“Our ways of thinking and knowing, teaching and learning are undergoing a sea change, and what is emerging seems both rich and strange.”[24]
Research practice is changing. Research problems increasingly require interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches, and collaboration spanning organisational and national boundaries is becoming commonplace. E-research — large-scale, distributed, national or global collaboration in research facilitated through the capacity of information and communication technologies — allows the study of complex problems across the research landscape.[25]
Australian publication and citation data confirms these trends, showing increasing collaboration (co-authorship), both domestic and international, and between research organisations, industry and the state.[26] And this is not confined to the sciences. Within the humanities collaboration and wider collegial networks are increasingly important and all fields show rapid increases in their use of electronic tools and content.[27] The Internet is seen as an important research tool, with a rapid increase in the use of data, databases and datasets as both an input to, and output from, research. Public web search engines have become an essential part of the research process for many scholars. In many disciplines, the preferred source of new and authoritative information remains the established scholarly journals, albeit now online.[28]
Just as libraries have been regarded as essential research infrastructure, so now are high-bandwidth networks, large data stores and high performance computer infrastructure. The US National Research Council suggests that:
“The rapidly expanding availability of primary sources of data in digital form may be shifting the balance of research away from working with secondary sources such as scholarly publications… New automated systems, and perhaps new intermediary institutions for searching and authenticating information, will develop to provide these services, much as libraries and scholarly publications served these roles in the past.”[29]
What of the disciplines where the library continues to be their ‘research laboratory’? Andrew Abbott contends that library research should be conceived as a particular kind of research system. Scholars of languages, literatures, history, musicology, art history, philosophy, and those from sociology, anthropology and political science — for these scholars the library is their primary data source. Even published material, which would be otherwise be regarded as secondary material, can be yet another form of primary data for these scholars. These are fields organised not around the pursuit of truth but in a “richness and plenitude of interpretations… a set of disciplines whose focus is less on the true than on the meaningful.”[30]
The practice of library research Abbott describes as artisanal; standardisation and sequentiality do not matter. What matters is the unity the researcher brings, “since it is his mind that reads and interprets, his mind that browses, his is the mind that ultimately puts it all together.” Abbott values the randomness introduced by the physical nature of the artefacts, the classification, the physical shelving. “But library research, as any real adept knows, consists in the first instance in knowing, when you run across something suddenly interesting, that you ought to have wanted to look for it in the first place.” As described by Abbott, the practice of humanistic research is clearly associative in nature. Going down one path leads a curious mind to other associated paths. Abbott describes the physical library facilitating this in its dominant systems of classification and in the physical aspects of browsing. In virtual spaces, search and discovery are facilitated by a range of mechanisms including taxonomies, folksonomies (tagging), formal classification systems, visualisations and semantic analysis.
The world within which all forms of scholarship operate is increasingly digital. Two-thirds of the 23,500 active scholarly refereed journals available globally are now available online. Scholarly books are increasingly published in digital form and some people are even predicting that virtually all new titles will be digital within 10 years.[31] Melbourne subscribes to approximately 53,188 current serial titles in both print and e-journal formats, 288,500 e-books and around 60 databases that contain records other than e-journals or e-books.[32]
Existing scholarly works are being digitised. Project Gutenberg has produced digital text versions of thousands of books and other source documents. The Google Scholar and Google Books initiatives are making published works available and digitising significant library collections, starting with collections from Harvard, Michigan, Stanford and Oxford universities and from the New York Public Library. Under this scheme, by early 2008 the University of Michigan had digitised one million books.[33] Other initiatives like the Yahoo-led Open Content Alliance are similarly drawing in the collections of scores of other institutions for eventual digitisation.[34]
This has raised questions for universities about the need to retain out-of-copyright volumes that are duplicated in other institutional collections. What is the ongoing value of the original object to a university? For a massive digitisation effort, a university could partner with a well-funded commercial provider, a non-commercial organisation or a community group. In choosing a strategy the university would need to consider the degree of alignment with its own core mission and values. Digitisation projects are also starting to change the commercial models in the publishing industry. For example, Amazon.com has found that putting the full text of books online increases sales by 9 per cent relative to other titles: “We wondered about things like cookbooks and reference titles — would people just take the snippet they need and not buy the book? In fact, by letting people search inside, sales of these types of books have gone up more than average.”[35] In a higher education context, the obvious effect is in terms of access by those outside an institution’s immediate audience of students and staff. Digital collections may have a greater reach and attract to a university a broader, more diverse audience of both scholars and the public.
Abbott notes that a study of 5700 scholars at the University of Chicago showed a strong correlation between heavy users of print and heavy users of electronic sources: “scholarship advances on electronic and physical fronts at once… what this means for policy is very simple, if very expensive. If you are going to have a serious research library, you have to have both a physical library and a technological one.”[36]
If a work is available in digital form, is it also needed in print? Do people seek both print and digital versions because the current user experience of the latter has limitations on ease, cost and convenience? How soon will those limitations become trivial, and will this encourage people to choose digital over print? How should millions of digital books be organised, presented and integrated to be of value? Some universities have already decided they don’t need a physical library at all. The University of Phoenix (USA) is a fully online university, with no physical campus or library, although it does deliver face-to-face tutorials in various locations. The Open University in the UK also maintains no library and yet scores well in national rankings of teaching quality,[37] student satisfaction[38] and research quality.[39]
Teaching materials are also becoming available in digital form, in some cases free of charge. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Open Course Ware is made available under a Creative Commons licence which allows anyone to copy, distribute, display and perform the work, and to make derivative works, subject to conditions that the work must be attributed, the use must not be for commercial purposes, and that derivative works must be licensed under similar conditions — a ‘share alike’ requirement.
Researchers can now download and use research data created by others, teachers can repurpose objects created by others for teaching purposes. Digital information can be copied, transmitted and manipulated, transformed and combined cheaply from almost anywhere in the world, and the price of transmission is usually independent of the destination. This, coupled with collaboration and social networking tools, allows scholars to become creators of new forms of content. Researchers, teachers and students can be co-creators of new and synthesised knowledge in ways not previously possible, raising interesting questions about the structure of academic work. A recent example is the discovery of a distant solar system believed to be like our own: the world-wide team of professional and amateur astronomers coordinated their observations over the Internet.[40]
Reliance on digital systems for creating, preserving and releasing scholarly information carries some inherent risk. There have been many examples of digitised artefacts becoming inaccessible because of the rapid pace of change in information technology: file formats become obsolete, storage media decay or can no longer be read because the hardware is no longer produced. The long-term “fragility of digital systems and the resulting possibility of significant cultural loss are intrinsic features of the new landscape of scholarly communication.”[41] Like the BBC’s laser-disc edition of the Domesday Book,[42] today’s digital records — and the cultural and intellectual heritage they represent — could disappear if there is insufficient attention paid to preserving them, thus eroding the foundations of future scholarship.
Digital information is also more easily tampered with. While forensics in the digital world are constantly improving, a reader or investigator needs to be aware of and looking for signs of interference in digital sources, whereas these may be more obvious in the physical form.[43] As we move toward a world where co-creation of content becomes a standard practice and where, perhaps, respect for a scholarly contribution’s provenance declines, what is the role of the library as a standard-bearer of authentic information?
Changes in scholarly practice, especially those arising from technological change, require a reconsideration of the physical spaces on university campuses. Teaching spaces can now enable more than a one-way lecture, and are equipped with multimedia equipment and furniture that encourages group work. Learning spaces and libraries are no longer reserved for solo endeavours: increasingly, students prefer and are encouraged to work collaboratively, requiring a mix of spaces that enable silent, quiet or loud study modes and that are flexible enough to adapt to different purposes as needed. What should campus-based universities look like in a digital age?