduct training in new areas ofinterest.

Funding libraries

The disparity in the progress made by librariesin ASEAN can be attributed to the disparities

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between the national economies. In the lessdeveloped ASEAN countries, seeking fundingfor library development has been a challengedue to conflicting priorities that the govern-ments have to tackle. Though libraries play animportant role in inculcating reading habits,supporting basic literacy training (including inEnglish) and in making available informationand reading materials, funding has been limited.Hence, many ASEAN countries seek fundingfrom world organizations and industry to raisethe information literacy of its population and tobridge the information gap. Indonesia, for in-stance, successfully obtained US$4.2 millionfrom the International Development Associationto fund its Library Development Project, whichaims to develop innovative approaches to in-crease the use of reading materials in commu-nity and primary school libraries, to motivatestudents and communities alike to make use ofvaluable information, and to develop a suppor-tive strategy among communities, non-govern-mental organizations (NGOs) and localgovernment. Cambodia, meanwhile, has sub-mitted a proposal to the World Bank Groupfor funding for the project on ‘Rejuvenation ofthe National Library of Cambodia’, estimated tocost US$117,850 per year.

Conclusion

The libraries in the region have – despite thesocio-economic situation – made good progressover the years and implemented various innova-tive services and programmes. The library worldcan learn from these countries because despiteconstraints, but with dedication, passion anddrive, the librarians in the region have madewaves in the library arena. Visitors to interna-tional meetings and conferences and exhibitionsin the region can bear witness to this statement.The fruits are seen in the IFLA mirror site beinghosted in Singapore, a noted Malaysian Librarianchairing IFLA’s Asia/Oceania Grouping andAsian international meetings being held in theregion.

References

Yit, C.C. and Foo, S. (2002) ‘Development of librariesof the Congress of Southeast Asian Librarians(CONSAL): 1996–1999’, LIBRES 12 (http://libres-curtin.edu.au/libres12n1/Index.htm).

Further reading

Abdoulaye, K. and Majid, S. (2000) ‘Use of the Internetfor reference services in Malaysian academic li-braries’, Online Information Review 24: 381–8.

Chaudhry, A.S. and al-Hawamdeh, S. (1999) ‘Librariesand the Internet in Singapore’, Journal of GlobalInformation Management 7: 12–17.

Chia, C. (2001) ‘Transformation of libraries in Singa-pore’, Library Review 50: 343–8.

Cordeiro, C.M. and al-Hawamdeh, S. (2001) ‘Nationalinformation infrastructure and the realisation ofSingapore IT2000 initiative’, Information Research6 (www.shef.ac.uk/is/publications/infres/6–2/paper96.html).

Cornish, G.P. (1996) ‘Developing document delivery inSouth East Asia now and in future’, Interlending andDocument Supply 24: 19–24.

Dean J.F. (1999) ‘Burma, Cambodia, Laos and Viet-nam: The road to recovery for library and archivalcollections after war and civil unrest’, in P. Sturgesand D. Rosenberg (eds) Disaster and After: ThePracticalities of Information Services in Times ofWar and Other Catastrophes, Taylor Graham, pp.29–50.

Fahmi, I., Mahmudin, O.W.P., Hasanah, N. and Su-wandi, S. (1999) ‘The library network in Indonesia’,LASIE 30: 24–8.

Gould, S. and Watkins, J. (1995) From Palm Leaves toPCs: Library Development in South East Asia, IFLA.

Hee, Y.K. (2000) ‘Multimedia library services onSingapore ‘‘One’’ network’, Herald of LibraryScience 39: 224–31.

Hernandez, V.S. (2001) ‘Trends in Philippine libraryhistory’, Libraries and Culture 36: 329–44.

Krebs, V. (2001) ‘The impact of the Internet onMyanmar’, First Monday 6 (www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue6_5/krebs/).

Lam, V.-T. (1999) ‘Issues for library development inVietnam’, Asian Libraries 8: 182–90.

Premsmith, P. (1999) ‘Library and information servicein Thailand’, IFLA Journal 25: 137–42.

Reid, E. (1999) ‘Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridorand role of information professionals’, IATUL Pro-ceedings, New Series, 8 (www.iatul.org/conference/pretpap/reid.html).

Samad, R.A. (2001) ‘The double edged sword: A briefcomparison of information technology and Internetdevelopment in Malaysia and some neighbouringcountries’, IFLA Journal 27: 314–18.

See, C.K. (2001) ‘Government information and infor-mation about government in Southeast Asia: A newera? An overview’, Inspel 35: 120–36.

Tran, L.A. (1999) ‘Recent library developments inVietnam’, Asian Libraries 8: 17–28.

Tung, L.L. (1999) ‘The implementation of informationkiosks in Singapore: An exploratory study’, Interna-tional Journal of Information Management 19: 237–52.

Van Koert, R. (2002) ‘The impact of democratic deficitson electronic media in rural development’,First Monday 7 (www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue7_4/koert/) [Indonesia and Vietnam].

Yusof, Z.M. and Chell, R.W. (1999) ‘Managing

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business records in Malaysia: Awareness and atti-tudes among business managers’, Information Devel-opment 15: 228–34.

SEE ALSO: information society; libraryeducation; social exclusion and libraries

JULIE SABARATNAM, WITH THE COLLABORATION

OF COLLEAGUES AND REVISED BY THE EDITORS

SOUTHERN EUROPE

A geo-political concept, Southern Europe onlyexists as an abstract entity in librarianship.During the twentieth century, Portugal, Spainand Greece went through harsh dictatorshipsthat were anything but interested in libraries andaccess to information. With its rich culturalhistory, Italy has considered libraries for long asmere heritage institutions. The movement forpublic libraries, buoyant in Northern Europeancountries and in the USA since the nineteenthcentury, has become reality in the Mediterraneanregion only in the last decade of the twentiethcentury. As a result, the Library Programmelaunched by the European Commission at thebeginning of the 1990s classified Southern Eur-opean countries as LFR (Less Favoured Regions).Not only political correctness made the acronymfade away. Improvements in librarianship andinformation science have been genuine and havehelped to remove, or at least to lessen, the gapwith other Western European countries.

Portugal

With the name of Mesa Censoria (CensorshipDesk), a public library was opened in Lisbon in1791 and became Biblioteca Nacional in 1836. Itwas only at the beginning of the twentiethcentury, with librarians such as Raoul Proença,that services were improved and cataloguing ofold Portuguese collections was triggered. TheGolden Age of the National Library came to anend with the Salazar dictatorship. The return todemocracy in 1974 and full membership of theEuropean Union in 1985 brought new life to themajor Portuguese library. Its mandate includesnot only legal deposit of the Portuguese publish-ing output and the publication of the nationalbibliography, but also the maintenance anddevelopment of PORBASE, the union catalogueof Portuguese libraries. Although resources arerelatively limited (7 million euros in 1999), the

national bibliography of print publications hasgood coverage and a satisfactory rate of effec-tiveness. Under legal deposit, publishers arecompelled to send thirteen copies of their pub-lications to the NL, which shares this task withtwelve other institutions. Reform in this field isurgently needed.The bulk of university libraries in Portugal are

gathered around the PORBASE union catalogue,which provides for 85 per cent of the biblio-graphic records they need. PORBASE is also usedas a source for interlibrary loan and documentsupply. It is not, however, the only pillar oflibrary development. The most accomplishedachievement is the growth of public libraries – asuccess story in Europe. After the Carnationrevolution (1974), adult illiteracy in Portugalwas of the order of 25 per cent. Started in 1986,the national scheme intended to support libraries,Programa de Apoio às Bibliotecas Municipais,was enacted as an effective way to combatilliteracy. The programme is still underway andcombines financial aid with technical assistance.A general framework is provided by the Ministryof Culture with a well-established set of technicalspecifications for library size and related perfor-mance. Municipalities have to initiate the projectand commit themselves to maintain the candidatelibrary, while the state intervenes with 50 percent of the global funds needed for its creationand development. Thanks to the Support Pro-gramme, 209 municipalities have received fundsand ninety-nine new libraries have been inaugu-rated in the last ten years. The successful schemeis now being applied to school libraries, stillunderdeveloped in Portugal.

Spain

Created in 1711, the National Library of Spainwas settled in its actual premises in Madrid in1894. Underdeveloped during the nineteenthcentury, it was reformed twice in the twentiethcentury, the last regulation being adopted in1986, more than a decade after democracy wasre-established. Legal deposit reaches relativelysatisfactory rates of effectiveness thanks to acomplex, but effective, system: legal depositoffices are situated in practically all Spanishregions and monitor the publishing output lo-cally. With its many series, the Spanish NationalBibliography has gone through some turbulenceduring the 1990s, but its work has recently

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improved thanks also to an agreement passedwith REBIUN (Red de Bibliotecas universitarias),the university library network.Mainly devoted to its Catalan collection –

Catalan is the second most spoken Spanishofficial language – is the National Library ofCatalunya, founded in 1907 and based in Barce-lona. As almost half of the Spanish publishinghouses are settled in Catalunya, the NationalLibrary has a rich legal deposit intake and alsopublishes the bibliography of Catalan publica-tions.The creation and the maintenance of public

libraries in Spain is the responsibility of munici-palities that have a legal obligation to set up alibrary when the area they control has more than5,000 inhabitants. Due to the Spanish federalsystem, Comunidades autonomas (Spanish re-gions) have legislated on their own and set upparameters for library performances in almosteach region. Official statistics identify over 3,700public libraries, but most of them are inade-quately equipped, with no acceptable standardsof performance. The average number of docu-ments per capita in public libraries was 0.79 in1999 (by comparison, 2.23 documents are circu-lated in the United Kingdom libraries and 6 insome Nordic countries). In the same year, ex-penses for acquisitions in Spanish public librariesamounted to 0.46 euros yearly per capita (bycomparison, France and the United Kingdomallocate, respectively, 1.98 and 3.73 eurosyearly). Fifty-two important public libraries aredirectly within the state remit. Great expectationshave been raised by a Support Plan for SpanishPublic Libraries, launched in 2000, with a viewto creating interconnection to the Internet for thewhole of the public library system.With the academic sector booming after the

end of the Franco regime, Spanish universitylibraries also thrived and made important stridesThe number of library administrative units in-creased by 29 per cent from 1981 to 1990, andservice points expanded at a rate of 7.5 per centevery year. For example, in Catalunya alone fiveuniversities out of eight were founded in the1980s! In the academic library field, co-operationbetween university libraries has eventually led tothe setting up, in 2000, of the academic unioncatalogue REBIUN, which is permanently incor-porated in the Conference of Rectors of Spanishuniversities. With its 6 million records and itsservices shared among fifty-four university li-

braries, REBIUN has emerged as one of the mostinteresting library resources in Spain.

Italy

When Italy was unified, the first Decree onlibraries (1869) designated no less than threenational libraries, with that of Florence havingthe privilege of being depository for all Italianpublications. Such idiosyncrasy still features inthe Italian library system. According to a Decreeapproved in 2001, the term ‘national’ is assignedto nine libraries, although only two, Florence andRome, are considered ‘central national’ andbenefit from legal deposit legislation. The centralnational library of Florence issues the nationalbibliography, which is produced within the fra-mework of the Italian union catalogue (SBN,Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale). Reform oflegal deposit is desperately needed in Italy:according to the current law, promulgated forcensorship purposes during fascist rule (1939),publications are sent to the local prefectures(regional governmental offices). As a result, only65–70 per cent of printed publications arecollected by both national libraries.In Italy, competence for public libraries has

been devolved to regions. Some of them havetaken advantage of the devolution movement andset up appropriate library policies. This is thecase, for instance, for the Region Lombardiawhere, in 2000, 2.15 documents per inhabitantwere loaned from public libraries and 1.11 eurosper capita is spent for library acquisitions. Otherregions, too, in northern and central Italy haveprovided momentum to the development oflibrary policies. Disparities, however, are con-spicuous and especially affect southern Italianregions. Co-operation between the state, theregions and the universities is enacted throughthe national union catalogue, SBN, which in-cludes 4 million bibliographic records and offersintegrated library services such as shared catalo-guing and bibliographic search, as well as accessto other national and international databases.A recent bill has given autonomy to local

Italian universities but not to university libraries,in spite of the creation of a position of a central‘co-ordinator’ in charge of steering the work oflibraries in university departments and schools.An inquiry carried out in 1999 showed thatresources are adequate for acquisitions and per-sonnel. The high number of access points

SOUTHERN EUROPE 613

(2,227), however, contributes to the dispersion oflibrary services and is a major hindrance to therationalization of the university library system inItaly.

Greece

Founded in 1832, the National Library of Greecewas established in its own premises in Athens in1903. Greek publications are collected by legaldeposit and recorded in a national bibliography.Both tasks are strenuously pursued, but difficul-ties are great and performance is less thansatisfactory.Greek university libraries were pictured in a

dismal way in a collection of essays published in1992. The list of problems included organization,infrastructure, collection development and per-sonnel. Poorly funded, libraries were dispersedamong faculties and departments, and wereconsidered more the personal commodity ofuniversity professors than as centres providingservices for the whole academic community. Bythe end of the decade the situation had changed,but more by fits and starts than as a result of ahomogeneous process. Libraries of the Universityof Athens still have dispersed collections and nooverall co-ordinated policy. Things are differentin Thessaloniki, where collections have beentransferred to a new, purpose-designed building,and at the University of Crete, where there is acentral library fully automated since its incep-tion.Under the general term of ‘popular’ libraries

are included Greek libraries belonging to munici-palities and civic and private associations or-iented towards the public. An enquiry carriedout in 1998 gave a figure of some 1,000 librariesof this kind in Greece; among these, the ‘centralpublic’ libraries are established in the regionalcapital cities, and also provide mobile libraryservices to the surrounding districts. The size oflibrary collections rarely goes beyond 20,000volumes. According to a recent report, publiclibrary development in Greece is hampered by aseries of factors such as the lack of a frameworklegislation – which would define funding rulesand service standards – an old-fashioned imageand collections housed in old buildings, whichare poorly furnished and equipped. At least on aregional basis, the importance of libraries isrecognized and there are serious attempts tocreate a regional infrastructure.

Education

Education in library and information science isa relatively recent development in SouthernEuropean countries. In Spain, since 1974, someten universities provide specialized courses di-vided into three cycles. The first lasts threeyears eventually leading to a Diploma in Librar-ianship and Documentation. The second impliesa greater degree of specialization and grants astudent a Licence. In the third cycle, studentsare enabled to prepare a PhD. The same schemeis now implemented in Italy after a generalreform of higher education studies that tookplace in 2000. Courses on Librarianship areorganized within the framework of the Depart-ments of Science of Cultural Assets, present insome fifteen Italian universities. Library educa-tion in Portugal and Greece has benefited fromthe assistance of Anglo-Saxon education insti-tutes but a national framework is still to beestablished with standards that would corre-spond to library needs and would be givenadequate consideration by cultural and educa-tional administrators.

Library networks

Library networks in Southern European countrieshave been established according to the differentpaths of development of library infrastructure. InPortugal and Italy, there are main, although notexclusive, library union catalogues, respectivelyPORBASE and SBN. Such networks act asbibliographic utilities and facilitate interlibraryloans and the exchange of records. The advan-tage is that resources are concentrated around asingle initiative, thus avoiding overlappingamong bibliographic utilities. Nevertheless, rulesgoverning the two networks lead to no cleartask-sharing schemes. In Spain, networking isfollowing three sectoral paths of development:the union catalogue of state public libraries(gathered around the REBECA database), theacademic library network (with the already men-tioned REBIUN) and the networks existing on agiven territory (e.g. Catàleg Col.lectiu de Catalu-nya (CCC)).


Portugal and Italy each have a single libraryassociation: respectively BAD (Bibliotecarios, Ar-quivistas e Documentalistas) and AIB (Associa-

614 SOUTHERN EUROPE

zione Italiana Biblioteche). Spain has some fifteenprofessional associations for librarians and doc-umentalists, on a regional or sectoral basis, mostof them members of FESABID, the SpanishFederation of Library Associations. The Greekmember of EBLIDA, the European Board ofLibrary Associations, is the Enosis Ellenon Bib-liothekarion.

Digital libraries

Plans for developing digital libraries exist inmost Southern European countries. In Portugal,such plans aim at setting up projects concerningdigitally published works of Portuguese authors,and theses, dissertations and reports, as well aspreserving heritage works in digital form. InSpain the National Library has launched theMemoria Ispanica project; other projects includethe availability of publications in full text. InItaly, developments are focused on the existingrich cultural heritage and its digitization as aform of support for research.

Useful websites

SOUTHERN EUROPEAN LIBRARIES: STATISTICS

www.libecon.org/.

SOUTHERN EUROPEAN NATIONAL LIBRARIES

http://portico.bl.uk/gabriel/The National Library of Catalunya (www.gencat.es/bc/).

SOUTHERN EUROPEAN PUBLIC LIBRARIES

Greece (www.culture.gr/2/22/221/22101/book.html).Portugal (www.iplb.pt/redes/redes.html).Spain (www.mcu.es/guia/pagina35c.html and www.mcu.es/lab/bibliote/plan/index.html).

Italy – Lombardia (www.biblioteche.regione.lombar-dia.it/regsrc/tabella.htm).

SOUTHERN EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

Greece (www.hri.org/nodes/grlib.html).Italy (www.miur.it/osservatorio/ricbibl.htm).

SOUTHERN EUROPEAN LIBRARY NETWORKS

Portugal (http://porbase.bn.pt/org/).Spain (www.crue.org/cgi-bin/rebiun).Italy (www.sbn.it/).

Further reading

Borbinha, J.L. (1998) ‘Digital libraries: A perspectivefrom Portugal’, LIBER Quarterly 8: 81–5.

Colodron, V. (2000) ‘Libraries in Spain’, InformationEurope 2 (summer): 26–8.

Keller, D. (ed.) (1993) Academic Libraries in Greece:The Recent Situation and Future Prospectus, NewYork: Haworth Press.

Ministério da Cultura, Instituto da Biblioteca Nacionale do Livro (1996) Guia da Biblioteca Nacional,Lisboa: Instituto da Biblioteca Nacional e do Livro.

National Book Centre of Greece, Book MonitoringUnit (1998) Survey of Greek Libraries, Athens(www.culture.gr/2/22/221/22101/book.html).

Moscoso, P. and Malo de Molina, T. (1999) ‘And afterautomation, what? Spanish libraries and the chal-lenge of modernization’, Journal of Librarianshipand Information Science 31(2) (June): 111–19.

Petrucciani, A. (2001) ‘La laurea in biblioteconomia:Finalità e prospettive dei nuovi ordinamenti universi-tari’, Bollettino AIB 41(2) (June): 145–55.

Raptis, P. and Sitas, A. (1996) ‘Academic libraries inGreece: A new perspective’, Libri 46: 100–12.

Ubieto, A.P., Sanchez Casabon, A. and Ubieto, I. (1996)‘Studies of librarianship and documentation in Spain(1978–1994)’, Education for Information, IOS Press14: 47–54.

Vitiello, G. (in press) Alessandrie d’Europa. Storie evisioni di biblioteche nazionali, Milano: SylvestreBonnard.

SEE ALSO: European Union information policies

GIUSEPPE VITIELLO

SPAM

Unsolicited e-mail messages or newsgroup post-ings sent seemingly at random across the net-work, usually containing advertisements. Theorigin of the name is said to be a reference tothe Monty Python song ‘Spam’, the words ofwhich are mainly mindless repetition of the wordspam, sung by a group of Vikings. Spam is theequivalent of junk mail and junk fax. Eventhough many online service providers do attemptto protect their subscribers from this wastefuland selfish use of network bandwidth, theirattempts tend to be as unsuccessful as attemptsto prevent junk mail.

SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

A collection of documents connected with somesubject, or the original collector of the material,or gathered on the basis of some other specificrationale in a library that is otherwise general incharacter. The term is often used as a genericterm for rare book libraries and manuscriptlibraries.

SPECIAL COLLECTIONS 615

SPECIAL LIBRARIES

Information resource centres located in corpora-tions, private businesses, government agencies,museums, colleges, hospitals, associations andother organizations with specialized informationneeds. Using the latest advances in computer andtelecommunications technology, such as onlinedatabases, compact discs and Internet access,special librarians collect, monitor, organize, ana-lyse, evaluate, package and disseminate resourcematerial for their parent or client organizations.According to William Esrey, Chairman of

Sprint, an international telecommunications com-pany, the special librarian is the one ‘whomonitors a river of information, identifies andselects key data that decision makers should see,then channels it to the right people – before itbecomes necessary to ask’.Technological advances are transforming the

special library from a finite collection of books,periodicals and documents stored on shelves andin drawers to an infinite collection of informa-tion stored in bytes. computers have grown inefficiency more than a million-fold during thepast thirty years, and fibre optics have en-hanced the efficiency of telecommunications asmuch as a million-fold. Today, information canbe transmitted at a rate of 6.6 gigabits persecond. That is the equivalent of 60,000 booksper minute.Computerization and automation are impact-

ing on every aspect of the library profession.multimedia and imaging, once novelties, havebecome serious technologies. Card catalogueshave been replaced by software packages. Onlinesearching can be done by knowbots. The physicalretrieval of material is being accomplished byrobotics. Knowledge engineering and expertsystems are being employed in libraries foreverything from inputting information to billing.Some alarmists contend that the proliferation

of computers and computer networks will resultin special librarians becoming little more thanantique dealers of outdated knowledge and cura-tors of dusty books in an electronic age. How-ever, special librarians have begun makingchanges in their traditional functions in responseto changing demands and technology.For example, special librarians have become

more proactive than ever. They have becomeinvolved in the vision, values and goals of theirpatrons and the organizations for which they

work. They anticipate their information needsand help meet their personal and professionalobjectives. push technology is now widelyemployed in special libraries, and special librar-ians are frequently involved in a broader knowl-edge management within the organization. Forexample, at Newsday, a major US daily news-paper, the members of the corporate library staffdo not sit at their desks waiting for reporters tocall. They attend editorial staff meetings. Theymake themselves part of the reporting teams.

A second way that special librarians’ tradi-tional role is changing is that they are learning toadd value to information. They do not justcollect information and pass it on. They beginby constantly evaluating the vast quantity ofsources available to them. For example, thenumber of online databases has grown fromhundreds to thousands, and an important respon-sibility of information managers is determiningwhich ones are best for their users.

As a vital part of the collection process for aparticular request, special librarians also evaluatethe information. They examine it for timelinessand assess its accuracy, based on their knowledgeof the field in which they are working. Manyspecial librarians have an undergraduate oradvanced degree in the speciality area of theorganization for which they work as well as aMaster’s degree in library or information science.

Then, the required next step in adding value tothe material is arranging it to increase its ease ofuse. Sometimes special librarians find it beneficialto arrange identical material in several ways forthe various users’ benefit. The ultimate objectiveis to convert data into information and thenconvert that information into knowledge thatwill benefit the organizations’ users.

Further reading

Dossett, P. (ed.) (1992) Handbook of Special Librarian-ship and Information Work, 6th edn, ASLIB.

Griffiths, J.-M. (1993) Special Libraries: Increasing theInformation Edge, Special Libraries Association.

Mount, E. and Massoud, R. (1999) Special Librariesand Information Centers, 4th edn, Special LibrariesAssociation.

Opitz, H. and Richter, E. (1995) World Guide toSpecial Libraries, 3rd edn, Saur.

SEE ALSO: online services

DAVID R. BENDER

616 SPECIAL LIBRARIES

SPREADSHEET

An applications program (usually a package) thathelps users to build up two-dimensional tables ofnumeric and text information. Spreadsheets arewidely used for budgeting and financial model-ling. As well as entering information, the usercan also create formulae that will, for example,compute column or row totals or work outvariances. When fresh data is entered, thespreadsheet software automatically recalculatesany other values that are affected.

SEE ALSO: software

STANDARDS SPECIFICATIONS

Documents that recommend or prescribe termi-nology; classification; attributes (such as dimen-sions, quality or performance) of materials,products, processes or systems; or methods ofmeasurement or testing. They are available to thepublic, developed with the approval of represen-tatives of interested parties and approved by arecognized body.

Technical requirements

Standards specifications (also referred to simplyas standards where the context provides no riskof ambiguity) are part of a range of technicalrequirements that include the mandatory techni-cal regulation which contains legislative or ad-ministrative rules, as well as the voluntaryconsensus standard.The development and adoption of standards is

essential to many aspects of modern life. Theiradoption ensures protection from hazard at workor in the use of products. They ensure compat-ibility and interchangeability of products such aselectrical connectors and fasteners. They reducecosts in industry by providing a means of com-munication for functions such as design, purchas-ing and production.

Scope

Standards can be characterized by their scopeand by their issuing body. Classifying them bytheir scope or purpose, we can distinguish:dimensional standards (e.g. for the sizes of paperused in printing); performance standards, whichspecify the minimum performance so that a

product is fit for its purpose (e.g. for the opticalproperties of paper for optical character recogni-tion); test methods, which specify procedures andtools (e.g. for determining the grammage ofpaper); terminology or graphic symbols (e.g. aglossary of terms relating to paper); codes ofpractice, which specify standard procedures forinstallation, operation, maintenance or otheroperations (e.g. for the storage and exhibition ofpaper and other archival documents). Any parti-cular standard may include elements from morethan one purpose (e.g. performance requirementsand the performance tests).

Issuing bodies

Standards can be produced by trade associationsand professional societies, government agencies,national standardization bodies and interna-tional standardization bodies. In addition, otherbodies such as testing organizations and insur-ance companies produce specifications that aresignificant because of the extent of their use andtheir status. The bulk of standards-making iscarried out by only a few of the many organiza-tions involved.

ASSOCIATIONS AND SOCIETIES

Trade associations and professional societies areparticularly important producers of standards inthe USA, where there is less centralization ofstandards-making by government than inEuropean and other countries. Often the stan-dard made by these bodies is approved as anational standard by the national standardiza-tion body. For example, a number of AmericanPetroleum Institute (API) standards are approvedby the American National Standards Institute(ANSI).

GOVERNMENT AGENCIES

Some standards are published as official pub-lications. For example, a large number ofstandards are produced in the military field, bythe (US) Department of Defense or the (UK)Ministry of Defence. In addition, in the USA thegovernment General Services Administration is-sues federal standards.

NATIONAL STANDARDIZATION BODIES

Over seventy countries have national standardi-zation bodies, though they operate in differing

STANDARDS SPECIFICATIONS 617

administrative, regulatory and legal circum-stances. The most significant in Western Europeare the British Standards Institution (BSI), theDeutsches Institut für Normung (DIN) and theAssociation Française de Normalisation (AF-NOR). ANSI has a corresponding though lessinfluential position in the USA. There are sig-nificant bodies also in Australia, Canada, Japanand New Zealand.

INTERNATIONAL STANDARDIZATION BODIES

The two most important international bodiesare the International Organization for Standar-dization (ISO) and the International Electrotech-nical Commission (IEC). ISO covers mostsubject fields other than electrical and electronicengineering, which is covered by the IEC. Inaddition, there are about thirty other interna-tional agencies concerned with standardization,such as the International TelecommunicationsUnion (ITU).

There are a number of standardization bodiesat the regional level, the most significant beingthe Joint European Standards Organization(CEN/CENELEC).

It is increasingly the case that standards-mak-ing at the regional or international level isreplacing the development of purely nationalstandards. This reflects both the importance ofinternational work on information technologyand communications standards (Spring 1991),and the emphasis placed on harmonization ofstandards across international markets. Of parti-cular note is the set of standards for qualityassurance (QA) systems (the ISO 9000 series),which is being adopted widely as a set ofnational and regional standards.


A number of printed and electronic sources existfor the bibliographic control of standards.The majority of standardization bodies producean annual catalogue; the BSI Standards Catalogueis a particularly good example. They also usuallyproduce a regular newsletter that lists new, with-drawn and changed standards. Often they main-tain extensive collections of their own and otherstandards that they are able to use to answerbibliographic enquiries; BSI and the (US) NationalBureau of Standards have important speciallibraries.

A number of bibliographic databases exist forstandards information, both online and on cd-rom. Currency and completeness are important asstandards are subject to constant revision, and theupdating of the databases is therefore oftenfrequent.A number of European bodies have collabo-

rated on PERINORM, a CD-ROM database ofnational, European and international standards.There are similar databases for Canada, thenordic countries and some US bodies. Thereare also databases produced by commercialcompanies, notably Information Handling Ser-vices (Technical Indexes in the UK).In addition, a number of standards bodies,

such as ISO and the (US) National InformationStandards Organization (NISO), are making theirstandards information available on the internet.

Electronic publishing

Some standards bodies are developing systemsfor electronic publishing. BSI, for example, isusing such a system for ‘on-demand’ publishing(in order to avoid the need to hold large stocks ofstandards). The full text of British, French, Ger-man and International Standards is available onCD-ROM as NormImage, as are the standards ofthe American Society for Testing and Materials(ASTM) and US military standards.

References

Spring, M.B. (1991) ‘Information technology stan-dards’, in Annual Review of Information Scienceand Technology, Learned Information, pp. 79–111.

Further reading

Abell, A.M. (1985) ‘Standards and engineering’, inInformation Sources in Engineering, Butterworth,pp. 35–55 [describes standardization bodies in animportant field of standards activity].

Pantry, S. (1985) Health and Safety: A Guide toSources of Information, Capital Planning Informa-tion.

Ward, S. (1994) ‘Standards: Their relevance to scientificand technical information’, ASLIB Proceedings46(1): 3–14 [looks at standards of importance tolibrary and information services].

Widdowson, J.S. (1989) ‘Standards – worldwide’, inR.T. Adkins, Information Sources in Polymers andPlastics, Bowker-Saur, pp. 64–90 [includes generalsections on the role of standardization, particularlyits relation to quality assurance, and on biblio-graphic control].

ALAN COOPER

618 STANDARDS SPECIFICATIONS

STATISTICS ON LIBRARIES

Statistics to describe a library andinformation service in whole or in part

Traditionally, statistics have focused on inputs,holdings and expenditure to record changes overtime and for comparison with others. In recentyears they have extended to cover outputs, useand availability; there are also interesting pro-jects to quantify aspects of quality and some boldattempts at impact.LIS statistics have three principal functions: (1)

to monitor operational effectiveness, (2) to pro-vide a base for strategic planning and (3) todemonstrate the value obtained by users – in-cluding the potential value to users in futuregenerations. While the form of statistics variesbetween academic, public, school and speciallibraries – and between closed-, open- andremote-access situations – their objectives arethe same.Generally the value of statistics such as these is

to point to particular problems and achievements– and to quantify their significance – rather thanto provide answers or explanations. Statistics,being essentially historical, can only provideinformation after the event. However they mayform the basis for operations research ormathematical modelling and so contribute toprediction.

Input and resource statistics

These measure the stock of physical resources,annual changes and the expenditure involved.Stock and acquisitions comprise: books, peri-odicals (current and back runs), newspapers,maps, music, other printed materials (greyliterature, standards, official publications,etc.), audiovisual materials, electronic data(CD-ROMs) and other items such as visual art,craft objects, toys and realia. Most frequentlyback runs of periodicals are counted with thebookstock. Microform and microfiche materialsmay be counted with books (by content) or aselectronic materials (by format). Bookstock isoften measured in length of shelving (linearmetres) rather than in volumes to avoid mislead-ing results when slight leaflets and thick tomescount as equal units. Statistics for separatecategories of stock are valuable: the most com-

mon in public libraries distinguish adult fromchildren’s, fiction from non-fiction, and lendingfrom reference.In future where access to electronic jour-

nals, databases and electronic books isacquired for the benefit of users this will beincluded as an extra element of both stock andacquisitions.Statistics of space include floor area, length of

shelving used and unused, number of sites,reserve storage and the number of seats andstudy places provided. The number, proportionand usage of workstations connected to theinternet and with other ICT facilities areincreasingly important.Statistics of staff should distinguish between

information professionals (see informationprofessions), specialist staff in other profes-sions, library assistants (or paraprofessionals)and manual/security personnel. Normally theyshould be expressed as FTE (full-time equivalent)so that the presence of part-time staff is correctlytreated. Staff engaged in binding and preserva-tion are usually counted separately. The amountof time spent by staff in training users is anincreasingly popular statistic as networked facil-ities become more widespread and complex.Expenditure statistics are appropriate for all

the above items. Spending on capital – distin-guished from annual recurrent expenditure – ismostly concerned with premises, furniture andequipment but includes computer systems, hard-ware and software. Materials should generally beincluded as operating expenditure, though largepurchases for new library buildings are oftentreated as capital.There is important variation in the way and

extent that libraries are charged with the cost ofpremises and central institution services. This canhave a substantial effect in calculating the pro-portion of the institutional budget allocated tolibrary services and in comparing different li-braries’ results. Other significant variations canarise from the questions of whether income-generating activities are netted in the accountsand to what extent the library retains suchincome.Expenditure is either gross or net: ‘net expen-

diture’ is calculated after deducting income thatthe library has generated from specific servicesand charges.

STATISTICS ON LIBRARIES 619

Output statistics

Availability is measured principally by openinghours: location features, although very impor-tant, are better described on a map than bystatistics.There are many measures of activity: material

issued for loan, material on loan, material con-sulted on the premises, personal enquiries, infor-mation provided to remote users, visits, seatoccupancy and photocopying. Borrowing statis-tics need to be qualified by the duration of loanpermitted and by any maximum limit to itemsborrowed.Access to material and information available

in other libraries is an increasingly importantfunction. interlibrary lending is counted inunits received and units supplied.In the provision of electronic information, data

from remote online databases are best quantifiedby cost – likewise the (declining) provision ofstand-alone CD-ROMs. Measuring the use ofelectronic materials accessed via the Internet is arapidly developing field (Bertot 2001) where,typically, the most useful data are provided bythe publisher or database provider rather thancollected from library sources. Activities to becounted include: database sessions, databasesearches, the number of items examined and thenumber items downloaded. The remote electro-nic use of library services is measured by virtualvisits and by virtual reference transactions.Several statistics pertain to users. Most com-

mon are registered users, active borrowers andvisiting users. For many performance ratios it isessential to know the number of potential users –the target user population – which may also beexpressed as primary and secondary user groups.

Quality and performance

Timeliness of service can be measured (1) in daysor weeks taken to acquire and catalogue mate-rial, and to supply material from elsewhere, (2)in hours or minutes taken to answer enquiriesand to obtain material from closed-access orreserve stocks, and (3) in seconds or micro-seconds to interrogate computer files. Generallyit is more appropriate to use the median ratherthan the arithmetic mean to calculate averagetimes taken. Sampling is appropriate for thesestatistics.Quality of service is only susceptible in part to

quantitative analysis. Statistical sampling is used

to measure the availability to users of particulartitles or of books appropriate to a particularneed. In the best-known methodology these areknown as ‘title & author/subject needs fill rates’(Van House et al. 1987). Other uses measured bysampling cover success or failure of users insearching the catalogue and in seeking informa-tion. Availability of material and informationmay also be sampled by the use of prepared lists.Questionnaires seeking users’ appraisal of parti-cular services typically use a 1–5 scale (unsatis-factory to very good), with results expressed as apercentage.Such user statistics are termed output perfor-

mance measures (see performance measure-ment in libraries). The term performanceindicators – the two are sometimes used inter-changeably – refers more specifically to the ratiowhere an output statistic is expressed per user,per target population, per unit of stock or perquantity of expenditure. Some common examplesare issues per capita, materials spend as aproportion of total expenditure, materials spendper capita, stock turn (average annual issues peritem of stock), proportion of stock on loan andprofessional staff per capita.Statistics of output related to cost form the

basis of cost–benefit analysis. Here it is impor-tant to compare only those costs associated withthe output in question.

Prospects

In many countries statistics are collected andpublished nationally in excellent and comprehen-sive collections. This is usually done separatelyfor national, academic and public libraries; it israre for them to cover special and school librariesto the same degree. In other countries nationalstatistics are rudimentary or non-existent, as canbe seen from inspection of United Nations andunesco compilations.There are two important developments at the

turn of the century. First, the LIBECON Projecthas assembled a complete database of Europeancountries’ national statistics (LIBECON2000 Mil-lennium Report) and is extending this collectionto several countries in the rest of the world.Second, a major revision of the internationalstandard ISO 2789 is well advanced and shouldbe published in 2002. Many traditional statisticalheadings and definitions are being revised. Sam-pling techniques are accepted in the new standard

620 STATISTICS ON LIBRARIES

and an Annexe was introduced to list and defineoptional measures applicable only to some librarysectors. To cover electronic services and theInternet statistics of expenditure, access provisionand facilities are being fitted into the existingstructure. Measuring use is less clear-cut – butdefinitions are emerging for virtual visits, data-base sessions, searches, electronic journals, etc.

Presentation and use

Computer facilities have revolutionized the pre-sentation and accessibility of library statistics. Itis now common for statistical data to be col-lected, compiled and presented in formats such asExcel. Not only does this facilitate data collec-tion, but it also allows easy transmission of, andaccess to, the results. Some statistical websiteshave advanced to interactive presentation wherethe user can build up a custom-made statisticalreport (see IFLA Journal 27(4) (2001)).Locally published statistics can form a valu-

able part of the annual report, but are of moredirect value in informing management decision-making and planning. Computer systems andstatistical sampling techniques extend muchfurther the scope and use of statistics in manage-ment. However, qualitative analysis will alwaysbe necessary to supplement the quantitative.Provision of information and materials canusually be measured: attempts to measure itsrelevance and value to the user are still develop-ing and are not yet standard.

References

Bertot, J.C. (2001) ‘Measuring service quality in thenetworked environment: Approaches and considera-tions’, Library Trends 49(4) (spring): 758–75.

IFLA Journal (2001) 27(4), special number, ‘LibraryStatistics to Enjoy – Measuring Success’ (also atwww.ifla.org/V/iflaj/index.htm).

International Standard ISO 2789, 2nd edn, 1991–05–01, Information and Documentation – InternationalLibrary Statistics, International Standards Organiza-tion.

LIBECON2000 Millennium Report on Economics (Sta-tistics) of European Libraries (www.libecon2000.org/millenniumstudy/default.htm) [LIBECON future de-velopments are described and updated at www.libe-con.org.].

Van House et al. (1987) Output Measures for PublicLibraries, American Library Association.

Further reading

In-progress research (and annual statistical reports) atwww.arl.org/stats/newmeas/emetrics/index.html.

Bertot, J.C., McClure, C.R. and Ryan, J. (2001)Statistics and Performance Measures for PublicLibrary Networked Services, Chicago, IL: AmericanLibrary Association.

Keys to Success: Performance Indicators for PublicLibraries; A Manual of Performance Measures andIndicators (1990) King Research Ltd [the compre-hensive description of particular measures and tech-niques is more valuable than the theoreticalmethodology].

Lancaster, F.W. (1993) If You Want to Evaluate YourLibrary, 2nd edn, Library Association Publishing.

Library Trends (2001) 49(4), special number ‘Measur-ing Service Quality’.

Poll, R. and Boekhorst, P. (1996) Measuring Quality:International Guidelines for Performance Measure-ment in Academic Libraries, Munich: K.G. Saur(IFLA Publications 76 – prepared by IFLA Sectionof University Libraries and Other General ResearchLibraries).

Proceedings of the Northumbria International Confer-ences on Performance Measurement in Libraries andInformation Services (1995, 1997 and 1999) ed. P.Wressell and associates, Newcastle upon Tyne: In-formation North.

Van House et al. (1990) Measuring Academic LibraryPerformance: A Practical Approach, American Li-brary Association.

Ward, S. et al. (1995) Library Performance Indicatorsand Library Management Tools (PROLIB/PI), Lux-embourg: European Commission, DG XIII-E3, ‘EUR16483 EN’ [often referred to as ‘The ToolboxStudy’].

SEE ALSO: performance measurement inlibraries; quality assurance; research in libraryand information science; user studies

JOHN SUMSION

STOCK EDITING

The process of maintaining the bookstock of alibrary in good condition and ensuring that thelatest and most useful titles are available inadequate quantities. It is an essential element ofcollection management and may in somelibraries be performed by a librarian whose postis designated as that of stock editor.

STRATEGIC PLANNING

A process and framework for relating an organi-zation to its environment, defining its scope anddirection, and deciding actions needed to achievespecified goals. This involves gathering and pro-cessing information, identifying and evaluatingoptions, deciding and refining objectives, formu-

STRATEGIC PLANNING 621

lating and implementing plans, monitoring andreviewing progress.Strategic planning originated in the USA dur-

ing the 1960s and spread to Europe and beyondin the 1970s and 1980s to become an acceptedpart of managerial thinking and practice in thebusiness world and public sector. It differs fromtraditional long-range planning in its focus onenvironmental forces and concern with funda-mental questions about where an organization isgoing and how it will get there. Strategic plan-ning is about the systematic management ofdiscontinuous change, requiring continuous mon-itoring of a changing environment and frequentreview of organizational priorities in line withenvironmental factors. There is considerableoverlap between corporate/business strategy andmarketing strategy, and many of the models andtools used in strategic planning are concernedwith marketing variables. However, strategicplanning is essentially about defining the business(or businesses) of an organization and settingoverall objectives, while marketing plans elabo-rate strategies to achieve these objectives. Never-theless, market research is an essential aspectof the environmental analysis that underpinsstrategic planning.The adoption of strategic planning concepts

and techniques by library and information servicemanagers has followed the general trend, withUS libraries acting as pioneers from the 1970sonwards, and libraries in other countries gradu-ally following their lead. In the United Kingdom,the british library was among the first toproduce and publish a formal strategic plan in1985, but was quickly emulated by academic andgovernment libraries. In both the USA and theUK public libraries also began to adopt formalplanning processes during the 1980s.There have been some centralized initiatives to

encourage formal planning in libraries, notablythe process developed by the Public LibraryAssociation, a division of the american libraryassociation (Palmour et al. 1980), the manualproduced by the UK Library and InformationServices Council Working Group on Public Li-brary Objectives (1991) and the programmeoffered by the Association of Research LibrariesOffice of Management Studies (Jurow and Web-ster 1991). The contribution of professionalassociations is also evident at international levelin papers presented at the General Conference ofifla where representatives of national libraries

have pointed to the value of strategic planningfor developing countries as well as richer nationsin raising awareness and opening debate on theirfunction and role with government, users, thegeneral public and the professional community(Ferguson 1992; Donlon and Line 1992). Devel-opments in special libraries are less well docu-mented but the Special Libraries Associationpromoted the concept by publishing a practicalguide (Asantewa 1992).Approaches and terminology used in strategic

planning vary but common elements include astatement of purpose or mission, the articulationof values or principles, a vision of the desiredfuture, a set of goals and targets, and an actionplan with a timetable. Early examples of libraryplans were often developed over eighteenmonths or longer, but planning processes havegradually been streamlined, evidenced by thelater Public Library Association recommenda-tion of a four- to five-month timeline tocomplete a plan (Nelson 2001). From the mid-1990s, the trend has been away from extensivedocumentation of environmental factors andservice characteristics to concise presentation ofkey issues, proposed strategies and intendedresults. Time spans covered have also shortenedwith plans typically limited to five years or less.Some library managers have extended the scopeof their planning processes by using moresophisticated techniques such as scenario devel-opment (Giesecke 1998) or developing broaderplans for interorganizational activity (Bolt andStephan 1998).The impetus for strategic planning may come

from within a library or information unit, butsome form of plan is usually required by theparent body or funding authority. Library plan-ning needs to be related to general organizationalobjectives and strategies for particular units orfunctions, especially those concerned with infor-mation provision. The nature and scope oflibrary plans will also be affected by the devel-opment of enterprise-wide information or knowl-edge strategies, which are often associated withthe convergence and restructuring of library andinformation technology services, and the adop-tion of formal approaches to knowledge man-agement.Despite the time and effort required for

strategic planning, published accounts point tosignificant benefits, including new perspectiveson services, strengthened cases for funding, easier

622 STRATEGIC PLANNING

delegation of decisions, more ownership ofchanges and a shared sense of purpose, especiallywhere staff and users have participated in theplanning process. Strategic planning also helpsmanagers to identify critical issues and is aprerequisite for performance measurement inlibraries.

References

Asantewa, D. (1992) Strategic Planning Basics forSpecial Libraries, Special Libraries Association.

Bolt, N.M. and Stephan, S.S. (1998) Strategic Planningfor Multitype Library Cooperatives: A PlanningProcess, American Library Association.

Donlon, P. and Line, M. (1992) ‘Strategic planning innational libraries’, Alexandria 4(2): 83–94.

Ferguson, S. (1992) ‘Strategic planning for nationallibraries in developing countries: An optimist’s view’,IFLA Journal 18(4): 339–44.

Giesecke, J. (ed.) (1998) Scenario Planning for Li-braries, American Library Association.

Jurow, S. and Webster, D. (1991) ‘Building new futuresfor research libraries’, Journal of Library Adminis-tration 14(2): 5–19.

Library and Information Services Council WorkingGroup on Public Library Objectives (1991) SettingObjectives for Public Library Services: A Manual ofPublic Library Objectives, HMSO.

Nelson, S. (2001) The New Planning for Results: AStreamlined Approach, American Library Associa-tion.

Palmour, V.E., Bellassai, M.C. and DeWath, N.V.(1980) A Planning Process for Public Libraries,American Library Association.

Further reading

Corrall, S. (2000) Strategic Management of Informa-tion Services: A Planning Handbook, ASLIB/IMI[comprehensive guide with practical examples andannotated bibliographies covering general manage-ment and information services].

Favret, L. (1995) ‘Local government change andstrategic management: An historical perspective anda case study’, Public Library Journal 10(4): 95–101[case study of the London Borough of Bromley,relating library developments to organizational stra-tegies].

Hughes, A. (2000) ‘Information strategies’, in J. Elkinand D. Law (eds) Managing Information, OpenUniversity Press, pp. 49–64 [discussion of strategydevelopment in higher education including specula-tion about future migration to knowledge manage-ment].

Hussey, D. (1999) Strategy and Planning: A Manager’sGuide, John Wiley [concise introduction with sepa-rate chapters on marketing, financial and humanresource planning].

Jacob, M.E.L. (1990) Strategic Planning: A How-to-do-it Manual for Librarians, Neal Schuman.

SEE ALSO: information management;organizational information policies

SHEILA CORRALL

STRING INDEXING

A form of document indexing characterized by a‘string’ or set of indexing terms for each entry.The terms within each string are connected byrelationships to each other according to a set ofrules for the particular scheme. The idea is that abasic string will be generated by a human indexerand then manipulated by a computer to producea multiple-access index to the documents. PRE-CIS is a highly developed example of a string-indexing system.


SUBJECT CATALOGUE

catalogues that offer the facility for tracingdocuments on a particular subject (as opposed totracing documents by their author), whether itdoes so by virtue of arrangement in alphabeticalorder of subject terms or some form of classifiedsubject order.


SUBJECT HEADING

The word or group of words under which booksand other material on a subject are entered inany catalogue or bibliography in which theentries are arranged in alphabetical order. In aclassified catalogue (see classified catalo-gues), a classification symbol is substituted forthe verbal subject denominator. Standard lists ofsubject headings, such as the library of con-gress subject headings, are used in the pre-paration of some catalogues to aid thecataloguers in making a choice of subject head-ings so as to preserve uniformity of practice.


SUBJECT INDEX

An index through which the user can tracereferences to material on a particular topic.Published subject indexes are available for manytopic areas, and subject indexes are provided for

SUBJECT INDEX 623

classified catalogues to direct users to theclass number under which entries for books orother documents on some required subject willbe found.


SUBJECT LIBRARIAN

A librarian with special knowledge of, andresponsibility for, a particular subject or subjects.This may include work on acquisitions, stockediting and services to users. In the USA this isoften known as a bibliographer, and in somecontinental European countries as a researchlibrarian, in the latter case having an explicitduty to carry on research, usually bibliographi-cal, in their subject area.

SEE ALSO: academic libraries; informationprofessions

SUBSCRIPTION LIBRARIES

Libraries that charge a subscription of readers orborrowers; now applied usually to libraries withpermanent collections and a regular membership,but can also cover commercial circulating li-braries (see circulating library). The historyof subscription libraries and circulating librariescan be traced back to the eighteenth century, wellbefore the concept of free public librariesbecame common.

Circulating libraries

Commercial circulating libraries developed fromthe early eighteenth century onwards, as anoffshoot of the bookselling business, when book-sellers began to hire out their surplus stock.Later, collections were built up specifically forlending. Libraries of this kind, usually meetingpopular demand for novels and less seriousmaterial, spread rapidly throughout Britain, theUSA and the continent of Europe; they wereopen to anyone, not restricted to members of aclub.The pattern in Britain was diverse. Most

towns of any size had a number of such libraries,usually linked to bookshops, and they were anaccepted feature of spas and seaside resorts. Bythe nineteenth century some had become verylarge, with sizeable premises; some, for exampleMudie’s Select Library, provided a postal service

on a national scale. Some catered for specializedneeds, for example supplying books in French orGerman, or music or plays. Chain stores such asW.H. Smith and Boots developed libraries intheir many branches, and which survived untilthe 1960s; most other large circulating librarieshad closed earlier in the century because ofchanges in taste and the rise of public libraries.Others remained small; the very smallest, whichsurvived well into the twentieth century, operatedfrom the back of newsagents or grocers’ shops,with the latest books supplied by specializedagencies. (The commercial video library is per-haps the modern equivalent.)Surviving printed catalogues of circulating

libraries, which are known from the 1730s orearlier, provide valuable evidence of contempor-ary reading taste; though very few records ofloans survive; such libraries had to cater to theirreaders’ wishes and their stock therefore reflectswhat was in demand. The largest libraries,however, had a strong influence on the policiesof fiction publishers through the later nineteenthcentury, because of their domination of themarket and their insistence on certain types andformats for the novels they bought. This led tochanges in publishing and book-pricing, anotherfactor in the disappearance of circulating li-braries.

Subscription libraries

The subscription library movement was a paralleldevelopment, providing permanent collections,often of more serious material and sometimes ofsignificant scholarly value, and offering moreclub-like facilities. (Their origin can be tracedback to book clubs, which bought books for asmall number of members who read them in turnbut which did not build up permanent collec-tions.)Subscription libraries were established in many

towns and cities of Britain from the mid-eight-eenth century onwards (Liverpool in 1758, Leedsin 1768) to provide for the needs of theirsubscribers; these were usually members of theprofessional and middle classes, though amongstthe earliest such libraries are those established bythe mining communities in Wanlockhead andLeadhills in Scotland. In many cases the librarieswere owned jointly by the subscribing ‘proprie-tors’ and had elaborate constitutions designed tocontrol abuse. Many soon acquired their own

624 SUBJECT LIBRARIAN

premises, often specially built; other activitiesoften took place alongside the library, such aslectures, classes or indoor games like cards orchess.The libraries thus became notable social cen-

tres, and in many cases provided services latertaken over – on a wider scale – by the publiclibraries. This was even more true of the parallelMechanics’ Institute movement, which had muchin common with subscription libraries but wasparticularly concerned with adult education andaimed to serve a rather lower social class.Specialized subscription libraries for law ormedicine also developed in larger towns.Indeed, subscription libraries in provincial

cities often took the lead in developing literaryand scientific culture, and their printed catalo-gues permit the study of the spread of new ideas.Their role in the development of urban society isconsequently very significant. (They did, how-ever, also provide fiction and some lighterreading, sometimes supplied by the large circulat-ing libraries, supplementing the services of thelocal commercial libraries.)In London there were various smaller sub-

scription libraries but, perhaps because of thepresence of large circulating libraries, nothing ona large scale before 1841, when the LondonLibrary was founded on the initiative of ThomasCarlyle. This represents the culmination of thesubscription library in Britain; it now has wellover 1 million volumes and is a major resourcefor writers and scholars in the humanities. Aswith other subscription libraries, one of itsattractions is the generous loan of books thatare otherwise unavailable.

The present day

The growth of public libraries, and other changesin society, has led to the disappearance of most ofthe old subscription libraries. The Association ofIndependent Libraries, founded in 1989, nowlinks about twenty surviving libraries throughoutthe British Isles. They continue to serve anenthusiastic membership that finds in such in-stitutions something lacking in public libraries.Most remain sturdily independent, though someare developing links with other local libraries, forexample to give wider access to their collectionsof older literature; the very collections of theLondon Library are a notable example. Others,such as the Linen Hall Library in Belfast, have a

very significant local role and receive some publicfunding. In the USA some important subscriptionlibraries survive, but they have largely disap-peared from the European scene.

Further reading

Gerard, D.E. (1980) ‘Subscription libraries (GreatBritain)’, in Encyclopedia of Library and Informa-tion Science, vol. 29, pp. 205–21 [covers bothproprietary and circulating libraries; useful biblio-graphy].

Griest, G.L. (1970) Mudie’s Circulating Library and theVictorian Novel, Indiana University Press.

Killen, J. (1990) A History of the Linen Hall Library,1788–1988, Linen Hall Library.

Martino, A. (1990) Die deutsche Leihbibliothek, Har-rassowitz [comprehensive study of commercial circu-lating libraries in German-speaking countries, withreferences to activity elsewhere].

Wells, J. (1991) Rude Words: An Informal History ofthe London Library, Macmillan.

PETER HOARE

SURFING

Surfing is a widely used term to describe a kindof unfocused browsing of the internet that hasbecome a popular pastime. The hyperlinks be-tween pages and the listings provided by searchengines offer almost infinite possibilities forwhiling away the hours, just as, at the sametime, they permit highly focused and effectivesearching on specific topics.

SURROGATE

Surrogates, or substitutes, are used for variouspurposes in LIS. In preservation, a surrogatecan be a copy of a document created to protectthe original, created by photography or digiti-zation, which is offered to all users other thanthose for whom direct examination of the origi-nal is unavoidable. In special librarianship andinformation science, it could be an abstract orother summary of a document, which is capableof satisfying user requirements in a proportion ofcases.


SURVEILLANCE

The close observation of people for any one of avariety of reasons. Originally it tended to refer to

SURVEILLANCE 625

policing, or military intelligence. It nowfrequently refers to other uses, such as work onthe incidence and spread of diseases for health-care purposes, or flows of traffic for transportmanagement and development. Modern surveil-lance relies on the availability of a range oftechnologies that, until recently, were only usedby the state, for instance, businesses practicesurveillance for marketing purposes through thecollection of information from credit cards andretailing loyalty cards. Data from customersurveys and extended warranty applications canalso be fed into consumer databases. Employersengage in monitoring of the actions and perfor-mance of their workers, by searching employeecomputer files, voice mail, e-mail or other net-worked communications. Public spaces are over-looked by closed-circuit television cameras,controlled by police, traffic authorities, house-holders and corporate property owners. It isfrequently alleged that a surveillance society hasdeveloped in which privacy is a concept that hasbecome seriously limited.

Further reading

Lyon, D. (2001) Surveillance Society: Monitoring inEveryday Life, Open University Press.

Lyon, D. and Zureik, E. (eds) (1996) Computers,Surveillance and Privacy, University of MinnesotaPress.

Surveillance and Society (www.surveillance-and-society.org/journal.htm).

SYSTEMS ANALYSIS

Analysis that can suggest how best an automatedsystem might be introduced into a particular areaof an organization’s operations. When the desir-ability and feasibility of introducing a newsystem have been established, existing systemsand procedures are investigated in detail. Fromthis analysis, the alternative ways that the systemmight be designed can be considered and the bestoption decided upon. For this, a functionalspecification can then be designed, so as to makeclear, both to potential users and to developmentstaff, how the new system should operate, infunctional rather than technical terms.

SEE ALSO: information systems; informationtheory; organizational information policies;systems theory

SYSTEMS THEORY

Systems theory is concerned with the co-ordina-tion of complex systems, both technical andsocial. The dominant paradigm for the applica-tion of systems theory to practical human pro-blems has evolved from the classical scientificmethod derived from the physical sciences andhas led to the search for overarching conceptsand ‘general laws’ that govern all systems, livingorganisms, societies, economics and languages.The proponents of systems theory reject thereductionist approach of classical science as theunderstanding of a phenomenon based upon thedisassembly and study of its constituent parts.Instead they propose to explain a phenomenon interms of the properties that are emergent fromthe relationship between its components. Thisholistic approach allows for the study of theseemergent properties of a system that are indepen-dent of its constituent elements. Thus from theperspective of systems theory valid knowledgeand meaningful understanding reflects the adagethat ‘the whole is often greater than the sum ofits parts’.In the development of systems theory a key

idea borrowed from the study of systems underthe natural sciences is the assumption that socialphenomena are real systems and that the socialworld therefore comprises many inter-relatedsocial systems. In demonstrating this LudwigVon Bertalanffy (1981), one of the founders ofthe general systems theory movement, observesthat concepts of reductionism are inadequate forthe appreciation of the dynamics of both naturaland social phenomena. Von Bertalanffy identifiesthat systems interact with their environments andin doing so acquire new qualitative properties.He suggests that these same principles of sys-temic organization are transferable to the under-standing of different disciplines and proposesthat this open systems view of the world mustreplace the scientific perspectives of the nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries and theirreductionist philosophies. Von Bertalanffy’s con-tribution, together with later work by RossAshby (1956) on cybernetics theory, was toallow the establishment of a series of principlesand insights, and the identification of theirpotential application to a variety of fields, mostnotably those of managerial and organisationalanalysis. Thus, although systems theory has ahistory independent of organizational and indus-

626 SYSTEMS ANALYSIS

trial theories, it has nonetheless evolved inmanagerial and policy circles as a methodologysuited to providing analysts with the tools andframeworks required for decision-making andcontrol in complex and uncertain environments.In terms of the development and applications

of systems theory, while many of its concepts aretraceable to the ideas of Von Bertalanffy andAshby (and the earlier ideas of the nineteenth-century philosophes Auguste Comte and HenriSaint-Simon), in its recent manifestations inmanagement and computer science, the prac-tical use of systems theory can be understood tobe the product of a series of converging develop-ments that have taken place both during andafter the Second World War. The military needsof this period in terms of managing scarceresources efficiently and effectively, and planningand controlling military strategies and tactics,resulted in the formation of multidisciplinaryscientific groups working on tactical and logisti-cal problems concerning the war effort. TheseOperational Research groups, as they wereknown, were characterized by the use of mathe-matical techniques and models to assist decision-makers in solving their problems. After the warmany of these groups were maintained anddeveloped as research centres concerned with theperceived threat of nuclear war and the develop-ment of space technology (e.g. The Research andNational Development [RAND] Corporation inthe USA). Early RAND research, like wartimeoperations research, dealt with the mathematicaland statistical treatment (largely through linearprogramming techniques) of well-defined, low-level, often military, tactical decision problems(e.g. radar operator response to target tracking).By the early 1950s RAND projects had begun toincorporate and develop work in various disci-plines including biology, computer sciences, in-formation theory, linguistics, economic gametheory, political science, communication theory,cybernetics and operations research. The ‘sys-tems approach’, as this convergence of methodol-ogies came to be called in the managerial andpolicy sciences, consists of a set of techniques forthe diagnosis, design, evaluation and control ofcomplex configurations of people, technologiesand organizations. Because of its use in theplanning and evaluation of complex tasks asso-ciated with NASA’s space programme, the sys-tems approach became described as the ‘Space-Age technology’ for problem solving and was

often described as the most valuable spin-off ofthe aerospace programme (Churchman 1979). Inthis aspect Churchman portrays it as revolutio-nizing management and planning in government,business and human problems.The success of systems theory in military and

space programmes led to the belief amongplanners that similar ‘scientific’ thought processescan be applied equally to getting a person to themoon and to solving problems of the inner cityor drought-stricken areas in Africa. In attemptingto deal with economic and social problems thathave less clearly defined objectives, systemsanalysis was adopted as one of the subdisciplinesof the general systems theory movement. Systemsanalysis, for this reason, tended to rely less onrigorous quantitative techniques, reserving theiruse for selected aspects of particular problems.Its practitioners sometimes describe it as anattempt to supply systematic reasoning to thestructuring of complex or ‘wicked’ problems.The seminal ideas rested upon the theory ofinformation feedback as a means of evaluatingbusiness and other organizational and socialcontexts. This form of control could be eitherpositive or negative. Negative feedback or ba-lanced loop control exists where the conditionsof an organism move out of a range of controlparameters, and then action is taken to re-establish normal conditions. Positive feedback,or amplifying loop control, emphasizes dynamicgrowth and trends. An example of this is thesystem dynamics model of Jay Forrester (1971),which is concerned with creating models of real-world systems, studying their dynamics andimproving problematic system behaviour. Assuch, systems analysis is a way of thinking thatcame to emphasize the technical side of problemsover their social and political dimensions. Thussystems theory, particularly in the USA, becameconsidered as a viable means to address the socialproblems surrounding the redesign of cities, theelimination of poverty and the improvement ofeducation.Systems theory continues to be a central tenet

of more recent developments in the study ofcomplexity in organizational environments. Ex-amples include work by Senge (1990), whodescribes the important contribution of ‘systemsthinking’ to the understanding and developmentof organizational learning and who continues tobe of major influence for researchers in themanagerial and social sciences.

SYSTEMS THEORY 627

References

Ashby, W.R. (1956) An Introduction to Cybernetics,London: Chapman & Hall.

Bertalanffy, L. Von (1981) A Systems View of Man, ed.P.A. La Violette, Boulding, CA: Westview.

Churchman, C.W. (1979) The Systems Approach andIts Enemies, New York: Basic Books.

Forrester, J.W. (1971) World Dynamics, Cambridge,MA: MIT Press.

Senge, P. (1990) The Fifth Discipline, New York:Doubleday.

SEE ALSO: military intelligence

FRANCIS WILSON

628 SYSTEMS THEORY

T

TAUBE, MORTIMER (1910–65)

Information scientist and library consultant.Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, and, after

studying at Harvard and Berkeley, held variouslibrary posts, including senior posts at the Li-brary of Congress. In 1952 Taube foundedDocumentation, Inc., and was its Chairman forthe rest of his life. It was arguably the first everinformation science company and it under-took innovative studies for government agencies,including the US Air Force and National Insti-tutes of Health. It also undertook informationfacilities management, administering the firstcontract-operated national information pro-gramme at NASA (1962–8).Taube pioneered the use of co-ordinate index-

ing through the application of uniterms. This wasnot only effective when applied to manualretrieval systems, but also forms the basis ofsearch strategies that are effective with electro-nically held information.He passed on his ideas through teaching at the

Universities of Chicago and Columbia, andthrough his articles and books. These includethe six volumes of Studies in Coordinate Index-ing (1953–65) and Computers and CommonSense: The Myth of Thinking Machines (1961).


TAXONOMIES

The word taxonomy is normally understood tomean classification, and is used mainly in thelife sciences. It is not clear where or when theword was given a different slant in the generalarea of information retrieval and so, perhaps not

surprisingly, there is no clearly agreed definitionof the term as it is now being used. This has ledto some confusion as to whether they are thesame as a classification or a thesaurus; butwhile they are clearly related to these retrievaltools, they usually display different characteris-tics, and since they are mostly used on theInternet, intranets or extranets, they may beclosely associated with the new generation ofinformation retrieval software.

The reasons for taxonomies

There are perhaps three main reasons to explainwhy taxonomies have attracted interest:

. Information overload. It was estimated in2000 that the surface (as opposed to theinvisible) Web contained some 2.5 billiondocuments and was growing at the rate of 7.3million pages per day. Large organizations likeBritish Telecom and Microsoft have 3 milliondocuments on their intranets. Conventionalsearch engines are often incapable of dealingeffectively with such large databases, and usersneed complementary search aids.

. information literacy. Research has shownthat the majority of end-users have severeproblems in knowing how to search forinformation, leading to wasted time and themissing of useful information.

. Organizational terminology. Published classifi-cations and thesauri do not reflect the parti-cular languages of organizations, in which,typically, 80 per cent of the information heldhas been created internally.

These three factors are addressed separately or incombination by different taxonomic approaches.

Types of taxonomies

WEB DIRECTORIES

These are in common use on the Web and are, infact, a form of classification. A menu of topterms is offered to the user, and clicking on aselected term will display a second level, and soon for perhaps six or seven levels. The searcherwill perhaps arrive finally at some information orreferences, or the option of offering the lastselected term to one or more search engines.Each level does not have to be hierarchical in thenormally accepted sense, and terms may berepeated at different levels, providing alternativepathways for the searcher. Common Web direc-tories most, or perhaps all, of which are manu-ally created include Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com)and the Open Directory (www.dmoz.com).

TAXONOMIES CREATED BY AUTOMATICCATEGORIZATION

A growing number of software packages are nowavailable, using a range of techniques such asstatistical analysis of occurrence and co-occur-rence of terms, and which purport to be able toanalyse text, to automatically create categoriesfrom that analysis and to classify the analyseddocuments according to the categories created.These categories may then be displayed as Webdirectories (see above) and/or as two-dimensionalmaps, where related terms are linked to theselected term, which appears in the middle ofthe map. Selection of a related term will thenmove that term to the centre and introduce a newset of related terms. In practice, these packagesare only effective when dealing with relativelylarge collections of conceptually homogeneousmaterial, and when seeded at the beginning ofthe operation with relevant terminologies orglossaries. They also normally require a signifi-cant amount of human editing and maintenance.

TAXONOMIES TO SUPPORT AUTOMATIC INDEXING

In this case, what the user sees is a shallowclassification of typically two levels and perhaps1,000 to 4,000 terms in all. What the user doesnot see is the rules base behind the classification,in which each term has associated with itsynonyms and quasi-synonyms, related terms,word stems and weights. All of these are used toextract appropriate index terms automatically.These may, or may not, appear in the documentsto which they refer. This approach is particularly

attractive where throughputs are so large as tonegate the possibility of manual indexing. Never-theless, the compilation of the rules bases is verylabour intensive, often taking four or five hoursper term.

CORPORATE TAXONOMIES

Many organizations, particularly the larger multi-nationals, are expending considerable resourceson tackling the three problems listed above in theimplementation of their intranet or portal (seeportals and gateways). They are also employ-ing a wide range of techniques and associatedsoftware, many of which are referred to, ratherloosely, as taxonomies. The generic term oftenapplied to this activity is information archi-tecture – a coherent set of strategies and plansfor information access and delivery inside orga-nizations. These architectures will often employone or more of the types of taxonomies describedabove, or adaptations and elaborations of exist-ing corporate classifications and thesauri. Somemanifestations include a super-thesaurus, whereina number of existing thesauri have been looselymerged and each term carries the addresses ofany corporate information repositories using thatterm; a corporate macrothesaurus containingterms common to the whole enterprise, and towhich are hooked microthesauri for specialistareas; a metadata registry made available toportal owners and information providers, con-taining tagging standards supported by genericterminologies; knowledge maps for the locationof relevant repositories, with guidelines on theircontents and access paths and protocols; exper-tise databases supporting knowledge-sharingthrough person-to-person connections, often sup-ported by the facility to annotate shared docu-ments or a process of collaborative filtering. Aparticular problem facing the corporate enter-prise is the mapping of internal and externalinformation retrieval languages.Finally, in an increasingly global and dynamic

world, there is a lot of interest in the use oftaxonomies to ameliorate mergers and acquisi-tions; to share information between organiza-tions through extranets; and to support the workof virtual communities of interest or practice.Some of these applications collect not only theterminologies of the topics of interest to theorganization, but also the organizational ter-minologies relating to their structures, businessprocesses, and standards and rules in operation.

630 TAXONOMIES

Further reading

Adams, K.C.Word Wranglers (www.intelligentkm.com/feature/010101/feat1.shtml).

Gilchrist, A. and Kibby, P. (2000) Taxonomies forBusiness: Access and Connectivity in a Wired World,TFPL Ltd.

ALAN GILCHRIST

TELECENTRES

Telecentres have quickly become a major concernof governments and civil society organizationslooking for ways to broaden access to informa-tion and communication technology (ICT).A telecentre may be roughly defined as a facilityfor providing public access to ICT-based services.Telecentres appeared in the mid-1980s in indus-trialized countries and spread over most of these.From the early 1990s the concept was introducedin the so-called developing countries, mostly asisolated experiments. A few years later, largeschemes for the implantation of telecentres werebecoming commonplace, especially in LatinAmerica.A number of different names are given to these

facilities such as telecottage (Europe), communitytechnology center (US), multipurpose communitytelecentre (africa), infocentro (El Salvador),computer club (Cuba), public Internet cabin(Peru), etc. Some consider the cybercafé as aparticular type of telecentre. Somewhat artificialdistinctions try to characterize one or anothername as corresponding more to a community-driven, or conversely a commercially driven,endeavour. In fact there is no real reason whythe same name cannot be used to describeradically different endeavours with the samefundamental character.

The groundwork of telecentres

The provision of public access to ICT is seen as apolicy requirement when geographic or socio-economic conditions make private access exces-sively expensive or difficult. Location-wise, tele-centres tend to be associated with isolatedcommunities and low population density areas(rural and mountainous districts or small is-lands), but also poor neighbourhoods in urbanareas. In terms of socio-economic conditions,they are directed at low-income, underprivilegedand minority groups. Telecentres are expected tocontribute to community development pro-

grammes of whatever kind. They are thusstrongly associated with a range of projects, inparticular those geared at the reduction of the so-called digital divide (the ratio of the populationthat cannot use ICT for lack of access and basicskills). They enhance community participation in,and effectiveness of, local government. Theyfurther represent an alternative to the individualequipment and consumption model upon whichICT industries have relied so far.The nature of telecentres is shaped by tensions

between contradictory forces: not-for-profit, oreven free, services versus financial self-sustain-ability; private ownership and management ver-sus community ownership; and collectivemanagement, consumer use of ICT and existingelectronic services versus empowerment orienta-tion (endogenous development). It is their goalsand the means they use to achieve them, ratherthan a name or any identifiable practical char-acteristics, which distinguish telecentres as a typeof business from telecentres as community devel-opment tools.Many telecentres, especially in the so-called

developing countries, are established throughinternational co-operation projects or govern-mental programmes. Unless they are deeplyrooted in their community and, from the incep-tion, implement a plan to secure an appropriatelevel of self-sustainability they face serious risksof disruption when programmes terminate.

Telecentre functions

Telecentres are expected to provide affordablebasic telecommunication services such as tele-phone, fax, access to the Internet for electronicmail, the World Wide Web and chat. A photo-copying service is often a popular feature. Otheroffice services such as binding, document protec-tion and local computer-based office applications(text processing, spreadsheet, printing) can beoffered as well as educational and entertainmentfacilities (use of CD-ROMs and educational soft-ware; videotapes, DVDs, film). A powerful addi-tion to the arsenal is the use of local radio orInternet radio for broadcast information as wellas the use of various types of conventional media(posters, newspapers) and communication oppor-tunities (community meetings, visits by extensionagents, etc.). When operated by public libraries,telecentres benefit from the complement of thetraditional services that libraries provide. Those

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housed within schools may take advantage ofthe school libraries and media centres. Othersmay build a basic reference collection of printmaterials.In addition most telecentres do offer opportu-

nities for acquiring the basic computer andinformation literacy skills that are required forusing them. This may be expanded to includeopportunities to learn about the production ofWeb pages and creation of local informationcontent. Training activities in community devel-opment-driven telecentres may encompass a widerange of skills, in particular those required forthe promotion of local business and teleworking.Eventually a room for the meetings of commu-nity groups and for courses may be available. Atelecentre may also operate advice services, orthese can be provided by other organizationsusing its premises. In conjunction with tele-medicine schemes, a telecentre may become aprimary healthcare centre. Distance educationresources may further strengthen the role oftelecentres in supporting educational efforts in acommunity.

TELECENTRE DEVELOPMENT

The idea that a new stage in human history hasbeen reached with the general diffusion ofcomputer networks and effective access to, anduse of, ICT, by themselves, is questionable. Butthere is ample evidence that these technologiescan be powerful tools to open up avenues fordevelopment. By enabling groups otherwise leftout to get connected to the rest of the world,express themselves and develop ties, leveragetheir unique skills and heritage, they createunprecedented conditions for change, even whenbasic social constraints, such as the powerstructure, gender, ethnic and age group relation-ships, welfare, etc., remain as they are.Telecentres face many challenges to their con-

tinuing success. Telecommunications companiesare reluctant to provide them with cost-effectiveconditions of connectivity, even if they are nottempted simply to take them over and eliminatecompetition. Technical and management skillsamong telecentre staff and the maintenance ofproactive community participation need constantstrengthening. Sharing of experience through arepresentative international movement of telecen-tres, as initiated by SomosTelecentros in LatinAmerica, appears a necessary response.

Further reading

The Commonwealth of Learning (www.col.org/Tele-centres/telecentre_intro.htm).

Community Technology Centers’ Network (2001)(www.ctcnet.org/publics.html).

Gómez, R. and Hunt, P. (eds) (1999) TelecentreEvaluation: A Global Perspective, Ottawa: IDRC(www.idrc.ca/telecentre/evaluation/html/main.html).

Latchem, C. and Walker, D. (eds) (2001) Telecentres:Case Studies and Key Issues, Vancouver.

Miller, J. (ed.) (2000) CentraTEL Telecentre CD-Rom,version 1.0, Hout Bay, Rep. of South Africa: Cen-traTEL (www.centratel.com).

Murray, W. and Cornford, D. (1999) ‘Telecottage andTelecentre Survey 1998 [UK and Ireland]’ (www.itu.int/ITU-D/Univ-Access/telecentres).

SomosTelecentros (2001) (www.tele-centros.org).Telecommons Development Group (2001) (www.tele-commons.com/reports.cfm).

Telework, Telecottage and Telecentre Association(TCA) (2001) (www.tca.org.uk).

Wilcox, D. (2001) Making the Net Work (www.ma-kingthenetwork.org/).

SEE ALSO: community information; informationsociety

MICHEL J. MENOU

TELECOMMUNICATIONS

The transmission of data from one point andreception at a remote point, using wires, fibre-optics, radio waves, microwaves or anothermedium of transmission. In association withcomputing, it forms the defining technology ofthe information age. Although traditionally asso-ciated with the transmission of voice data (asconventional telephone calls), telecommunica-tions systems (telecoms, or telecomms, in thejargon) are now universally used for transmittingdigitized data of all kinds.

SEE ALSO: communication; informatics;information and communication technology;information management; information policy;knowledge industries; mobile communications;PTT

TELECOMMUTING

Describes the increasingly common practice ofemploying people to carry out office work in thehome rather than in premises provided by theorganization. It depends on using informationtechnology and a telecommunications link tomaintain contact, and once the physical link with

632 TELECOMMUNICATIONS

the office is broken there is theoretically no limitto the distance from which it can be carried out.Although it has been presented by some commen-tators as the working mode for the twenty-firstcentury, and some telecommuters thrive on thescope it offers for a less pressured lifestyle,ingrained organizational cultures often mean thatit does not always prove to be as effective asanticipated.

SEE ALSO: economics of information

TELETEXT

A generic term for broadcast information servicesthat are received by an adapted television, andwhich use the spare lines of the television pictureto form frames consisting of text and simpleblock graphics. In the UK, where the earliestwork was done on such systems, CEEFAX andORACLE provide continuously updated newsservices by this means. It can also be used toprovide closed captions for aurally handicappedviewers of television programmes because of itsability to be superimposed on the normal trans-missions. Despite its crudity, it is still widely usedby those searching for simple up-to-date informa-tion on topics such as the weather, travel condi-tions and sports results.

SEE ALSO: electronic public-information services;information and communication technology;knowledge industries

TEXT

In common parlance (and in most informationscience contexts), a text is a coherent assemblageof words. This might take the form of continuousprose (or indeed verse), or it may be a list ofwords (as in an index), or a short phrase,possible even grammatically and syntacticallyincomplete (as in some advertising slogans), orindeed may be numerical as well as verbal. In ahighly specialized sense, the word is used byliterary critics and theorists (and with greatercaution in historical bibliography) to de-scribe the work of an author.

TEXT RETRIEVAL

The form of information retrieval in whichthe files that are searched consist of free-form text,

such as documents, reports or abstracts, ratherthan structured data found, for example, in aspreadsheet or a structured database. The useruses either specified keywords (keyword retrieval)or any combination of words contained in the text(full-text retrieval) as search criteria to identify therecords required. The user is provided with aprintout or display of the whole or part of therelevant documents, instead of merely referencesto them. This is essentially the form of retrievalused by search engines, as opposed to searchingmetadata specifically provided for that purpose.


TEXTBASE

A database of textual records, which may rangein terms of structure from a simple datastream ofcharacters to a highly structured database man-agement system. Bibliographic databases tend tobe in the middle of this range, having structure atthe level of fields (e.g. author, title, abstract) butwith the content of fields remaining largelyunstructured. A textbase does not set out toprovide exact responses to queries, but rather toleave the interpretation of the meaning of thedata largely to the user.


THESAURUS

A lexicon in which words are grouped byconcept, thus providing a grouping or classifica-tion of synonyms or near-synonyms, and a set ofequivalent classes of terminology. Thesauri of themost commonly used terms in various fields havebeen published so as to permit a harmonizing ofindexing terminology in these fields.


TOUCH SCREEN

A visual display screen that has sensors (eitherinfrared or capacitance-sensitive) superimposedon the display. Menu options, icons and otherinterface buttons are overlaid with touch-sensi-tive areas (see hot spot) so the user can choosean option directly, with a finger, rather thanusing a mouse or other pointing device. Thepotential of touch screen facilities in public

TOUCH SCREEN 633

information service kiosks and interactive mu-seum displays has been explored and is increas-ingly exploited. They are also used in somecommercial applications, forming, for example,the interface with self-operated ticketing facilitiesat airports and railways stations.

Further reading

Internet Studies Research Group (ISRG) (2001) ASLIBProceedings 53: 110–11.

TRADE BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bibliographies issued by or for the book trade asa guide to currently available publications, suchas British Books in Print. Trade bibliographiesare typically published serially (perhaps as fre-quently as weekly), and cumulated. The cumu-lated versions are normally available online tosubscribers.

TRADE LITERATURE

Material prepared in hard copy and on websiteswith varying degrees of technical specification bycompanies to describe their products or servicesto potential customers and which Lowe (1999)considers to include the term ‘product literature’.Examples include catalogues, technical datasheets, price lists, product brochures and techni-cal literature. Some commentators also specifi-cally include directories, house journals andannual company reports in the definition, whileKaye (1991) precludes directories and furtherlimits the definition solely to the companies thatare manufacturers or suppliers of parts. As amarketing tool, trade literature is often subject todeliberate attempts to avoid uniformity of formatand series in the belief that variety will enhancethe chance of sales. Thus, it can be considered tobe a type of grey literature, with all theproblems associated with that category of mate-rial, but exacerbated by overlap, duplication andcurrency problems between paper and onlineversions.The range, frequency of change, variations of

format and limited bibliographic controlmake trade literature one of the least easy typesof information to collect, catalogue, store andretrieve. It is often issued for free, or with thenominal cost waived, and customers usually viewit as a transitory, but very necessary, form of

information. It is subject to such frequent revi-sion that the need to maintain a comprehensivecollection is easily challenged. Nevertheless, tradeliterature often contains the latest informationabout new technology, chemical compounds,processes or service provisions, and is oftenavailable before a patent specification appears.As such it can be a useful source of competitorintelligence to monitor the activities of othercompanies.Lowe (1999: 191) describes efforts to stan-

dardize bibliographic control in industriessuch as construction using the Uniclass system.Specialist companies such as Technical IndexesLtd and Barbour Index Ltd organize, classifyand index manufacturers’ literature in online,CD-ROM, binder or microfile format, coveringhigh-demand, complex areas such as construc-tion and chemical engineering industries. These‘package libraries’ are available for hire, areregularly maintained and can be tailored to acustomer’s requirements. Otherwise, directoriescan be used to identify certain products orpossible companies as they provide comprehen-sive coverage usually by product or geographicarea; examples include the Kompass series,Kelly’s Manufacturers’ and Merchants’ Directoryand the Thomas Register of American Manufac-turers.Websites, mailing lists, advertising, exhibi-

tions and trade fairs are used to disseminateinformation, and consequently different versionsof trade information may be tailored to targetdifferent audiences of customers, such as con-sumers and professional buyers. Specialist tradejournals, such as the Grocer or Metal Bulletin,often contain pricing information for their mar-kets.public libraries and academic libraries

tend to amass collections in an uneven manner,usually in response to specific pressure frominterested users, direct mailings from companiesor donations from various projects. Certaincompanies may be targeted for information in asystematic manner, but this is usually the excep-tion. The sheer volume of material makes acollection policy difficult and libraries tend toprefer to concentrate on the usual directoriessuch as those produced by Kompass to enable,and indeed encourage, enquirers to contact thecompanies direct.While the importance of the technical detail is

often given less prominence than the advertising

634 TRADE BIBLIOGRAPHY

copy included, trade information has been de-scribed by Auger as ‘eventually becoming ofgreat interest to historians, especially those work-ing in the fields of technology and social studies’(1994: 157). Researchers in the US (Connor1990; Ratner 1990) have reviewed trade litera-ture and related it to aspects of social history andthe graphic arts. Certainly the cultural value ofthe drawings and photos is of value to historiansand designers. In the mean time the opportunitiesto examine and access sizeable collections arelimited to those in the hands of special libraries,usually associated with major companies, tradeor professional associations, some research re-lated organizations, the National Art Library andthe british library Science Reference Informa-tion Service, which maintains an extensive collec-tion of product-related literature.

The advent of the availability of trade litera-ture via the Web from organizations advertisingtheir services and products, such as software, willlead to a broadening of the current definition. Asinformation is updated electronically at a veryrapid rate the appearance of ‘electronic ephe-mera’ will make the task of cataloguing tradeinformation even more difficult. Indeed someorganizations have turned to libraries to servicetheir collection (Gartrell 1999).

References

Auger, C.P. (1994) Information Sources in Grey Litera-ture, Bowker-Saur.

Connor, B.M. (1990) ‘Trade catalogs in the Los AngelesPublic Library’, Science and Technology Libraries10: 9–14.

Gartrell, E.G. (1999) ‘Some things we have learned:Managing advertising archives for business and non-business users’, American Archivist 60(1): 56–70.

Lowe, M. (1999) Business Information at Work,ASLIB/IMI.

Kaye, D. (1991) Information and Business: An Intro-duction, Library Association Publishing.

Ratner, R.S. (1990) ‘Historical research in trade cata-logs’, Science and Technology Libraries 10: 15–22.

Further reading

Wall, R.A. (1986) (ed.) Finding and Using ProductInformation: From Trade Catalogues to ComputerSystem, Gower.

SEE ALSO: business information service; speciallibraries

DEREK STEPHENS

TRADE MARKS

Signs that identify and distinguish the goods orservices of particular enterprises and that areprotectable by registration or other legal means.According to the UK Trade Marks Act 1994,which was enacted primarily to harmonize Uni-ted Kingdom trade mark law with that of otherEuropean Union countries, a trade mark mayconsist of words (including personal names),designs, letters, numerals or the shape of goodsor their packaging. This definition is wide en-ough to include slogans, colours, sounds andother sensory marks such as scents. The term‘trade mark’ originally referred only to goods,but modern trade mark law also encompassesservices, for example banking, telecommunica-tions and transport. Trade marks, popularlyknown as ‘brand names’ or ‘brands’, fulfil anumber of distinct though related functions: theyindicate in commercial terms the origin or sourceof goods or services; they distinguish the goodsor services of one enterprise from those of itscompetitors; they identify particular goods orservices, thus assisting and informing consumerchoice; and they provide for consumers anassurance of quality. Examples of enduring andsuccessful trade marks include Coca-Cola, Klee-nex, Kodak and Sony.Although trade mark law varies from country

to country, in general two broad aims areevident: the protection of consumers againstconfusion or deception and the protection oftraders against acts of unfair competition bycommercial rivals. Trade marks are valuablecommercial assets and can be legally safeguardedin a number of ways. The strongest protectionresults from registration, which gives the owneran exclusive property right in the mark itself andthe right to sue for trade mark infringementshould a competitor use an identical or similarmark on the same or similar goods or services.Remedies for trade mark infringement rangefrom monetary compensation to confiscation ofthe offending goods.Trade mark proprietors always take care to

alert competitors and consumers to the existenceof their trade marks by emphasizing their specialstatus in a variety of ways, including typographyand colour. The symbol 1 is widely used toindicate that a trade mark is registered; and thesymbol 2 is also frequently used to indicate thattrade mark rights are claimed in the mark,

TRADE MARKS 635

although it may not be formally registered.Registers of Trade Marks are normally main-tained by the national patent or trade marksoffice: in the United Kingdom this is the PatentOffice. It is also possible to register trade marksinternationally or on a European-wide basis(Community Trade Marks). In theory, registeredtrade mark rights can continue indefinitely: inEuropean Union countries the initial period ofregistration is ten years, renewable thereafter forfurther ten-year periods. Trade mark rights mayalso be revoked, on certain grounds, and themark removed from the Register. Trade markrights can be lost, for example as a result of non-use over a certain period of time or if the markbecomes generic, i.e. comes to mean the productitself rather than the brand name for the product.Examples of trade marks that have suffered thisfate include aspirin, cellophane and linoleum.Some trade mark owners face a constant battleto ensure that their trade marks are not endan-gered in this way. Trade marks are commerciallyexploitable and may be bought and sold, oftenchanging hands for vast sums of money, as wellas licensed for use by third parties, for examplein product merchandising. Counterfeiting of re-gistered trade marks is in most countries acriminal offence and in the United Kingdom ispunishable by fine and/or imprisonment.Not all marks qualify for registration, and

those which are not registered may be protectedunder other forms of action, depending onnational laws. Additionally, all countries that aresignatories to the Paris Convention for theProtection of Industrial Property have an obliga-tion to protect well-known marks. In the UnitedKingdom and in other countries whose laws havebeen influenced by the English legal system,unregistered marks may be protected by thenon-statutory form of action known as ‘passing-off’, provided that the owners have acquiredgoodwill and reputation in the marks and themarks have become distinctive of their goods orservices.Specialist advice on trade mark matters can be

obtained from professional trade mark agents orsuitably qualified lawyers. Enterprises that havelarge trade mark portfolios usually employ theirown legally qualified staff to manage their trademarks, keep a watchful eye on the activities ofcompetitors and initiate any necessary legalaction.

Further reading

Annand, R. and Norman, H. (1994) Blackstone’sGuide to the Trade Marks Act 1994, BlackstonePress.

Firth, A. (1995) Trade Marks: The New Law, Jordans.Gyngell, J. and Poulter, A. (1998) A User’s Guide toTrade Marks and Passing Off, 2nd edn, Butterworths.

Kerly, D.M. and Kitchin, D. (2001) Kerly’s Law ofTrade Marks and Trade Names, 13th edn, Sweet &Maxwell.

United Kingdom Trade Mark Handbook (1991–) FTLaw and Tax, for the Chartered Institute of PatentAgents and the Institute of Trade Mark Agents, 2vols [continuously updated].

SEE ALSO: information policy; intellectualproperty

ELLEN GREDLEY

TRANSBORDER DATA FLOW

The movement of electronic data between com-puter systems across national frontiers to bestored, processed, retrieved or otherwise utilizedby the receiving system.

The nature of transborder data flow(TDF)

Data have been transferred across national fron-tiers for centuries, but the advent of instanta-neous, mutable, invisible electronic datatransmissions marks a fundamental change fromthe paper-based transfers of the past. Transmittingelectronic information or messages involves manyparties. There is the provider of the communica-tion infrastructure by cable or satellite. Value-added networks (VANs) provide services along theroute, packet switching, data storage, data proces-sing and so on. Computer service companies canprovide hardware and software on their own, orleased, networks. Online systems and services (seeonline services) will involve the informationproviders and the database host. Many nationalfrontiers may be crossed. An online databasemay collect information in countries A, B and C,key it by low-cost labour in country D into acomputer in country E, to be transmitted even-tually to a user in country F. Possibilities forcorruption of data are considerable; allocation ofresponsibility is difficult. Security and authenti-cation of business messages can involve encryp-tion to prevent unauthorized access, checks toshow up corruption en route, and electronic

636 TRANSBORDER DATA FLOW

‘signatures’ to authenticate origin, all of whichhave had to be evolved.

Applications of TDF

Online databases are the most familiar applica-tion of TDF to the information professional.Multinational corporations with world-wide op-erations are the major users of TDF: datacollected in other countries form the basis ofmanagement decisions at headquarters subse-quently transmitted back to foreign branches forimplementation. The travel industry needs hotelreservations and airline bookings; airline opera-tions depend on TDF. International financialtransactions are conducted by TDF, with elec-tronic fund transfers ranging from smallinvoice settlements to multimillion-pound trans-fers. The Society for Worldwide Interbank Finan-cial Communications (SWIFT) handles over 1million electronic messages a day. Internationaluse of credit cards involves TDF. Currencytrading and international stock markets dependon TDF for information and implementation oftrades. electronic data interchange (EDI) orElectronic Commerce can involve the whole of acommercial transaction being documented byelectronic communication obviating paper-baseddocumentation. Shipping documents can be re-placed by TDF. Academic and research commu-nication on the internet is well developed andthe information superhighway can handle any-thing from electronic shopping to films, newsand books.

Cultural, political and social concerns

Free flows of information are important todefenders of freedom of information as wellas to multinational corporations, whose opera-tions are highly sensitive to any restrictions. Freeflows may, however, be restricted by governmentsfor various reasons. States can be concernedabout their vital economic or other data beingheld in foreign computers. In times of crisis anation could be cut off from its essential infor-mation sources or they could be misused by anenemy. Cultural dilution is a menace to, forexample, France, fighting against the dominanceof the Anglo-American language, or Singapore,seeking to preserve Asian values whilst aiming tobe a global communications centre. Electronicdata flows from abroad pose greater problemsfor a country seeking to preserve its cultural

identity than older, more controllable, media.International division of labour facilitated byTDF can disadvantage developing countries.Multinational companies can centralize manage-rial functions at headquarters, communicatinginstructions to, and collecting information from,lower-grade personnel in distant developingcountries. Inputting data into online databases isoften performed in low-wage countries, forutilization in the developed world.

Legal aspects

Legal issues raised by TDF concern, first, con-trols imposed by governments for reasons ofpublic policy or national security and, second,legal rights and responsibilities of individuals andcorporate bodies that form part of all legalsystems but which involve particular problemsin the context of TDF. Public policy oftendemands controls on TDF for reasons of personalprivacy. Many states attempt to regulate inter-national transfers of personal data, especially tocountries with inadequate protection. Two inter-national agreements prescribe rules for dataprotection: the Council of Europe Conventionis binding on signatory states; the guidelines ofthe Organization for Economic Co-operation andDevelopment (OECD) are advisory only. In theUK, the Data Protection Registrar has statutorypowers to forbid overseas transfers of personaldata. National sovereignty, security, economicinterests or suppression of crime may requirecontrol of TDF. Banking and financial law mayrestrict data flows.

PRIVATE LAW

Copyright infringement is a serious problemgiven the ease with which data can be trans-mitted worldwide, downloaded, reformatted andrepublished illegally. Pirated software is availableon the Internet. Defamation on the Internet andrelease of confidential information are furtherproblems. In the criminal field internationalelectronic banking fraud is almost commonplace.Fraudulent investment schemes have appeared onthe Internet.

DIFFICULTY OF CONTROL

The nature of TDF, mutable, invisible andinstantaneous, transiting national frontiers with-out hindrance and involving many differentparties, makes conventional legal solutions

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inadequate. Identifying the party at fault,whether fraudulent or simply negligent, is com-plicated. There are formidable problems of proofwhen a permanent paper-based evidential trailhas been replaced by evanescent digital signals.Even if the point in the transmission can beidentified where crime, breach of contract ortortious act occurred, which country’s law ap-plies? Conventional conflict of principles of lawcannot be applied to a communications satellitetransiting seventy countries in as many minutes.

Further reading

Collier, H. (1988) Information Flow across Frontiers:The Question of Transborder Data, Learned Infor-mation.

SEE ALSO: informatics; information policy

PAUL MARETT

TRANSFER OF TECHNOLOGY

The processes whereby new technologies gener-ated by invention and innovation are dispersedacross national boundaries. The transfer of tech-nology is the international diffusion of informa-tion and is governed by many of the same forcesthat determine the diffusion of informationwithin an economy. Broader definitions of tech-nology allow the phrase to refer to the transfer ofknowledge.

Context

While the processes of invention and innovationare critical to the development of new technolo-gies, without the diffusion of those technologiesthey will not enhance the growth of an economy.Consequently the diffusion of technology haslong been recognized as a critical determinant ofgrowth, and the rate of technological change as amajor determinant of an economy’s growth rate(Denison 1967). Thus it is argued that develop-ing countries can raise their growth rates andcatch up if the technological gap is reduced bythe transfer of more advanced technologies fromdeveloped economies. The technological gap istherefore presumed to be synonymous withdeveloping countries. Although research has castdoubts upon the completeness of this argument,it remains generally accepted that transfers oftechnology will have a positive impact on growthrates.

Processes

Economists have sought to understand the diffu-sion process from a range of theoretical perspec-tives. Two key considerations have beenprominent in the literature: the extent to whichthe processes of diffusion represent shifting equi-libria or are disequilibrium processes, and whatthe determinants of the availability of informa-tion are and how these affect potential adopters.Equilibrium models use firm-specific characteris-tics to explain differential adoption paths, bothwhen there is full information and when acquir-ing information is costly. In contrast, disequili-brium models argue that technological advancesare inherently disequilibriating, and thus currenttechnologies generally lag behind the optimalchoices either because firms are not fully adjustedto new technologies and/or there are limitationsupon knowledge (Metcalfe 1988). The econom-ics of information literature has emphasizedthe costs of information. These costs are incurredboth in acquisition and assimilation of informa-tion, and reduce the potential benefits of adopt-ing new technologies.

MARKET TRANSFERS

A major justification for patent schemes is thatdevelopers of new technologies, in a marketeconomy, must be able to profit from thetechnology. Thus if developers can sell rights touse their technologies they have incentives toengage in inventive and innovative activities.Moreover, potential users, particularly those incompetitive industries, have an incentive to adoptthe technology so as to remain competitive andto realize additional profits. However, if the newtechnology is a product, then patents mayinhibit the diffusion of technologies but stimulateattempts at imitation. Since imitation is likely tobe less costly than innovation, its importance as ameans of technology transfer is potentially im-portant.

MARKET FAILURE

The market mechanism may produce sociallysuboptimal transfers of technology, i.e. theremay be market failures. Such failures can arisefor a multitude of reasons, although two areparticularly important. First, if the technologiesand/or the structure of an industry proscribe theprivate realization of all the benefits of newtechnologies transfers will be socially suboptimal.

638 TRANSFER OF TECHNOLOGY

This situation is common in agriculture, and thetransfer of Green Revolution technologies, lar-gely through funding from the Ford and Rock-efeller Foundations, has often been explained inthese terms. Second, the acquisition of informa-tion is costly and this may inhibit the diffusion oftechnologies. This may be offset by the publicprovision of libraries, databases and archivessince there are potential economies of scale in theprovision of information. Moreover, since entre-preneurial time is severely limited in developingcountries, information systems that save time andincrease information flows are valuable.

MULTINATIONAL COMPANIES

Although technological innovation remainsheavily concentrated in the developed countries,it is increasingly firm- rather than nation-speci-fic: hence new technologies are often simulta-neously exploited in several economies. Thisimplies the existence of economies of scale inR&D that can be exploited by the transfer oftechnology. The extent to which this happensbetween developed and developing economiesdepends in part upon transfer costs. If thetechnology can be readily embodied in newcapital equipment without the need for sophisti-cated co-factors, then the cost of transfer maybe relatively low, whereas a lack of localexpertise, e.g. an unskilled labour force, mayseverely restrict the transfer of technology.

Information

The pure (neo-classical) theory of internationaltrade presumes that the technologies available ineconomies are identical, and thereby ignores theissue of the transfer of technology, whereastechnology gap theories allow for internationaldifferences in technology. Early explanations ofthe transfer of technology were modelled on theidea that technologies were initially exported incommodities. Then, as the technology becameolder, the technology was exported embodied incapital goods and ultimately the technology itselfbecame available to overseas economies (Vernon1966). Developments in the economics of infor-mation have indicated the extent to which thecosts of acquiring information and market fail-ures in the provision of information place sub-stantive constraints upon economic performance.These developments have indicated that rationalagents may engage in socially suboptimal trans-

fers of technology. Advances in informationtechnology may not reduce the costs of assim-ilating information but should reduce the costs ofacquiring information. Economic theory wouldtherefore suggest that, other things being equal,transfers of technology will become more rapidas information systems become more comprehen-sive and less expensive. The shift in policyemphasis from invention and innovation todiffusion (Stoneman and Diederen 1994) is con-sistent with growing recognition of the potentialbenefits of increasing the flows of information.

References

Denison, E.F. (1967) Why Growth Rates Differ: Post-War Experience in Nine Western Countries, Brook-ings Institute.

Metcalfe, J.S. (1988) ‘The diffusion of innovations: Aninterpretive survey’, in G. Dosi, C. Freeman, R.Nelson, G. Silverberg and L. Soete (eds) TechnicalChange and Economic Theory, Pinter.

Stoneman, P. and Diederen, P. (1994) ‘Technologydiffusion and public policy’, Economic Journal 104:918–30.

Vernon, R. (1966) ‘International investment and inter-national trade in the product cycle’, QuarterlyJournal of Economics 80: 190–207.

Further reading

Dosi, G., Freeman, C., Nelson, R., Silverberg, G. andSoete, L. (eds) (1998) Technical Change and Eco-nomic Theory, Pinter.

SEE ALSO: information policy; informationsociety

SCOTT MCDONALD

TRANSLATIONS

A written work expressed in a language otherthan the language in which it was originallycomposed. The purpose of a translation is tomake a document accessible to those who haveinsufficient knowledge of a language to be ableto comprehend the text in its original form.

Types of translation

SUBJECT MATTER

A distinction can be made here between transla-tions of literary works, scientific and technicaldocuments, legal documents, business reports,etc.

TRANSLATIONS 639

PUBLICATION AND ACCESSIBILITY

Published translations are accessible to a wideaudience through conventional outlets such aslibraries and booksellers. A translation can bepublished in the same form as the original (e.g.book, report, journal) or incorporated into acollective publication such as a translationjournal. Translation journals contain a selectionof translations from either the same source ormultiple sources, usually in the same subjectfield. A cover-to-cover translation journal is afull translation of a journal originally publishedin another language. Ad hoc (unpublished)translations are translations that have been pri-vately commissioned by an individual, commer-cial or government organization for in-houseuse. Some organizations make their scientificand technical translations available throughthe World Translations Index (WTI) database togive other researchers the benefit.

Methods of translation

HUMAN TRANSLATION

The most common method of translation is thatof human translation performed by someonewith a good knowledge of both the subject andthe source and target languages.

MACHINE TRANSLATION

Since the 1960s it has been possible, to avarying extent, to employ computers to generatetranslations. This is known as machine trans-lation (MT). A machine translation is a trans-lation generated by a computer, with or withoutthe assistance of a human (Lawson 1989).MT provides translations of entire sentencesor texts but can offer translations that areunacceptable. For this reason, human assistancemay be necessary. This may be given inthe form of pre-, interactive, or post-editing.A translation produced without any humanintervention is known as a raw machine transla-tion.

MACHINE-AIDED TRANSLATION (MAT) OR COMPUTER-ASSISTED TRANSLATION (CAT)

This is translation generated by a human withthe help of a computer. This help can be in theform of: word processing; terminology banks ordictionaries; other computerized databanks; spel-ling, grammar or style checkers; electronic pub-lishing, etc.

Translation indexes

These can cover translations produced by a singleorganization or a country, or translations per-taining to a specific subject field. The recenthistory of translation indexes, and the enterpriseof translation itself, is illustrated by the story ofthe World Translations Index (WTI). This majorsource cited Western language translations offoreign research reports, papers and theses, con-ference proceedings and patents. The files 1979–97, still available online (WTI 2002), are aconsiderable information resource. They coveredengineering and aeronautics and aerospace tech-nology, biological and marine sciences, chemistry,earth sciences and oceanography, agriculture,physics, maths, energy, and nuclear science andtechnology. The existing records contain biblio-graphic references to both the original and thetranslated documents. Included in the file aretranslations that were published in journals andother publications, and translations that wereprepared by translating organizations. Signifi-cantly, more than 65 per cent relate to transla-tions into English. Half of the Englishtranslations were originally published in Russian,while another 30 per cent were from Japaneseand German originals.

The index was produced by the not-for-profitfoundation International Translations Centre(ITC), which was dissolved at the end of 1997after thirty-six years of business. Subscriptions tothe WTI had declined steadily over the years to apoint at which it was no longer economic tocontinue. The fall in demand for WTI was areflection of the changes that had taken place inthe field of translation since the centre’s founda-tion in 1961. The increasing acceptance ofEnglish as the lingua franca for scholarly com-munication had, along with other factors, re-sulted in a significant decline in the number oftranslations that needed to be made, so thatmaterial for citation in WTI became increasinglyscarce. Whilst translation continues to be animportant activity, in the scientific and technicalfield it is more commonly undertaken as a resultof demand for a specific document than as, in thepast, an offering of whole categories and group-ings of literature in translated form.

References

Lawson, V. (1989) ‘Machine translation’, in C. Picken

640 TRANSLATIONS

(ed.) The Translator’s Handbook, ASLIB, pp. 203–13.

WTI (2002) (http://library.dialog.com/bluesheets/html/bl0295.html/).

Further reading

Benefits of Computer Assisted Translation to Informa-tion Managers and End-Users (1990) Agard lectureseries no.171.

Risseeuw, M. (1993) ‘Translations, a darker shade ofgrey: Their value and accessibility’, in ConferenceProceedings First International Conference on GreyLiterature GL ’93, pp. 107–13.

Risseeuw, M. and Smits, G.N. (1989) ‘Indexes oftranslations’, in C. Picken (ed.) The Translator’sHandbook, ASLIB, pp. 215–30.

Risseeuw, M., Wilde, D.U. and Cooper, N.R. (1992)‘Global awareness boosts productivity’, Proceedingsof the Thirteenth National Online Meeting, pp. 307–13.

SEE ALSO: book trade; communication

MICKEY RISSEEUW, REVISED BY THE EDITORS

TURING, ALAN MATHISON (1912–54)

Mathematician and computer pioneer.Born in London and educated at Cambridge.

He developed the idea of the ‘Turing Machine’,which would be capable of modelling the process

of human computation. When during the SecondWorld War he was assigned to the task ofdeciphering German codes, he was able todemonstrate the importance of logical machinesin solving otherwise intractable problems. Afterthe war he joined the staff of the NationalPhysical Laboratory at Teddington to work onthe development of ACE (Automatic ComputingEngine), moving in 1948 to Manchester Univer-sity to work on MADAM (Manchester Auto-matic Digital Machine). Whilst there hepublished a widely read paper, ‘Computing ma-chinery and intelligence’ (1950), which arguedthe essential similarities between computers andintelligent minds.Turing was one of the major intellectual

pioneers of computer science and of electroniccomputing but obtained little of the officialsupport that his work deserved. His prematureend was tragic: he committed suicide after havingbeen arrested for a homosexual act, which was atthat time in Britain a criminal offence.

Further reading

Hodges, A. (1983) Alan Turing, the Enigma, Simon &Schuster.

Turing Digital Archive (www.turingarchive.org).


TURING, ALAN MATHISON 641

U

UKMARC

The British version of the marc format, devel-oped by the british library.

UNESCO

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cul-tural Organization, an international body thatexists to further work in these fields among themember states of the United Nations, and parti-cularly in less-developed countries. UNESCOsupports many of the activities of ifla and theinternational council on archives, and hasalso developed its own information-related activ-ities, including the General Information Pro-gramme (Programme Générale d’Information orPGI) (Roberts 1989; Tocatlian and Abid 1986).As an initiator and funder of projects andprogrammes in the information field it provedextremely influential in the past and is stilllooked on as a source of leadership in thecultural sphere, having recovered from the poli-tical difficulties it encountered in the 1980s andearly 1990s. Important statements include itsManifestos on public libraries and schoollibraries, which are significant general state-ments of policy objectives in their respectivedomains. Other areas of activity include copy-right and other aspects of intellectual prop-erty, preservation of the heritage (through itsMemory of the World programme) (Abid 2001)and archives (Records and Archives ManagementProgramme, or RAMP) (Cox 1990; Couture andLajeunesse 1993). UNESCO has been particu-larly active in supporting the revival of librariesand librarianship in central and eastern eur-ope, and in russia and the former soviet

union, and in helping libraries in the successorstates to Yugoslavia to recover from war damage.UNESCO is also an important source of sta-

tistics on libraries, although these are derivedfrom national statistics and are therefore only asreliable as their various sources, and are often inarrears. They are to be found in the Culture andCommunications section of the UNESCO Statis-tical Yearbook, of which the most recent editionis available at www.uis.unesco.org/en/stats/stats0.htm. This invaluable resource also includesdata on the book trade, and other aspects of theknowledge industry (see knowledge indus-tries) and cultural industries.

References

Abid, A. (2001) ‘Memory of the world: Preserving andsharing access to our documentary heritage’, Focus2: 5–25.

Couture, C. and Lajeunesse, M. (1993) ‘Statues princi-ples et statues fonctions archivistiques: historique duprogramme RAMP et analyse des études RAMP:origine, développement et synthèse analytique’, Ar-chives Québec 25: 17–43.

Cox, R.J. (1990) ‘RAMP studies and related UNESCOpublications: An international source for archivaladministration’, American Archivist 53: 488–95.

Roberts, K.H. (1989) ‘The General Information Pro-gramme of UNESCO’, IATUL Quarterly 3: 165–72.

Tocatlian, J. and Abid, A. (1986) ‘The development oflibrary and information services in developing coun-tries: Unesco/PGI’s role and activities’, IFLA Journal12: 280–5.

Further reading

Full details of UNESCO’s activities can be found on itswebsite at www.unesco.org.

SEE ALSO: informatics; information ethics;information policy; national information systems

UNIFORM RESOURCE LOCATOR

The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is theaddress that a web browser uses to locate aninternet file. It indicates the site that holds thefile, and the file pathname.

UNIMARC

The most comprehensive version of the marcformat, developed under the auspices of ifla.UNIMARC (Universal Machine-Readable Cata-loguing) specifies the tags, indicators and sub-fields to be assigned to bibliographic records inmachine-readable form. Its primary purpose isto facilitate the international exchange of biblio-graphic data in machine-readable form betweenthe agencies responsible for national bibliogra-phies (see national bibliography).

UNION CATALOGUES

A catalogue (see catalogues) that contains notonly a listing of bibliographic records from morethan one library, but also locations to identifyholdings of the contributing libraries.Union catalogues must be considered in the

context of shared cataloguing, networks andbibliographic control. Mid-nineteenth-century attempts at compiling a union catalogue,such as those of Charles Coffin Jewett of theSmithsonian Institution Library, were unsuccess-ful due to technical difficulties and also problemsof lack of standardization and quality control.One of the most important union catalogues is

the National Union Catalog (NUC), published bythe library of congress (1953–83 in bookform and subsequently on microfiche; see alsothe Library of Congress website at www.loc.gov).The NUC is a continuation of the Library ofCongress Catalog: A Cumulative Catalog ofBooks Represented by Library of CongressPrinted Cards (published 1942–7), and its namechange indicates an extension of scope to en-compass records, many including location infor-mation, from contributing libraries in NorthAmerica. Many Western European countriesfollowed suit in an attempt to exert nationalbibliographic control. Current online biblio-graphic databases, such as those of the OnlineComputer Library Center (oclc), and other

bibliographic co-operatives (utilities) function, inpart, as union catalogues in this way.

The role of union catalogues

The usefulness of a catalogue is limited if itincludes the holdings of only one library. It is adecided advantage if readers can inspect theholdings of several institutions, especially on anational or regional basis. This was the rationaleof developing such catalogues, especially ifprinted or otherwise made widely available, sothat, for example, a scholar anywhere could seeall the books or periodicals held by variouslibraries and, more importantly, could find themost suitable location for access. The impetus forthis approach was the increasing climate of co-operation and the growth of interlibrarylending. Similarly, the development of sharedcataloguing networks resulted in large nationaland regional union catalogues.Another reason for their development was as a

result of direct policy, for example the co-ordina-tion of library resources on a national, regionalor local basis. Unnecessary duplication is avoidedif the strengths of particular collections areknown and available to all. In a similar way,gaps and weaknesses in provision can be dealtwith by focusing resources in an appropriatemanner.

The future of union catalogues

As access to online public-access catalogues(opacs) and other information databases be-comes common, the potential of union catalo-gues is stimulated but may also be calledinto question. To ascertain the location ofspecific items, it is increasingly possible toaccess most major catalogues in a region orcountry individually. However, at present thiscan be time-consuming and unsystematic. Agood regional, national or indeed internationalunion catalogue still has an important role toplay in offering more effective access to suchinformation.

INESE A. SMITH

UNION LIST

A listing, typically with less complete biblio-graphic records than a union catalogue (see

UNION LIST 643

union catalogues), of the holdings of two ormore libraries. It is typically confined to aparticular genre of documents (newspapers,manuscripts, materials on a particular place,subject or person, and so on), and a well-definedgroup of libraries or archives (such as those in aparticular city or country, or of a certain type).Such lists are still valuable, especially to research-ers in the humanities seeking unique or fugitivematerial scattered among many libraries andarchives.

UNIVERSAL AVAILABILITY OFPUBLICATIONS

Universal Availability of Publications (UAP), aprogramme sponsored by ifla, supported byunesco, aimed to ensure the widest possibleavailability of published materials. It is nowincorporated into IFLA’s programme for univer-sal bibliographic control and interna-tional marc.

UNIVERSAL BIBLIOGRAPHICCONTROL AND INTERNATIONALMARC

Universal Bibliographic Control and Interna-tional MARC (UBCIM) is a complementaryprogramme to the universal availability ofpublications (UAP) that seeks to create aworldwide system for the control and exchangeof bibliographic information in an internationallyacceptable form. Launched in 1974 by ifla, asthe Universal Bibliographic Control project, itrelies on efficient national bibliographic con-trol. For this, each national bibliographicagency has to ensure that it has access to allnew publications issued in its country so as toestablish a definitive record. Then it can, in turn,distribute this to other countries and receive theirdata. IFLA has produced international standardsfor the presentation of the bibliographical dataincorporating, for example, the internationalnumbering schemes such as ISBN and ISSN. TheInternational marc Programme was amalga-mated in 1986 with the UBC Programme, asUBCIM.

UNIVERSAL DECIMALCLASSIFICATION

The Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) isessentially an elaborate expansion of the deweydecimal classification, using various symbolsin addition to Arabic numerals to create long andexpressive notations for particular documents.This makes it particularly appropriate for use inspecialist libraries and collections, and its adop-tion by the International Organization for Stan-dardization (ISO) has ensured its use worldwide.It was developed by the fid, under the directionof Paul otlet and Henri la Fontaine.

SEE ALSO: bibliographic classification;organization of knowledge

UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

The library, or libraries, of a university, whichobtains and maintains collections of books andother media and provides information services tousers. The two objectives have frequentlyclashed, but from the mid-nineteenth centuryonwards the second has become more importantin most institutions. By the late twentieth centurythe university library without its own collectionsappears a distinct possibility; certainly the devel-opment of digital libraries (see digital library)and virtual libraries (see virtual library) givesrelatively easy access to users outside the uni-versities to many services and information re-sources formerly only available in the librarybuilding itself.Like the universities, libraries reflect the com-

munities they serve. The university exists for theadvancement of learning by teaching and re-search. When that simple objective is put in thecontext of thirteenth-century Paris, RenaissanceFlorence, seventeenth-century England, nine-teenth-century Germany or twentieth-centuryAmerica, all times and places where universitiesflourished, the outcomes are very different. Theuniversity may serve an elite, whether secular orreligious, or be a vehicle for mass education. Itsfunding, and thereby largely its autonomy, mayor may not be independent of state or Church.Similarly, the aims and problems of universitylibraries are superficially the same, independentof time and place. Culturally, however, differ-

644 UNIVERSAL AVAILABILITY OF PUBLICATIONS

ences between institutions are most marked, evenwithin one country and in one century.

Patterns of service

The common themes of university libraries maybe classified under seven headings.

USERS

Teachers and students of the university are thosenormally served, but there have been manyexamples where students were excluded. In someparts of the world, for example in Germanic andsome nordic countries, a university library isalso the national library (see national li-braries) or has a state-defined role outside itsparent university. The relationship between thesupport of research and the support of teaching isfrequently uneasy. In contrast to other areas ofacademe, however, the library has long been aservice-oriented organization.

FINANCE

Early university libraries suffered from the al-most total absence of reliable income streams,and Sir Thomas bodley’s endowment withmoney as well as with books of the BodleianLibrary in Oxford in the seventeenth century wasamongst his most significant innovations. In noage has any individual library been adequatelyfunded in the eyes of its keepers. A universitylibrary is, however, almost the administrator’sfinancial bottomless pit! It is also a temple oflearning, a material symbol of scholarship and anessential adjunct to teaching. Funding variesbetween these extreme views.

STAFFING

Book handling is labour-intensive. As all librariesare always underfunded, so they are alwaysunderstaffed. In the twentieth-century university,librarianship became a profession but re-mained an ill-paid one, with a largely femaleworkforce, save in positions of library director.

THE COLLECTIONS

Medieval and Renaissance libraries, as well asmany later foundations, were stocked almostentirely by donation (see donations to li-braries). Another method was the imposition oflegal deposit in approved libraries, enforcedon publishers by the state. In the mid-twentiethcentury, libraries were better funded than ever

before. They grew exponentially but still failed tokeep pace with the growth in the output ofpublications. Selectivity and specialization re-placed aspirations to universality. Policies ofproviding access to information, rather thanowning and storing books, have become inevita-ble for most universities.

BUILDINGS

The library needs to provide space for books,readers, staff and, increasingly, equipment. Mostearly libraries were small, rooms within buildingsrather than entire structures. In the nineteenthcentury and later, large dedicated library build-ings became the norm, frequently conceivedmore with a view to form than function. Size(with consequent problems of lighting and venti-lation), changing ideas concerning good service(e.g. open and closed access), the need to adaptto updated technology (such as networking bycable) and, above all, growth in user numbersand collection size have led to frequent exten-sions and new structures.

TECHNOLOGY

Contrary to popular reputation libraries havealways been good at exploiting new technology.The card catalogue and its arrangement weredeveloped in the nineteenth century and reachedincredible size and sophistication in the twenti-eth. Developments in linguistic as distinct fromnumeric data processing were led by the needs oflibraries. The physical forms of recorded infor-mation (manuscript, printed, photographic, elec-tronic, etc.) have been exploited by librarians.The reverse of the coin is that libraries also mustpreserve past scholarship, sometimes to the detri-ment of the needs of most users.

CO-OPERATION

Libraries have been far more successful at co-operating amongst themselves than most facultiesof universities. Co-operation has taken manyforms: local and national consortia; provision ofservices centrally, and sometimes even interna-tionally, by both national libraries (library ofcongress) and commercial enterprises (oclc).

Past and future

The university library reached its apotheosis inmid-twentieth-century North America. The Uni-versity of Toronto library system grew from less

UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES 645

than half a million volumes in 1947 to 8 millionin 1981. The University of Texas assembled inAustin the greater part of the manuscripts of all‘significant’ twentieth-century writers from allover the world. It is probably safe to assume thatthese days are passing forever. Scale, complexityand electronic technology require university li-braries to be different beasts in the future.

Further reading

Corrall, S. (2001) The SCONUL Vision: AcademicInformation Services in the Year 2005, SCONUL.

Cummings, A.M. et al. (1992) University Libraries andScholarly Communication. A Study Prepared for theAndrew W. Mellon Foundation, Association of Re-search Libraries.

Hamlin, A.T. (1981) The University Library in theUnited States: Its Origins and Development, Uni-versity of Pennsylvania Press.

Higher Education Funding Councils’ Libraries ReviewGroup (1993) Report (Chairman: Sir Brian Follett).

Philip, I. (1983) The Bodleian Library in the Seven-teenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Oxford UniversityPress.

SEE ALSO: academic libraries; informationprofessions; women in librarianship

CHRISTOPHER J. HUNT, REVISED BY THE EDITORS

URQUHART, DONALD JOHN(1909–94)

Librarian and innovator in document deliveryservices.Born in Whitley Bay, England, he studied at

Sheffield University then joined the Science Mu-seum Library in 1938, under S.C. bradford.Service during the Second World War in govern-ment departments concerned with the supply ofscientific and industrial information convincedhim that information services generally were inneed of modernization and improvement. Hissolution to the lack of an adequate system ofscientific libraries in the UK was to advocate theestablishment within the Department of Scientificand Industrial Research (DSIR), by which he wasemployed after the war, of a so-called LendingLibrary Unit.This was then set up as the National Lending

Library for Science and Technology (NLLST),later the british library Document SupplyCentre. The location of the Library in BostonSpa, Yorkshire, was very much Urquhart’schoice. He argued that the functions of the

library could be carried out anywhere withinnormal (i.e. next-day delivery) postal reach of allparts of the country. The institution that he setup there was very self-consciously the antithesisof the conventional library. Since it was there tosupply other libraries with documents they didnot themselves hold, the NLLST stored its hold-ings in the very crudest way, alphabetical orderby title, and demanded that requesting librariesput in the bibliographical work needed to estab-lish accurate details of the requested document.Within the NLLST’s warehouse-like walls, Urqu-hart delighted in introducing devices, such asconveyor belts, to speed up its operation. Hisclarity of vision and determination gave Britain aservice that was respected and emulated through-out the world and has remained at the forefrontof document delivery work since.

Further reading

Urquhart, D.J. (1990) Mr Boston Spa, Wood Garth.

USENET

The network of tens of thousands of discussiongroups, the first of which were set up in 1979using ARPANET, the original network fromwhich the internet evolved. Usenet is categor-ized into areas such as recreation, the sciencesand social issues, and within these categoriesthere are groups that deal with an enormousnumber of specific subjects. These newsgroupsprovide discussion and news items that are heldfor a specified time by receiving computers sothat users can access them, respond and down-load. Archives of Usenet postings (such as Deja-news) are also made available for consultation.

USER EDUCATION

User education (UE) is training in how to use alibrary, so as to be able to find out whereinformation is available, why to use a particularsearch strategy, what other sources can help andhow to exploit them further. Formal pro-grammes of user education have tended to beregarded as essential for all library and informa-tion services and facilities, and in the 1970s and1980s a very considerable literature was gener-ated on the topic. More recently, the area hasbeen subsumed within the more versatile andinclusive concept of information literacy.

646 URQUHART, DONALD JOHN

Programmes dedicated to helping users make thebest advantage of library services are still, how-ever, provided by great numbers of institutionsand the principles and practices of user educationremain an important aspect of the skills of thelibrarian.

Introduction

Library users are heterogeneous, and informa-tion-seeking is a complex activity. User educationhas to be a continuous process for two reasons:first, because of some characteristics of thelibrary system, such as the use of jargon, lack ofstrategy and professionalism in marketing, com-plexities and perplexities in catalogues, precon-ceived ideas of user needs and self-centredlibrarians; second, the deficiencies in communi-cation between the user and the library, such asattitudes of users towards the library as a lastresort, the image of the librarian and intricaciesin information-seeking patterns in the idea planeand in the verbal plane.The term UE is used interchangeably with

‘library instruction’, ‘library orientation’ and‘bibliographic instruction’. Neelameghan (1985)distinguishes user education, user orientationand user assistance. Roberts and Blandy (1989)prefer a broad term: library instruction. Usereducation (1) is a comprehensive service and aprocess of making the user self-reliant in locat-ing, sorting and repacking information; (2) is aninspirational and informational link between the‘book’ and the user, essential for a new user anddesirable for an experienced one; and (3) pre-pares the user for self-evaluation of information.This process may require two strategies: forgeneral exposure, and for specific subject-oriented – bibliographic instruction. The firstvisit to the library is mostly casual and in asense this requires more frequent meetings withthe user. Thus UE is at first impersonal andgradually becomes personal.

History

By the 1850s, US librarians instructed patrons onlibrary use. Samuel Green’s attempt to initiate areference desk in the public library in the 1870s,Louis Shore’s library-college movement in the1920s and Patricia Knapp’s Montieth Collegeprogramme in the 1960s are all significant. In1949 the three-stage user education programmeproposed by the UK library association’s

University and Research Section was a landmark.ranganathan (1940) prescribed the role of anintermediary as a user-friendly reference librar-ian. Boon (1960), Fjallbrant and Stevenson(1978), Hopkins (1982), Roberts and Blandy(1989) and others have made extensive historicalassessments. Progress was slow, partly due to theproblem of defining its place in the services; itwas lost in the informational function or refer-ence service.While lectures, tours and seminars are tradi-

tional methods, programmed learning, teachingmachines, audiovisual tools and computer-assisted learning (CAL) are the recent advances.User education is not merely a library tour or abrochure, it includes searching databases (localand global) and generally making the user lessdependent on others.

Practice

MEDIA

A variety of media are used. One-to-one instruc-tion is simple but expensive. Orientation byinformal tour is traditional and effective, but itis time-consuming and too general, and can causeboredom. Printed materials (leaflet, handout)describe services, tools and search strategies, butneed frequent revision and may not be used.Displaying of posters, diagrams, etc. can teachingskills, but requires a mediator. In workbooks, theaudience is involved, which enables learning atthe individual’s pace and the educator can knowthe effect of learning. But some users mayhesitate to write and even feel shy. In course-related education, library assignments becomepart of the course, but this is cumbersome interms of staff and materials, and consumes muchstaff time.audiovisual materials are useful and effec-

tive, but they are not easily prepared, economicalor simple to use. Programmed instruction in-cludes multimedia, and CAL is one example (seecomputer-assisted learning in library andinformation science). CAL can be a costlyproduct as it needs computers and still dependson other methods, but it has the advantage that itallows networking.For groups, lectures, seminars and tutorials,

and audiovisuals, CAL and tour methods can beused. For individuals, printed guides, pathfinders,practical exercises, programmed instruction andpersonal assistance are helpful.

USER EDUCATION 647

APPLICATIONS

Among the existing general purpose tools someare highly useful, for instance the video devel-oped by the Learning Resource Centre, OhioState University: Battle of the Library Superstars(1981). It gives coverage of specific tools –catalogues, manual and automated, indexes, etc.– and is professionally produced.

Model user education programmes include theperson-to-person approach (University of Sus-sex), the systematic approach (Chalmers Univer-sity of Technology) and the project-orientedapproach (Roskilde University Centre). User edu-cation has been a popular theme for seminars,conferences and workshops. For example, theLibrary Orientation Instruction Exchange’s(LOEX) Clearing House (Eastern Michigan Uni-versity) has conducted many programmes and anannual meeting since the 1970s. The ALA’sLibrary Instruction Round Table is involved inmany such meetings and ACRL’s BibliographicInstruction Section has a Think Tank that is veryactive. In Britain the Standing Conference ofNational and University Libraries (SCONUL)has encouraged co-operative production ofaudiovisual materials since the 1970s, and manypublic libraries and special libraries have takenup the task.

The future

Though user education has come of age, manyissues are yet to be resolved – a major one is thatit is not always well integrated with other aspectsof library services and with programmes ininformation literacy. Assessment of needs, cleargoals and objectives, and involvement of staff inthe development of user education programmesare still much needed.

References

Boon, G.S. (1960) ‘Training laymen in the use of thelibrary’, in The State of the Library Art, RutgersUniversity Press.

Fjallbrant, N. and Stevenson, M. (1978) User Educa-tion in Libraries, Clive Bingley.

Hopkins, F.L. (1982) ‘A century of bibliographicinstruction: The historical claim to professional andacademic legitimacy’, College and Research Libraries43: 192–8.

Neelameghan, A. (1985) ‘User orientation’, in ‘Libraryand information studies curriculum: Some aspectswith special reference to developing countries’, Jour-nal of Library and Information Science 10: 53–65.

Ranganathan, S.R. (1940 [1992]) ‘Initiation of fresh-men’, in Reference Service, UBS Publishers.

Roberts, A.F. and Blandy, S.G. (1989) Library Instruc-tion for Librarians, 2nd rev. edn, Libraries Unlimited.

Further reading

Aluri, D.R. (1981) ‘Application of learning theories tolibrary user instruction’, Libri 31(2): 41.

Cox, A. (1997) ‘Using the World Wide Web for usereducation: A review article’, Journal of Librarianshipand Information Science 29: 39–43.

Dewey, B.I. (2001) Library User Education: PowerfulLearning, Powerful Partnerships, Scarecrow.

George, M.W. (1993) ‘Information literacy: A selectivereview of recent literature’, New Jersey Libraries 26:3–4 (bibliographical essay).

Green, S. (1876) ‘Desirableness of establishing personalintercourse and relations between librarians andreaders in public libraries’, Library Journal 1: 74–81.

Kokkonen, O. (1992) User Education Around theWorld: The UNESCO Survey of Library and Infor-mation User Education Programmes in Some Devel-oping Countries, 58th IFLA General Conference,New Delhi.

Kumar, G. and Kumar, K. (1983) Philosophy of UserEducation, Vikas.

Prorak, D. et al. (1994) ‘Teaching method and psycho-logical type in bibliographic instruction: Effect onstudent learning and confidence’, RQ 33: 484–95.

Shirato, L. (1993) What is Good Instruction Now?Library Instruction for the 1990s, 20th LOEXLibrary Instruction Conference, Pierian Press.

Van Vuren, A.J. and Henning, J. (1999) ‘User educationin a flexible learning environment: An opportunity tostay relevant in the 21st century’, IATUL Proceed-ings, new series vol. 8, at www.iatul.org/conference/pretpap/vuren.html.

White, H.S. (1991) ‘Bibliographic instruction andlibrary school curriculum’, Journal of Education forLibrary and Information Science 32: 194–202.

MOHAMED TAHER

USER STUDIES

In a narrow sense, the study of the characteristicsof users of libraries and/or information; inpractice, most so-called user studies consider useas well as users. In contrast to use studies,however, user studies are more concerned withpeople and what they do than with libraries andother information organizations per se. Studiesthat take the form of market or communityanalyses also collect information about non-users.

Background

User studies, however defined, have reflected avariety of emphases and perspectives. They have

648 USER STUDIES

examined information needs, information-seeking behaviour and more personal charac-teristics of users. The proceedings of a series ofInformation Seeking in Context conferences, forexample Wilson and Allen (1999), illustrate thistype of investigation very effectively.Specific user-related characteristics or variables

that have been measured include:

1 Frequency of library/information use.2 Reasons for use.3 Types of library/information use.4 Attitudes and opinions regarding libraries.5 Reading patterns.6 Level of satisfaction.7 Demographic data.8 Personality.9 Lifestyle.10 Awareness of library services.

The scope of user studies has varied frominvestigations of broad communities (e.g. USphysicians), through studies of individuals withina single organization, to studies of the use of aparticular service or resource. Some studies focuson a single type of library; others consider alllibrary and information use of certain indivi-duals.User studies have been conducted for a

number of purposes and have realized a varietyof benefits. In general, they have been used toprovide data for evaluations of libraries andother information agencies and to facilitateplanning for collection development, pro-grammes and services. More recently, userstudies have been utilized in some of theattempts to measure how the use of librariesand information affects the user. There is agrowing consensus that if libraries are to betruly effective they must be most concernedwith their ultimate performance, and that themost meaningful indicators of performance areuser-oriented.The literature of user studies is considerable

and ranges from reports of generalizable basicresearch to descriptions of situation-specific pro-jects. Some of the reports represent nationwidestudies; others are limited to small, in-housestudies.Also, there is a substantial body of literature

on how to design and conduct user studies. Bakerand Lancaster (1991), in their standard work onthe measurement and evaluation of library ser-

vices, present a useful overview of user studies.An article by Butler and Gratch (1982) providessome helpful suggestions for planning a userstudy. Texts on research methods for library andinformation science professionals (Powell 1991;Simpson 1988; Busha and Harter 1980; andothers) provide more detailed information on avariety of research methods and techniques ap-plicable to user studies.

Methods

User studies can be designed as basic research oras applied/action research. In the latter case, theyoften are used to gather evaluative data. In eithercase, user studies can employ quantitative orqualitative methods, direct or indirect methods.Quantitative research methods involve a pro-

blem-solving approach that is highly structuredin nature and that relies on the quantification ofvariables for purposes of measurement and ana-lysis. Qualitative research methods are less re-liant on quantitative measurement and give moreattention to the subjective aspects of humanexperience and behaviour.Direct methods rely on obtaining information

directly from the user. Indirect methods involveexamining some evidence of user behaviour, suchas circulation records, and deducing somethingabout the user accordingly. Both direct andindirect methods can be quantitative or qualita-tive in nature.The bulk of user studies continues to take the

form of surveys and is usually designed to collectdata from a sample rather than from an entirepopulation. The questionnaire, interview andobservation remain common data-collectiontechniques for surveys. Here again, these techni-ques can take a qualitative or quantitativeapproach to the measurement process. An in-creasingly popular type of interview used toevaluate library use is the focused or focus groupinterview.In contrast to the typical survey, critical-

incident techniques concentrate on a single recentevent. Case studies focus on a small number ofindividuals or organizations but gather compre-hensive data. In diary-type studies, users areasked to collect their own data over a period oftime. Techniques involving the examination ofdocuments include citation and content analyses.Modelling has found some applications in userstudies.

USER STUDIES 649

Summary and conclusions

User studies can provide information about thepopulations using libraries, user awareness ofservices, levels of and reasons for user satisfac-tion and dissatisfaction, unmet needs, types ofinformation used, reasons why individuals useparticular resources, and even help to predictlibrary/information usage. User studies also canmeasure the actual impact of library/informationuse, i.e. how such use affects or benefits the lifeof the user. But user studies cannot provide anyof these benefits if careful attention is not givento their design. They must be as valid, reliableand scientifically rigorous as is possible. Userstudies must reflect the best and latest knowledgeon how to design and conduct sound research.Only then can such studies provide the kind ofuser-based information needed to determine thereal effectiveness of libraries and other informa-tion agencies.

References

Baker, S.L. and Lancaster, F.W. (1991) The Measure-ment and Evaluation of Library Services, 2nd edn,Information Resources Press.

Busha, C.H. and Harter, S.P. (1980) Research Methodsin Librarianship, Academic Press.

Butler, M. and Gratch, B. (1982) ‘Planning a user

study: The process defined’, College and ResearchLibraries 43(4): 320–30.

Powell, R.R. (1991) Basic Research Methods forLibrarians, 2nd edn, Ablex Publishing.

Simpson, I.S. (1988) Basic Statistics for Librarians, 3rd

edn, Library Association.Wilson, T. and Allen, D. (1999) Exploring the Contextsof Information Behaviour. Proceedings of the SecondInternational Conference on Research in InformationNeeds, Seeking and Use in Different Contexts,Sheffield 13–15 August 1998. Taylor Graham.

Further reading

Siatri, R. (1999) ‘The evolution of user studies’, Libri49: 132–41.

Wilson, T.D. (2000) ‘Recent trends in user studies:Action research and qualitative methods’, Informa-tion Research 5, at www.shef.ac.uk/is/publications/infres/paper76.html.

SEE ALSO: performance measurement inlibraries; quality assurance; research in libraryand information science

RONALD R. POWELL

USMARC

The US version of the marc format, developedby the library of congress.

650 USMARC

V

VALUE ADDED

A term from the business field used in LIS todescribe the enhancement of existing informationproducts and services for the benefit of users. Inparticular, it is used to refer to networks thatlease telecommunications links from a publicutility, supplement these with additional services,specialized features, etc. and market the im-proved resulting network to customers.

VIDEOCONFERENCE

The use of telecommunications networks andvideo technology to permit people in remotelocations to participate in meetings where all orsome of the participants are ‘present’ in the formof an interactive video link. Videoconferencing isan attractive alternative to ‘real’ meetings whenthe costs of air travel and hotel accommodationare considered, though set-up costs can be high,and a reasonable quality of transmission can onlybe achieved when broadband networks areaccessible.


VIDEOTEX

Generic term for interactive information retrievalservices designed for adapted television receivers.It was originally called viewdata, and was in-vented by Sam Fedida, UK Post Office engineer,in 1970. A special decoder enabled the display ofpages of information, retrieved from a remotecomputer system, on the television screen. Thesystem could also be accessed via a conventional

visual display terminal or a personal computerrunning special software. A number of countriesestablished public videotex services, such as theUK’s Prestel, but the technology was put to besteffect in successor versions such as France’sminitel (a distributed system that was muchmore popular than Prestel). Some companiesestablished private videotex services, for exampleto distribute corporate information internally orto give customers details of their current productrange. The crudity of the technology and thelimited range of resources to which it gave accessled to its swift eclipse when public access to theInternet became widely available during the1990s.

SEE ALSO: electronic public information services;information and communication technology;knowledge industries

VIRTUAL LIBRARY

A user-accessible network of computer-basedinformation resources, also referred to as digitallibraries (see digital library) or electroniclibraries (see electronic library). Accessthrough a subject gateway or portal (see portalsand gateways) creates the sense of a singlelibrary of resources. To be distinguished from avirtual reality library, which is effectively anew form of OPAC built using virtual realitytechnology so as to create the illusion that theuser is searching the shelves of an actual libraryto retrieve information about resources.

SEE ALSO: libraries

VIRTUAL REALITY

A computer-generated world, around which aperson can move, interacting with items encoun-tered. Special software is required to control thevisual, audio and tactile presentation of thevirtual world. Devices such as head-mounteddisplays and data gloves may be required forimmersion and interaction in the virtual world.Desktop virtual reality systems eschew immer-sion and similar devices, using instead a conven-tional computer monitor and control devicessuch as joysticks or keyboards.

History

Virtual reality is a recent development in com-puter science that promises a new form ofhuman–computer interaction. Because of itsimmaturity, virtual reality technology is expen-sive and not particularly effective in creatingrealistic virtual worlds. It has found applicationsin areas that either can bear the huge expense ofcreating realistic virtual worlds (e.g. militaryflight simulators) or benefit from less intensivecomputer-controlled renderings of physical phe-nomena (e.g. architecture, medicine).

Applications

There is a potential for using virtual realitytechnology to create information spaces, visualrepresentations of information to aid informa-tion retrieval.One approach sees virtual reality as a way of

emulating by computer the retrieval by brows-ing that users carry out in the real world. Userswould browse an image of items in an informa-tion collection using a virtual reality system, inmuch the same way as they browse physicalshelf orderings of items. Since browsing dependssolely on a person’s innate ability to recognizeand recall item orderings, a virtual reality-basedretrieval system ought to be simpler to use thanthe current generation of textual, query-basedonline public access catalogues (opacs) (Poulter1993, Koh 1995, Beheshti 1997).Another approach harnesses the ability of

virtual reality to create on computers visualrepresentations of information that would notbe possible in the real world. This is known asinformation visualization, as these representa-tions seek to enrich a user’s perception ofavailable information. One does not have to

use virtual reality technology to create informa-tion spaces, but rather conventional three-di-mensional computer graphics.

References

Beheshti, J. (1997) ‘The evolving OPAC’, Cataloguingand Classification Quarterly 24(1/2): 163–85.

Koh, G. (1995) ‘Options in classification availablethrough modern technology’, Cataloguing and Clas-sification Quarterly 19(3/4): 195–211.

Poulter, A. (1993) ‘Towards a virtual reality library’,ASLIB Proceedings 45(1): 11–17.

Further reading

Hearst, M. (1999) ‘User interfaces and visualization’, inR. Baeza-Yates and B. Ribeiro-Neto, Modern Infor-mation Retrieval, Addison Wesley, pp. 257–323.

Newby, G.B. (1993) ‘Virtual reality’, Annual Review ofInformation Science and Technology 28: 187–229.


ALAN POULTER

VISUAL DISPLAY TERMINAL (VDT)

Sometimes also called a visual display unit(VDU). This is a terminal, equipped with key-board and screen, which is capable of connectionto a computer system for the exchange of databetween the terminal and the computer. Oftenreferred to as a dumb terminal.

VON NEUMANN, JOHN (1903–57)

Mathematician who made important contribu-tions to a number of disciplines, includingcomputer science.A Hungarian-born German-American who

studied in Berlin and Zurich, in 1929 he receiveda PhD in mathematics from the University ofBudapest, with a dissertation about set theory.He was appointed professor at Princeton in 1931and after 1933 was attached to the Institute forAdvanced Study there, until his death. His bookon quantum mechanics, The Mathematical Foun-dations of Quantum Mechanics (1932), remainsa standard treatment of the subject, and,although his papers were mainly in physics andpure and applied mathematics, his ideas wereinfluential and much cited in a diverse range ofdisciplines.In computer science, Von Neumann did much

of the pioneering work in logic design, in the

652 VIRTUAL REALITY

problem of obtaining reliable answers from amachine with unreliable components, the func-tion of memory, machine imitation of random-ness and the problem of constructing automatathat can reproduce their own kind. His work onthe theory of competitive games has been much

used in applying mathematical analysis to social,industrial and business situations, including thoseconcerned with information.

SEE ALSO: economics of information;information theory

VON NEUMANN, JOHN 653

W

WAPLES, DOUGLAS (1893–1978)

Educationalist whose efforts established the im-portance of research in librarianship and educa-tion for librarianship.Waples was born in Philadelphia and edu-

cated at Haverford College, Harvard and theUniversity of Pennsylvania (1920). He taught asAssistant Professor of Psychology and Educationat Tufts University, and moved to the Universityof Pittsburgh in 1923 and the University ofChicago in 1925. At the Chicago GraduateLibrary School his work centred on publiccommunication, in particular the internationalexchange of ideas. He was acutely aware of theneed for a research-based body of knowledgefor librarianship and was largely responsible forthe dominant influence of research on theGraduate Library School. His book on researchmethods for librarianship, Investigating LibraryProblems (1939), was for long the chief text onthe topic.He, himself, did important work on reading

behaviour in a series of books and articlesthat explored different methods and approachedresearch questions from different perspectives.Perhaps his outstanding contribution wasthe research report (with Bernard Berelson andFranklyn Bradshaw) What Reading Does toPeople (1940), which contained a summingup of research on the social effects of readingand important methodological recommenda-tions.

SEE ALSO: reading research; research in libraryand information science

WEB BROWSER

Also referred to as simply ‘browser’, this is asoftware application that is used to locate anddisplay pages on the world wide web. Thetwo most widely used browsers, Netscape Navi-gator and Internet Explorer, are able to displayboth text and graphics. Sound and video canalso be presented by browsers, though it may benecessary to use additional plug-in software,sometimes referred to as viewers, for certainformats.

WEBMASTER

The individual responsible for setting up, input-ting content to and maintaining a website.

WIDE-AREA NETWORK (WAN)

A network, or part of a network, that inter-connects computer resources at sites and/orbuildings, over large distances (regionally, na-tionally or internationally). janet is an exampleof a WAN.


WIENER, NORBERT (1894–1964)

Mathematician and a founder of cybernetics.Wiener studied at Tufts (graduating in Mathe-

matics at the age of fourteen) and Harvard. Healso studied at Cambridge and Göttingen. Hethen taught mathematics at Massachusetts In-stitute of Technology. The theoretical develop-

ments arising from his wartime work on math-ematical theory applied to artillery fire led tovaluable statistical methods for control andcommunications engineering, and, in turn, ledto Wiener’s formulation of the concept ofcybernetics.

Further reading

Wiener, N. et al. (1997) The Legacy of Norbert Wiener:A Centennial Symposium, Providence: AmericanMathematical Society.


WINDOWS

Both the generic term for overlaid screens andthe proprietary name of Microsoft’s graphicuser interface, of the kind that was devel-oped by Xerox and featured on Macintoshcomputers from 1984. It has since become thenormal form of interface across the range ofcomputer types.

WIRELESS APPLICATIONS

Originally the term ‘wireless’ was used incomputing to refer to the use of radio commu-nication to connect computers within a net-work, but now it includes other methods oftransmission, such as infrared and ultraviolet.The convergence of cellular phone and networktechnology increases the scope for wirelessapplications to contribute to the informatizationof society. The Wireless Application Protocol isthe technical basis for the use of mobiletelephones for internet access.

SEE ALSO: mobile communications

WOMEN IN LIBRARIANSHIP

Overview: historical, comparative andtheoretical issues

Women have held full-time positions inlibraries for more than a century and a half,but it was during the fifty-year period betweenthe 1870s and the 1920s that they were activelyencouraged to pursue library careers in NorthAmerica and Europe. Although not always wel-comed in the great university and research

libraries, well-educated women on both sides ofthe Atlantic were recruited by public libraryleaders who presented a dynamic, new image ofthe profession. For example, in 1910 a USvocational guide for women stated that thepublic librarian:

[H]as the opportunity of making her librarythe centre of educational and intellectual lifeof the community.. . .There is in this workscope for the exercise of all a woman’s powers,executive ability, knowledge of books, socialsympathies, knowledge of human nature.

(Rathbone 1910)

Library careers opened to women in continentalEurope later than in the USA (1850s) or Britain(1870s); in 1888 the first two Italian womenpassed the state library examination and in 1895the first German woman librarian was employedin a public library in Berlin. Although femalepublic librarians in Germany had founded theAssociation of Women Working in Libraries by1907, few women were employed in academiclibraries prior to the end of the Second WorldWar. The earliest reference to a French womanholding a full-time library post dates from 1903,but it was between 1920 and 1945 that the rapidfeminization of the field occurred in France.Following the Russian Revolution, many wo-

men were recruited into librarianship at theinstigation of Lenin’s wife, Nadezha Krupskaja,who became a central figure in the movement tocentralize Soviet library services and set up publiclibrary collections throughout the USSR. In LatinAmerica a few women emerged as library leadersduring the interwar period, and by the 1930s thefirst women were named to library posts in India.In Africa it was not until the 1940s and 1950sthat a few expatriate women librarians camefrom France and England to participate in theestablishment of new libraries and in the trainingof African librarians. In the decade following theindependence movement a small number ofAfrican women rose to positions of leadership inlibraries; however, by the end of the century menstill accounted for a large majority of the trainedlibrarians in Francophone Africa, and even inNigeria, where more women held library creden-tials, male librarians greatly outnumbered wo-men in academic and special libraries.Looking at the experience of women librarians

from an international perspective, it is clear that

WOMEN IN LIBRARIANSHIP 655

their career opportunities have differed signifi-cantly, due to social and cultural norms in eachcountry as well as the economic and politicalconditions that influenced their access to educa-tion and employment. To understand the natureof women’s employment in librarianship, itis useful to combine a ‘gender role’ perspectivewith a broader ‘structural perspective’. In sucha socio-historical approach the ‘gender roleperspective’ allows for analysis based on gendersocialization as the primary determinant ofwomen’s workforce status, while the ‘structuralperspective’ emphasizes the structural featuresof the workplace and other social institutions.Although these two perspectives are oftenconsidered mutually exclusive, it is only througha synthesis of the two that a comparative analysisof women’s careers is possible.In addition it is important to identify con-

straints, barriers and restraints that influencedwomen’s career choices and advancement. In thecontext of library careers barriers are definedas external variables that make entry or ad-vancement in a field more difficult for womenthan for men (e.g. laws and regulations barringtheir access to higher education and professionalpractice, and discrimination against womenin appointment or promotion). In addition, lawsthat bar married women from working alsoproved significant barriers to women’s persis-tence and advancement. Restraints relate tosocial expectations and family responsibilitiesplaced on women that may limit their careerpotential, and constraints are the internalizedpatterns of behaviour and attitudes that resultfrom gender socialization. For each of theseinhibiting factors, there are other factorsthat motivate women to seek careers in fieldspreviously occupied by men. Thus women maybe motivated to overcome various kindsof barriers when new opportunities for employ-ment exist; they are more likely to overcomesocial restraints when there are strong incentives(such as the need to become self-supporting).Lack of confidence and other self-imposed con-straints are less inhibiting for those womenwho have socio-psychological support from fa-mily, friends, teachers, mentors or colleagues.Barriers and opportunities are seen as structuralvariables because they are largely determined bythe legal, political and educational system and by

the economic structure of the workforce. Re-straints and incentives can be viewed from both astructural and a gender socialization perspective,whereas constraints relate to the degree to whichindividual women have internalized gendernorms that limit their achievements outside thehome.Historical research in Europe and North

America suggests that large numbers of womenentered librarianship at times when great socialchange affected the longstanding structure ofgender relations. Other incentives were, ofcourse, economic; for example women have beendrawn to librarianship as vacancies occurred –either because of economic expansion (as in theUSA in the 1870s), or at times when there was ashortage of men to fill new and/or existing posts(e.g. Britain and France after the First WorldWar). In many cases, the feminization of librar-ianship occurred simultaneously with the grow-ing professionalization of the field. In bothFrance and the USA the feminization of librarian-ship was relatively rapid, occurring withintwenty-five to forty years. Britain meanwhileexperienced a much slower influx of women intothe library field, and nearly sixty years elapsedbefore women made up the majority of librar-ians. The contrast between Britain and the othertwo countries is even more striking in regard toprofessional leadership. In France and the USA,the election of the first woman as library associa-tion president occurred approximately one gen-eration after the admission of female librarians tothe national association, whereas nearly ninetyyears passed in Britain before the libraryassociation elected a woman to its highestoffice. Although no woman was appointed tothe professional ranks of the British MuseumLibrary until 1931, Britain was the first of thethree countries to name a woman as head of itsnational library. However, a number of leadingwomen librarians have held senior posts in thelibrary of congress and the bibliothèquenationale de france (BN), and the first twowomen presidents of the French library associa-tion were drawn from the staff of the BN.Regardless of their nationality, women were

often barred or discouraged from becomingdirectors of major libraries. Although a numberof US women held library directorships orheaded library schools at the end of the nine-

656 WOMEN IN LIBRARIANSHIP

teenth century, historians have documented abacklash that began prior to the First WorldWar when some of these leading women werereplaced by men or were denied promotion todirector. Nonetheless, certain outstanding womenbecame what feminist scholars have termed ‘non-positional leaders’, serving as change agents andas opinion leaders even though they did not holdhigh-ranking posts. In many countries womenlibrarians played a crucial role in the develop-ment of children’s services, outreach services andbookmobiles; in other areas, such as referencework and cataloguing, women have also left animportant legacy and the american libraryassociation (ALA) has named awards in hon-our of women in these two specialities. Through-out Europe women have been acknowledged asleaders in all aspects of librarianship, includingthe closely related fields of documentation andbibliography. In Britain, women played a signifi-cant role in the county libraries set up by thelegislation of 1919 and in France during theinterwar years non-positional leadership wasdemonstrated by a number of female librarianswhose work greatly influenced the reform ofFrench public libraries following the liberation(Maack 1983).

Research and publication

Although all aspects of librarianship have bene-fited from contributions by women, until recentlytheir accomplishments were often overlooked bybiographers and historians. In 1979 KathleenWeibel and Kathleen M. Heim published TheRole of Women in Librarianship 1876–1976, aground-breaking book that included an anthol-ogy of forty-four selections from the libraryliterature of Great Britain and the USA, and aninternational bibliography of over 1,000 itemsarranged chronologically. The bibliography hasbeen updated in five-year supplements, eachentitled On Account Of Sex: An AnnotatedBibliography on the Status of Women in Librar-ianship; these four supplementary volumes nowcontain over 2,500 additional entries of worksranging from dissertations and research mono-graphs to book reviews, letters and opinionpieces. Although historical and biographicalworks make up nearly 40 per cent of the entriesin the latest volume, the publications listed coverall aspects of women’s experience in librarian-ship, from contemporary research on salaries and

placement to articles on leadership, pay equity,career development and sexual harassment. Ananthology of earlier articles on women in librar-ianship (similar to Weibel and Heim 1979) waspublished in Germany by Helga Ludtke (1992),who also included an extensive bibliography.There is a small but growing body of researchliterature from Australia and Canada that dealswith a wide range of topics, from non-sexistcataloguing to women in management and theimpact of technology on women’s careers. InBritain two important studies were published byDr Gillian Burrington (1987, 1993) and in 1994the Library Association (LAUK) commissioned aresearch study of career barriers and progressionof woman in senior management (Poland 1996).In France there have been a number of scholarlybiographical studies of women library leaders,including academic theses and oral history inter-views; the most notable publication is a recentmonograph on the history of documentation inFrance that features a number of importantwomen librarians (Fayet-Scribe 2000). Earlier, aspecial issue of a French library journal (Lemaı̂tre1983) was devoted to articles on and interviewswith the first French women to work as librar-ians.Special issues of journals have also been an

important means to disseminate feminist researchin other countries including Canada, Britain andthe USA (Canadian Journal of InformationScience (1992), Journal of Library History (fall1983) and Library Trends (fall 1985)). In addi-tion, several collections of papers from specialmeetings devoted to women in librarianship havebeen published. Examples include a collection ofpapers from ALA Library History ResearchForum (Grotzinger 1994) and the proceedings ofan international conference entitled ‘GenderingLibrary History’, which have been recently issuedas a monograph (Kerslake and Moody 2000).

Gender issues and activism

In response to the second feminist movement,both researchers and library activists have orga-nized special sessions offering managerial orassertiveness training to help empower womenwith the confidence and skills they needed toadvance their careers. In a number of countriesfeminist librarians also called meetings to exam-ine issues such as pay equity and advancement,and in Japan a Feminist Library Network was

WOMEN IN LIBRARIANSHIP 657

formed. Although there are a few autonomousorganizations for women librarians, more oftengender interest groups operate within profes-sional associations (e.g. the Task Force on theStatus of Women of the Canadian Library Asso-ciation; the ALA Committee on the Status ofWomen in Libraries; and the Status of Women inLibrarianship Special Interest Group of the Li-brary Association of Australia). In Britain, agroup called Women in Libraries was createdand the Library Association published a specialmanual entitled Training and Development forWomen (Morris 1993). The International Federa-tion of Library Associations and Institutions(IFLA) has sponsored conference programmes onwomen in libraries since 1988 when eightylibrarians attended a pre-conference seminar on‘Women and the Power of Managing Informa-tion’ in Australia; in 1993 the Round Table onWomen’s Issues was formally recognized byIFLA.Another significant outcome of feminist acti-

vism has been the publication of placement,salary and advancement statistics broken downby gender. First gathered in the 1970s or early1980s, these statistics clearly showed a pattern ofemployment called ‘hierarchical segregation’ orgender stratification where women were system-atically denied the highest-level posts. Librarywomen have, to some degree, also experiencedwhat feminist scholars term ‘territorial discrimi-nation’ – that is they have been more concen-trated in certain kinds of libraries or in certaintypes of work than in others. Important surveysdone in the early 1980s showed that the propor-tion of male librarians was 16 per cent in France;19 per cent in the USA; and 38 per cent inBritain; however, in all three countries there wasa pattern of greater concentration of men inhigh-prestige academic and research libraries.For example, in 1981 men accounted for 38 percent of the professionals in the 120 largest USand Canadian libraries that belong to the Asso-ciation of Research Libraries (ARL); this figure(which was double the proportion of men in thefield at large) fell slightly by 2001 when menoccupied 35 per cent of ARL positions. In regardto type of work within ARL libraries, women aresomewhat more concentrated in both cataloguingand reference where they hold 78 per cent of thepositions, but less concentrated in rare-booklibrarianship (54 per cent); men outnumberwomen in computer systems work (they hold 65

per cent of the positions) and they still accountfor 54 per cent of the library directors (ARL2001).

During the last thirty years considerableprogress has nonetheless been made in women’sadvancement to top positions in Britain and inNorth America. ARL statistics clearly show thatit is in the directorship category where womenhave made the greatest gains; according to a1980 survey women held only 27 per cent ofthe directorships in all academic libraries (Heim1982), whereas in 2001 they headed 46 per centof the ARL libraries and, as a group, earnedslightly more than their male counterparts.Women in ARL libraries also made salary gainsoverall – going from 87 per cent of the salaryearned by male librarians in 1981 to 93 percent in 2001. While this is definite progresstowards pay equity, at that rate of change itwould take another two decades before parity isreached (ARL 2001). Salary statistics fromBritain also show that the gender gap inadvancement to top positions and in pay equityhas begun to narrow. Overall there has been agrowth in the percentage of women in manage-ment positions, from 5 per cent in 1971, to 11per cent in 1981 to 25 per cent a decade later(Morris 1993); however, by 1996 a survey ofsenior library managers showed that 20 per centof the men librarians earned over £27,000 ascompared with only 9 per cent of the women(Poland 1996).

References

ARL Annual Salary Survey 2000–2001 (2001) Associa-tion of Research Libraries.

Burrington, G.A. (1993) Equally Good: Women inBritish Librarianship?, Association of Assistant Li-brarians.

—— (1987) Equal Opportunities in Librarianship?,Library Association.

Fayet-Scribe, S. (2000) Histoire de la documentation enFrance, Paris: CNRS Editions.

Grotzinger, L. (ed.) (1994) Women’s Work: Vision andChange in Librarianship, Occasional Papers of theGraduate School of Library and Information Science,University of Illinois, no. 196.

Heim, K. (1982) ‘The demographic and economicstatus of librarians in the 1970s with special refer-ence to women’, Advances in Librarianship 12: 1–45.

Kerslake, E. and Moody, N. (eds) (2000) GenderingLibrary History, John Moores University Press.

Lemaı̂tre, R. (ed.) (1983) Bulletin d’Information del’Association des Diplomés de l’Ecole de Bibliothé-

658 WOMEN IN LIBRARIANSHIP

caires Documentalistes. Numéro Special FemmesBibliothécaires 22 (Novembre): 3–16

Ludtke, H. (1992) Leidenschaft und Bildung: zurGeschichte der Frauenarbeit in Bibliotheken, Berlin:Orlanda Frauenverlag.

Maack, M.N. (ed.) (1983) ‘Women librarians in France:The first generation’, Journal of Library History18(4): 407–49.

Morris, B. (1993) Training and Development forWomen, Library Association.

Poland, F. (1996) Women and Senior Management: AResearch Study of Career Barriers and Progression inthe Library and Information Sector, Library Associa-tion.

Rathbone, J. (1910) ‘Library work’, in Vocations forthe Trained Woman, New York: Longmans, Greenand Co.

Weibel, K. and Heim, K. (eds) (1979) The Role ofWomen in Librarianship 1876–1976: The Entry,Advancement and Struggle for Equalization in OneProfession, Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press [this work isupdated by four supplements, each entitled: OnAccount of Sex: An Annotated Bibliography on theStatus of Women in Librarianship, vol. 1, 1977–81(1984); vol. 2, 1982–6 (1989); vol. 3, 1987–92(1993); vol. 4, 1993–7 (2000).

Further reading

Dumont, R. (ed. ) (1985) ‘Women and leadership in thelibrary profession’, special issue, Library Trends34(2)

Harris, R. (1992) Librarianship: The Erosion of aWoman’s Profession, Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Hildenbrand, S. (ed.) (1996) Reclaiming the AmericanLibrary Past: Writing the Women In, Norwood, NJ:Ablex.

Kenady, C. (1989) Pay Equity: An Action Manual forLibrary Workers, Chicago: American Library Asso-ciation.

Maack, M.N. and Passet, J. (1994) Aspirations andMentoring in an Academic Environment: WomenFaculty In Library and Information Science, West-port, CT: Greenwood Press.

Passet, J. (1994) Cultural Crusaders: Women Librariansin the American West, 1900–1917, Albuquerque,NM: University of New Mexico Press.

Williams, C. (1995) Still a Man’s World: Men Who DoWomen’s Work, Berkeley, CA: University of Califor-nia Press.

SEE ALSO: history of libraries; informationprofessions; public libraries

MARY NILES MAACK

WORD PROCESSING

A computer application program that enables theuser to enter text, edit it, format it, manage itand print out documents consisting of text andsimple graphics and tables. The contrast, which

has meant that it has more or less replaced thetypewriter, is that changes to the text can bemade easily, at any stage, whilst the typewriterproduces a hard-copy version at the same time astext is entered. Word processing has transformednot merely office practice, but the whole act ofwriting; literary composition has become a muchmore fluent activity.

SEE ALSO: office automation

WORKSTATION

A powerful desktop computer system, usuallyhaving a high-resolution display screen and theability to integrate text and graphics. A work-station would be expected both to process andstore information locally, and to exchange infor-mation with other systems. The performance gapand the price differential between products mar-keted as workstations and the standard perso-nal computers widely used in offices havegradually narrowed. In practice, most work-stations are now networked PCs.

SEE ALSO: informatics; information andcommunication technology; informationmanagement

WORLD WIDE WEB

The World Wide Web (WWW), or just ‘the Web’,is a hypermedia information service on theinternet, which has been in place since 1991. Itbegan as a distributed hypertext-based informa-tion system developed at CERN (the Europeanparticle physics research centre in Geneva, Swit-zerland) by Tim berners-lee, but found its truehome on the Internet, becoming almost a syno-nym for Internet itself. It interfaces with mostother Internet services (FTP, telnet, NNTP, etc.).It allows the easy production of documentscontaining multimedia as well as text andhyperlinks by means of a simple mark-up lan-guage, HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language).Web documents, typically referred to as pages,are stored on servers and retrieved by clientsoftware known as web browsers (for exampleMicrosoft’s Internet Explorer). A page is re-trieved by quoting its URL (uniform resourcelocator) in a browser, which then fetches acopy of the page from its server using the HTTP(HyperText Transfer Protocol). Pages tend to be

WORLD WIDE WEB 659

stored in linked local groups, termed a website,on a server.Popularity has a price. Nobody knows for sure

how many web pages there are. Current esti-mates range from 2 billion upwards. Thus thepractice of exploring links to see where they lead,known as surfing, can be fun but is not for theserious information seeker. There are two typesof search engine (see search engines). One typestores URLs of hand-picked pages under ahierarchical subject listing. The other type em-ploys software known as a spider or a robot tocopy pages into a searchable database. Examplesof these two types are Yahoo! and AltaVista,respectively. Most search engines are commer-cially funded but some are publicly funded, e.g.those in the UK Resource Discovery Network.Some search engines search just agglomerationsof other search engines (e.g. Ixquick) and areknown as metasearch engines. However no onesearch engine is comprehensive and not allinformation resources on the Internet (e.g. the‘invisible Web’) are directly accessible via theWeb.The invisible Web consists of databases ac-

cessible via Web servers, but indirectly. A Webserver can access a database either by server-sidescripts (special programs accessible to a Webserver) or by middleware, software which con-nects Web servers to other facilities. Server-sidescripting comes in many forms from standardCGI (Common Gateway Interface) scripts writ-ten in programming languages like Perl orPHP to proprietary server extensions like Micro-soft’s ASP (Active Server Pages). It allows theaddition of new features to the web such as theability to create ‘dynamic’ pages in response touser input via a Web form or to track users bymeans of ‘cookies’, short identifying strings.Dynamic Web pages can also be produced byembedding client-side scripts in pages, usinglanguages like JavaScript or Java (a powerful

cross-platform language). These scripts work inthe browser on the user’s machine.This functional and technical extensibility of

the Web has enabled it to become a platform fore-commerce on the Internet. Sites like Amazonuse Web-based ‘shopping cart’ systems to sellbooks and other products. Other sites like MSN(MicroSoft Network) are portals (see portalsand gateways) offering many Web-based ser-vices to users (e-mail, chat, searching, etc.) inorder to create audiences for advertising. Withinorganizations, intranets can access a variety ofWeb-based and legacy information systems andservices, and deliver the results via Web browsersto employees.Because the Web is now so vital globally and

in so many arenas, its technical development iscontrolled by an international organization re-presenting governments, business and academia,the World Wide Web Steering Consortium(W3C). The most important new directionheaded by W3C is the replacement of HTML byXML (eXtensible Mark-up Language), whichwill enable the encoding not just of the displayof content but of the meaning of content on Webpages, what Tim Berners-Lee refers to as the‘semantic Web’. The Web appears to be thepremier information management tool for theforeseeable future.

Further reading

Berners-Lee, T. (1999) Weaving the Web: The Past,Present and Future of the World Wide Web by ItsInventor, Orion Business Books.

Poulter, A., Tseng, G. and Sargent, G. (1999) TheInformation and Library Professional’s Guide to theWorld Wide Web, Library Association Publishing.

SEE ALSO: information and communicationtechnology; information technology; knowledgeindustries; networks

ALAN POULTER

660 WORLD WIDE WEB

Z

ZIPF, GEORGE KINGSLEY (1902–50)

Psychologist and philologist who applied statis-tical and linguistic theories to human commu-nication.

Born in Freeport, Illinois, he graduated fromHarvard in 1924, also studied in Bonn andBerlin, and took a Harvard PhD in ComparativePhilology in 1930. He taught German at Harvardfor the rest of his life.

Zipf pioneered the study of word frequencies,not so as to apply this to questions of style, butas a means of throwing light on the nature ofcommunication. From these studies he devel-oped a theory of word frequencies that paral-leled that of lotka for research papers and

which is referred to as Zipf’s Law. His use ofranking also relates to the study of the distribu-tion of papers across a range of journals de-scribed by bradford. In The Psychobiology ofLanguage (1935) he related his linguistic ideas tohuman communication generally, and in HumanBehaviour and the Principle of Least Effort(1949) he brought together semantic, psychologi-cal, sociological and geographical elements into abroader theoretical basis for his statistical ob-servations.

Further reading

Tuchinsky, P.M. (1980) Zipf’s Law and His Efforts toUse Infinite Series in Linguistics, Cambridge, MA:Birkhauser Boston.

Index

A2A (Access To Archives) 222

AAM see American Association of Museums

abstract 1, 89

abstracting and indexing services 1–3, 4

academic libraries 3–5, 172

see also libraries

Africa 12

Bangladesh 598

Caribbean 56

Central America 64

crime in libraries 111

India 594

Pakistan 596

picture collections 514

Southeast Asia 601, 602, 608

Academy of Certified Archivists 23

acceptable use policy (AUP) 5, 201

Access To Archives (A2A) 222

accessions 5–6

accreditation of LIS achools 6, 298

acquisitions 6–7

donations 150

Acts

see also legislation; Regulations

Access to Health Records Act (UK, 1990)

203

Access to Medical Reports Act (UK, 1988)

203

Access to Personal Files Act (UK, 1987) 203

Administrative Services Act (USA, 1949) 442

British Library Act (UK, 1972) 383

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (USA, 1984)

260

Computer Misuse Act (UK, 1990) 98

Consumer Credit Act (UK, 1974) 203

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (UK,

1988) 109, 110, 323, 430

Criminal Damage Act (UK, 1971) 98

Data Protection Act (UK, 1984) 203, 272,

521

Data Protection Act (UK, 1998) 124, 521

Digital Millennium Copyright Act (USA,

1998) 390–391

Disability Discrimination Act (UK, 1995)

577

Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (USA, 1993)

521

Federal Records Act (USA, 1950) 442

Forgery and Counterfeiting Act (UK, 1981)

98

Freedom of Information Act (UK, 2000)

203, 462

Freedom of Information Act (USA, 1966)

462

Health and Safety at Work Act (UK, 1974)

216

Human Rights Act (UK, 2000) 521

Library Services Act (USA, 1956) 17,

383–384, 559

Library Services and Construction Act (USA,

1964) 17

Local Government (Access to Information)

Act (UK, 1985) 203

Local Government and Housing Act (UK,

1989) 384

Official Secrets Act (UK, 1989) 203, 463

Patents Act (UK, 1977) 323

Privacy Act (USA, 1974) 521

Notes: Bold page numbers indicate main entries. Abbreviations, see also detailed list on pages xxiii to

xxxii.

Public Lending Right Act (UK, 1979) 528,

529

Public Libraries Act (UK, 1850) 383, 550

Public Libraries and Museums Act (UK,

1964) 531, 559

Public Records Acts (UK, 1838, 1958, 1967)

532–533

Radio Act (USA, 1927) 50

Theft Act (UK, 1968) 98

Trade Marks Act (UK, 1994) 323, 635

Adorno, Theodor 113

ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Loop)

247

Advancement of Librarianship in the Third

World Programme (ALP) 13

advice service 7–9

Advisory Group for Aerospace Research and

Development (AGARD) 507

Africa 9–14

archive services 13

broadcasting media 11

indigenous knowledge (IK) 10

information services 11

legal deposit 12

libraries 10–13

library associations 13

library development 133

library education 13–14

library history 10

newspapers 11

Roman libraries 10

African Journals Online (AJOL) 113

AGARD see Advisory Group for Aerospace

Research and Development

agricultural documentation and information

14–15

agricultural libraries, Africa 11–12

AIC see American Institute for the Conservation

of Art and Historic Artefacts

AJOL (African Journals Online) 133

algorithm 15

All-Union Institute for Scientific and Technical

Information (VINITTI) 187

Allan, Alastair J. 460–461

Alliance of Information and Referral Systems,

Inc. (AIRS) 9

alphabetization rules 15–17

Alty, J.L. 98–101, 228–230

Amazon (firm) 43

AMBAC see Asociación Mexicana de

Bibliotecarios

American Association of Museums (AAM) 433

American Association of School Libraries 29

American Documentation 18

American Documentation Institute (ADI)

18–19

American Institute for the Conservation of Art

and Historic Artefacts (AIC) 103

American Library Association (ALA) 17–18

Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR) 20

Children’s Library Association (CLA) 71

Code of Professional Ethics 78, 526

Friends of Libraries Group 204

Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered

Round Table (GLBTRT) 367

library education 382

American National Standards Institute (ANSI)

617

American Society for Information Science and

Technology (ASIST) 18–19, 29, 299

American Society for Testing and Materials

(ASTM) 80

analytical bibliography 38

Anderson, James D. 471–490

Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR) 19–20, 35,

60, 399, 472

Angola, archive services 13

anomalous state of knowledge (ASK) 20, 301

archival description 20–22

archival library 22

archive services, Africa 13

archives 22–24, 26

see also data archives

International Council on Archives (ICA)

325–327

Public Record Office (PRO) 532–533

archivist 23, 24

Archivum 326

Argentina 590, 591

ARLIS/NA (Arts Libraries Society of North

America) 25

ARLIS/UK & Ireland (British and Irish Arts

Libraries Society) 25, 26

Art and Archaeology Technical Abstracts (AATA) 103

art libraries 24–26

artefact 26

artificial intelligence 26–28, 100

Arts Libraries Section (IFLA) 26

Index 663

Arts Libraries Society of North America

(ARLIS/NA) 25

ASDL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Loop)

328, 329

see also broadband

ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asia

Nations) 600–612

Ashby, Ross 626

Ashman, John 139–140

ASIST see American Society for Information

Science and Technology (ASIST)

ASLIB (Association for Information

Management, formerly Association for

Special Libraries and Information Bureaux)

186

One-Man Band (OMB) group 463

Asociación Mexicana de Bibliotecarios

(AMBAC) 65

Assistant Librarian 579

Association of American Library Schools

(AALS) 28

Association of Caribbean University, Research

and Institutional Libraries (ACURIL) 57,

377

Association Française de Normalisation

(AFNOR) 618

Association of Independent Libraries 625

Association for Information Management see

ASLIB

Association for Library and Information

Science Education (ALISE) 28–30, 299

Association of Research Libraries (ARL) 556,

658

Office of Management Studies 622

Association of Southeast Asian Nations

(ASEAN) 600–612

Association for Special Libraries and

Information Bureaux see ASLIB

Astbury, Raymond G. 374–375

ASTIA-Uniterm experiment 293

audiovisual materials 30

AUP see acceptable use policy

Austin, Derek 476

Australia, LIS distance learning 143

Australian Institute for the Conservation of

Cultural Materials (AICCM) 103

Australian Library and Information Association

(ALIA) 73

author 30

authoring systems 30

authority file 30–31

automatic indexing 630

Avison, David 306–310

Baird, John Logie 50

Bakewell, K.G.B. 236–237

bandwidth 32, 243, 245

Bangladesh, libraries 598–599

barcode 32

barefoot librarian 32

Battle of the Library Superstars 648

BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 49, 50,

587

Bender, David R. 616

Berard, Raymond 147–149

Berne Convention 32–33, 110, 323

Berners-Lee, Tim (1955–) 33, 231–232, 574

Bertalanffy, Ludwig von 626

Besterman, Theodore (1904–76) 33

Bhola, H.S. 391–394

BIALL (British and Irish Association of Law

Librarians) 362

bibliographic classification 33–35, 193

bibliographic control 35–36

abstracting and indexing services 2–3

music 438

Bibliographic Data Services 389

bibliographic databases 127

bibliographic description 19, 36–37

AACR 19

bibliographic instruction 37

Bibliographical Society 413

bibliography 33, 37–38

historical 38, 225

bibliomania 38

bibliometrics 38

Bibliotheca Universalis 209–210

Bibliothèque Nationale de France 39–40, 379

bibliotherapy 40

Billings, John Shaw 2, 218

Billington, James H. 385–386

Biological and Medical Sciences Section (IFLA)

219

BIRON Catalogue 121

Bloomfield, Barry 204–205

Bodleian Library 16, 645

Bodley, Sir Thomas (1545–1613) 41, 149, 204,

645

664 Index

book 41, 168

book club 41, 348, 624

book design 42

book fair 7, 42

book jobber 42

book production 42

book publishing 342, 344–345, 347, 436

Book Recovery Officers 112

book selection 42, 81

book trade 42–44, 157, 172

bookselling, online 43

Boole, George 44

Boolean logic 44–46

criticisms 46

Venn diagrams 44–45

Booth, Andrew 189–190

Bosnia 67, 68, 69

Botswana Technology Centre 104

Bottle, R.T. 295–297

Bourne, Ross 35–36

Bowden, Russell 375–377

Bowers, Fredson Thayer (1905–91) 36, 37,

46–47

box libraries 47

Bradford, Samuel Clement (1878–1948) 38, 47

Bradford’s Law of Scatter 47

Bray, Thomas (1656–1730) 47–48, 158

Brazil 590, 591, 592

Brazilian Institute for Information in Science

and Technology (IBICT) 591

Brine, Alan 95–96

British Books in Print 634

British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 49, 50,

587

British Institute of Recorded Sound (BIRS) 588

British and Irish Arts Libraries Society (ARLIS/

UK & Ireland) 25, 26

British and Irish Association of Law Librarians

(BIALL) 362

British Library 36, 48–49, 379

Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules 20

ephemera 184

UKMARC (United Kingdom Machine-

Readable Cataloguing) 642

British Library Document Supply Centre

(BLDSC) 145, 366, 380, 646

interlibrary lending 324

British Library Information Science Service

(BLISS) 375

British Library Research and Development

Department (BLR&DD) 507

British Library Science Reference Service 635

British Library strategic plan (1989–94), Gateway

to Knowledge 381

British Museum 496

British National Bibliography (BNB) 36, 476

British Records Association 335

British Standards Institution (BSI) 618

British Union Catalogue of Periodicals (BUCOP) 33

broadband 49

Internet 328

broadcasting 49–51

knowledge industries 344, 345, 346, 347,

348–349

broadcasting media, Africa 11

Brophy, Peter 536–537

Brown, Samuel (1779–1839) 47, 427

browsing 51

public libraries 373

Bruce, Christine S. 261–263

Brunei 603

Bryant, Philip 327–328

BSI Standards Catalogue 618

bulletin board 51

Bulletin Board for Libraries (BUBL) 51

Bunch, Allan 7–9

Bureau of Canadian Archivists 24

Bureau for Foreign Science and Technology

(BINT) 186

Burkina Faso 9

Burma see Myanmar

Bush, Vannevar (1890–1974) 51–52, 243

business community, knowledge management

(KM) 351–359

business information service 52–54

fee-based services 194

public sector 53

byte 54

CAB International 15

cable television 55

knowledge industries 344

Cairo, libraries 332

Calcutta University Commission 593

Caldecott Medal, children’s literature 18

CALIBER (Convention of Automation in

Libraries) 594

Cambodia 604, 611

Index 665

Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA) 2

Campanario, Juan Miguel 76–78

Campbell Collaboration 189

Canadian libraries and librarianship see North

American libraries and librarianship

Canadian Library Association 17

Caribbean 55–58

Caribbean Community (CARICOM) 55

Caribbean Information System for Planners

(CARISPLAN) 57

Caribbean Medical Literature Indexing Project

(MEDCARIB) 56

Carlin, John W. 443

Carlyle, Thomas 625

Carmichael, James V., Jnr 366–368

Carnegie, Andrew (1835–1919) 58–59, 150

Carnegie Medal 73

Carpenter, Kenneth E. 556–557

Carr, David 285–293

cartographic materials

International Standard Bibliographic

Description (ISBD) 408

libraries 407–408

CASLIN Union Catalogue 68

catalogues 59–60, 135, 154, 172

cataloguing

CATSKILL training package 95

organization of knowledge 472–474

categorization 35, 60

categorization of fiction 60–62

CATSKILL (cataloguing skills training package)

95

Cave, Roderick 524–525

Cawkell, Tony 244–252

CD-ROM 52, 62, 172

CDNL (Conference of Directors of National

Libraries) 445

CEEFAX 633

censorship 17, 62–64, 78

Center for Documentation and Communication

Research (CDCR) 579

Central America 64–67

Central Computer and Telecommunications

Agency (CCTA) 179

Central and Eastern Europe 63, 67–70

exchange programmes 191

Centre for Ephemera Studies, University of

Reading 183

Chadwick, Andrew 152–154

chain indexing 70, 484

Chandler, Helen E 1–3

Chaney, Michael 212–214

channel capacity 246

chaos research 317

chaos theory 70

Chapman, Liz 6–7

Chartered Institute of Library and Information

Professionals see CILIP

Checkland, Peter 584

Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) 80

children’s libraries 70–72

Children’s Library Association (CLA) 71

children’s literature 72–73

Caldecott Medal 18

Newbery Medal 18

children’s rights 201

Chile 591

CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and

Information Professionals) 73–74, 374–375

Cataloguing and Indexing Group 237

cinema 74, 79

circulating library 74, 624

circulation system 74–76, 155

citation analysis 76–78

citation indexing 206

Citizens’ Band Radio 426

Clarida, Robert W. 258–261

classification 33–35, 78, 135

colon 83–84, 483

ephemera 185

faceted 34, 193, 483

film 199


classified catalogues 60, 78

Cloonan, Michèle Valerie 518–520

closed access 78

Clubb, Nigel 220–223

Co-operative Online Bibliographic System and

Services (COBISS) 68

Coadic, Yves F. Le see Le Coadic, Yves F.

COBISS (Co-operative Online Bibliographic

System and Services) 68

Cochrane Collaboration 189

Code of Professional Conduct 78–80

Library Association 526

Code of Professional Ethics, American Library

Association 526

coden 80

666 Index

codes of practice 203, 204

cognitive science 80

Cole, John Y. 384–386, 441–443

collection 80–81

archival description 21

collection development 81

collection management 81–83

college libraries, Caribbean 56–57

Colombia 591

colon classification 83–84, 483

Columbia–Harvard–Yale Medical Libraries

Computerization Project 341

Committee of European Social Science Data

Archives (CESSDA) 122

Commonwealth Library Association (COMLA)

58

communication 84–92

scholarly 565–567

communication structuring, abstract 89

communication technology 92

communications audit 92

information management 271

communities of interest 92

community information 92–94, 178

community librarianship 94

Community Trade Marks 636

Compact Disc – Read Only Memory see

CD-ROM

COMPASS 36

competitive intelligence 53

computer 94–95

computer-assisted learning (CAL) in library and

information science 95–96

computer crime 96–98

computer ethics 257

computer–human interaction (CHI) see

human–computer interaction (HCI)

computer science 98–101

see also artificial intelligence

computer security 101–102

computer-supported co-operative work

(CSCW) 229

Comte, Auguste (1798–1857) 518, 582, 627

concordance 102

Conference of Directors of National Libraries

(CDNL) 445

Conference on the Improvement of

Bibliographic Services (1951) 443

conferencing software 459

Congress of South East Asian Librarians

(CONSAL) 377, 600

Congressional Research Service (CRS) 501

Connor, R.D.W. 442

conservation 102–104

consolidation of information 104–105

conspectus 82, 105

constructivism, information theory 314

consultancy 105

content 105–106

continuing professional development (CPD)

106, 526

contracts for information provision 106–108

Convention of Automation in Libraries

(CALIBER) 594

convergence 108

Cook, Michael 20–22

cookies 108–109

Cooper, Alan 617–618

Copitch, Gary 92–94

copyright 30, 109–111, 156, 160

digital library 137

information provision liability 368

legislation 109–110, 323, 390–391, 430,

454–455

Southeast Asia 609–610

Corrall, Sheila 621–623

Costa Rica 64, 65, 66

counter-intelligence 425

county libraries 559

Cranfield–Uniterm experiment 293

Craven, Penny 74–76

Craven, Timothy 485

Creaser, Claire 577–578

creativity 114

crime in libraries 111–112

Croatia 68

Crump, M.J. 48–49

cultural industries 112–117

Cumulative Book Index 443

Current Alerting Services – Individual Article

Supply (CAS-IAS) 145

current awareness 118

current awareness services, academic libraries 4

current contents list 118

Cutter, Charles Ammi (1837–1903) 59, 118

cybercafé 118, 631

cybernetics 118–119, 365

cyberspace 119

Index 667

Czech Republic 68, 69, 70

data 120

data archives 120–122

data bank 122

data compression 122, 245

Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) 121

data mining 122

data protection 123–126


legislation 123–126, 203, 272, 521, 637

transborder data flow (TDF) 637

Data Protection Act (UK, 1984) 203, 272, 521

Data Protection Act (UK, 1998) 124, 521

Data Protection Registrar 637

data security 126

data warehouse 126

database 126

knowledge industries 345

networks 394–395

database management systems (DBMS) 126,

418

database protection directive (1996), European

Parliament (EP) 260–261

databases 126–128, 159, 165

bibliographic 127

grey literature 211–212

relational 156, 552

DataStar 227

Davies, J.E. 123–126, 320–321, 419–421,

552–554

Davies, Maurice 433–435

DBP (Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka) 603

DCMES (Dublin Core Metadata Element Set)

418

DDI (Data Documentation Initiative) 151

Dearnley, James 18–19, 587–588, 588–589

decision support systems (DSS) 128–130

DEF (Denmark Electronic Research Library)

451

defamation 130, 369

Denmark Electronic Research Library (DEF)

451

descriptive bibliography 38

desktop computer 130

desktop publishing (DTP) 130–132

Deutsche Stiftung für Internationale

Entwicklung (DSE) 13

Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN) 618

development co-operation in support of

information and knowledge activities

132–134

Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP) 603

Dewe, Michael 183–185

Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) 34, 60,

135, 644

Dewey, Melvil (1857–1931) 17, 134–135, 370

DIALOG 135, 173, 227

Dibdin, Thomas Frognall (1776–1845) 38

dictionary 135

dictionary catalogues 60, 118, 135

digital library 136–138, 156, 164, 165

digital preservation 138, 519

digitization 138, 156

manuscripts 406

Dilther, Wilhelm (1833–1911) 224

diplomatic 138

Directive on the Harmonization of Certain

Aspects of Copyright and Related Rights in

the Information Society (2001) 391

directory 138

trade literature 634

Directory of Australian Ephemera 185

directory databases 127

disaster preparedness planning 139–140

discography 140

dissemination of information 141–142

push technology 535

distance learning 142–144

document 144, 168

document clustering 144–145, 242

document delivery 4, 145–147, 156

document identifiers 473

document image processing 147

documentation 147–149

Documentation, Inc. 629

Doherty, Neil F. 128–130, 458–460

domain name 149

Domesday Book 532

donations to libraries 149–150

Drabble, Margaret 195

Dublin Core 150–151, 174, 179

Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES)

418

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative 151

DVD 199

e-commerce 152, 171

668 Index

bookselling 43

domain names 149

e-GIF (Government Interoperability

Framework) 179

e-government 152–154

e-mail see electronic mail

EAD see Encoded Archival Description

East African School of Librarianship 14

East Asia 154–157


East, Harry 465–466

Eastern Europe see Central and Eastern Europe

EBM (evidence-based medicine) 416

ecclesiastical libraries 157–158

ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin

America and the Caribbean) 57

Ecoles Sans Frontières (ESC) 604

Economic Commission for Latin America and

the Caribbean (ECLAC) 57

economics of information 158–167, 402

Edison, Thomas 588

education

information management 274–275

information professions 286–290

information science 297–300

Egypt 9, 10, 12

Egyptian National Library 421

Eisenschitz, Tamara 502–504

Ekholm, Kai 62–64

El Salvador 67

electrocopying 168

electronic books 6, 168–171

electronic data interchange (EDI) 152, 171, 388

electronic document delivery 171–172

electronic funds transfer 172

electronic information resources 172–174

electronic-journal archives 174–176, 177

electronic journals 156, 176–177

see also journal

electronic library 177

electronic library development 451

electronic mail 152, 177, 179, 249

Internet 329

networks 448

electronic materials, security 573

Electronic Patient Record (EPR) 417

electronic public information services 178–179

eLibraryHub 607

Ellis, David 300–301

emoticon 179

empiricism and positivism 179–181

Encoded Archival Description (EAD) 24, 410

encryption 101, 181

encyclopedia 181

end-user 172, 181

enterprise resource planning (ERP) 181–183

enumerative bibliography 183

EPCRD (European Centre for Parliamentary

Research and Documentation) 502

Ephemera Society 183

ephemera 183–185

EPIDOS (European Patent Information and

Documentation Systems) 503

epistemology 185, 510–512

EPR (Electronic Patient Record) 417

ERP see enterprise resource planning

ESC see Ecoles Sans Frontières

espionage 186–187

Europe, LIS distance learning 144

European Association for Grey Literature

Exploitation (EAGLE) 211

European Bureau of Library, Information and

Documentation Associations (EBLIDA) 377

European Centre for Parliamentary Research

and Documentation (EPCRD) 502

European Commission (EC) 187

European Convention for the Protection of

Human Rights 272

European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL)

95–96

European Convention for the Protection of

Human Rights 272

European Information Researchers Network

(EIRENE) 255

European Parliament (EP) 187

database protection directive (1996)

260–261

European Patent Information and

Documentation Systems (EPIDOS) 503

European Patent Office (EPO) 503

European Register of Microfilm Masters

(EROMM) 520

European Union (EU)

data protection 123, 260–261, 391

Directive on the Harmonization of Certain

Aspects of Copyright and Related Rights in

the Information Society (2001) 391

Index 669

Lending and Rental Right Directive (1992)

529

library associations 377

European Union (EU) information policies

187–189

evaluation, reference books 549

Evans, Hilary 513–515

evidence-based healthcare 189–190

evidence-based medicine (EBM) 416

exchange programmes 190–192

expert systems 129, 192

eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML) 241,

409–410, 574, 660

extranet 152, 192

faceted classification 34, 193, 483

Family Records Centre 533

FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) 15

Farradane, Jason (1906–89) 193, 296, 322

Feather, John 37–38, 42–44, 342–351

Featherstone, Tom 365–366

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 187

Federation of Independent Advice Centres

(FIAC) 9

Fédération Internationale d’Information et de

Documentation see FID

fee-based services 193–195

Ferguson, Stephney 55–58

Fernandez de Zamora, Rosa Maria 64–67

fibre-optics 195, 247–248

fiction 195–196

categorization 60–62

FID (Fédération Internationale d’Information et

de Documentation) 196–198, 493

file transfer protocol (FTP) 198

film 198–199

filtering 200–202

finding aid 202

FinELib (Finnish National Electronic Library)

452

Finland 451, 452

Finnish National Electronic Library (FinELib)

452

Fitzgerald, Guy 306–310

Five Laws of Library Science 512–513

fixed location 202

floppy disk 202

Follett Report 3, 218, 508, 555

fonds 202


Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 15

Ford Foundation 639

Foreign Affairs Information Systems (FAIS) 269

forgery 202

Forrester, Jay 627

Foster, Gordon 322

Foundations of Education for Librarianship 579

Fourman, Michael P. 237–244

Framework for Continuing Professional Development 375,

526

France

legal deposit 39

national library 39–40

Frankel, Maurice 203–204

Frankfurt Book Fair 42

free-text searching 202

freedom of information 203–204

legislation 203–204, 462

freenet 204

freeware 204

Friends of Libraries Group 204

friends of the library 150, 204–205

Froehlich, Thomas J. 256–258

full-text databases 127

Furlong, John 363–365

fuzzy logic 205

Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1900–2002) 206, 215

Gale Directory of Databases 549

Garfield, Eugene (1925–) 206–207, 321

gatekeeper 88, 207

gateway 173, 207

gateway library 207

Gateway to Knowledge, British Library strategic plan

(1989–94) 381

Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered

Round Table (GLBTRT) 367

gay librarians 366–368

gazetteer 207

Geiger, Brian K. 17–18

gender interest groups, library associations 658

General History of Africa Project 470

General Information Programme (PGI) 38, 642

General International Standard Archival

Description (ISAD(G)) 20–21, 24

Genieva, Ekaterina 560–564

geographic information systems (GIS) 178,

207–209

670 Index

geographical databases 209

geographical information science (GISc) 209

geological libraries, Africa 11

Germany

censorship (1933–45) 63

espionage 186

Gesner, Conrad (1516–65) 209–210

Gilchrist, Alan 629–631

GISc (geographical information science) 209

GLBTRT see Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and

Transgendered Round Table

Global Positioning System (GPS) 208, 223

Golding, Peter 49–51, 414–415

Good Reading Guide, The 195

Goodall, Deborah L. 60–62, 195–196

gopher 210

Gorman, G.E. 81–83

Gorman, Michael 19

Government Interoperability Framework

(e-GIF) 179

government publishing 210

GPS see Global Positioning System

graphic user interface (GUI) 210, 655

graphics 210

Gredley, Ellen 635–636

Greenaway Medal 73

grey literature 132, 210–212

Griffiths, José-Marie 504–510

group communication 88

Guatemala 64, 65, 66

Guide to Reference Books 18, 549

guiding and signs 212–214

Gutenberg, Johann (1395–1468) 214

Habermas, Jürgen (1929-) 206, 215

hacking, computer crime 97

Hall, Matthew 254–255

Hannesdóttir, Sigrún Klara 450–453

Hanson, Chris 322

hard copy 215

hard disk 215

hardware 98, 215

Harnad, Stevan 174–176

Harrison, Janet 415–417

Harrison, K.C. 378–380

Hartley, R.J. 172–174

Harvard-Williams, Peter 444–445

Harvey, Ross 142–144

Hayes, Robert M. 158–167

health and safety 216–217

Health and Safety at Work Act (UK, 1974) 216

health science libraries 217–220

Hebrew books 336

Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976) 224

Heim, Kathleen M. 657

HEIRNET see Historic Environment

Information Resources Register

Hepworth, Mark 569–572

heritage sites and monuments information

220–223

hermeneutics 180, 206, 223–225

heuristics 225

Hingley, Sheila 157–158

Historic Environment Information Resources

Register (HEIRNET) 221

historical bibliography 38, 225

history of libraries 225–227

Hjørland, Birger 179–181, 223–225, 510–512

Hoare, Peter 3–5, 149–150, 624–625

Hockey, Susan 408–410

Holley, Edward G. 17–18

homosexual librarians 366–368

Hook, Bob 220–223

host 227–228

hot spot 228

HTML see HyperText Mark-up Language

HTTP see HyperText Transfer Protocol

human–computer interaction (HCI) 100,

228–230

communication 86

Hungary 69

Hunt, Christopher J. 644–646

Hunt Committee 55

Huxley, David 198–199

hybrid libraries 230–231

hypermedia 170, 231

hypertext 231–232

HyperText Mark-up Language (HTML) 33,

241, 409–410, 569, 660

HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 33, 659

IAALD (International Association of

Agricultural Information Specialists) 15

IASLIC (Indian Association of Special Libraries

and Information Centres) 594

ICA see International Council on Archives

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned

Names and Numbers) 149

Index 671

ICBS (International Committee for the Blue

Shield) 234

Iceland 451, 452

ICOM (International Council of Museums) 433

icon 233

ICPSR (Inter-University Consortium for

Political and Social Research) 120

IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) 328

IFLA (International Federation of Library

Associations and Institutions) 29, 59, 71,

233–235

Arts Libraries Section 26

Biological and Medical Sciences Section 219

ISBD development 35

Library and Research Services for

Parliaments Section 502

Library Theory and Research Section 555

Office for International Lending 325

publications 235

UBCIM Core Programme 38

UNESCO support 642

Universal Availability of Publications 644

Universal Bibliographic Control and

International MARC 644

image retrieval 235–236

InCU-VL (Indonesian Christian Universities

Virtual Library) 608

incunabula 236

index 236

index display, organization of knowledge

486–488

Indexer, The 237

indexing 27, 236–237

see also automatic indexing; string indexing

NEPHIS (Nested Phrase Indexing System)

485

organization of knowledge 475–482,

484–485

services 1–3

software 476

India

libraries 592–595

LIS distance learning 144

Indian Association of Special Libraries and

Information Centres (IASLIC) 594

Indian Library Association (ILA) 592

Indian National Scientific Documentation

Centre (INSDOC) 593, 594, 595

Indian Science Abstracts 595

indigenous knowledge (IK), Africa 11

Indonesia 604

Indonesian Christian Universities Virtual

Library (InCU-VL) 608

INFLIBNET (National Information Network)

594

informatics 98, 237–244

information 244

economics 158–167

micro-economics 162–166

information access, Africa 10

information architecture 252

information audit 252–254, 270, 492

information broker 52–53, 165, 254–255

information and communication technology

(ICT) 152, 160, 244–252

ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Loop)

247

art libraries 25

channel capacity 246

data transmission 245–246

fibre-optics 247–248

history 244–245

Internet 249–250

networks and systems 248–251

open systems interconnection (OSI) 248

standards and protocols 248

telecentres 631–632

information ecology 255

information economics 158–167

information engineering 255

information ethics 256–258

information law 258–261

information literacy 261–263

information management 263–278

audits 270, 271

data protection 272

education 274–275

strategic information systems 274

information networks, Caribbean 57–58

information policy 278–285

concepts 284–285

European Union (EU) 188

information professions 285–293

definition 286–288

education 288–290

information provision, liability 368–369

information and referral service 252

672 Index

information resource(s) management (IRM)

263, 265

information retrieval (IR) 27, 44, 173, 293–295

information science 18, 295–297

see also American Society for Information

Science and Technology (ASIST)

Information Science Abstracts 3

information science education 28, 297–300

curriculum 297–298

South America 591

information-seeking behaviour 300–301

information-seeking research 301–303

Information Services Group 551

information skills 303

information society 303–305

Information Society Programme 592

information systems (IS) 306–310

journals 308–309

research 308

information technology 310

impact forecasts 52

information theory 310–319

epistemology 185

informetrics 319–320

Ingwersen, Peter 301–303

Institut International de Bibliographie see FID

(Fédération Internationale d’Information et

de Documentation)

Institute of Information Scientists (IIS) 73, 79,

193, 299, 321–322

see also CILIP

Institute of Paper Conservation (IPC) 103

Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) 76, 206,

320–321, 484

Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN)

328

intellectual property 30, 322–323, 429

legislation 323, 528, 529

patents 502–504

intelligence 323–324

competitive 53

espionage 186

military 424–426

interface 324

Intergovernmental Conference on the Planning

of National Documentation Library and

Archives Infrastructure 444

interlibrary lending 156, 324–325, 380–381

academic libraries 4

British Library Document Supply Centre 324

Office for International Lending 325

union catalogues 643

International Archival Development Fund

(FIDA) 326

International Association of Agricultural

Information Specialists (IAALD) 15

International Association of Music Information

Centres (IAMIC) 439

International Association of Music Libraries

(IAML) 439

International Association for Social Science

Information Service and Technology

(IASSIST) 122

International Association of Sound Archives

(IASA) 439, 588

International Committee for the Blue Shield

(ICBS) 234

International Conference of the Round Table on

Archives (CITRA) 326

International Congress on Archives 326

International Congress on Medical

Librarianship 219

International Convention for the Protection of

Literary and Artistic Works see Berne

Convention

International Council on Archives (ICA) 22,

325–327, 642

International Council of Museums (ICOM) 433

International Council of Scientific Unions 444

International Development Research Centre

(IDRC) 13

International Electrotechnical Commission

(IEC) 618

International Federation of Data Organizations

(IFDO) 122

International Federation for Information and

Documentation see FID

International Federation of Library

Associations and Institutions see IFLA

International Institute of Bibliography 430

International Institute for the Conservation of

Art and Historic Artefacts (IIC) 103

International Organization for Standardization

(ISO) 618, 644

International Standard Bibliographic

Description (ISBD) 19, 35, 38

cartographic materials 408

Index 673

International Standard Book Number (ISBN)

327–328

International Standard Music Number (ISMN)

438

International Standard Recording Number

(ISRN) 438

International Standards Organization see

International Organization for

Standardization (ISO)

International Telecommunications Union (ITU)

618

International Translations Centre (ITC) 640

Internet 96, 152, 154, 173, 249–250, 328–329

broadband 328

censorship 63


e-mail 329

networking protocols 328

public library access 373

search engines 569–572

Internet Content Ratings Association 200

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and

Numbers (ICANN) 149

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) 328

Internet Explorer 654

Internet protocols 448

Internet Service Provider (ISP) 51, 164, 328,

329

Internet services, academic libraries 4

Inter-University Consortium for Political and

Social Research (ICPSR) 120

intranet 152, 329

invisible college 330

ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network)

328

Islamic libraries 330–334

ITAP Report on Wideband Cable Systems 55

Jamaica 56, 57, 58

Jameson, J. Franklin 442

JANET (Joint Academic Network) 250–251,

335, 448

see also SuperJANET

Janus 326

Järvelin, Kalervo 293–295

Jayaratna, Nimal 584–587

JCR (Journal of Citation Reports) 76

Jefferson, Thomas 385

Jelušic, Srecko 386–388

Jenkinson, Sir Hilary (1882–1961) 23, 335

Jerusalem, Jewish National and University

Library (JNUL) 337

Jewish libraries 335–340

Italy 337

United Kingdom 337–339

United States 337

Jewish National and University Library (JNUL)

337

Johnson, Rosalind 187–189

Joint European Standards Organization (CEN/

CENELEC) 618

Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR

(JSC) 20

joint use libraries 340

Jones, S. 402–404

journal 340

Journal of Citation Reports (JCR) 76

Journal of Documentation 33

Journal of Education for Library and Information Science

(JELIS) 28

Journal of Government Information 460

journalism 340

Katz, W.A. 394–395, 548–550

Keenan, Stella 196–198

Kelly’s directories 634

Kennington, Don 410–412

Kenya, archive services 13

KERIS (Korean Education and Research

Information Services) 156

Keys to Success 507

keyword 341

Khalifa, Shaban A. 421–424

Khurshid, Anis 592–600

Kilgour, Frederick Gridley (1914–) 341

kilobyte 341

Kinnell, Margaret 70–72, 72–73

Kirk, Joyce 297–300

KLSE Library (Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange

(KLSE) Library) 603

KM see knowledge management

knowledge 26, 341–342

knowledge-based companies 342

knowledge industries 342–351

knowledge management (KM) 189, 351–359

definitions 351–352

development 352–353

themes and applications 353–356

674 Index

Koenig, Michael R. 351–359

Koivunen, Hannele 112–117

Kompass directories 634

Koontz, Christine M. 412–413, 526–527

Korean Education and Research Information

Services (KERIS) 156

Krupskaja, Nadezdha 655

Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange (KLSE) Library

603

Kuhn, Thomas S. (1922–96) 359–360

KWAC (Keyword and Context) 484

KWIC (Keyword in Context) 398, 484

KWOC (Keyword out of Context) 484

Labrouste, Henri 39

Ladizesky, Kathleen 190–192

Lancaster, F. Wilfrid (1933–) 361

Landoni, Monica 168–171

Lao People’s Democratic Republic 604

Laos 604

Law, Derek G. 230–231

law libraries 361–363

LCSH see Library of Congress Subject Headings

Le Coadic, Yves F. 582–584

Lea, Peter W. 550–552

League of European Research Libraries

(LIBER) 369–370

Leahy, Emmett J. (1910–64) 547

Lees, Diane 435–437

legacy information system (Legacy IS) 182

legal deposit 109, 363

Africa 12

Caribbean 56

Central America 66

France 39

United Kingdom 48

legal information 363–365

legislation

see also Acts; library legislation; Regulations

copyright 109–111, 323, 390–391, 430,

454–455

data protection 123–126, 203, 272, 521, 637

freedom of information 203–204, 462

health and safety 216–217

information law 203, 258–261, 463


intellectual property rights 323, 528, 529

libraries 531, 550, 559, 577

licences 390–391

official secrecy 462–463

privacy 521

public records 532, 533

trade marks 635, 636

transborder data flow 637

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716) 365

lending libraries 365–366

Lending and Rental Right Directive (1992) 529

lesbian librarians 366–368

lesbigay librarians 366–368

liability for information provision 368–369

Liaquat Memorial Library (LML) 596

LIASA (Library and Information Association of

South Africa) 73

LIBECON Project 620

LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de

Recherche) 369–370

LIBNET 562–563

librarian 370–371

librarianship 371

multimedia 430–432

libraries 26, 157–158, 371–374

see also academic libraries; public libraries;

school libraries; special libraries; university

libraries

academic 3–5

acquisitions 6–7, 150

African 10–13

Bangladesh 598–599

Cairo 332

Caribbean 56–57

cartographic materials 407–408

Central America 64, 66–67

Central and Eastern Europe 67–68

circulating 74, 624

crime 111–112

cultural industries 116

digital 136–138, 156, 164, 165

filtering 201

Greece 614

health science 217–220

history 225–227

hybrid 230–231

India 592–595

Islamic 330–334

Italy 613–614

Jewish 335–340

joint use 340

law 361–363

Index 675

legislation 531, 550, 559, 577

lending 365–366

manuscript 404–406

map 407–408

mosque 331

Pakistan 595–598

parliamentary 501–502

performance measurement 504–510

picture 513–515

Portugal 612

presidential 442, 520

private 522–524

promotion 527

public 530–531

publicity 527, 533–535

rare book 538–544

reference 550–552

research 30, 39, 324, 556–557, 562

rural services 558–560

Russia and the former Soviet Union 560–564

security 572–574

security measures 112

South America 590–592


Southern Europe 612–615

Spain 613

statistics 619–621

subscription 365, 624–625

Libraries for All 580–581

libraries and social exclusion 579–582

Library 2000: Investing in a Learning Nation 601

Library Association (LA) 374–375

see also CILIP

CATSKILL training package 95

Code of Professional Conduct 78–79, 526

Information Services Group 551


Local Studies Group 396

Policy Action Group on Social Exclusion 581

Publicity and Public Relations Group 535

University and Research Section 647

Wheatley Medal 237

library associations 233, 375–377

accreditation of LIS schools 6

Africa 13

Bangladesh 599

Caribbean 57


gender interest groups 658

India 595

Middle East 424

Nordic countries 453

Pakistan 598

Russia and the former Soviet Union 563

South America 591


UNESCO guidelines 376

library automation 377–378

Caribbean 56


library buildings 378–380

see also Carnegie, Andrew

security 573

Library Collections Conservation Discussion

Group (LCCDG) 103

Library of Congress (LC) 17, 20, 59, 384–386

cataloguing service 17

Congressional Research Service 501

Manuscript Division 23

National Digital Library 385–386

National Library Service for the Blind and

Physically Handicapped 577

National Union Catalog 643

USMARC 650

Library of Congress (LC) classification 34, 386

Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)

60, 386, 483

library co-operation 380–381

library education 225, 381–383

Africa 13–14

Bangladesh 599

Caribbean 57

Central America 65

Central and Eastern Europe 69

India 594–595

Jamaica 57

Middle East 423–424

Nordic countries 452

North American libraries and librarianship

453–456

Pakistan 597–598

South America 591

Southeast Asia 610

Southern Europe 614

library history 225–227

Library and Information Association of South

Africa (LIASA) 73

Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) 3

676 Index

library and information science (LIS)

accreditation of schools 6

distance learning 142–144

education 225, 381–383

research 554–556

Library and Information Science Research 555

Library and Information Services Council

Working Group on Public Library Objectives

622

library legislation 17, 383–384, 383–384, 531,

550, 559

Library Literature and Information Science 3

library management systems (LMS) 377–378

library materials

interlending 380–381

security in libraries 573

Library and Research Services for Parliaments

Section (IFLA) 502

library security systems 388

Library Services Act (USA, 1956) 17, 383–384,

559

library staff, security in libraries 572–573

library stock, water damage 140

library suppliers 42, 388–389

Library Theory and Research Section (IFLA)

555

licences 175, 389–391

Light, Ben 181–183

Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de

Recherche see LIBER

Lindop Committee on Data Protection 124

Linux operating system 377, 468

literacy 157, 391–394

literature search 394–395

literature survey 395–396

LMS (library management systems) 377–378

local area network (LAN) 396

local authority websites 178, 282

local collections, electronic access 396–397

Local Government Acts (UK) 203, 384

local studies collections 396–397

ephemera 183

Local Studies Group, Library Association 396

London Library 625

Longley, Paul A. 207, 209

Lor, Peter Johan 445–447

Lotka, Alfred James (1880–1949) 397–398

Lubetzky, Seymour 59

Luhmann, N. 315

Luhn, Hans Peter (1896–1964) 293, 296, 398

Maack, Mary Niles 655–659

MacAlister, Sir John 217

McCarthy, Joseph 17, 63

McColvin, Lionel 513

McDonald, Scott 638–639

MacDougall, Alan 572–574

McGarry, Kevin 371–374

machine language 399

Machine-Readable Cataloguing (MARC) 60,

155, 399–400

East Asia 155–156

Southeast Asia 606

machine translation (MT) 400–402, 640

Machlup, Fritz (1902–83) 268, 341, 402

Mchombu, Kingo 469–471

McKerrow, Ronald Brunless (1872–1940) 413

McKnight, Cliff 136–138

McLuhan, (Herbert) Marshall (1911–80) 413–

414

macroeconomics of information 161–162

Madras Library Association (MALA) 593

magazine production 346

magnetic storage 402–404

mailing list 404

mainframe computer 404

Malaysia 603, 604

Malaysian National Digital Library

(PERDANA) 608

MALMARC 606

Management of Archives 565

management support systems (MSS) 129, 404

manufacturing resource planning (MRP) 182

manuscript 157, 404

digitization 406

manuscript libraries 404–406

map 406–407

map library 407–408

MARC see Machine-Readable Cataloguing

MARC-AMC (Machine-Readable Cataloguing

– Archival and Manuscripts Control) 23

Marconi, Guglielmo 49

Marett, Paul 322–323, 636–638

mark-up languages 33, 121, 241, 408–410

eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML) 241,

409–410, 574, 660

HyperText Mark-up Language (HTML) 33,

241, 409–410, 569, 660

Index 677

market research 410–412

marketing 412–413

Maroevic, Ivo 432–433

Martin, Geoffrey 15–17, 494–495, 532–533

mass media 414–415

Massil, Stephen 335–340

materials requirements planning (MRP) 182

Matthews, Graham 111–112

Mauritius, archive services 13

Meadows, Jack 84–92, 565–567

Mechanics’ Institutes 427, 625

MEDCARIB (Caribbean Medical Literature

Indexing Project) 56

medical informatics 415–417

medical libraries, Columbia–Harvard–Yale

Medical Libraries Computerization Project

341

Medical Library Association 17, 526

MedIndEx 477

MEDLINE 593, 596

megabyte 417

Melrose, Elizabeth A. 396–397

Memory of the World programme (UNESCO) 66,

642

Menou, Michel J. 631–632

menu 417

Mercer, Penelope Yates see Yates-Mercer,

Penelope

metadata 116, 240, 417–419

Dublin Core 150–151, 174, 179

Dublin Core Metadata Element Set 418

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative 151

metaphysics 180

metasearch engines 571

Mexico 64, 65, 66, 67

MGC see Museums and Galleries Commission

microdot, espionage 186

micro-economics of information 162–166

microfilm, espionage 186

microforms 419–421


middleware 424

military intelligence 424–426

Minitel 178, 426, 651

mobile communications 426–427

mobile library 427–429

vehicles 428

modem 429

Modern Archives: Principles and Techniques 565

monastic library 429

monitoring 429

surveillance 626

monograph 429

moral rights 429–430

Morel, Eugène (1869–1934) 430

Morocco 13–14

Morris, Anne 26–28, 216–217

Mosaic (Web browser) 33

mosque libraries 331

Moys classification scheme 362

Mozambique, archive services 13

MRP see manufacturing resource planning;

materials requirements planning

multimedia 62, 170, 173, 430

multimedia databases 127

multimedia librarianship 430–432

Murray, Ian 569–572

Musembi, Musila 440–441

museology 432–433

museum 433–435

museum documentation 435–437

museum professional 437

Museums and Galleries Commission (MGC,

now Re:source: the Council for Museums,

Archives and Libraries) 435

music, bibliographic control 438

music libraries and documentation 437–439

Music Libraries Online 438

Myanmar 602, 610

Naito, Eisuke 154–157

name authority control 36

Napster 329, 504, 589

national archives 325, 440–441

National Archives and Records Administration

(NARA) 23

National Archives of the United States 23,

441–443

National Art Library 635

National Art Library of the UK 25

National Association of Citizens’ Advice

Bureaux (NACAB) 8–9

national bibliography 12, 37, 49, 154, 443–444

National Centre for Information and

Documentation (CENID) 591

National Commission on Federal Paperwork

(USA) 264, 266–267

National Consumer Council 9

678 Index

National Digital Library (USA) 385–386

National Electronic Library for Health 219

National Electronic Site Licence Initiative

(NESLI) 146

National Health Service (NHS) 9, 218,

416–417

National Information Centre (NICNET) 594

National Information Network (INFLIBNET)

594

national information policies 279, 280

National Information Standards Organization

(NISO) 508

National Information System for Science and

Technology (NISSAT) 594

national information systems 444–445

National Lending Library 366

National Lending Library for Science and

Technology (NLLST) 324, 646

national libraries 69, 105, 445–447

Africa 12

Bangladesh 598

Cambodia 604

Caribbean 56

Central America 66


France 39–40

Greece 614

India 593

Indonesia 604

Israel 337

Jamaica 56

Lao 604

Malaysia 601, 604

Middle East 421

Pakistan 596

Philippines 601, 604

Portugal 612

Russia 561

Scotland 184

Singapore 601, 605

Southeast Asia 601

Spain 612–613

Thailand 605

United Kingdom 48–49

Vietnam 606

Wales 184

websites 69

national libraries’ websites, Central and Eastern

Europe 69

National Library of Agriculture (USA) 385

National Library for the Blind 577

National Library Board (NLB) 601

National Library of Cambodia (NLC) 604

National Library of Catalunya 613

National Library of Greece 614

National Library of Indonesia 604

National Library of Jamaica 56

National Library of Lao (NLL) 604

National Library of Malaysia (NLM) 601, 604

National Library of Medicine (NLM) 217–218

National Library of Medicine (USA) 385

National Library of the Philippines (NLP) 601,

604

National Library of Portugal 612

National Library of Russia 561

National Library of Scotland, ephemera 184

National Library Service for the Blind and

Physically Handicapped 577

National Library of Singapore 601, 605

National Library of Spain 612–613

National Library of Thailand (NLT) 605

National Library of Vietnam (NLV) 606

National Library of Wales, ephemera 184

National Library Week (NLW) 17

National Literacy Strategy 545

National Medical Library (NML) 593

National Network of University Libraries

(RENBU) 590

National Register of Archives 335

National Science Library (NSL) 593

National Sound Archive (NSA) 588

National System of Library Information

(SINASBI) 590

National Technical Information Service (NTIS)

187

National Union Catalog (NUC) 643

National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections

(NUCMC) 23

National University of Singapore 608

National Year of Reading 545

NATIS 444

natural-language processing (NLP) 242

Naudé, Gabriel (1600–53) 447

navigation 175, 447

Nelson, Ted 231–232

NEPHIS (Nested Phrase Indexing System) 485

NESLI see National Electronic Site Licence

Initiative

Index 679

NESSTAR 121

Nested Phrase Indexing System (NEPHIS) 485

Net Nannies (filtering software) 200

netiquette 447

Netscape Navigator 654

network 447

hosts 227

protocols 328, 448

networks 164, 447–450

literature search 394–395

Neumann, John Von see Von Neumann, John

neural network 450

Newbery Medal, children’s literature 18

newspaper 450

newspaper library 450

newspapers

Africa 11

production 346

NHS Direct 9, 416–417

Nicaragua 66

NICNET (National Information Centre) 504

Nigeria 13

NISSAT (National Information System for

Science and Technology) 594

NLB (National Library Board) 601

NLC (National Library of Cambodia) 604

NLL (National Library of Lao) 604

NLM (National Library of Malaysia) 601, 604

NLP see National Library of the Philippines;

natural-language processing

NLT (National Library of Thailand) 605

NLV (National Library of Vietnam) 606

NORDBOK (Nordic Literature and Library

Committee) 451

Nordic Council for Scientific Information

(NORDINFO) 451

Nordic countries 450–453

Nordic Federation of Research Libraries

Association (NVBF) 453

Nordic Information Studies Research

Education Network (NordISNET) 452

Nordic Literature and Library Committee

(NORDBOK) 451

NORDINFO (Nordic Council for Scientific

Information) 451

NordISNET (Nordic Information Studies

Research Education Network) 452

North American libraries and librarianship

453–456

Norway 451, 452

numeric databases 127–128

Nuttall, Sande 435–437

NVBF (Nordic Federation of Research Libraries

Association) 453

Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) 457

object-oriented technology 457–458

O’Brien, Ann 33–35, 399–400, 466–468

occupational stress 216

OCLC 458

see also Ohio College Library Center; Online

Computer Library Center

OCR (optical character recognition) 458

Oddy, Pat 19–20

office automation 458–460

Office for Intellectual Freedom 18

Office for International Lending (IFLA) 325

Office of Management Studies, Association of

Research Libraries (ARL) 622

Office of Strategic Services (OSS) 186

Official Journal of the European Communities 460

official publications 460–461

official secrecy 461–463

legislation 462–463

Official Secrets Act (UK, 1989) 203, 463

Ogden, Sherelyn 102–104

Ohio College Library Center (OCLC) 146, 341,

458

Ohio State University Learning Resource

Center 648

Oldroyd, Robert E. 499–500

OMNI 218

On Account of Sex: An Annotated Bibliography on the Status

of Women in Librarianship 657

one-person library 463–464

online 465

online abstracting services 2

online bookselling 43

Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) 146,

458, 643

online information retrieval 27

Online Public-Access Catalogues see OPACS

online services 465–466

ontology 466

OPACS (Online Public-Access Catalogues) 34,

155, 156, 172, 466–468

India 594

open access 468

680 Index

Open Document Architecture (ODA) 457

open source 468

open systems interconnection (OSI) 248, 325,

469

Open to All? 581

operating system 469

library management systems 377

operations research 469

Oppenheim, Charles 109–111

optical character recognition (OCR) 458

optical disk 62, 163, 469

ORACLE 633

oral traditions 469–472

ordering, acquisitions 6


cataloguing 472–474

classification 483–484

document identifiers 473

indexing 475–482, 484–485

syntax 481–485

vocabulary 474–475, 481, 485–486

organizational information policies 490–493

Orman, David 145–147, 324–325

Orna, Elizabeth 490–493

Otlet, Paul-Marie-Ghislain (1868–1944) 148,

197, 493

outreach service 493

P2P (peer to peer) 122, 329, 504, 589

packet switching 494

Pakistan, libraries 595–598

Pakistan Library Association (PLA) 595–596

Pakistan National Bibliography 596

Pakistan National Scientific and Technical

Documentation Centre (PANSDOC) 595,

597

Pakistan Scientific and Technical

Documentation Centre (PASTIC) 597

palaeography 23, 494–495

Palgrave, Sir Francis (1788–1861) 532

pamphlet 495–496

Panama 65, 66

Panizzi, Sir Antony (1797–1879) 59, 496

paper 496–499

paper preservation 518–520

paperless society 499

see also Lancaster, F. Wilfrid

paraprofessional 499–500

Paris Convention for the Protection of

Industrial Property 323, 502, 636

Parker, Jim 528–530

Parker, Nicola 297–300

parliamentary libraries 501–502

PASTIC (Pakistan Scientific and Technical

Documentation Centre) 597

Pateman, John 579–582

patents 502–504

Patents Act (UK, 1988) 323

PDR Lao see Laos

Pearson, David 522–524

peer to peer (P2P) 122, 329, 504, 589

Pemberton, J. Michael 547–548

PERDANA (Malaysian National Digital

Library) 608

performance measurement in libraries 504–510,

623

Performance Measures 505

periodical 510

Perrault, Dominique 379

personal computer 510

PGI (Programme Générale de l’Information) 38,

642

PHILIN (Philippine Library Information

Network) 608

Philippines 604–605

philosophies of science 510–512

philosophy of librarianship 512–513

PICAS (Picture Archives Singapore) 609

PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection)

100

Picture Archives Singapore (PICAS) 609

picture libraries 513–515

piracy 515–516

pixel 516

Plaister, Jean 380–381

Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS)

100

Poland 68, 69

Policy Action Group on Social Exclusion 581

Poole, William Frederick 1–2, 17

Porat, Marc Uri (1947–) 264, 268, 516

Pors, Niels Ole 381–383

portability 516

portals and gateways 156, 173, 516–518

Portugal 612

positivism 180, 224, 518

postal services 152, 518

Index 681

Poulain, Martine 39–40

Poulter, Alan 126, 328–329, 447–450,

457–458, 652, 659–660

Powell, Ronald R. 648–650

PRECIS (Preserved Context Indexing System)

36, 476, 484, 623

preprint 518

preservation 102, 518–520

see also conservation

digital 138

digital information 137, 138

film 199

presidential libraries 520

National Archives of the United States 442

Prestel 178, 651

Priest, Derek J. 496–499

Priestley, Carol 132–134

primary literature 520–522

printing 214

privacy 521–522

Privacy Act (USA, 1974) 521

private libraries 522–524

Private Libraries Association 524

private press 524–525

Private Press Books 524

professionalism 525–526

Programme Générale de l’Information (PGI) 38,

642

programming language 99, 526–527

promotion 527

see also publicity

propaganda 528

protocol 33, 528

HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 33

protocols, library management systems (LMS)

378

provenance 528

rare books 540

PTT 528

public domain 528

public information services, electronic 178–179

Public Interest Immunity Certificates (PIICs)

462

Public Lending Right Act (UK, 1979) 528, 529

Public Lending Right (PLR) 61, 196, 528–530

public libraries 530–531

see also libraries

Africa 12, 12–13

Bangladesh 599

browsing 373

Caribbean 56

Central America 66


crime in libraries 111

ephemera 183

fiction 196

India 593–594

Internet access 373


Pakistan 596–597

picture collections 514



Public Libraries Act (UK, 1850) 383, 550

Public Libraries and Museums Act (UK, 1964)

531, 559

Public Library Association 505, 622

Public Library Data Service 506

Public Library Manifesto (UNESCO) 531

Public Record Office (PRO) 335, 532–533

official secrecy 462

Public Records Acts (UK) 532–533

public sector business information services 53

public services, electronic delivery 282

publicity 527, 533–535

see also promotion

Publicity and Public Relations Group (PPRG)

535

publishing 42, 132, 171, 535

publishing companies, knowledge industries

349–350

Pugh, Lyndon 430–432

push technology 535

Putnam, Herbert (1899–1939) 385, 386, 557

quality assurance 536

quality in library and information services

536–537

radio, knowledge industries 345

RAND (Research and National Development

Corporation) 627

random-access memory (RAM) 538

Ranganathan, Shiyali Ramamrita (1892–1972)

34, 83, 512, 539, 593

rare book 538

rare book libraries 538–544

RATER categories 537

682 Index

Raven, Claire 92–94

Re:source: the Council for Museums, Archives

and Libraries 435, 577

read-only memory (ROM) 544

reading research 544–546

reading room 544

recommended systems 546

record 546

record office 546–547

Records and Archives Management Programme

(RAMP) 23, 327, 642

records management 23, 547–548

see also archives

reference book 548–550

reference interview 550

reference libraries 550–552

referral service 552

Regulations

see also Acts; legislation

Education (School Records) Regulations

(UK, 1989) 203

Environmental Information Regulations

(UK, 1992) 203

Health and Safety (Display Screen)

Regulations (UK, 1992) 216

Management of Health and Safety at Work


Provision and Use of Work Equipment

Regulations (UK, 1998) 216–217

Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare)


relational database 156, 552

remote sensing 552

rental right 552

Répertoire Bibliographique Universel (RBU)

197

Répertoire Internationale de la Presse Musicale

(RIPM) 439

Répertoire Internationale de Littérature

Musicale (RILM) 439

Répertoire Internationale des Sources Musicales

(RISM) 438

Répertoire Internationale d’Iconographie

Musicale (RIdIM) 439

report literature 552

reprography 552–554

research libraries 30, 39, 556–557, 562

Research Libraries Group (RLG) 324, 556

research in library and information science

554–556

Research and National Development (RAND)

Corporation 627

research provision, academic libraries 4

reserve collection 557–558

Resnick, Paul 200

Resource Discovery Network 218

resources allocation, collection management 82

Restaurator 103

Reuters 27

review article 558

Rhodesia see Zimbabwe

Richards, Pamela S. 186–187

Rider, Arthur Fremont (1885–1962) 558

Risseeuw, Mickey 639–641

RLA (Russian Library Association) 563

Robbins, Louise S. 453–456

Robinson, William H. 501–502

Rockefeller Foundation 639

Rogerson, Ian 404–406

Role of Women in Librarianship 1876–1976, The 657

Roman libraries, Africa 10

romanization 154

Roper, Michael 325–327

Rösch, Hermann 141–142

Rosenberg, Diana 558–560

Round Table for the Management of Library

Associations 376

Rowlands, Ian 278–285

Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB),

Talking Books Service 577

royalty 558

Rules for Archival Description 24

Rules for a Printed Dictionary Catalogue 118

rural library services 558–560

Russia and the former Soviet Union 191,

560–564

Russian Academy of Sciences Library 561

Russian Library Association (RLA) 563

Russian State Library 561

SAA see Society of American Archivists

Sabaratnam, Julie 600–612

Sargent, Goff 178–179

Scandinavia see Nordic countries

Schellenberg, Theodore R. (1903–70) 23, 565

Schleiermacher, Friedrich (1768–1834)

223–224

Index 683

scholarly communication 429, 565–567

electronic journals 177

School of Information Studies for Africa (SISA)

14

school libraries 567–569

see also libraries

Africa 12

Bangladesh 599

Caribbean 57

Central America 66

India 594

Middle East 422

Pakistan 597

South America 590


SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online)

133

scientometrics 569

script 569

search 569

search engines 173, 175, 517, 569–572, 660

Sears List of Subject Headings 36

secondary literature 572

security in libraries 572–574

Semantic Web 33, 240, 574

semiotics 574

Senegal 13

serendipity 574

serial 574

serials librarianship 575–576

server 576–577

services, academic libraries 4

services for visually impaired people (VIP)

577–578

SGML see Standard Generalized Mark-up

Language

Shannon, Claude Elwood (1916–2001) 84,

310–311, 312, 578

Shannon–Weaver model 84–85

shareware 578–579

shell 579

Shera, Jesse Hauk (1903–82) 579

Shimmon, Ross 233–235

Shorley, Deborah 24–26

Short Messaging Service (SMS) 426

Sierra Leone 9, 14

SIGLE (System for Information on Grey

Literature in Europe) 211–212

signs see guiding and signs

SILAS see Singapore Integrated Library

Automation Service

Singapore 601–602, 603, 605, 607, 609

Singapore Integrated Library Automation

Service (SILAS) 606

Singapore National Bibliography 606

Singapore Press Holdings Library 603

single search engines 569–571

Slee, David 106–108, 368–369

Slovenia 68, 70

Smith, Inese A. 643

Smith, Kerry 554–556

Smith, Linda M. 533–535

SMS (Short Messaging Service) 426

Social Exclusion Action Planning Network 581

social exclusion and libraries 579–582

Society of American Archivists (SAA) 23, 29

Society of Indexers 237

Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial

Communications (SWIFT) 637

sociology of knowledge 582–584

soft systems methodology (SSM) 584–587

software 98, 99–100, 587

enterprise resource planning (ERP) 181

security 101

sound archives 587–588

sound recordings 140, 588–589

South Africa 13, 143


South Asia 592–600



Soviet Academy of Sciences 187

Soviet Union

see also Russia and the former Soviet Union

censorship 63

espionage 186, 187

Spain 612–613

spam 615

special collections 615

special libraries 616

see also libraries

Africa 10–11

Bangladesh 599

Caribbean 56


India 594

Middle East 423

Pakistan 597

684 Index

Russia and the former Soviet Union 562

South America 591

Southeast Asia 603

Special Libraries Association 29, 507, 622

Solo Librarians’ Division 464

SPECTRUM 435, 436

spreadsheet 617

Sroka, Marek 67–70

SSM (soft systems methodology) 584–587

Standard Book Numbering Agency Ltd 327

Standard Generalized Mark-up Language

(SGML) 121, 241, 409–410, 457

standards specification 617–618


Standing Committee on Social Science Data

Archives (UNESCO International Social

Science Council) 122

Standing Conference of East, Central and

Southern African Libraries (SCECSAL) 13,

377

Standing Conference of National and

University Libraries (SCONUL) 648

statistics on libraries 619–621

Stephens, Derek 634–635

Stevenson, Valerie 361–363

Stielow, Fred 22–24

stock editing 621

stock selection, acquisitions 6

storage, magnetic 402–404

strategic information systems, information

management 274

strategic military intelligence 425

strategic planning 621–623

Street, Penelope 145–147, 324–325

string indexing 476, 484–485, 623

students, academic libraries 4

Studies in Bibliography 46

Studies in Conservation (IIC journal) 103

Sturges, Paul 9–14, 96–98, 101–102, 104–105,

200–202, 383–384, 389–391, 461–463,

521–522

subject catalogue 623

subject heading 35–36, 293, 482–483, 623

subject index 623–624

subject index search engines 571

subject librarian 624

subscription libraries 365, 624–625

Sumsion, John 619–621

SuperJANET 250–251, 335

surfing 625

surrogate 625

surveillance 109, 429, 625–626

Svenonius, Elaine 59–60

SVERIB (Swedish Electronic Research Library)

452

Swartzburg, Susan G. 102–104, 518–520

Sweden 451, 452

Swedish Electronic Research Library (SVERIB)

452

syntax, organization of knowledge 481–485

system dynamics 627

systems analysis 626

systems theory 626–628

SYSTRAN 400, 401

tacit knowledge 355

tactical military intelligence 425

Taher, Mohamed 330–334, 646–648

Talking Books service (RNIB) 577

Talking Newspaper Association 577

Tanganyika Library Services Board 383

Tanganyika see Tanzania

Tanzania


library legislation 383

Taube, Mortimer (1910–65) 293, 629

taxonomies 23, 629–631

Taylor, Anne 407–408

Taylor, Marcia Freed 120–122

teaching staff, academic libraries 4

TEI see Text Encoding Initiative

telecentres 631–632

telecommunications 632

telecommuting 159, 632–633

teletext 178, 633

television, knowledge industries 344, 345

text 633

Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) 409–410

text messaging 426

text retrieval 633

textbase 633

Thai Computer Network Project 607

Thailand 144, 605–606, 607

theft from libraries 111

thesaurus 633

Thomson, James 512–513

Tomikubo, Takashi 154–157

Total Quality Management (TQM) 536

Index 685

touch screen 633–634

trade bibliography 634

trade literature 634–635

trade marks 635–636

Trade Marks Act (UK, 1994) 323, 635

Train, Briony 544–546

Traister, Daniel 538–544

transactional databases 127–128

transborder data flow (TDF) 636–638

transfer of technology 638–639

translations 639–641

transliteration 154

Tseng, Gwyneth 44–46, 126–128, 227–228

Turing, Alan Mathison (1912–54) 641

UBC (Universal Bibliographic Control) 36

UBCIM Core Programme (IFLA) 38

Uganda, library education 14

UK Data Archive 120–121

UKMARC (United Kingdom Machine-

Readable Cataloguing) 642

Ulrich’s International Periodicals Directory 2, 575

UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de

Mexico) 64, 65, 66

UNESCO 33, 642

conferences on national information systems

443

co-operation with International Council on

Archives 327


General History of Africa Project 470

IFLA support 642

information ethics 258

International Social Science Council 122

library association guidelines 376

Memory of the World programme 66, 642

Programme Générale de l’Information 38,

642

Public Library Manifesto 531

Records and Archives Management

Programme 23, 327

Standing Committee on Social Science Data

Archives 122

World Heritage Sites 221

UNESCO Statistical Yearbook 642

Uniform Resource Locator (URL) 33, 643

UNIMARC (Universal Machine-Readable

Cataloguing) 155, 643

union catalogues 59, 68, 643

union list 643–644

UNISIST (World System of Information in

Science and Technology) 444

United Kingdom

espionage 186

Jewish libraries 338

legal deposit 48, 363

United Kingdom Machine-Readable

Cataloguing see UKMARC

United States

censorship 63

legal deposit 363

libraries and librarianship see North

American libraries and librarianship

LIS distance learning 144

United States Machine-Readable Cataloguing

see USMARC

United Way of America, advice service 9

Uniterm experiments 293

Universal Availability of Publications (UAP)

644

Universal Bibliographic Control (UBC) 36

Universal Bibliographic Control and

International MARC (UBCIM) 644

Core Programme 38

Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) 34, 47,

197, 293, 644

Universal Machine-Readable Cataloguing see

UNIMARC

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico

(UNAM) 64, 65, 66

university libraries 644–646

see also libraries


South America 590

University of Reading, Centre for Ephemera

Studies 183

University and Research Section 647

University of Texas Library 646

University of Toronto Library 645–646

University of the West Indies (UWI) 56

UNIX operating system 377

Urquhart, Donald John (1909–94) 646

usenet 646

user education 4, 37, 646–648

see also bibliographic instruction

user studies 648–650

Usherwood, Bob 78–80, 530–531

USMARC (United States Machine-Readable

686 Index

Cataloguing) 156, 650

value added 651

van Loo, John 217–220

vehicles, mobile library 428

Vellucci, Sherry L. 417–419

Venezuela 590

Vergueiro, Waldomiro 590–592

videoconference 651

videotape 199

videotex 426, 651

Vietnam 606

viewdata see electronic public information

services; videotex

virtual library 651

virtual reality 119, 652

viruses

computer security 101

Internet 329

visual display terminal (VDT) 652

visually impaired people (VIP) 577–578

Vitiello, Giuseppe 612–615

vocabulary, organization of knowledge

474–475, 481, 485–486

Voice Over IP (VOIP) 449

von Bertalanffy, Ludwig see Bertalanffy, Ludwig

von

Von Neumann, John (1903–57) 652–653

W3C see World Wide Web Consortium

Walford’s Guide to Reference Material 2, 549

WAP see Wireless Application Protocol

Waples, Douglas (1893–1978) 654

Web 23

Web browser 33, 654

Web directories 630

Webb, Bill 427–429

Webb, Sylvia P. 193–195, 252–254, 463–464

Webber, Sheila 52–54

Webmaster 654

websites, national libraries 69

weeding, relegation and disposal, collection

management 83

Weibel, Kathleen 657

Weingand, Darlene E. 28–30

Wersig, Gernot 310–319

Wessels, R.H.A. 210–212

West Indian Case Laws Indexing Project

(WICLIP) 56

Wheatley Medal 237

White House conferences

Library and Information Services (1979) 381

Productivity 269

White, Martin 516–518

Whitworth, Andrew 303–305

WICLIP (West Indian Case Laws Indexing

Project) 56

wide-area network (WAN) 654

Wiegand, Wayne A. 225–227

Wiener, Norbert (1894–1964) 119, 311,

654–655

Willars, Glenys 567–569

Williams, Peter Harvard- see Harvard-Williams,

Peter

Wilson, Colin St John 379

Wilson, Francis 626–628

Wilson, Sir Angus (1913–91) 367

Wilson, T.D. 263–278

WIMPS (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pull-down

menus) 208, 210

Windows 655

Winsor, Justin 17

Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) 251, 655

wireless applications 655

women in librarianship 655–659

Wood, Kate 525–526

Woodhouse, Susi 437–439

Woodward, Hazel 575–576

word processing 659

workstation 659

World Health Organization (WHO) 471

World Heritage Sites 221

World of Learning, exchange programme

information 191

World Patents Index 503

World Translations Index (WTI) 640

World Wide Web (WWW) 33, 143, 173,

659–660

browsing 51

bulletin board 51


portals and gateways 516–518

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) 33, 660

WORM (Write Once, Read Many) disks 469

Wormell, Irene 319–320

Wortley, Patricia Jane 14–15

Wu, Zimin 400–402

Index 687

Wurman, Richard Saul 252

XML see eXtensible Mark-up Language

Yahoo! 516, 517

Yates-Mercer, Penelope 130–132

Yiddish literature collections 337

Yugoslavia 67

Zambia, archive services 13

Zimbabwe, archive services 13

Zipf, George Kingsley (1902–50) 661

688 Index