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 Ju n e 1 9 9 6 /3 6 9 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. ■ Ju n e 1 9 9 6/371