Elinor Electronic Library Project

Citation

Shinebourne, J. (1998), "Elinor Electronic Library Project", Library Management, Vol. 19 No. 7, pp. 437-438. https://doi.org/10.1108/lm.1998.19.7.437.2

The ten chapters of this book costing £35 for 155 pages of text report investigations and experience occasioned by the work on ELINOR (Electronic Library Information Online Retrieval). This was “the first such project to build a working electronic library for use by students in a UK university (p. 1).” Most electronic library projects have been focused either on archive materials or on on‐demand scientific and technical journal article distribution for the research community. “The decision by De Montfort University to develop an electronic library system was taken as of necessity in order to provide a more effective means of delivering high demand materials and core texts in a multi‐campus environment (p. 131).” Although this necessity was triggered by budget constraints, maybe this project would show the way to a successful pragmatic response towards developing equivalent or better library services for students through the use of on‐line access to electronically stored information?

The first two chapters provide a good overview of the project and introduction to the ELINOR system; the next three chapters cover administrative and economic issues relating to stock acquisition, copyright and use; chapters 6‐8 discuss respectively user responses, the Z39.50 information retrieval protocol and the concept of the Personal Digital Library. Chapter 9, the longest, at 26 pages, discusses future issues and “the phenomenal growth of the World Wide Web since the start of the ELINOR project (p. 105).” No doubt if the project had started later, the WWW would have occupied a more prominent role.

The project team have been able to demonstrate there are no fundamental technical obstacles to offering undergraduate students an electronic library facility of which they can make good use. But there are significant ergonomic problems which are inherent in implementing a cost‐effective system‐user interface. “Future screen technology will make text imaging a more comfortable option, but it is not clear when reasonably cheap and common monitors will be up to this (p. 115)… Present limitations of scrolling and other navigation devices make the movement through a document very cumbersome (p. 116).” The authors are also frank about their uncertainty as to whether interaction with the screen as contrasted with paper will be the preferred means of interaction for most users. There is much to do in examining user interaction with, and the relationships between, in‐house collections, undergraduate curricula, students’ written work, and Internet resources.

But the main practical and intractable issues for this project team were to do with costs and copyright arrangements. “Libraries want to take advantage of the cost savings offered by electronic collections ‐ no need for multiple copies of textbooks or administration of reserve collections, less storage, up‐to‐date editions, no vandalism or theft. The institutions, however, have to provide safeguards to protect copyright and minimise risk or unauthorised use (p. 60).” In practice users wishing to print out pages were restricted to ten pages per book per day “because the publishers involved have different requirements for charging and the number of pages a user can print per day (p. 22).” So given the fact that users like to print out “any text that is of a substantial length (p. 115)” a serious conflict was not resolved. I hope I am therefore not alone at being irritated at the meaningless customary genuflexion by information personnel on p. 127: “Whatever new technologies and materials are to be found in the electronic library of the future, the end user must always remain paramount.”

Since 1992, there has been significant movement in developing licensing arrangements with publishers. At the same time there has been a growth as phenomenal as the growth of the WWW itself in the volume of materials available on the WWW, freely available for copying, with proper acknowledgements. In the face of ongoing budgetary restraint and pressure and the unwillingness of society to pay for mass higher education through taxation, academics have responded by making their intellectual capital freely available on the WWW. There is a quality control issue around this, but the fact remains that these materials are considered fit, or good enough, to be provided for student use. The copyright issues on which De Montfort had to struggle with publishers are moving into the background.

In the foreground now are other questions. Are electronic libraries of texts and workbooks functionally equivalent to undergraduate textbook libraries and hardcopy workbooks? Is the serendipitous library search to be replaced by hypertext links? Do we assume that impoverished students read little; that reading lists, signposting the territory of a discourse domain for students to discover, are obsolete? And if the electronic library is an alternative mode of provision for undergraduates, is it an appropriate alternative for all undergraduate programmes?

The great virtue of this book is that it describes operational issues that had to be faced which would not have been addressed had there not been a project like this. It can conclude that “What is certain is that building electronic libraries is not easy, quick or cheap, but it can be done (p. 134)!” But important questions this project was trying to address remain unanswered by the team. The penultimate page of the book asks: “Should high‐use printed materials, such as core textbooks and extracts of works, be available in electronic form through Electronic Book Reserves, or downloaded through on‐demand publishing systems? Or will copyright, costs and technical considerations keep them in their existing format? (p. 133).” No answer; and that is the problem with technical projects at the forefront of organisational and political change in Higher Education which duck important educational questions. It is difficult to see the justification of paying £4+ per page for that. Where’s the photocopier?