The electronic library and public services
| Date | 01 March 1994 |
| Pages | 44-62 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb047927 |
| Published date | 01 March 1994 |
| Author | Susan J. Barnes |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
THE ELECTRONIC LIBRARY AND PUBLIC SERVICES
Susan J. Barnes
with sidebars by Oya Y. Rieger, Howard Raskin, Katherine S. Chiang,
Martin L. Schlabach, and Susan Carpenter
The Albert R. Mann Library at Cornell University
has created a working electronic library and has
made significant changes in services and staff
responsibilities to address users' evolving needs. This
article presents an overview of these changes, after
discussing the development of electronic libraries at
Mann and elsewhere. The increased usage that
Mann's collections have received as the electronic
library has been developed is also described.
INTRODUCTION
The staff of Cornell University's Mann Library
received a memo from their director in 1971. This
memo preceded great changes—changes few could have
predicted at the time:
Mann Library has entered the computer age!
Monday, November 29, 1971 our terminal was
connected by telephone lines with the computer
located in Albany and we became operational on a
limited basis.
The terminal is located in the former typewriter
room at the north end of the reference room. It
consists basically of an IBM Selectric typewriter
with electronic controls. It is an information retrieval
system for medical and biomedical literature based
on the data obtained from the National Library of
Medicine's MEDLARS file plus the book catalog
records of three State University of New York
medical libraries...
It is expected that the terminal will be operated
three to four hours a day, Monday through Friday,
by our present
staff.
A
training officer from Buffalo
will come to Mann Library to instruct us in the use
of the terminal. As soon as we have that training
mastered and the hook-up at the Albany end is
completed, we will be fully operational and able to
provide public service.1
Mediated online searching at Mann Library had
begun. This use of computers to produce tailored
bibliographies, combined two years later with catalog-
ers'
use of OCLC, formed the foundation of an
electronic library.
Mann's electronic collection now includes resourc-
es in subject areas paralleling its print collection: life
sciences, agriculture, and selected social sciences. The
Public Services Division at Mann has been deeply
involved in building this electronic library. This
division includes staff responsible for reference,
circulation, reserves, interlibrary services, and instruc-
tion. These staff have experienced profound changes
in their daily work as the division and the library have
evolved together. The changes in services and staff
responsibilities have not appeared all at once, but have
emerged as the electronic library was built. This article
describes electronic library development and then
presents an overview of notable changes to services,
collection use, and staff responsibilities in Mann
Library's Public Services Division.
HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT
Mann's electronic library began with its mediated
online search service. As in other academic libraries,
Mann staff began to provide mediated access to
Barnes is head of public services, Albert R. Mann
Library.
44 LIBRARY HI TECH — SUSAN J. BARNES —
bibliographic databases in the early 1970s, when
self-service, "end-user" access was rare. Mann's
reference librarians produced MEDLINE printouts for
students and faculty, and the library charged a fee,
which partially recovered costs of
the
service. As the
decade wore on, Mann contracted with BRS and
DIALOG. Eventually, there
were hundreds
of databases
from which to choose for mediated online access.
This progenitor to an electronic library expanded
information retrieval possibilities for several hundred
users each year. It
also made its
initial impact
on
public
services staff at
Mann:
they learned
to
use
a
computer-
ized information retrieval system, then learned others
and began to face the challenge of knowing multiple
command languages. They learned
to
find information
in one database and then many more, and found that
selecting the best databases could be every bit as
challenging
as
finding the best printed reference works
to meet a user's needs. As they changed rolls of paper
and plugged squealing telephone receivers into rubber
modem cups, many reference librarians began their first
long-term relationships with computer equipment.
In retrospect, the seventies now look like relatively
simple
years.
Although
some
staff experienced signifi-
cant changes in their responsibilities, most public
services personnel at Mann were almost completely
unaffected by automated information retrieval. Most
of the staff in circulation,
reserve,
interlibrary services,
and reference did not realize that they hadn't seen
anything yet. In 1979 it would have been hard to
imagine how thoroughly computerization would change
every single public service job in the library within
fifteen
years.
A new decade brought a new vision to Mann
Library: computers should be exploited in every way
possible to provide better access to information. In
1983,
Mann began its After Dark service (named after
the commercial online system that
was
first
used, BRS
After
Dark).
This was an "assisted" end-user service,
since users were rarely left on their
own.
Students and
faculty who wished to conduct their own online
searches were trained by reference librarians. The
librarians also provided assistance in planning searches.
As After Dark users performed their searches, a
reference librarian stayed nearby to answer questions.
After Dark
users
paid
fixed
fees, usually for a half hour
of searching and printing. The After Dark service was
very successful, but it was never truly self-service.
Librarians provided assistance and also monitored
search duration to avoid cost overruns.
In addition to providing access to bibliographic
databases, Mann
began to acquire numeric
files
on
tape
and diskette and hired a numeric files librarian to
provide user assistance with these resources. In 1984,
Mann opened the Stone Microcomputer Center.
Although the
IBM PCs in
this
public access
center were
used mainly for word processing, the center's primary
future purpose was intended to be for retrieving
information from bibliographic and numeric databases.2
Four years after the After Dark service began,
Mann
made ERIC
and Agricola on CD-ROM available
on a PC near the reference desk. These were Mann's
first truly self-service electronic resources, and they
were very popular. Eventually, so many more were
added that the population of CD-ROM workstations
became a swarm of microcomputers surrounding the
reference
desk.
Users liked being
able to
perform their
own searches and were especially fond of
the
fact that
the library did not charge for the
searches.
The library
could
make
resources like ERIC
and
Agricola available
free of charge because CD-ROM databases were
acquired for a
fixed
subscription
fee.
Although librari-
ans had to be concerned with implications to the
collections budget, they no longer had to monitor
search duration. With commercial online services,
which charged
by
connect time and citations retrieved,
careful attention to the clock had been necessary.
The year after ERIC and Agricola on CD-ROM
arrived, Cornell's online catalog was made available
to the public. Meanwhile, Mann staff were beginning
their first experiment with acquiring bibliographic
databases on tape and mounting them on a local
computer for use from outside the library building. In
the Scholar's Information System study, a controlled
population of students and faculty used Agricola and
BIOSIS subsets from their labs and offices. These
databases could be leased for a
fixed
fee, so the library
could provide access without charging its users—just
as with CD-ROMs. In addition, multiple users could
access
the databases
from many
locations.
This project
laid the foundation for a major expansion of Mann's
nascent electronic library.
The popularity of After Dark, numeric files, the
microcomputer center, the CD-ROMs, and the Scho-
lar's Information System showed that Mann's users had
both the appetite and the need for self-service com-
puterized information. By the end of
the
1980s, many
faculty and students were ready to try to find and use
electronic information themselves. Mann staff set about
building a real electronic library and expanding services
to meet the growing needs of electronic library users.
THE
ELECTRONIC LIBRARY AT MANN TODAY
Tenopir and Neufang recently described the range
of electronic reference options available in many
research libraries .3 These options include combinations
of mediated online searching, CD-ROMs, OPACs, and
locally mounted tapes. Mann's electronic library
— THE ELECTRONIC LIBRARY AND PUBLIC SERVICES —
ISSUE
47 - 12:3
(1994)
45
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