The day of the electronic library: the digital transformation

Information Outlook, August, 2002 by Leslie Shaver, Nikki Enright

BY NOW, MOST LIBRARIANS HAVE AN UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT THE terms "Digital Library" mean to them. To some, it is a wonderful technological advancement that allows users to find bits and pieces of essential information without Leaving the comfort of their own desks. To others, it is potential, bringing promise of a day when a user can find an article with the information he or she wants and go straight to a full-text copy. But for some, the digital Library has the potential of becoming an avalanche, burying users under Loads of information, and Leaving them without the tools they need to dig themselves out.

This month, Information Outlook spoke with several information professionals concerning the digital library and the affect it has had upon them. Mary Talley has, in her role as a consultant, guided a number of libraries into the digital world. Laura Cronk's facility discarded the physical card catalog in 1985 and has been gradually implementing digitization since 1998.

The final interview features three librarians from corporate giant 3M--Barbara Peterson, Kristin Oberts and Mariann Cyr. The company is a rare case, in that it began storing digital information back in the '60s. While 3M made this available to its information knowledge workers in the 1980s, librarian Kristin Oberts sees her company's digitization effort as something that will not end any time soon.

"We have watched this transition from print to electronic, but we still feel we have one foot in each environment," she said.

As you will read below, she is not alone in these sentiments.

Mary Talley

Mary Talley is Axelroth & Associates' senior consultant and project director. She has been providing information management consulting services for more than 20 years, joining Axelroth & Associates in 1999, after selling her Los Angeles-based consulting company. She specializes in information assessments, strategic planning and change management strategies for a wide range of organizations, including such specialties as consulting, technology, petroleum, manufacturing, law firms, nonprofits and government. She has written and lectured on a variety of topics, including customer service and focus groups. Talley holds a master's degree in library science from the University of Michigan.

Leslie Shaver (LS): When did libraries begin to go digital and why did they?

Mary Talley (MT): I think you will get different answers to this question from different people, it means different things in different information environments. It can mean replacing commercially available print materials with commercially available electronic resources. This was already happening to some extent by the mid- to late 1980s, in mostly sci-tech libraries. The librarians in them were performing research using only electronic databases to locate documents and were acting primarily as information brokers. During this time, outside of Lexis and Westlaw, electronic resources were used mostly as indexes to identify the full-text print version. Although the legal profession has had access to the full-text electronic versions of many primary print resources since the mid-1970s, it's been my experience that law libraries have been more reluctant than other special libraries to swap out electronic for print and "go" digital or virtual, because their users have resisted it.

It can also mean replacing internally produced print documents with digital versions. In the mid-1980s, CD technology, which has never been very satisfying or user-friendly, made it possible to place large amounts of material onto CDs. Meanwhile, LAN technology made it possible to distribute access through networks to remote users.

It wasn't until the advent of the Internet and the Web, in the mid- to late 1990s, that becoming a virtual operation was a viable option for information centers. By the late 1990s, it wasn't unusual to see information centers whose user population needed primarily current data abandoning their paper collections altogether, with the exception of maybe their journals. The Internet and the Web interface have had the greatest impact on the ability to go digital, bringing along not just access to content but also the technology. Intranets and advances in Web search technology over the last several years have meant that electronic content can be retrieved more effectively.

LS: Were economic and space constraints a driver in this movement, as well?

MT: I think providing access to an unlimited number of print resources for an increasingly remote user base has been more of a driver than space or economic constraints. Economically, costly and unpredictable site licenses, the cost of the technology itself, highly skilled staff and end-user training costs make it more expensive to create a digital, virtual information center. We have had more than one client (management, not librarians), whose initial attraction to a virtual operation was for its expected cost-savings potential--in both staff and materials. We have broken more than one client's bubble with the news that costs may well rise with an increase in electronic media.