A utopian place of criticism? brokering access to network information
| Date | 01 March 1999 |
| Published date | 01 March 1999 |
| Pages | 33-70 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/EUM0000000007137 |
| Author | Lorcan Dempsey,Rosemary Russell,Robin Murray |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Journal of Documentation, Vol. 55, No. 1, January 1999
© Aslib, The Association for Information Management.
All rights reserved. Except as otherwise permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise without the prior
written permission of the publisher.
Aslib, The Association for Information Management
Staple Hall, Stone House Court, London EC3A 7PB
Tel: +44 (0) 171 903 0000, Fax: +44 (0) 171 903 0011
Email: pubs@aslib.co.uk, WWW: http://www.aslib.co.uk/aslib
A UTOPIAN PLACE OF CRITICISM? BROKERING ACCESS TO
NETWORK INFORMATION
LORCAN DEMPSEY
and ROSEMARY RUSSELL
{l.dempsey; r.russell}@ukoln.ac.uk
UK Office for Library and Information Networking, University of Bath
Bath BA2 7AY
ROBIN MURRAY
rmurray@fdgroup.co.uk
Fretwell-Downing Informatics, Ecclesall Rd
Sheffield S11 7AE.
The management of autonomous, heterogeneous network resources
and services provides new challenges which libraries are now
addressing. This paper outlines an approach based on the construc-
tion of broker services which mediate access to resources. It outlines
a framework – the MODELS Information Architecture – for
thinking about the components of broker services and their logical
arrangement. It describes several development projects and services
which show how brokers are developing. It uses examples drawn
from the serials environment to describe some of the issues.
Technologists understand that they must build more stable and unobtrusive
media. They must establish more coherent contexts into which the technology
may disappear.
Malcolm McCullough. Abstracting craft: the practised digital hand [1].
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Libraries
Alberto Manguel has a chapter on libraries and librarians in his recent A history
of reading [2]. He calls them ‘ordainers of the universe’, an epithet used, he tells
us, by the Sumerians. He dwells on the efforts of Callimachus to ordain the order
of books at The Library of Alexandria, and notes that:
According to the French critic Christian Jacob, Callimachus’s library was
the first example of a ‘utopian place of criticism, in which the texts can be
compared, opened side by side’ [3]. With Callimachus, the library became
an organized reading-space.
For many years, libraries have refined the techniques developed by Callimachus.
They have created physical places and intellectual reading-spaces which connect
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Journal of Documentation, vol. 55, no. 1, January 1999, pp. 33–70
their users to resources in useful ways. They have evolved well-understood inter-
nal practices and procedures for management, and predictable ways of presenting
services for their users. In this they have been assisted by the evolving technolo-
gies of print and publishing, as well as by internal library technologies. Books and
journals come in accepted formats, which support some consistency of treatment
and arrangement, which allow the advance construction of shelves and process-
ing equipment, the assignment of space, and so on. They only exceptionally
require separate introduction or special treatment: these particular technologies
have become unobtrusive, experience of them submerged in the practice of read-
ing. Libraries have also developed an intellectual apparatus for the organisation of
their resources in various ways and with various goals (to collocate works by
authors, for example). The physical and intellectual apparatuses are meshed
together in different ways.
Libraries are now faced with the challenge of recreating this role in a new kind
of space, the space of flows supported by the worldwide span of networks.
Writing about access to networked information, Richard Heseltine remarked:
What I am more concerned about is the need to make the desktop working
environment of the end-user simple and easy to operate. End-users are
being confronted now by a multiplicity of systems and services: for obtain-
ing information; for communicating; for taking delivery of documents, and
for producing documents. We need to have much better models of how all
these services should fit together from the point of view of the end-user.
What are the key standards? What are the most effective means of present-
ing services? This is not just a matter of user interfaces but of the means
of bringing everything together in a real working environment [4].
Heseltine’s concern is echoed in a recent UK Higher Education policy document
[5] which lays out a view of how national information services should develop
alongside local provision as part of a Distributed National Electronic Resource
(DNER):
Integration is the key, allowing the user to move more easily between
different information functions; more easily across all services (. . .); and
to use from the desktop, the emerging tools for exploiting networked infor-
mation, for more intelligent and standardised searching and retrieval, for
locating material, requesting and receiving it, and for making appropriate
use of all forms in further analysis and research.
What is being suggested in each case is an ‘organised space’, in which resources
may be used ‘side-by-side’ in a ‘real working environment’. However, this envi-
ronment is not limited by the PC or the local library, it is an environment which
may reach out in space and time: in space because the network spans the globe; in
time, because users may be supported more persistently – by some combinations
of personal profiles, agents, alerting services, or configurable, adaptive environ-
ments. It is also a space in which there are new divisions of labour in the learning
and information domains (as for example in document supply, where publishers,
libraries and aggregators are realigning the pattern of delivery), and new forms of
user behaviour and expectation (as for example, where communication technolo-
gies are reaching into writing and learning environments).
JOURNAL OF DOCUMENTATION vol. 55, no. 1
34
Journal of Documentation, Vol. 55, No. 1, January 1999
© Aslib, The Association for Information Management.
All rights reserved. Except as otherwise permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise without the prior
written permission of the publisher.
Aslib, The Association for Information Management
Staple Hall, Stone House Court, London EC3A 7PB
Tel: +44 (0) 171 903 0000, Fax: +44 (0) 171 903 0011
Email: pubs@aslib.co.uk, WWW: http://www.aslib.co.uk/aslib
How such ‘integration’ will be constructed is a research and development
challenge. Current digital environments are in early stages of development. What
integration there is tends to be rather shallow, typically at the user access level
where the web has become the approach of choice. Pages of links, perhaps a data-
base of resource descriptions [6], provide a level of integration at the discovery
stage, but resources themselves are differently presented, accessed, structured.
They remain individual, unconnected opportunities. A user may have to interact
with quite different information systems to carry out a full search, for example.
Furthermore, individual tasks rather than end-to-end processes are automated: the
emphasis has been on getting individual systems to work – the ILL system, access
to BIDS, the CD-ROM network – rather than seeing them as part of a wider infor-
mation environment which needs to be linked in various ways. These systems do
not connect to each other. Information flows intermittently through supply chains,
which are fragmented and incomplete.
Part of the challenge is that ‘standardization efforts are lagging behind the
development of digital library services’ [7]. The standards infrastructure is not yet
achieved enough to make the management and use of electronic resources rou-
tinely predictable in the way that the management and use of print resources is.
We do not yet have a ‘coherent context’ into which the technology can disappear:
difference and distraction are very much on the surface, data do not cross system
boundaries. Libraries have evolved ways of combining components to provide
services. In the digital environment, components do not work well together.
This is a serious issue, and, we suggest, the most significant barrier to perva-
sive deployment of networked information systems as part of users’ normal work-
ing practice. It is this development deficit that is driving the current interest in
digital library research.
1.2 Access to serials – an example of some of the issues
It would be useful to make some of the ‘integration’ issues more concrete with
specific examples. The serials literature presents some particular challenges [8],
which highlight more general issues, and we use it throughout this article to illus-
trate issues and trends. Take a simple example, which we have introduced else-
where [9]. A project group wishes to discover journal articles and books about
Roman Bath. In a well-stocked library, they can scan the shelves. Say they want
to do a more thorough ‘discovery’ of material. They can look in the catalogue.
They can look in databases on CD-ROM. They might have access to some remote
databases over the Internet. But each of these is delivered through a separate
interface, they may have to move between machines, they may have to print out
or write down results. They also have to know which databases to look in: in fact
there may be very relevant resources which they will fail to use if they are not
directed to them by staff. Figure 1 shows some of the resources which may typi-
cally be available to users.
Once they have discovered a selection of materials, they may have to find out
where they are. Typically, they will have to return to the catalogue and redo
searches for the desired titles. Say they are in a library which has an arrangement
for reciprocal borrowing with several neighbouring institutions: they will have to
redo searches for unfound titles in those libraries’ catalogues. They might bring
January 1999 BROKER SERVICES
35
Journal of Documentation, Vol. 55, No. 1, January 1999
© Aslib, The Association for Information Management.
All rights reserved. Except as otherwise permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise without the prior
written permission of the publisher.
Aslib, The Association for Information Management
Staple Hall, Stone House Court, London EC3A 7PB
Tel: +44 (0) 171 903 0000, Fax: +44 (0) 171 903 0011
Email: pubs@aslib.co.uk, WWW: http://www.aslib.co.uk/aslib
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