College and Research Libraries Librarians and Information Centers THE INCREASING COMPLEXITY of modern civilization, the advent of the space age, and the consequent added significance of recorded knowledge have presented a serious challenge to the traditional prac- tice of librarianship. The bibliographical apparatus and tradition of library service so carefully created and nurtured for many decades have been severely tested by the demand for rapid access to vast stores of highly complex and diversified information. The traditional tools of the librarian have been critically scrutinized and in many instances rejected by inno- vators who wish to create and systematize a more powerful and flexible information technology. The dependence of society on recorded knowledge is such that it is not surprising that radical and often in- temperate solutions 'bold an appealing charm. The conservatism of librarianship, whether a result of the humanistic tra- dition or of other factors, has fanned the ardor with which innovators wish to break with traditional practices. The very ability of the librarian to adjust to a new industrialized and automated era has 'been questioned since it is "immaterial to so- ciety whether its thirst for recorded knowledge is quenched by librarians or by some new professional breed. "1 Response on the part of librarianship to ~he information needs of a changing society necessitates consideration of both means ~nd ends-the efficiency of the technological means (traditional and non- conventional) for accomplishing present library objectives; and the definition of the objectives themselves. The former will be discussed in relation to informa- 1 Jesse H. Shera, " Little Girls Don't Play Librar- ian," Library Journal, LXXVII (December 15 1962) 4486. ' ' BY ALAN M. REES Mr. Rees is Assistant Director, Center for Documentation and Communication Re- search, and Assistant Professor, Library Sci- ence, Western Reserve University. tion retrieval and the latter with reference to specialized information centers, since information retrieval represents. alterna- tive means of achieving current library objectives, whereas the information cen- ter concept is based upon marked dif- ferences in, objectives. · LIBRARI~NSHIP A~b INFORMATION RETRIEVAL The so-called schism between library science and information retrieval has been grossly exaggerated. Although it is somewhat fascinating to debate the com- parative ~ merits . of variants in indexing techniques, -relative speeds of search, complexity of search prescriptions, rele- vance and recall of search output of com- puterized information retrieval systems ~ersus traditional library based practices, It must be recognized that we are con- sidering nothing more than the merits of alternative means of achieving common ends. Excessive attention to the engineer- ing aspects of librarianship should not lead to' a confusion of means with ends. The avowed aim of librarians is to pro- vide documents which contain relevant information, or in some limited cases the information itself. Likewise, the advo- cates of mechanized retrieval systems of- fer titles, bibliographies, abstracts, and relevant documents. A decade of debate has neither proved nor disproved the alleged superiority in terms of effectiveness and efficiency of 200 C 0 L LEGE A N D RES E A R C H LIBRA R I.E S computerized over manual retrieval sys- tems. No demonstrable proof has been advanced to define at what point in the operation of a traditional library system it is expedient to mechanize or under what circumstances the choice of a com- puterized system is preferable to that of a manual system. Test methodology to establish the comparative performance of systems is still in an experimental stage. Moreover, coordinate indexing, de- scriptors, thesauri, and other devices de- riving from information retrieval tech- nology represent nothing new to librarian- ship. The theoretical basis of the thesau- rus, for example, can in no manner be sharply differentiated from principles long known to librarians. The successful per- formance of the thesaurus over that pro- vided by classification and subject head- ings has not been demonstrated in any systematic manner. In fact, the available evidence seems to point in the other di- rection.2 In short, the contributions of the in- novators have not been held up to ade- quate scrutiny and' evaluation. Differences have been emphasized, rather than simi- larities. The old wine poured into new bottles has not been labeled .by librarians as the same old stuff. The argument . with respect to technological detail has been barren and unsubstantiated and has de- tracted from consideration of the impor- tant matter of what librarians should be doing, rather than how they should do it: Systems analysis atid ·experimentation will eventually yield quantitative data with respect to the efficiency · of alternative means; b!Jt this can hardly replace the "somewhat shopworn dreams of the giants of our field in the nineteenth century"3 2 Jean Aitchison and Cyril Cleverdon, "A Report on a Test of the Index of Metallurgical Literature of Western Reserve University," College of Aeronautics, Cranfield, England, October 1963 ; Cyril Clever.don' and J. Mills, "The Testing of Index Language De- vices," AS LIB Proceedings, XV (April 1963), 106-30. 8 Ralph R. Shaw, "The Library's Role in Society Today," Journal of Education for Librarianship, II (Spring 1962), 182. MAY1964 with objectives more appropriate to the modem world. THE INFORMATION CENTER CONCEPT The principal issue facing librarian- ship relates to objectives. The rapid pro- liferation of specialized information cen- ters, 4 many of which do not utilize elec- tronic searching equipment, illustrates the point that the essential differences be- tween librarianship and the newer con- cepts of information handling relate more to the type and extent of information ser- vices offered to the user than to the tech- niques employed to describe, store, and retrieve documents. · The increasing acceptance of the in- formation center concept is proof that in- formation services which go beyond the librarian's traditional conception of ref- erence service are required and demand- ed. Already the role of the librarian is being usurped by the large number of persons engaged in information handling outside of the library. The information center therefore represents a more seri- ous challenge to librarianship than was ever posed by the appearance of-the com- puter on the library scene. The information center concept is based upon several assumptions. The transfer of information is considered to be more complex than the acquisition, storage, and retrieval of documents as 4 It is necessary at this point to indicate that I accept the definition of specialized information cen- ters advanced by G. S. Simpson: "A scientific infor- mation center exists for the primary purpose of pre- paring authoritative, timely and specialized reports of the evaluative, analytical, monographic, or state- of-the-art type. It is an organization staffed in part with scientists and engineers, and to provide a basis for its primary function, it conducts a selective data and information acquisitio~ and processing program." American Documentation, XIII (January 1962), 43. This definition can be supplemented by that of Cohan and Craven, who consider that an informa- tion center represents the unification of "library, patent, translation, · report writing, archival, ab- stracting, literature research, editorial, communica- tions, and publication activities within a single in- formation facility." Leonard Cohan and Kenneth Craven, "Science Information Personnel," (New York P.O. Box 624, Radio City Station: 1961), p.ll. I in no way consider special libraries as information cen- ters even though they may designate themselves as such. 201 the physical repositories of information. Storage and retrieval are only a part of the total information transfer chain which extends from the generation of the in- formation itself to the ultimate utilization of the information by users. The exces- sive emphasis upon retrieval as such and accompanying mechanical aids does not recognize the fact that many informa- tion services are cluttered with redun- dant, useless, and inconsequential trivia which should never have been written, let alone incorporated into a retrieval sys- tem. The flood of scientific publication is so great that "scientific information cen- ters are necessary to reduce, analyze and shrink to manageable proportions all such data and information. " 5 A further assumption is that document retrieval cannot be equated with infor- mation retrieval. "A pile of documents on a manager's or researcher's desk is of little use; it is information he needs." The user is consequently not informed but is "overwhelmed with a pile of reports instead of a concise answer to a ques- tion. "6 The information center offers se- lected, specific, and synthesized informa- tion derived from a carefully preselected store of documents. A sharp distinction is made between such centers and libraries. The whole spirit and tradition of librarianship, it is argued, has been dominated by the no- tion that the librarian's primary task is to connect the user with documents which contain the information he is seeking and that librarians either will not, or cannot, go beyond the furnishing 5 G. S. Simpson, op. cit., p.48. 6 Jerome B. Wiesner, in Surgeon General's Confer- ence on Health Communications, November 5-8, 1962, U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Public Health Service Publication No. 998, p.95. See also D. J. Foskett, Classification and Indexing in the Social Sciences (London: Butterworth's, 1963), p.5: ". . . there is a useful and valid distinction to be made between examining the literature to see whether it contains any information that appears to be rele- vant to a given topic, and actually studying the lit- erature thus selected to decide whether . its informa- tion has value for one's own research. The establish- ment of relevance is not the same as the establish- ment of value." of documents. Since information and doc- uments are not identical, the librarian is providing addresses of information and not information itself. Document retrieval is therefore only "a prerequisite to infor- mation retrieval and an information re- trieval system that stops short of transfer- ring information from one human mind to another is inadequate. " 7 The problem therefore involves the transfer and dis- semination of information and not just the retrieval of relevant documents. The traditional role of the librarian has in fact been confined to document han- dling, and techniques have accordingly been developed to describe documents in suitable indexing languages to permit sub- sequent retrieval of abstracts of docu- ments or possibly the documents them- selves. The information center empha- sizes information processing and the dis- semination of information derived from documents. Users are furnished with processed information in an assimilable form with direct and explicit relationship to their research interests. The information center is a "technical institute, not a technical library. It differs from a library in that those who operate the specialized information center are ex- pected to know, in the usual manner that a scientist knows, the contents of the ma- terial contained in the center." Informa- tion is processed by information special- ists in a manner which is alien to the technical library in that the "iriput of the specialized information center is docu- ments and uncorrelated data; its output is reviews, correlated data, compilations. " 8 The user of the information center differs from the library patron in the de- gree of delegation which he is willing to 7 Alvin Weinberg, "Science, Government and In- formation," Preprint of an article in International Science and Technology, March 1963, pp.4, 5. a Ibid., p·.5. See also "Science, Government and In- formation : the Responsibilities of the Technical Com- munity and the Government in the Transfer of In- formation." A Report of the President's Science Ad- visory Committee, The White House, January 1{), 1963. (This is known popularly as the Weinberg Re- port.) 202 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES assign. In the case of library based ref- erence service, the user delegates the task of searching to a trained reference li- brarian who furnishes the question-asker with a list of relevant documents in the form of titles, abstracts, or possibly the actual documents. The question-asker ap- proaching the information center dele- gates not only the search function but also much of the judgment involved in selecting information appropriate to his information · needs. He therefore assigns the task of reading, digesting, selecting, critically evaluating, and synthesizing in- formation derived from documents and relating the information to the specific information need which initiated the question. Judgment as to the significance of search output is therefore exercised. The information center therefore dif- fers from the library with respect to four main points: 1. Degree of delegation on the part of the information requester. · 2. Exercise of judgment and evaluation as to the significance and merit of the identified documents relative to the information needs of the requester. 3. Provision of information and not doc- uments. 4. Processing of search output into a variety of search products-state-of- the-art review, critically compacted data, digests, and so on. LIBRARIANS AND INFORMATION CENTERS The somewhat rigid differentiation be- tween librarianship and the information center concept represents a present trend in the development of information ser- vices. It does not, however, imply that this polarization is desirable or inevitable. Moreover, some special libraries do in- deed furnish selected information and thereby approximate the services of in- formation centers; conversely, many in- formation centers provide documents with MAY1964 only limited processing of information.\} Within librarianship there is an in- creasing awareness of the role of the li- brarian in the total information transfer chain. The Special Libraries Association recently scheduled a panel discussion on the Weinberg Report at the association's annual convention. 10 Rothstein considers that "reference service represents a new dimension in librarianship" and that the "chief pattern now is to decide on the proper dimensions of that service. " 11 "Both the needs of our clients and our own self-interest say that we should look for ways to work at greater range and depth, to do always more and not less. " 12 The history and development of ref- erence service and special librarianship make the function and scope of the spe- cialized information center the natural birthright and responsibility of the library profession. In the same manner that ref- erence service as presently understood re- placed the older concept of "access to librarians" and "aid to readers" the pro- vision of synthesized information extract- ed from documents or the compilation of the state-of-the-art review is a natural ex- tension of reference work. "The modem librarian," wrote Dewey in 1885, "is ac- tive and not passive. He is as glad to wel- come a reader as the merchant a cus- tomer . . . he magnifies his office and he recognizes in his profession an oppor- tunity for usefulness to his fellows in- ferior to none. " 13 u As of November 1961 there were 427 information centers listed in the National Science Foundation Directory of Specialized Science Information Services in the United States. This does not include many classified centers within such agencies as the De- partment of Defense .- Not all centers listed can, however, be considered as such, since they are not centers according to the definition cited above. 1o "Special Librarians and the Weinberg Report," Special Libraries, LIV (July-August 1963), 325-32. u Samuel Rothstein, "Reference Service: the New Dimension in Librarianship," College and Research Libraries, XXII (January 1961), 12. H Ibid., pp.17-18. 13 Quoted by Samuel Rothstein in The. DeveZot?~ent of Reference Services through Ac~emw. Tra~ttto~, Public Library Practice and Spectal Ltbrarmnshtp (ACRL Monograph, No. 14 [Chicago: ACRL, 1955]), p.25. 203 The services of the information center j tier; and have highly selective and aggres- can therefore be viewed as the most de- \ sive acquisition programs. 16 veloped point of a continuum which began ) One can only conclude that librarian- in 1865 with the publication of Samuel Swet Green's paper, "The Desirableness of Establishing Personal Intercourse and Relations Between Librarians and Read- ers in Popular Libraries." Simpson, the leading exponent of the information cen- ter concept, concedes that . "conventional libraries were sufficient up to the twenti- eth century. Specialized libraries then de- veloped to supply services not available from conventional libraries. Specialized information centers are but an extension of that trend. "14 .The rapid rise and increasing accept- ance of such centers can in large part be attributed to the unwillingness of special librarians to provide new dimensions in reference services. A whole spectrum of information services can be identified which range from the provision of specific documents, answering pf "spot" questions, conducting of bibliographical searches to the synthesized state-of-the-art review. At the far end of this spectrum the librarian would be an active participant in the research process, rather than an interested bystander with ·his hands full of printed text. · It is hardly possible fo:Jf librarians to maintain that the · responsibility for the establishment, operation, and manage- ment of information centers does not rest within librarianship. The information cen- ter concept should be used to "advance our own programs of making our libraries more closely satisfy the total information requirements of our organizations. " 15 It is hardly flattering for special librarians to be informed that, unlike libraries, infor- mation centers are user-oriented; handle data rather than documents in many in- stances; operate at the information fron- 1 4 Simpson, op. cit., p.48. 15 Winifred Sewell, in "Special Librarians and the Weipberg Report," Special Libraries, LIV (July- August 1963), 331. ship cannot permit the abnegation of the traditional function of the librarian-to satisfy the information needs of clientele. It is not possible for librarianship to slough off the responsibility of catering to the highly specialized and rapidly chang- ing information needs of scientists and engineers. A new breed of librarians will be required, possessing both s~ientific knowledge and training in the application of appropriate and proved information handling techniques. The significance of adequate educational programs in this connection cannot be overemphasized. 17 The future librarian must be concerned with the total information problem and must be as expert in the evaluation, selec- tion, dissemination, and presentation of information as in the techniques of stor- age and retrieval. A recent writer proposes an "open- skies system of library service which will be conspicuously outgoing, steadfastly ori- ented towards Juse and unquestionably effective. ·And with this achievement will come honor, and glory, and status, and power, and money, and a far larger share of the academic kingdom. But we must justify our existence-it will be no give- away."18 A new definition of library ob- jectives is necessary before the imple- mentation can begin. No amount of dis- cussion with respect to technological de- tail can achieve this for librarianship. • • 16 Walter M. Carlson, Director of Technical Infor- mation in the Department of Defense recently ob- served that, "within the broad pattern of scientific and technical information, the research libraries and their associated staffs are fitting effectively into a rather clearly defined role--a role in which they serve a primarily archival function and are mainly concerned with the published literature. Specful Li- braries, IV (January 1964), 14. 17 Alan M. Rees, "New Dimensions in Library Edu- cation-The Training of Science Information Per- sonnel," Special Libraries, LIV (October 1963), 497- 502. See also Jesse H. Shera, "Toward a New Di- mension in Library Education," ALA Bulletin (April "' 1963), 313-17. 18 Neal Harlow, "Open-Skies System of Library Service," Journal of Education for Librarianship, II (Spring 1962), 189. 204 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES ;,. l