The paper relates the relatively slow evolution of the first 'information age' and contrasts this with the explosion of the second, the 'Internet Information Age'. The paper gives a brief resume of IT developments indicating the exponential explosion that is underway. The context of a changing landscapes in information services is be presented in terms of the impact on the information professionals, the librarian and the computing officer. The Internet phenomena is certainly the largest IT development since the original PC and may be the largest IS development since the published book. It provides a communications revolution for the citizen and industry. The levels of investment are very high and there is a rapid pace of innovation. The Internet is changing the shape of commerce with industry convergence various sectors including communications, computing, media, information, etc. Ubiquitous access via new technologies to an information rich world will inevitably open up opportunities for new paradigms of learning delivery. The role of the academic, the student and support services must undergo enormous change. It is for the information professionals to be clear in setting and implementing change agendas to deliver an environment in which they may prosper.
Archaeology shows that man was carving on the tooth of a Woolly Mammoth 47,000 years ago; we have the oldest known animal carving [Marshall 1993, p15] from 30,000 years BC and from 28,000 BC we have the phases of the moon carved into bone [Marshall p14]. During the next 25,000 years man developed the use of clay tablets and by 2,200 BC we have documents written on Papyrus and in Greece in 530 BC we have knowledge of a library. It is significant to note that in AD105 T'sai Lun invents paper and by 600 books were being printed in China. However it is not until 1309 that paper is known to have been used in England. The Europeans started to use the Chinese method of block printing and in 1453 we have the Gutenberg 42-line Bible being printed; 200 copies of the two volume Bible were printed using metal plates, about a quarter of all the originals created survive today. It is interesting to note that by 1814 steam-powered presses are printing the Times and just a few years later in 1839 Fox Talbot in Laycock, England is experimenting with black and white photography from negatives and by 1873 colour photography is being tried [Gernsheim, 1982]. Perhaps the next major arrival to impact printed text is the computer and it's storage media. The CD-ROM invented in 1985 allowed 270,000 papers of text on a single CD and opened to question the whole future of printed material as a subject for debate.
The history of the computer is nowhere nearly as interesting and for many of us is a history that we have in part or fully lived. The stored programme computer was born in Manchester University just 51 years ago with the birth of 'Baby'. The evolution of the computer is easily traceable, and perhaps the significant impact on the world of information came with the arrival in 1975 of both the PC and the Internet. The PC, initially not seen as a consumer device, expensive and restricted in performance, quickly evolved as a tool of the workplace and home. The Internet, initially a research topic and later a research tool quickly became widely accessible to the academic community and this spread to industry and commerce. It is now pervasive providing a rich environment for communications and access to information.
The computer and the Internet share some interesting characteristics of product cycle compared with other technological developments in the marketplace. Figure 1 shows penetration to the US market versus years since 'invention'. It can be seen that both the PC and the Internet have shared a rapid evolution into the marketplace. The Internet is likely to be significantly more pervasive in it's rise to market saturation due to new developments in terms of fast low-cost modems, ISDN based access, and of course emerging technologies such as web-tv through the so-called 'set-top' box. The ubiquitous set-top box will provide interactive high-resolution TV services combining communications, access to Web content and games into a single low-cost unit. It is likely the unit will carry either a JVA or a 'light' version of the Microsoft's Windows such as the Windows CE operating system. Microsoft must be a dominant player as a consequence of the dominance with 90% of the worlds computers (excluding games consoles) running their operating systems. However, development of the PC itself, with processors capable of accurate speech recognition may push the expectations of the set-top box yet further. It is worth noting that Playstation-2 will be a an order of magnitude more powerful than it predecessor and the processor of Playstation-1 will be used as an I/O chip in Playstation-2. It is anticipated that there will be ample capacity for voice recognition in this system and there are no plans for a keyboard interface. Inevitably the marketing of the system will be heavily subsidised on the assumption that income is to be generated from the DVD games it will run, or from the Internet games that will be accessible using the system.
What is clear is that: the 'experts' will over-estimate the changes that will occur in the next couple of years; but also desperately under-estimate the changes that will occur in ten. Universities are experiencing the threats of a changing environment that have been felt in so many industries. Education and Health are the only two global and 'mega-industries'. It is inevitable that new providers will attack both markets but education is to be challenged at a time when technology is impacting the whole raison-d'être of delivery of learning. It is thus essential that our institutions consider the implications for themselves of the changing environment. It is clear that skills with information processing, media-creation and content-creation are going to be essential for the academic or para-academic. In the UK there is growing regionalism and it is inevitable that institutions within regions will work more collaboratively and there will be a thrust towards subject centres and centres of excellence proving focussed support.
In the UK there is confusion relating to the Government agendas for education. The Labour Government has stated its prime objective for the nation as: "Education, Education, Education...". The Prime Minister said, "The information superhighway should not just benefit the affluent or the metropolitan. Just as in the past books were a chance for ordinary people to better themselves, in the future online education will be a route to better prospects. But just as books are available from public libraries, the benefits of the superhighway must be there for everyone. This is a real chance for equality of opportunity" [Blair]. The Government has launched a number of initiatives including: the University for Industry (UfI), the National Grid for Learning (NGfL), the Public Libraries network, the Schools network, etc. The country is addressing the issues of regionalism through the foundation of the Regional Development Agencies and Regional Chambers. The commitment is clear but with a myriad of schemes it is difficult to see the strategy. It is clear that life-long learning is of growing importance and Universities must expect to play an important role in delivering the content. However, the funding model is changing with the expectation that the traditional student will make a substantial contribution to the cost of the education received either at the time the education is received or though life-long taxation.
UK Universities through the Thatcher era were required to be more efficient in both teaching and research. To a large degree this was achieved through competition, selectivity, league tables, Research Assessment Exercises (RAE), Teaching Quality Assessments, etc. Unfortunately UK universities are now naturally competitors fighting for market share and resources. The number and diversity of institutions has increased significantly with higher education now being commonly achieved also in the Further Education Colleges. There has been a significant increase in mature students and an increasing tendency for students to seek 'local' education as a consequence of the additional costs associated with living away from home. Inevitably, competition hinders collaboration. If effective competition is to be achieved in the global education market for distance learning then it is essential that UK Universities learn to collaborate to compete. This is inevitably going to be difficult after the years of in-grained competitiveness.
The current funding model for UK Universities is very complex and in my opinion unsustainable. It is inevitable that a simpler model based on the customer buying services will come about by stealth as the funding from the government is reduced as a fraction of the total cost due to inflation. The customer will of course be able to choose from a global market of suppliers, offering a myriad of styles of learning. The customer will have to balance cost against quality, as for any other market commodity. Institutions are today providing ISP (Internet Service Providers) services, i.e. our students are being provided with internet access, email, web-access, etc. Certainly in the UK this model is unlikely to survive due to the changing face of the higher education customer. The arrival of 'free' ISP services, where income is derived from a small overhead on the call-charge won from the telephony provider to the ISP, is proving very attractive and has increased the number of ISP customers at a remarkable rate. Once customers have established a network identity it is unlikely that they will want to adopt a new identity whilst studying, instead they will request that we use their own identity to which our IT systems will require to interface. Thus I would suggest the inevitable rapid change of role for University IT services from proving ISP services to that of being a Point-of-Presence (POP), where the role is to deliver access to content and services to the Internet as for any other supplier.
The issue for university libraries, as suppliers of access to data-sets, e-resources, etc., is the costs that are associated with this service. The available funding in institutions grows only at the rate of RPI (Retail Price Index) whilst inflation in stock is typically 6% for academic books, 11% for journals and e-resources. This is exacerbated by the growth in number and diversity of the requirements of the customers. Libraries have traditionally purchased physical stock, monographs and serials, and made them available to their customers. Today, libraries broker the purchase of electronic resources and make them available to customers, this might be CD-ROMs or on-line electronic information services. The role of the library in this task is largely that of broker; is this a sustainable role? Would the customer not prefer to make direct access of any service and use personal purchasing power rather than brokered access to a restricted subset of that available. I believe the model for the life-long learner, employee, enthusiast is one where the customer will inevitably not require the middle-man brokering function.
The task for Universities is to ensure that we provide our customers with the best possible learning mechanism and support environment. This is not to say that there is a single approach, but rather the institution is adopting a particular market stance based on a distinctive style for its content that can be understood and appreciated by the customer. The task for us is to ensure that the interface to this content is consistent, simple and scaleable. The Universities ability to make content available and to market that content in the global marketplace is essential. It will be necessary to provide mechanisms to ensure that the authentication and charging of the customer are appropriately undertaken. The support environment for the customer is likely to include knowledge agents whose task will be to support the learner and seek resources on demand. The major challenge for us is to determine from where the skilled content producers and supporters for the learners are going to derived. Library staff are traditionally very focussed on customer support whilst the IT specialists are more focussed on the support of systems and their services. The academic is not a trained content producer and will rarely have the appropriate skill sets for the task. Clearly there is a 'new industry' role [T.N. Speake] for the supporters of the academic in terms of creating and updating the environments in which learning is to occur. The new information professional and knowledge mediator must be committed to partnership approaches to learning with the customer part of the partnership.
thus far we have developed an information world where 'publishing' has little cost, and there are effectively no restrictions as to who can publish. The role of the publisher is similarly threatened by the technology and the market. There requires to be strong information quality control procedures where the reader must be able to make an assessment of the value of the content that is being read based on some easily understood perspective. In the same manner that information can be easily created and published it can similarly be easily lost. There requires to be mechanisms established to protect our information e-heritage if society is not to look back on this as a period when care was not taken to ensure 'history' was preserved.
The global market approach to learning is going to challenge the normal pedagogy of teaching and learning. The quest for efficient, effective and value for money based learning is going to be driven by the market. The ability to provide supported learning environment where the customer will be demanding support at any hour, and from any place will put new challenges in front of us all. It is for the information professionals, both the system and service staff, to set a clear agenda
A quote from the UK weekly newspaper for the Higher Education community [THES] is a succinct statement of the position described in this paper:
"The success of the knowledge century will depend not on the spread of new technologies themselves but on the quality of the information which is made available through them and our ability to use it wisely. The challenge to universities is to adapt fast enough to exploit the opportunities of the market so that they survive to uphold those values."
D. Lomas & Prof. M.J. Clark
Academic Information Services, University of Salford
Salford, M5 4WT; +44 (0)161-295 5028
email d.lomas@ais.salford.ac.uk
m.j.clark@ais.salford.ac.uk