ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries


3 6 8 /C & R L News

Conference

Circuit

Electronic d ream , virtu a l 
nightm are

By Lester J . Pourciau

The 1996 VALA Biennial 
Conference and Exhibition

VALA, the Victorian Association for Library Automation, held its biennial conference 
in Melbourne, Australia, January 30– February 
1,1996. Each day o f the conference began with 
a plenary session and included multiple tracks 
o f contributed papers. More than 600 people 
attended the conference which offered more 
than 30 exhibits. There was an Internet room 
sponsored by AST Computers in association 
with the State Library o f Victoria, AccessOne, 
and UB Networks. Overall, the conference was 
one o f quality that left this writer with the very 
clear impression that Australian librarians are 
doing excellent work.

D ream s, m ad n e ss, an d  reality
The opening plenary presentation was made 
by Walt Crawford (Research Libraries Group) 
who spoke about “Electronic Libraries: Dreams, 
Madness, and Reality.” His remarks about 
dreams reviewed ideas that affect libraries and 
publishing. Particularly, he indicted the notion 
o f the universal scholar’s workstation, compar­
ing it to the radio personality o f the 1930s and 
’40s, “The Shadow: It seems to have the power 
to cloud men’s minds.” Crawford maintained 
that, setting aside issues o f commercial and in­
tellectual ownership, economic reality will not 
allow even the most ambitious program of digi­
tization to keep pace with newly printed pub­
lications.

Moving on to madness, he spoke o f falla­
cies inherent in the argument that print is ob­
solete, pointing to the expense of universal full- 
fledged electronic access, making light sport of 
those predictions o f the domestic, TV-based 
“infotainment” center, and taking issue with the

claims of Project Gutenberg that it had “given 
away” 2.6 billion electronic texts.

Discussing the reality of the electronic li­
brary, Crawford compared print with electronic 
publishing, pointing out that electronic pub­
lishing eliminates only imagesetting, printing, 
binding, and some portion o f distribution; it 
has no impact on the need to acquire, edit, 
design, index, and publicize things. Further, he 
pointed out that print publishing is actually 
several related industries; that most o f them are 
financially healthy and growing.

He closed with a credo [appearing in a dif­
ferent form in his and Michael Gorman’s F u ­
tu re Libraries: D ream s, M adness, a n d  R eality 
(ALA, 1995)]. Among the tenets o f his credo is 
the conviction that “electronic publishing and 
dissemination will continue to grow in impor­
tance, displacing print where electronic does it 
better,” and that “printed books, magazines, and 
newspapers will survive for the indefinite fu­
ture.” He also thinks that future users will get 
most o f their information without the media­
tion o f librarians. He thinks this is true now 
and asks “how would it b e otherwise in the 
future?” He expressed hope for strong support 
for the “true expert systems in libraries: the 
wetware, the stuff between the ears o f good 
librarians.”

The virtual cam pus
Two tracks of contributed papers, one address­
ing the virtual campus and the other address­
ing content solutions, included some excellent 
reports of research and experiences. O f par­
ticular interest was Jillian Beswick’s discussion 
o f the introduction of library services for exter­
nal students at Edith Cowan University (ECU) 
in Perth. She discussed various strategies imple­
mented to increase low library usage by exter­
nal students, and briefly discussed future plans. 
In 1995, external students at ECU made up 18

Lester J . P ou rciau  is director o f  libraries a t  the University o f  Memphis; e-m ail: pourciau@ cc.m em phis.edu

mailto:pourciau@cc.memphis.edu


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3 7 0 /C & RL News

percent of the library’s client group and have 
diverse circumstances and backgrounds.

Besw ick reviewed the establishment, in 
1992, o f a computer-based communication fa­
cility called the Virtual Campus. This Virtual 
Campus was designed to provide external stu­
dents with the electronic equivalent o f a uni­
versity campus. With the creation of the Virtual 
Campus, the ECU Library introduced services 
which allow students to request library mate­
rial via e-mail, search the library catalogs of 
ECU and o f other tertiary institutions in west­
ern A u stralia. Stu d en ts ca n  a lso  a c c e s s  
F irstS earch , U nC over, Current C o n ten ts, 
ASKEric, and, through Hytelnet, search library 
catalogs throughout the world.

The initial response to these services was 
perceived to be slow and, in order to explore 
the reasons for this, a telephone survey of ex­
ternal students was conducted in mid-1994. 
Among reasons given by students for not tak­
ing advantage o f services included the steep 
learning curve associated with new technology, 
the time involved in learning it, and the un­
availability of computer and telecommunica­
tions equipment. With knowledge gained from 
the telephone survey, the ECU Library devel­
oped several new strategies aimed at promot­
ing and increasing the usage of electronic li­
brary services. These have included both print 
and electronic promotional campaigns, the es­
tablishment o f real time user education sessions 
using the chat facilities on the Virtual Campus, 
and the trial use of access to CD-ROM data­
bases via Silverplatter’s Electronic Reference 
Library.

Although Beswick acknowledged difficulty 
in assessing the precise impact o f their promo­
tional efforts, they do know that e-mail requests 
for material have increased from approximately 
one per month to 10 to 15 per week. Also, the 
demand from external students for authoriza­
tio n s  and p a ssw o rd s to  ERL, U n C ov er, 
FirstSearch, and Current Contents has been 
particularly strong. And the number o f exter­
nal students registered as users on the Virtual 
Campus doubled during 1995. Among future 
plans for the development of electronic library 
services are providing electronic document- 
delivery request forms, and developing self- 
paced information literacy programs.

HELP is here
Vincent Galante, Sue Grandfield, and Jackie 
Saunders (La Trobe University) discussed the

Hypertext Electronic Library Project (HELP) ini­
tiated in the La Trobe University Library. HELP 
was envisaged as the provision of workstations 
in the library for the express purpose of pro­
viding access to information resources on the 
Internet and to locally mounted electronic ver­
sions of past exam papers and electronic re­
serve materials for which the university had 
copyright. In 1994, the university’s Quality As­
surance Fund granted the library funding to 
implement HELP. The grant was approved for 
the purchase of equipment and furnishings, and 
for additional staff time.

The first task for the HELP team was the 
design o f a user interface (library homepage) 
identifying the various services offered. A key 
aspect o f the library’s application for funds was 
the electronic reserve for examination papers. 
There were many problems with the printed 
copies of the examinations: extensive wear, mu­
tilation of bound copies of the exams, and the 
range o f other problems typically associated 
with bound periodical volumes.

The Reserve Online facet of HELP was ini­
tially limited to material that was copyright free 
or that had been produced within the univer­
sity. One of the requirements experienced early 
on was that o f an acceptable use policy to guide 
use of the HELP stations in the library. This 
resulted in a general overall statement that the 
purpose o f the HELP workstations is to sup­
port the educational, research, and administra­
tive purposes o f the university.

The presenters offered the view that this 
effort appears to be moderately successful. They 
spoke of two significant efforts being made to 
support the HELP project. One of these is a 
“train the trainers” program designed to famil­
iarize library staff with the HELP workstations 
so that they can then assist students. The other 
is an ongoing program o f instruction aimed at 
library users. This includes hands-on assistance 
by library staff at the workstations, and more 
formal, classroom-type instruction (e.g., hour- 
long “Introduction to Netscape” sessions) of­
fered during the first two weeks o f the semes­
ter.

It seems, by any measure, that the HELP 
project is a success. The real challenge appears 
to be not “how to attract students to Internet 
workstations but how to facilitate and encour­
age the scholarly use o f the workstations.” 
Overall, acceptance o f HELP by students was 
judged to be very good and the HELP team 
sees it as an ongoing project. ■



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