Digital Information: Order or Anarchy?

Citation

Tedd, L.A. (2010), "Digital Information: Order or Anarchy?", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 44 No. 3, pp. 293-295. https://doi.org/10.1108/00330331011064294

The editors of this work are well placed to bring together a set of relevant authors to write on the topic of order or anarchy in the future of digital information systems. Hazel Woodward has been University Librarian and Director of the University Press at Cranfield University in the UK since 1998 and prior to that she was Head of Electronic Information Services at Loughborough University. As well as her “day” job she has been very active professionally and, as given on the Cranfield web site (www.cranfield.ac.uk/about/people/page1603.jsp), this has included being “Editor of the journal Serials, Chair of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) E‐Books Working Group; member of the JISC Journals Working Group; member of the (European) International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) Organising Committee; and a member of the COUNTER Steering Committee which is developing an international Code of Practice for electronic information usage statistics”. Lorraine Estelle is Chief Executive of JISC Collections, the organisation in the UK that manages the national procurement and licensing of a broad array of intellectual property for academic libraries. One recent project has been the National e‐Books Observatory which features in a paper in this issue of Program: electronic library and information systems. The JISC web site (www.jisc‐ collections.ac.uk/contact_us/collections_staff.aspx) gives further information on Estelle as being “a member of the Knowledge Exchange Licensing Group”, which looks at the issues of digital licensing and procurement at multi‐national level and she is an active participant in the ICOLC conferences. She is a member of the Edina Management Board, the chair of the ETHOS Governance Steering Committee. Prior to joining JISC Collections she worked in the publishing industry, firstly in trade book publishing and then in the area of children's educational books and multimedia.

As described in the preface to this work, the editors were keen to ensure that contributors were chosen from a number of different countries and from a variety of backgrounds in order to present their views on the digital revolution that is taking place in the library, information and publishing world.

The work comprises seven chapters. The editors wrote the first chapter which provides an overview of the digital information landscape in 2009, with a quick look at the future for academic libraries, public libraries, national libraries, bookshops, the publishing industry as well as the librarian. The second chapter, “Scholarly communication: the view from the library” is written by Rick Anderson, Associate Director for Scholarly Resources and Collections at the University of Utah's Marriott library in the USA and also the Association of Research Libraries Leadership Fellow for 2009‐2010. His chapter starts with the sentence “Our current situation is highly unsettled”. He progresses to outline the challenges facing libraries and publishers with the increasing costs of journals, varying publishing models, including open access, and mobile devices, such as the Kindle, for reading e‐books. A complementary chapter follows entitled “Scholarly communications – the publisher's view”. This is written by Ian Russell the Chief Executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers. He acknowledges the fact that scholars of the future will use digital information in the form of blogs, tweets, wikis and so on as well as the more recognised sources of journals and books, and outlines his views of four scenarios of open access publishing. E‐books and scholarly communication of the future is the title of the next chapter, written by Colin Steele, formerly University Librarian at the Australian National University. Alastair Dunning, who is the JISC's Digitisation Programme Manager contributed the chapter on “Digitising the past: the next steps for public sector digitisation” with brief details of a wide range of digitisation developments mainly, but not totally, in the UK. Discovering what digital information is available is of key importance and Graham Stone's chapter, “Resource discovery” covers abstract and indexing databases, identification systems, FRBRisation (i.e. use of the functional requirements for bibliographic records), federated searching, visualisation and so on. Stone is Electronic Resources Manager and Repository Administrator at the University of Huddersfield in the UK. He concludes his chapter with a statement “we need flexible, interoperable resource‐discovery systems based on open‐source software”. The final chapter covers another important aspect of digital information – ownership of digital information and has the title “Who owns the content in the digital environment”. It is written by Lorraine Estelle and Wilma Mossink who is the legal adviser, particularly with respect to copyright issues, for the SURF foundation which is a collaborative organisation providing assistance to higher education and research in The Netherlands.

There is no concluding chapter – but at the end of the preface the editors state that “While this book does not present a definitive answer to the many challenges faced by the information industry, we hope that it looks to the future”. To my mind the book achieves this aim.

Inevitably, one could suggest other themes and other contributors. However, a challenge facing the editors, I am sure, was ensuring that the final publication came out “on time” and that there was no great lag between writing and publication. It would seem that the chapters were written in mid‐2009 and my review copy appeared in January 2010. The editors and Facet Publishing are to be congratulated for the speed of delivery, and the publishers are also to be commended for making the first chapter freely available online on the website (www.facetpublishing.co.uk/downloads/file/sample_chapters/Woodward‐&‐Estelle‐ch1.pdf). A work like this is valuable in bringing together knowledgeable authors to write concise chapters on key topics. All chapters have a lengthy set of sources used by the respective authors and there is also a detailed index. I have already included this as an essential reading in a module I teach on “Digital Information: discovery to delivery”, and have indeed just marked an excellent student dissertation which cites this work!