The future of the special library: in this librarian's view, the future will be more digital, more collaborative

Information Outlook, Sept, 2004 by R. James King

With the constant wave of changes that have washed against libraries over the past decade, many libraries are hunkered down into a defensive position, fighting to stay alive. Between these waves of disruptive change, many librarians are looking at trends and patterns to discern how the next wave of change will affect them. Peering into the future is a dangerous pastime with predictions holding less accuracy than a local weather forecaster. Since it is often said that the best way to predict the future is to invent it, I will gaze into the future that I plan to make it here at the Naval Research Laboratory.

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To better understand the potential future, we must first understand the rich past upon which we are built, as well as the current environment. It is also helpful to keep in mind that every library is different because every user community is different. I'll be focusing on the future through the eyes of a library serving NRL, the corporate research facility for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps.

I suggest, as I'm sure others already have in the past, that the advent of the World Wide Web and its disruptive impact on publishing, libraries, and scholarly communication are similar in scope and impact to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century.

Elizabeth Eisenstein's book The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, reprinted in 1993, offers a detailed view into the world of manuscript and explores the impact that print had on the world at the time. As she explains, the revolution around print started with a series of innovations, including movable metal type, oil-based ink, wooden hand presses, paper, and wood carvings for accurate reproduction of illustrations.

Print allowed, for the first time, the wide dissemination of existing ideas that were previously limited to direct oral transmission or hand-copied manuscripts; standardization of output which allowed for the accurate reproduction of text and complex illustrations without transmission errors; and the preservation of the content through massive duplication. Interestingly, initial efforts with the type used in printing presses were designed to match the scribes' work as closely as possible, a phenomenon that we see today with PDF mirroring the look and layout of paper in the new digital medium. Scholarly communication was enhanced by print because it became easier to see other discoveries, rationalize those discoveries into a comprehensive whole, or critique an opposing thought from another part of the world.

Jumping ahead to World War II, special libraries were faced with tremendous growth in demand and volume of information due to the rapid creation of technical reports and journal articles. Suddenly, bibliographic control had to deal with journals at the article level and special libraries had to deal with the 'new' format of the technical report. Libraries responded by indexing journal articles themselves, a task that was later replaced by abstracting and indexing firms. Libraries also created special cataloging formats and processes to deal with the explosion of pseudo-published technical reports. As the volume of information continued to grow, libraries collaborated more than ever, driving the creation and standardization of MARC--originally created to help libraries print catalog cards from tape.

Now, the World Wide Web--built on top of a series of innovations including the Internet, FTP, Ethernet, cheap PCs, graphics cards, and Web browsers--has continued this evolution in information distribution, having a revolutionary effect on the existing players. Rather than having to visit a monastery to view the only manuscript in the region, or a large regional library that holds one of a thousand copies of a printed book, researchers are now able to view an item from millions of locations around the world, making an endless number of copies without any degradation of the original. Of course, the current Web model is also a step backwards in the sense that much of the content has moved from having thousands of copies to having a single copy stored on a single publisher's Web site.

Based upon where the NRL research library has been over the past 75 years, the suite of services that we currently have, the plans that we have for continuing to meet researchers' needs, and the environmental scan that I've been doing over the last decade, here's what I see the library of 2010 looking like.

Journals

Much of the focus with journals has been to get current issues online. By 2010, I expect that at least 80 percent of all journal issues will be in digital form with the remainder either being from organizations that have ceased operations or are still afraid of losing memberships to institutional access.

Given the costs of digitizing this volume of material, I do not expect it to be available free of cost. Organizations like J-STOR will make it available at a low cost, publishers will sell it at a one-time cost, or publishers/associations will charge an annual fee for access. The continuum of journal access methods are consolidating, forcing libraries to reevaluate how they portray these access methods. Long before 2010, I expect that libraries will be able to offer a single gateway into the world's collection of journal literature. Users would be able to get desktop access to the journals that are important enough for that organization to secure a subscription to (based upon a threshold of annual, unique article usage), while the others will be provided on an article-by-article basis either through ILL (where the request is not urgent) or document delivery (where immediate gratification is required).