Notes

  1. This consultation paper was jointly prepared by Linda O’Brien, Mark Brodsky, Margaret Ruwoldt and Sally Newton. It has benefited from earlier reports and consultation processes, including the Sheehan report, the Fisher report and the Library of the Future consultation process; advice from the Expert Advisory Panel, many members of staff, and from comments and contributions from Lynda Gilbert, Belinda Nemec and Stephen Young. Our thanks to Richard Katz and Dame Lynne Brindley for their comments on a draft version.
  2. Davis, G and Sharrock, G (2005) p.10
  3. See for example Macintyre, S and Selleck, R (2003) p.67 and p.109: “Long overdue, the tragedy of Melbourne’s Library was that it was built too soon.”
  4. Courant, P (2006)
  5. See for example Doherty, P (2004) describing the librarian as “both the guardian of the record and key figures among the keepers of the gates of knowledge”. See also Davis, G (2007) on “The end of the gatekeeper: when knowledge is free and available to all, universities have to rethink everything they do.”
  6. It also serves other functions. James, P and McQueen Thomson, D (2002) p.193: “Academic appointments, promotions and funding allocations are all highly dependent upon the codified system of publishing new research in refereed academic journals, and to a lesser extent scholarly books. In days gone by this was a simple process of submitting articles to any of a small group of journals within an established field of study. Manuscripts would be peer reviewed, either published or not, and then journal issues would be distributed to university libraries and researchers at a price that reasonably reflected the costs of publication. The process was collegial, good-willed and commercially unambitious. Researchers were generally happy to give away their findings in order to encourage wide distribution and to enhance scholarship. Subsidised, not-for-profit university presses… were vital facilitators of this enterprise, with commercial presses playing an increasing role…”

  7. Oblinger, D and Oblinger, J (Eds) (2005) p.1
  8. Davis, G (2007)
  9. Tapscott, D (1998). Other terms used are the Google Generation, Generation Y, and Millennials.
  10. While the technology has been with us for a number of years, we have only recently seen a rapid maturing in the availability and take-up of a range of tools.
  11. Katz, R (2008): there is a debate as to whether the technology cuts its own channels or we control it, but either way at a macro level these change will affect the University.
  12. Oblinger, D and Oblinger, J (Eds) (2005) Ch 2
  13. Gartner Inc. have recently talked about the V generation.
  14. Joint Information Systems Committee (2007).
  15. Salaway, G and Borreson Caruso, J (2007). See also Kennedy, G et al (2008).
  16. Chipchase, J and Tulusan, I (2006).
  17. Amazon.com uses automated analysis of customer behaviour to make recommendations about products you may wish to purchase. Google’s AdWords advertising service analyses the text displayed on your computer screen to target relevant advertising placements. Flickr.com encourages people to ‘tag’ their own and other people’s photographs, and to contribute to ‘photo pools’ and online discussions about photography.

  18. Judd, T and Kennedy, G (2007)
  19. Wilder, S (2005) pB13
  20. Davis, G and Sharrock, G (2005) p.11
  21. Usually attributed to Niels Bohr, physicist (1885-1962)
  22. Katz, R (2008)
  23. Gartner Inc. is a commercial organisation that researches trends in Information Technology and delivers these to subscription members. The reference is to a presentation by Brian Prentice from Gartner Inc. at the Gartner Symposium in November 2007.
  24. Dede, C (2007)
  25. See for example Australian Research Council (2005) p.2
  26. Houghton, J, Steele, C and Sheehan, P (2006)
  27. Houghton, J, Steele, C and Sheehan, P (2006) p.6
  28. Based on a study of 43 academics, Kingsley, D (2008) identified typical information-seeking behaviours for three academic disciplines. For general ‘keeping up,’ researchers in chemistry tended to subscribe to alert services and to scan indices and newsletters in a structured, systematic manner. Computer scientists preferred to attend specific conferences, while sociologists relied on serendipity and personal subscriptions to journals. For directed searching (aimed at finding the answer to a specific question), chemistry researchers turned first to bibliographic databases of scientific journals; computer scientists used web search engines; and sociologists accumulated a ‘snowball’ mixture of texts and academic papers.

  29. Office of Special Projects, National Research Council (2001) p.5
  30. Abbott, A (2006)
  31. Brindley, L (2005): “Most people are aware that a national switch to digital broadcasting is expected by the end of this decade. Less well known is the fact that a similar trend is underway in the world of publishing: by the year 2020, 40 per cent of UK research monographs will be available in electronic format only, while a further 50 per cent will be produced in both print and digital. A mere 10 per cent of new titles will be available in print alone by 2020.”
  32. Quoted in Détraz, M (2008)
  33. The Michigan library published a commemorative web page: www.lib.umich.edu/news/millionth.html
  34. The Open Content Alliance was created by the Internet Archive and Yahoo! in early 2005. Contributors include university libraries, public libraries and museums from the USA, Europe and Australia. Corporate contributors include Adobe, HP Labs, MSN, O’Reilly Media and Xerox Corporation. The alliance aims to create a permanent, web-accessible collection of multilingual digitised text and multimedia content, offering broad public access to “a rich panorama of world culture… representing the creative output of humankind.”
  35. Anderson, C (2005)
  36. Abbott, A (2006)
  37. Open University (2004): “The Sunday Times University Guide 2004’s table of universities with the best marks for teaching places the OU at fifth place — ahead of Oxford and University College London — for the second successive year.”
  38. Higher Education Funding Council for England (2007), cited in Open University (2007).

  39. Higher Education and Research Opportunities in the UK (2001): Open University achieved rankings of 3a or higher in its 26 units of assessment. Its overall average of 3a places it in the third-highest band overall, demonstrating research quality that equates to attainable levels of national excellence in over two-thirds of the research activity submitted, possibly showing evidence of international excellence.
  40. Kerr, R (2008)
  41. Fyffe, R (2002)
  42. Often cited as an example of digital obsolescence. For a summary, see Wikipedia (2008c).
  43. Errami, M and Garner, H (2008) propose that “Given the pressure to publish, it is important to be aware of the ways in which community standards can be subverted. Our concern here is with the three major sins of modern publishing: duplication, co-submission and plagiarism… Two important contributing factors are the level of confusion over acceptable publishing behaviour and the perception that there is a high likelihood of escaping detection. The lack of clear standards for what level of text and figure re-use is appropriate (for example in the introduction and methods) is a well known problem; but the belief that one can get away with re-use is probably the single most important factor.” From a sample of 7 million abstracts, Errami and Garner estimated that at least 50,000 Medline records — and potentially 200,000 records — refer to duplicated papers.
  44. Jefferson, T (1813) put the argument for free access to ideas: “If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.”
  45. Davis, G and Sharrock, D (2005) p.5
  46. Wikipedia (2008b)
  47. Samuelson, P (1954) used the term “collective consumption good”.
  48. Hajjem, C and Harnad, S (2007) and Eysenbach, G (2006)

  49. See notes and links at Brodsky, M (2008)
  50. Courant, P (2006)
  51. Wikipedia (2008b)
  52. Courant, P (2006): “The technical property that matters most is that the cost of adding another consumer is zero (or approximately so). The good is non-rival. It then follows, as a matter of economic efficiency that the market price ought to be zero. Why? Because if I charge you something for an item that costs nothing to produce at the margin, I am passing up possible value. I could make you better off while doing no harm. This notion of efficiency underlies what economists love about market economies with respect to private goods. But when there are public goods, charging invariably reduces social welfare relative to what is technically possible.”
  53. See Lynch, C (2008). “These programs represent substantial investments, and while extramural funding has helped with some of the early efforts, there’s great concern about ‘sustainability’ of these efforts — they either have to move to some kind of recharge basis, most likely, which will add a great deal of overhead, impede access, and consequently, reduce the contribution of the programs to the university’s mission goals, or they simply have to be funded out of core institutional budgets as part of the essential mission-critical activities of the institution. The choice of an aggressive interpretation of institutional mission to disseminate scholarship will not be without substantial ongoing cost.”
  54. Brindley, L (2005)
  55. Courant, P (2006): “Unfortunately, although public goods can be extended to more users at zero cost, they can still be costly to produce in the first place. The case of digitally produced scholarship is of course an excellent example. What the theory tells us is that we ought to charge nothing for it at the margin — give it away. It tells nothing about how to pay for its production or how to determine how much to produce. What it tells us is that markets will under— produce. It also tells us that as a general matter, the solution of public goods problems requires collective action.”
  56. Lynch, C (2008) says “No one university ‘owns’ or ‘creates’ the body of knowledge that comprises any significant field of intellectual inquiry for any length of time; these are built up out of the contributions of multiple scholars, at multiple universities (and sometimes at institutions beyond the academy). Further, the body of knowledge in any discipline is constantly being re-interpreted, re-integrated, and re-organized by the continuing efforts of scholars, and thus lives, evolves and grows. Collectively, the faculty of our colleges and universities represent very deep reservoirs of knowledge and scholarship across a tremendous range of disciplines and fields of inquiry. It is this full body of knowledge and scholarship, as expressed in the scholarly work of these faculty and their students that I am concerned with here, not simply the ‘new knowledge’ being created at a given time. And I want to stress that no single university or university system, even one as large and prestigious as the University of California system, controls a critical mass within this body of scholarship, but that collectively the (international) academy does control such a critical mass in many — perhaps most — disciplines, at least prospectively. (They have allowed copyright for the vast majority of the retrospective literature representing scholarly work over the past century to enter private hands.)”
  57. Houghton, J, Steele, C and Sheehan, P (2006) pp. vi-vii
  58. Errami, M and Garner, H (2008) observe that, as measured by scholarly publication rates, scientific productivity world-wide is at an all-time high. At the same time, duplication, co-submission and plagiarism appear to be becoming more widespread. “Rising duplicate publication rates… [are] a global phenomenon. Potential factors contributing to this trend are the explosion in the number of journals with online content (increasing opportunities for unethical copying), and a body of literature growing so fast that the risk of being detected seems to diminish.”

  59. James, P and McQueen Thomson, D (2002) pp.193-4: “Over the past few decades, most journals were subsumed into large commercial enterprises, such as Sage, Routledge, Blackwell and Elsevier, or sought the distribution-publishing strength of globalising university presses such as Cambridge and Oxford. Moreover, mergers and takeovers concentrated the commodification-effect. In recent years, a small number of transnational conglomerates — Reed Elsevier, Thomson, Wolters Kluwer, Springer Verlag and Wiley — have been cornering the journal market, precipitating enormous change for researchers, universities and libraries. For instance, in 2000 Reed Elsevier purchased major science journal publisher Harcourt for US$4.5 billion, giving this conglomerate control over 1700 journals and 42 per cent of average university spending in this field. During the same period, universities made themselves doubly dependent upon journal and commercial monograph publishing, for it became the evidentiary basis used to determine distribution of resources. For example, one key indicator of purchasing directions is the statistical knowledge of citations provided by the institute for Scientific Information, but the index itself is owned by Thomson, a transnational publisher.”
  60. Duderstadt, J (2006): “The more I look at this new world we are in, the more it seems to me that we are observing a classic case of the irresistible force and the immovable object. The irresistible force is the ease of working and playing online, the billions of people who start and stop there, who expect to have access to all that matters there (meaning, again, that if it isn’t there it isn’t going to matter). Some of them are even the children of members of Congress. The immovable object is the rights environment and the effort to save old business models, with copyright law aiming for infinity less a day as being the ideal term of protection. I think that the force wins; I know that it should.”
  61. Harvard has decided that arts and science research is to be made publicly available free on-line (with a waiver possible) — see Cohen, P (2008).
  62. Geist, M (2008): “If it’s public funding that’s paying for this research the public ought to have access to these works and not have to be asked to pay for them multiple times as is currently the case.”
  63. See for example Davidson, L (2005) who notes “we also face the sure demise of the academic library, an event that has been predicted for years but that only just know is finally coming to pass“ (p.26) and questions whether universities will also disappear.
  64. Duderstadt, J (2006)
  65. Courant, P (2007)
  66. Davis, G (2006)
  67. Davis, G (2005) p.3

  68. Davis, G (2006)
  69. The University of Melbourne (2007) p.5
  70. Bridgland, A, et al (2007) estimate that we have invested over $300 million in our library collections.
  71. Financial Operations (2008)
  72. Nemec, B (2008)
  73. Data about conservation, preservation and cataloguing costs were supplied by Dr Belinda Nemec in correspondence to the authors. The 2006 review of Baillieu Library collections identified more than 33,000 items (13 per cent of the collections) as requiring conservation or preservation work. Of these, around 7000 items required immediate attention. The total cost of conservation and preservation work was estimated at up to $17 million. Similarly, the cost of bringing the University of Melbourne Archives up to standard was estimated at around $11 million in 2000. Works would include preservation, conservation, rehousing and improvements to storage facilities.
  74. Nemec, B (2008)
  75. Tony Barry is quoted in Clarke, R (2004) as saying “There were three classes of people who made the net successful. The technicians… the content providers… and the enthusiasts/promoters. [These included] the library community as they were into networks way back in the mid 80’s both via [the Australian Bibliographic Network] ABN but also accessing Dialog and Orbit in the US via MIDAS (OTC). They did a lot to promote the internet from 1992 onwards… The Campus-Wide Information Systems (CWIS) movement, driven by university librarians, provided a model for intranets and information sharing, which started with gopher in late 1992.” Melbourne University’s CWIS team underwent an organisational restructure in 2006 and no longer exists by that name.
  76. Macintyre, S and Selleck R (2003) p.67: “In the mid 1920s the library moved to the Quadrangle’s North Wing from the first floor of the North Extension where for fifty years it grew steadily and scandalously over-crowded. The new accommodation was immediately revealed as inadequate and, especially in the ‘swot vac’ before the final examinations, students queued outside waiting their turn to pursue their studies.”
  77. Macintyre, S and Selleck, R (2003): p.109 “After repeated false starts, a library was completed in 1959. The Baillieu family had been donating funds for this sorely needed amenity since 1944, yet the library collection remained pitifully inadequate and the library staff were treated as menial functionaries. The new Ballieu Library provided for 1000 reading places and a doubling of the current collection of 150,000 volumes. It was almost immediately swamped by 8000 daily readers and rapidly exhausted the storage capacity. Sydney University was already planning for double the reading places and three times as many books. Long overdue, the tragedy of Melbourne’s Library was that it was built too soon.”
  78. The number of web site visitors is based on data available at www.unimelb.edu.au/stats/www.lib.unimelb.edu.au/ and excludes usage of catalogue search engines and other online applications provided by the library.

  79. CAUL statistics.
  80. Analysis by the authors of statistics collected annually by the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL). Raw data are available at www.caul.edu.au/stats/
  81. Fisher, K (2005) p.19
  82. It costs $76.40 to store a volume on open access in our libraries, $38.20 to store a volume in high density store and $6.57 to store a volume in a purpose-built, high density facility such as CARM.
  83. Abbott, A (2006)
  84. Abbott, A (2006)
  85. Abbott, A (2006)
  86. Brodie, M (2008)
  87. Abbott, A (2006)
  88. Abbott, A (2006)

  89. Fisher, K (2005) p.20
  90. Fisher, K (2005) p.20
  91. Fisher, K (2005) p.23
  92. Davis, G (2005) p.1
  93. Davis, G (2005) p.8
  94. Research and Research Training Quality Taskforce (2007)
  95. See for example articles by Steve Lawrence at citeseer.ist.psu.edu/online-nature01/ and www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html. This mirrors the Amazon.com experience which shows that making the full text of a book available online can increase sales of the work.
  96. For example Melbourne distributes its Research Infrastructure Block Grant funds based on faculty and department performance. Other universities use these funds to build their library resources, network and compute infrastructure to support research and research training needs.
  97. Curriculum Commission (2006) p.15

  98. Davis, G (2005) p.8
  99. Curriculum Commission (2006) p.11
  100. James, R and Baldwin, G (2002) p.14
  101. Kennedy, G et al (2008)
  102. Davis, G (2005) p.8
  103. The University of Melbourne (2007) p.2
  104. Davis, G (2005) p.7
  105. The University of Melbourne (2007) p.2
  106. Davis, G (2005) p.8
  107. Cohen, P (2008)
  108. Baxter, R (1996, 2007)
  109. Davis, G (2005) p.7
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