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Open Access to Digital Libraries. Must Research Libraries be Expensive?

William Y. Arms

Department of Computer Science

Cornell University

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Before Digital Libraries

Access to scientific, medical, legal information

In the United States:

-- excellent if you belonged to a rich organization (e.g, a major university)

-- very poor otherwise

In many countries of the world:

-- very poor for everybody

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Research Libraries are Expensive

library materials

buildings & facilities

staff

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The Potential of Digital Libraries

materials

open access

buildings & facilities

staff

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Economic Models for Open Access

Who pays for open access to information?

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Two Fallacies

1. The Luddite Publishing Fallacy

Academic authors will never change. Prestige is determined by which journals a researcher publishes in. The prestigious journals make the rules.

2. The Free Lunch Fallacy

Web publishing costs nothing. Therefore groups of researchers should publish their own research. There is no need to waste money on publishers.

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Four Economic Models

Example: Broadcast Television

Open Access

Advertising network television

External funding public broadcasting

Restricted Access

Subscription cable

Pay-by-use pay-per-view

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Examples

Old New

Books in Print (subscription) Amazon.com (advertising)

Medline (pay-by-use) Grateful Med (external)

Journal (subscription) ePrint archives (external)

Westlaw (pay-by-use) Legal Information Institute (external)

Inspec (subscription) Google (advertising)

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Thoughts on the Future of Open Access

The dominant force is author pressure, which emphasizes open access rather than closed access.

1. A mixture of economic models will coexist.

2. Eventually, we will have open access to most scientific and professional information.

3. The most common economic model will be that information is published by the producing organization.

The producing organization may be a university (or part), a conference series, a laboratory, an association, etc.

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A New Role For Academic Libraries and Associations

Academic libraries and associations can provide support for open access information:

-- Establish standards for academic quality

-- Maintain local archives (e.g., M.I.T.'s archive of local research)

-- Protect and preserve for the long-term

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buildings & facilitiescomputers & networks

The Potential of Digital Libraries

materials

open access

staff

?

staff

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Automated Digital Libraries

How effectively can computers be used for the skilled tasks of professional librarianship?

-- Time horizon: 5 to 20 years

-- All materials in digital form

Computers cannot imitate intelligence. Can automated digital libraries provide equivalent services?

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Example: Catalogs and Indexes

Catalog, index and abstracting records are very expensive when created by skilled professionals

-- only available for certain categories of material (e.g., monographs, scientific journals)

-- contain limited fields of information (e.g., no contents page)

-- restricted to static information

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Equivalent Services: Catalogs and Indexes

Cataloguing rules

-- Application of cataloguing rules is skilled

-- It is hard to imagine a computer system with these skills

but ...

-- Cataloguing rules are the means, not the end

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Equivalent Services

Information discovery

I used to be a heavy user of Inspec. Now I use Google instead.

Why are web search services the most widely used information discovery tools in universities today?

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Conventional Criteria

Web search services have many weaknesses

-- selection is arbitrary

-- index records are crude

-- no authority control

-- duplicate detection is weak

-- search precision is deplorable

yet they clearly satisfy some users ...

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Effectiveness of Web Search

Why I use Google instead of Inspec:

=> Broader coverage

=> Better ranking

=> Immediate access to information (e.g., open access version of published paper)

Google is an equivalent service for information discovery (for some users)

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Simple Algorithms

+

Immense Computing Power

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Brute Force Computing

Few people really understand Moore's Law

-- Computing power doubles every 18 months

-- Increases 100 times in 10 years

-- Increases 10,000 times in 20 years

Simple algorithms + immense computing powermay outperform human intelligence

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Brute Force Computing

Example

Creators of the world champion chess program (Deep Thought later Deep Blue)

-- moderate chess players

-- simple tree-search algorithm

-- very, very fast computer hardware

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Examples of

Automated Digital Library Services

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Brute Force Computing:Web Search

Web search engines:

-- retrieve every page on the web

-- index every word

-- repeat every month

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Substitutes for Human Intelligence

Automated algorithms for information discovery

Closeness of match

-- vector space and statistical methods

(Salton, et al., c. 1970)

Importance of digital object

-- Google ranks web pages by how many other pages link to them

(NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Libraries Initiative)

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Brute Force Computing: Archiving and Preservation

Internet Archive

-- Monthly, web crawler gathers every open access web page with associated images

-- Web pages are preserved for future generations

-- Files are available for scholarly research

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Brute Force Computing: Reference Linking

ResearchIndex (CiteSeer, ScienceIndex) (NEC)

-- fully automatic

-- all open access material in computer science

-- a free service

Contrast with the Web of Science (ISI)

-- input: combination of automatic means, skilled people

-- limited number of journals

-- very expensive

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Brute Force Computing: Automated Metadata Extraction

Informedia (Carnegie Mellon)

Automatic processing of segments of video, e.g., television news.

Algorithms for:

-- dividing raw video into discrete items

-- generating short summaries

-- indexing the sound track using speech recognition

-- recognizing faces

(NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Libraries Initiative)

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Automating Interoperability

Example: Cornell University's Core System for the NSDL

(The National Science Foundation's digital library for science, mathematics, engineering and technology

education)

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Levels of Interoperability

A comprehensive science library:

The NSDL must provide coherent services across a vast range of materials managed by organizations with many objectives.

Three levels of interoperability:

Federation

Harvesting

Gathering

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Federation (e.g., Z39.50 and MARC)

Digital libraries that follow a full set of agreements form a federation.

Standards and agreements

-- Technical: formats, protocols, security systems, etc.

-- Content: data and metadata (including semantics)

-- Organizational: access, services, payment, authentication, etc.

Federations are desirable but very demanding and hence rare

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Gathering (e.g., Internet Archive, Google)

Gathering: service for open access information, even if information providers do not follow standard agreements:

-- web crawlers gather open access information

-- web search engines index it

-- automated services are possible (e.g., ResearchIndex)

Entirely automated

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Harvesting (e.g., Open Archives Initiative)

Digital libraries:

-- provide a brief metadata record for each item (e.g., minimal Dublin Core)

-- support a simple protocol for access to this metadata

Automated harvesters:

-- harvest the metadata automatically

-- build automated services

Mainly automated

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Costs and Benefits

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Costs of Automated Digital Libraries

The Google Company

-- 5.5 million searches daily

-- 85 people (half technical, 14 with Ph.D. in computing)

-- 2,500 PCs running Linux, with 80 terabytes of disk

The Internet Archive

-- 7 people plus support from Alexa

(March 2000)

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Overall

If you are rich ...

-- Research libraries, using commercial information services, provide excellent service at very high cost to a favored few

-- Automated digital libraries are far from providing the personal service available to a faculty member at a rich university

but ...

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The Model T Library

The Model T Ford, with mass production, brought car travel to the masses ...

-- Automated digital libraries, with open access materials, can already provide good service at low cost

-- In the future, automated digital libraries can bring scientific, scholarly, medical and legal information to everybody

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Some Light Reading

William Y. Arms, "Automated digital libraries." D-Lib Magazine, July/August 2000. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july20/07contents.html

William Y. Arms, "Economic models for open-access publishing." iMP, March 2000. http://www.cisp.org/imp/march_2000/03_00arms.htm