Higher Education at the Crossroads - CAUL Response

28 June 2002

Higher Education Review Secretariat

Department of Education, Science and Training

Location 701

GPO Box 9880

Canberra ACT 2601

Higher Education Review 2002

The Council of Australian University Librarians is pleased to submit information for the consideration of the Review Committee. This report will cover:

The role of the university library;
Cooperative and collaborative approaches in Australian university libraries;
The national and international environment in which Australian university libraries operate.

The Role of Libraries in Higher Education.

Libraries play a vital role in support of pedagogy in teaching & learning - particularly for resource-based and collaborative learning and for supporting lifelong learning skills through the promulgation of information literacy skills in partnership with academic staff. Libraries support universities by:

Creating an environment which promotes learning;
Supporting research and discovery;
Providing information to researchers and members of the community;
Grounding lifelong learning skills;
Enabling personal development for students;
Facilitating excellence in teaching.

The rapid evolution of information and communication technology has brought with it challenges for academic staff which lie in the integration of new modes of learning into the curriculum – designing and selecting the best teaching and learning resources and approaches, and supporting students as they experience interactive learning and transform information into knowledge.

The need for leading edge information resources is based on the understanding that:

Information and communication technologies are an integral part of the process of knowledge development and dissemination in all fields.
Information and communication technologies provide previously unimaginable learning experiences and expose students to the frontiers of knowledge.
Graduates must develop the skills of independent information seeking, evaluation and utilisation using all available sources of information whether physical or virtual.

A University education must, as an objective, develop students with attitudes and skills to learn throughout life. These qualities are essential in a world in which the workplace is both international and global, knowledge is growing and being reviewed at a rapid rate, and the volume of new knowledge at the fingertips of individuals is often overwhelming.

The implications of these changes are that in Australian university libraries:

Students have ready access to comprehensive and up-to-date information, in printed and electronic form;
Research students are provided with access to the resources necessary for the completion of their projects and, wherever possible, with the means to participate in activities of the research community, such as conferences.
Students are consulted on the quality and accessibility of book and other information collections of the University.
Students are able to access and use state of the art educational technologies;
Staff provide sufficient structure and guidance for students to find their way through the masses of information available to them.
Students are assisted in developing the skills to use these resources to their greatest advantage, including technical but, more importantly, analytical skills;
Students are assisted to become increasingly independent explorers of these resources, using them to follow their individual interests and concerns.
Students are made thoroughly familiar with the ethical considerations involved in the use of printed or electronic materials.
Independent, resource-based learning is incorporated into all courses, with the goal of establishing an appropriate balance of teacher-directed and self-directed learning.

While the online environment has increased the available information resources, there has been a continuing reduction in the capacity of the libraries to purchase sufficient books and research journals. While concepts such as a single Australian university library collection have been raised, the collections of individual libraries must necessarily reflect the diversity of the universities they serve.

The Internet has generated an anytime-anywhere approach to information retrieval. It has not replaced, but added to, the demand for the information (print and online) and services that libraries provide.

Collaboration & Cooperation.

Australian university libraries have led the way in finding collaborative approaches to resource sharing and cooperative programs. Other countries are using Australia as a benchmark for their own collaborative activities, such as the recently announced Canadian national borrowing scheme for all students.

Strong national collaboration has been fostered through the Council of Australian University Librarians which has developed a number of highly collaborative programs which benefit the Australian higher education sector. (Ref: Crossroads[i]Qe5) Examples of these initiatives include:

Consortial purchasing & national licensing of electronic journals and databases since 1993, initially through seed funding from the National Priority (Reserve) Fund, but since 1996 entirely from libraries' budgets, managed through the CAUL Office; CAUL’s program widened to the 8 New Zealand universities, and other government research and higher education organisation in Australia, New Zealand and Fiji; (ref Crossroads[ii] para 131)

For a decade, CAUL has negotiated – with a range of international and national publishers – national and regional licences for electronic journals, bibliographic databases and datasets. CAUL has completed 51 agreements in this time, two-thirds in the past three years in a rapidly expanding electronic publishing environment, and currently has 27 on trial or under negotiation. The number of subscribing institutions varies between 2 and 40 (including the New Zealand universities and the CSIRO). 23 agreements cover 20 or more universities. CAUL successfully negotiated the world’s first consortial agreement for the American Chemical Society’s SciFinder Scholar (Chemical Abstracts) in 1999, facilitating subscriptions for 30 universities.

Some overseas countries have recognised the value of this approach with government funding for state or nation-based consortia that increase access to resources and minimise costs. Experience here and overseas suggests that it is only when such additional funding is available that the benefits of such consortia can be maximised. The most recent significant funding has been the $C20m that the Canada Foundation for Innovation awarded to the 64 Canadian research universities to implement a National Site License for science, technology and medical information resources. The universities committed $C30m over the 3 years, and to stay in the program for 5.

University Library Australia – the national borrowing scheme was launched in July 2001 allowing all university staff and students to borrow in-person from any other Australian university library – complementing the regional borrowing schemes in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia for in-person borrowing by students and staff of other universities in that region; the name, University Library Australia, is intended to signify that the collections of the 38 university libraries are available and accessible to the students and staff of all universities as though they were part of a single national collection; ULA has cut red tape to a minimum, while providing maximum access to the breadth of the national collection to distance education students and visiting researchers. (Ref: Crossroads[iii] Qe3)
Australian Digital Theses program – begun with seed funding from the Research Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities Program, and continued by participating libraries, now twenty, providing instant access to approved higher degree theses in Australian universities;
Publication of guidelines and a handbook on benchmarking in university libraries.[iv]
Publication of information literacy standards, and development of performance indicators to evaluate the effectiveness of information literacy programs.[v]
Cooperative discipline-based gateways (portals) in engineering, chemistry, agriculture, Australian literature, etc;
AARLIN (the Australian Academic Research Library Network) is aiming to provide university staff and students with seamless access to the information resources required to support their research. Specifically, it should enable researchers to create their own approach to the information landscape. This might include a portal facility that can be customised, an authentication process, and unmediated access to services including catalogues, inter-library loans, subject gateways and full text serial, monograph and image database resources. The project is being funded through DEST’s Systemic infrastructure Initiative.
Cooperative digitisation of Australian literary and historical manuscripts in a range of projects;
Cooperative storage of low use books and journals in Victoria and South Australia, and current planning to expand this under a national cooperative storage scheme; (Ref: Crossroads[vi] Qe3)

Active participation in inter-library loans & document delivery between universities to provide greater access to research resources without the researcher leaving campus. (Ref: Crossroads[vii] Qe3)

Australian libraries have a very long history of sharing of their collections through inter-library loan and document delivery. In a environment where the quantum of published material is growing faster than ever, and university libraries are able to purchase a smaller proportion of that published material, they are constantly working to streamline the processes to improve the speed and reduce the costs. CAUL statistics show that the universities with the largest collections are also the largest borrowers from other libraries. Documents that were once photocopied and posted are now (since 1990) scanned and transmitted, often direct to the requestor’s desktop. The libraries benchmark against each other, and against international standards, in order to pursue best practice.

Cooperative development of software to improve the efficiency of inter-library loan delivery – LIDDAS (Local Inter-lending and Document Delivery Administration System)
Contribution of catalogue data to the National Bibliographic Database to provide location information for university resources nationwide;

Collection and publication of university library statistics from Australia and New Zealand (since 1953).

Collaboration has been achieved in a highly diverse library environment where differences have been respected but the precompetitive nature of libraries has been recognised.

Uptake of Technology.

Library staffing in university (and CAE) libraries in 1983 was 6,750 serving a total institutional population of 619,000, decreasing to 4,300 in 2000 serving a total population of 885,000, effectively halving the ratio from 1:92 to 1:206 over the last 20 years[viii]. (Ref: Crossroads[ix]Qe4)

This has been facilitated by the rapid and widespread uptake of technology. University libraries made the move to automated catalogues and transaction processing systems in the early seventies. Online database searching was widespread by the late seventies. The Internet provided email and access to national and international library catalogues in the early nineties, together with rapid delivery of scanned documents from other libraries, effectively replacing postal delivery. By the mid-nineties standards-based web services began to take precedence over other forms of information delivery, both print and locally networked proprietary databases. Australian universities were world leaders in the move from print to electronic journals. In 2002, web-based delivery is ubiquitous, and resources are being committed to the enhancement of interfaces which link the student and the researcher seamlessly to the best and most appropriate information resources for their needs.

Quality Improvement.

CAUL facilitates the exchange of information which supports benchmarking across universities – statistical data has been collected by university libraries for nearly 50 years, comparative service and resource surveys have been run since pre-facsimile days, performance indicator benchmarking kits have been developed and adopted, and a handbook of best practice and guidelines for the application of best practice have been published (through DEST’s Evaluations & Investigations Programme[x]). Research is underway to develop and test performance indicators for information literacy programs. The libraries of the Universities of Wollongong and Melbourne have achieved Australian Quality Awards for their performance.

The Environment.

The Transition from Print to Electronic.

Cooperative purchasing has assisted the universities in the transition from a print to an electronic environment. It has not reduced costs, but has slowed their increase. The cost of electronic resources is almost invariably higher than that of the same resource in print. Access has been expanded quantitatively – most often, more journals are available through publishers’ packaging of their products. These additional titles may not, however, all be the journals of choice of the university, and the higher cost of the package may in fact divert funds away from preferred titles of smaller publishers. A recent example showed that if University A had accepted an offer to buy the whole of publisher Z’s collection at “best ever” price, the additional cost would have meant the cancellation of 40% of the rest of the university’s journal subscriptions.

There is concern internationally that this mode of purchasing may not be sustainable. It may reduce the flexibility of the individual library in the management of its budget. National licensing of publishers’ packages may serve to increase the overlap between library collections, thus decreasing their diversity.

Cost Pressures in University Libraries.

In order to understand the increasing challenges of our libraries in supporting the missions of their universities, it is necessary to look beyond explanations that may rely on the level or mechanisms of public funding. This is not to say that funding issues do not affect libraries. Good libraries are only built with assured levels of recurrent revenue - the kind of funding for which it is impossible even in the US to attract private donors. Such private benefactors may be persuaded to construct buildings or endow chairs, or fund scholarships or buy rare books. They are not much attracted to the idea of committing to annual subscriptions to journals or databases or the salaries of library staff.

However the current quandary of Australian university libraries owes more to economic factors and changes in the academic publishing industry itself. Of the former the greatest is the effect of the fall in purchasing power of the Australian dollar.

Value of the Australian Dollar.

Australian universities import most (80-90%) of their research information needs.
The value of the Australian dollar against the U.S. dollar and other foreign currencies significantly affects the purchasing power of Australian research libraries. In October, 1996 $A1.00 bought $US0.8055 – since then the drop in value of the Australian dollar has reduced purchasing power by 37%.

Growth in Academic Publishing Output.

Incentive and reward schemes in universities and the research industry internationally contribute to the exponential growth of the academic publishing industry.
The number of journals published from 1985/86 (103,700) to 1999 (161,000) – an increase of 55% (Source: Ulrich’s International Periodicals Directory)
Government funding of universities’ research infrastructure depends, in part, on academic publishing – the number of peer-reviewed journals or monographs published by university staff each year.
This expansion in output, together with a publishing industry price inflation rate far beyond CPI and a relatively static funding environment, reduces the proportion of new academic publications accessible directly to Australia’s researchers.
Between 1986 and 1998:
Consumer Price Index Increased 60%[xi]
Cost of Monographs Increased 66%
Price of US Health Care Increased 111%
Cost of Scholarly Journals Increased 175%
Universities are pursuing ways of providing free access to the publications of their own staff eg in e-print archives such as that at the Australian National University <
Australian research output is 2-3% of global research output – even were all that output accessible gratis to the Australian research community, it would still be necessary to import most information requirements.

Changes in the academic publishing industry are complex and have affected all university libraries, not just those in Australia. The following is a brief history and explanation.

The original objectives of academic learned publishing, dating from the 17th century, were for authors to share knowledge and discovery with peers, partly as a contribution to public good and the advancement of society, and partly to invite debate about new theories or discoveries. Publication in learned journals also advanced the reputation of the authors.

These remain the ways in which the modern academic publishing provides value to the universities and through them the wider community. The free flow of information is the life blood of the scholarly and research enterprise, and career advancement for academics is still dependent upon publication and review of their work to and by their peers.

Over the last 150 years, most academic publishing, especially its prestigious titles, has moved from learned, member-based societies to commercial ownership. Concurrently, and partly if not mainly as a result, the prices of academic journals have risen steeply – well above the rate of inflation.

Over the same period the volume of academic publishing has increased almost exponentially, keeping pace with the growth of knowledge.

These developments in the industry flow through to cost pressures on libraries due to the peculiar characteristics of the academic publishing industry. These are unmitigated by those normal laws of the market that are generally believed to protect the interests of the consumer:

the creator of content (the academic or researcher) gives away their property (copyright) to the publisher as a condition of publication. They receive no payment from the publisher.
as employers of the authors, universities and research institutions pay for the production of content
the incentive to publish (the reward) for the academic is the prospect of career advancement
the labour which gives the product value in the marketplace viz, peer review and editing, is also provided free by scholars, since this activity too advances careers
the profitable market for the product (the journal) is not the end user (or reader/author) but collectively, the higher education and research sector (the employers of the authors) through their libraries.

Commercial publishers, concentrated in increasingly few hands, have been able to take advantage of the peculiarities of the system and their control of the journals most valued by the scholarly community, to make sizeable profits.