The TULIP participants not only gained a lot of practical experience during the project, but also valuable insights on digital libraries and their development. The first part of this chapter (paragraphs 1 - 4) gives an overview of the implications of TULIP for the future as expressed by university participants during interviews and in their final reports. In paragraphs VI 1 and VI 2, the changing environment, the role of the library, librarians and publisher are discussed. The views of university participants on the transition period and possibilities for the distant future can be found in paragraphs VI 3 and VI 4. Paragraph VI 5 expresses the opinion of Elsevier Science on the implications of the TULIP project for a scientific publisher.

VI 1. Changing environment as viewed by participating universities

The technological possibilities keep growing, the information flow keeps increasing, the budgets remain tight and users demand more. In a nutshell, this determines the environments of the universities today.

Electronic information raises opportunities. Quick searches come within easy reach, the wish of many users to access information at their desktop becomes possible:
“The electronic environment brings people together faster so there is much quicker sharing of info. On their desktops, wherever they are, they can have access to this (electronic information) without having to come to the library to do it. What that does is make their time in the library more efficient and more productive”.

The Web was mentioned many times as the major external influence these days:
“At the time TULIP started, Gopher was an innovative development. With the advent of Web capabilities, we discovered a much more viable medium for image delivery”.

Someone else formulated it this way:
“The rapid evolution of the World Wide Web as an information environment presented the developers with a better approach to TULIP than possible during its initial implementation”.

Although experts notice many shortcomings of the Web, the number of users familiar with it and using it keeps increasing, influencing strategies of all parties involved.

At the same time, preprint publications and more informal publications appear. According to some information specialists this will even increase:
“I don’t believe the money is around to support first rate, fully refereed, fully edited publications, everything people want to publish. Since it is becoming easier to become your own publisher, we will see more informal stuff. If this happens, we will have to ignore or sort through a great wave of junk before we get at the quality information”.

Within the groups of users of the library, we see changing demands. The librarians’ perception of the changes in demands of graduate students and faculty mirror the findings in chapter IV 4.

In general, the graduate students are the early adopters of the new possibilities. They are most computer literate, are the heavy users of TULIP and ask in surveys and focus groups for full texts of everything, with all possibilities available on their desktop at home. According to the participants, the group of faculty is mixed. Some prefer browsing in paper journals and wish for information to remain in paper format as long as possible, while some others see and use the advantages of electronic media for scientific information and are early adopters as well. Undergraduate students differ per discipline and per institute. They need peer reviewed scientific publications less than graduate students and faculty, in general have access to less hi-tech equipment but in some places are trained right from the start to use computers to access information. In the coming years, when undergraduates become graduate students and some graduate students become faculty, more demand for electronic information is expected.

How do participants in the TULIP project look at these changes? How do they see the future roles of the traditional participants in the process of scholarly information?

VI 2. Future roles of the players in the field as viewed by participating universities

VI 2.1. The library - as viewed by TULIP universities

With the exception of only a few, all see the need for libraries increasing instead of decreasing in this environment.
“If there are no libraries, users are going to be confronted by a lot of inconsistent interfaces, financial arrangements, delivery vehicles...and the library can at least potentially add value by making that coherent.”

One of the specialists formulated it this way:
“I don’t think faculty can be responsible for the information needs of their whole community. They can be responsible for their personal information needs. It is just a matter of centralization and cost efficiency”.

Many information specialists said that the crucial role for libraries is as agents for the universities’ information needs. Traditionally, someone said, libraries were seen as storehouses:
“What I see is moving from content to context. Right now we deliver page images, but, in the future, libraries will be delivering an array of information in a lot of different digital media, that provide an information environment for the user”.

In their role of agents of the universities’ information needs, five aspects were named as being crucial: finding, selecting and providing the information needed by the community and leading people to the right information. Finally, protection of holdings is seen as an increasingly important responsibility of the (future) library. Someone said that electronic material is absolutely necessary for a library to lead people to information in the increasing information flow, making the task of providing information more difficult in an intermediary period, but also more efficient for the end users.

VI 2.2. The “physical” library - as viewed by TULIP universities

Where will users access the information? If the infrastructure is available, the desktop access is expected by most information specialists to increase enormously. But while almost all are certain that the remote visits to the library will increase, the views on the physical visits differ per university. In contrast to what might be expected, a few universities noticed that the physical visitors to the library increase when online databases are available:
“The more you put online, the higher traffic volume you see physically of people coming into the libraries”.

Users are more aware what information is available and will use more. In some of those cases librarians visit the users instead of users visiting the libraries. Librarians even have offices within departments and work together with “their clients”. The number of physical visitors depends, of course, on the services offered by the library. There were views of participants that go beyond the roles mentioned above and which will influence the number of visitors to the physical library. Several information specialists see a learning space as one of the roles of future library: either for all study purposes or for collaborative learning. In the first scenario, the library could be opened 24 hours a day and provide all facilities necessary for quiet studying. In the other scenario, the notion of the library as being a quiet place for independent study will disappear. Instead, libraries will be a place for collaborative, joint learning, where people can come together and find the tools they need. An individual should be able to learn wherever they are, using their laptop as their gateway. The library may then become a high-tech seminar room where students gather and work together as teams, which in many ways emulates society these days. As one of the few neutral grounds on campuses, libraries can become community centers, meeting places.

VI 2.3. The librarians - as viewed by participating universities

Instead of less staff, most universities think they will need more librarians in the future. They will be the ones leading users to all kinds of information on all kinds of media. To quote one of the university’s reports:
“Many people will have to move to more service-oriented positions, and less “behind the scenes” activities will have to be done”.

Whether the resources for this will be available is another question. The librarians who have to deal with this overflow of information, the technology that will keep changing and with that the demand from users, while the budgets are not expected to grow apace with these two, need to have a lot of qualities. In this changing environment flexibility is crucial. Technological knowledge and good computer literacy help a lot. In their job, they mainly expect more emphasis on decision making and more training. But giving training on electronic products also requires more technological knowledge. As someone said:
“Librarians will become more technicians, and technicians will become more of librarians. For sure, good cooperation and understanding is essential in this”.

VI 2.4. The publisher - as viewed by participating universities

Most participants in the TULIP project see a continued role for publishers: “Publishers enhance the credibility of information”. More informal and preprint publishing is expected, but in the overflow of information, publishers can help in selecting the quality information.
“I don’t see the publisher’s contribution to the scholarly process changing drastically. I think the way they do it is dramatically changing. But they remain the same in terms of managing a process and adding value to content.”

There does not seem to be a consensus among participants about the role of publishers in the archiving of the electronic content. While some universities are quite willing to let the publisher be the ultimate archive for electronic material, others are much more apprehensive about leaving this role up to the publisher, either for reasons of continuous availability (publishers can go broke), or for reasons of continuous access:
“If online access to standard science journals is to become a reality, that material will probably need to be archived at one or more institutions of higher learning -- rather than maintained by the publisher. There is too much distrust on the part of many institutions that --because the primary objective of the publisher is revenue-- access could be denied or impaired as soon as it no longer generates revenue.”

VI 3. The transition to digital libraries - as viewed by participating universities

More of the technical information specialists who worked on TULIP foresee a faster change than others, but one of the common views which all TULIP participants share is that the transition to a digital library will be slower than they had expected before starting the project. The majority of the universities don’t think that everything will be electronically available: not all information is suitable for it. And older information isn’t expected to be completely available in electronic format. One university says that it seems certain that within two decades electronic networked access to scholarly information will be the norm. Estimates of what share of the journals would be provided by their institution electronically ten years from now ranged from 10% to almost 100%. Estimating is hard since many issues are still unsolved at this moment. The issue most often mentioned is the question what users want and would use: “It all depends on how individuals value information”. Users are seen as the driving force behind much of what libraries are going to do and they will often be one step ahead. The speed of contents which are made available electronically, the development of infrastructure, how access will be organized in the future with changing technologies, user authentication and identification on a university wide scope, copyrights and of course resources, are some of the other questions which need to be answered. Technologically, everyone wishes for one standard interface, on which all electronic information can be accessed. Unfortunately, no one expects this to happen in the near future. So we will have to deal with different software, different interfaces and different media. Most see this as something they just have to cope with in a transition period. Storage (see paragraph V 2.1.2) and archiving (VI 2.4) are also open issues.

VI 4. Views on the library of the remote future

While solving the open issues will take more time than expected, there might come a day when most issues are solved and digital libraries are a standard. At that point, the way (scientific) literature is written might change, and the way people access/read/use information might be different as well. While reading an article from the screen is not practical at this moment, improvements in technology will change this. Certainly, more people will be comfortable with electronic information. The infrastructure is expected to become much “deeper and thicker” in the future: greater bandwidth, better delivery mechanisms, more efficient protocols. Then we can see information really beginning to flow. Eventually, everyone will be able to access the information from outside the physical library. At the library itself, some expect a “multimedia explosion”, with the possibility of hearing and seeing an author giving a presentation from a computer, enhanced with interactive features.

VI 5. Implications of the TULIP project for Elsevier Science

The TULIP project has allowed Elsevier Science to make better decisions on how to proceed with the conversion of its physical production process to produce digital output, on how to store and distribute electronic material, how to support its customers, how to work with end users, etc. Many of the lessons learned have already been translated into actions.

Looking towards the future, one of the most challenging aspects of publishing today comes in trying to judge the speed of change from the libraries’ perspective as a purchaser, and the scholar as information consumer. Publishers must try to estimate how quickly a transition from paper to electronic (only) will occur. TULIP has generated some important insights concerning this question:

• At the moment, managing large digital collections locally is harder and more expensive than managing a comparable print collection.
  
• Not everyone is ready for digital collections, nor will they be soon. Saying it is harder and more expensive, is to say that the leading edge market is still small. Whether one talks of large local stores of data or regional networked collections, or single remote hosts, the number of academic libraries really ready to support digital collections is still small.
  
• Users will only move to electronic publications when they find the content they need in sufficient quantity. Having journals in electronic form and bringing them to the desktop are necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for the scholarly user. You must deliver a certain “critical mass” of needed information to warrant learning a new system or accessing information in a different way. Publishers have speculated about critical mass questions for years, but now are learning from doing. In TULIP some users loved the local system but did not find enough of “their” journals to warrant regular use. Users don’t have the time or inclination to be inefficient on a long-term basis. Novelty will only go so far. Then, organized collections (libraries) will be required to bring critical mass and retrieval across more databases.
  
• Expanding electronic publishing (internationally) offers very different challenges from paper. Elsevier Science has been delivering a uniform product which required little local training or support all over the world. With electronics, this is not the same. As we found out in TULIP, the process is more complicated and requires a different involvement from the publisher’s side. The delivery of, and use of, the system - even if Web based - means still more publisher involvement with the library and user.

The universities and Elsevier Science have not resolved one critical issue, that of how to make the transition work economically. For Elsevier Science as a publisher the question is how to price your paper and electronic publications so that you have no vested interest in the media chosen. The goal - ideal - would be for the price to be media-neutral, to let purchasing decisions be value-based from the buyers’ perspective. This, however, is much easier said than done.

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