Section of Science and Technology Libraries

IFLA SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY LIBRARIES SECTION
Project SCIE - 3/94

Introduction

The situation in scitech librarianship is characterized by sky rocketing of printed periodicals' price. That was why one of the main reasons provoking interest to electronic publishing, namely on-line access and CD-ROM, were economics and providing value-added services.

The situation with on-line access and networking is shortly described by John W. Berry in "Digital libraries: New initiatives with world wide implications" (IFLA JOURNAL V.22 N 1 pp. 9-17. The disparity between US and foreign data communications environments (including networks, hardware and software) is a source of frustration to businesses and, in particular, members of the research community when they seek to effect or use international connection. Within a country, distribution - local infrastructure - is largely a matter of local policy and investment; it is the area of greatest unevenness across countries. For example, in countries such as China and Russia, the infrastructure for very high speed links is almost nonexistent. A major finding of the 1990 Report of the Task Force on Telecommunications and Broadcasting in Eastern Europe, commissioned by the US State Department, stated: "The years of political bias against private access and dissemination of information have left all Eastern European countries, regardless of GNP, with telecommunications and broadcast infrastructure which are among the very poorest and most antiquated in the world. Massive investment will be required to bring the telecommunication and broadcast infrastructure up to developed country levels."

Libraries and documentation centers are important CD-ROM marketplace. Despite for the moment the difference in price is of 10-15% (publisher's catalog price) in favor of the printed versions the optical disc technology is less expensive than that of printed items. Well developed CD industry provides specific production costs (ca 0.03 cents per MByte) what is 2000 times less than printed version, Table I.

The tendency is also promising: while periodicals' cost is rising twice for ten years the CD-production costs are decreasing steadily. Due to huge capacity the CD shipping and storing cost is 1500 times less than for paper materials. In-library processing cost is 250 times higher for paper. As for service the paper is 20% cheaper due to lower investment costs.

The final expenditures' comparison formulae for 1 thousand scietech grey literature volumes comprising 220000 pages versus 1 CD-ROM disk (the price of information itself is omitted) is presented in Table II.

So approximate comparative formulae for 1994 Russian situation will be:

For printed publications:

P = 5000 + 383 * years USD.

For information-equivalent CD:

C = 4 + 320 x* years USD.

I wish to remind once again that here costs are indicated for Moscow 1994 prices with no respect to the cost of information itself. For CD and paper these costs are difficult to compare because CD-recorded full text usually is indexed and presents more value for money. The CD technology looks viable due to the existence of a large and rapidly growing market. Electronic publishing is growing quicker than the conventional one - both as to the number of new titles and the information comprised. Besides bibliographic and reference databases the full-text and multimedia materials occupy more space in CD-ROM production. As any digitized records the CD may be easily converted in the future.

The Project history

That is why IFLA SciTech Libraries Section project: Electronic Deposition of the Full Text Grey Literature Documents, Feasibility Study for East Europe, FSU, Asia was initiated in 1993. The proposal for a feasibility study was submitted during SCI-TECH session in Barcelona by Andrey Zemskov. SC reached consensus that there should get out a more complete and detailed proposal, with Mr. Dennis Shaw's assistance. Review committee of Mrs. Anderson, Mr. Bradbury, Mrs. Koskiala, and Mr. Shaw was nominated.

The aim of the project was to examine the problems of access to and conservation of scientific and technological grey literature in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union countries and Asia and to make recommendations for ensuring improved access internationally to this material. Electronic Deposition here means digital optical CD technology. The project considers CD as additive to the traditional printed materials, microfilms and on-line access. The project was in good relevancy with Core Programs (ALP, UDT) and SC project on Satellite Communication and adopted by CB 26/10/93.

1. First version of the Questionnaire           15 August     1994

2. Discussion with SC members                   01 September  1994

3. Duplication and dissemination                20 December   1994

4. Follow up                                    01 February   1995

5. Analysis, statistics, recommendations        15 June       1995

6. Report to SC and preparation for publishing  15 August     1995

Project started in May 1994. The Calendar plan and the questionnaire were discussed, corrected and approved at SC sessions in Havana, Marty Kesselman being very helpful. After that 300 copies of questionnaire were made (200 for starting dissemination and 100 for the follow up).

The feasibility study included:

Questionnaires and Discussions with librarians, information specialists, publishers and suppliers at seminars, conferences to identify the institutions (with names of individuals) in Eastern Europe, FSU and Asia prepared to experiment with electronic deposition.

The 300 questionnaires (see Appendix 1) were mailed or handed over during seminars in Shangkai, Warsaw, Crimea, Habana, Prague etc. Of 300 disseminated forms the response till now was 136 forms (45.3%). Data processing was performed with respect to the Questionnaire topics, selecting 4 kinds of libraries (Regional, Central, Corporate and University libraries) and 5 subregions (Asia, East Europe outside former Soviet Union, former Soviet Union, Russia, Moscow). The latter regions (Russia and Moscow were selected because information from these regions only enabled to get some statistics. Other regions and countries gave 1-3 answers per country. The only absolutely the same answer "Yes" was to question concerning the necessity of the given project. So in the following I'll speak rather of whole project but differential illustrative statistical information will be for Russian libraries. Some questions discussed during personal contacts were:

Are electronic publications relevant to libraries' need?

Is user training a problem?

Is hardware and software available?

As for grey literature problem this project was much influenced by discussions with D. Farace, Th. Larr, at GL conferences in Amsterdam and Washington. The detailed discussion with Mr. D. Marquis, vice-president of Special Interest Group on CD-ROM Application and Technology (SIGCAT), Annapolis, USA on the conservation and reliability of CD and relevant topics should be mentioned.

CD is combining holdings and access to best advantage. The CD technique is more compact, facilitates search and has no considerable training difficulties due to wide spread CD players and no fear of counter. The CD-ROMs combining several titles within a disk are very advantageous. On-line methods are more vulnerable, more expensive and need well developed infrastructure. The project was discussed with UNESCO representatives, with EC mission and representatives in Moscow and with members of International Association of Research and SciTech Libraries during Crimea'94 Annual ARSTL Conference.

Study of Findings of ongoing sister projects (LC's Digital Library, ADONIS, Tilburg University projects, UNESCO projects on electronic publications). The valuable experience of Hartlib Papers Project (conversion to digital form 25,000 pages and preparation of CD with original handwritten letters) is very encouraging. The problems of conservation are very important. Testing suggests that a properly produced CD-ROM can last more than 100 years ensuring the integrity of the data for the life cycle. Reliability of the digital records preservation is not necessarily connected with the physical integrity of documents, although it can be solved in the better way taking into account the compactness of records and automated service (an untrained user will not touch the documents). We should speak rather of the reliability of the rewriting, because for CD it is quite sufficient and rather easy to rewrite the whole collection. Compact discs offer a small probability of errors in rewriting (1 mistake in 2 thousand discs), that is approximately one letter in 1 million volumes. Even if in the electronic storage the rewriting of the whole collection is done annually, the rate of information losses will be considerably lower than in case of the paper version. A possibility of accommodating full-text collections in a rather small premises allows for creation of inexpensive reserve depositories. There should be initiated a research of CD-ROM conservation including high-temperature- and water resistance in cases of disasters.

Pilot project in the NPLS&T included:

Monitoring the full-text analogs of sci-tech journals. Special databases were generated and updated.

The electronic files collection generated during desk top publishing and which will be in-house transferred to CD. The problem revealed to be rather more difficult as it seemed during proposal preparation. The Western publishers are reluctant to develop the electronic publishing access due to very complicated and heavily discussed Copyright problem. As for Russian publishers they are not considering yet libraries as an important customer. They prefer to solve problems at upper levels by establishing of financial support on the ground of state supported programs.

Preparing for the in-house transfer to CD of full texts of printed publications available in the Library collection. Two full text one-off CD-Recordable publications of 1994 and 1995 Crimea Conferences Proceedings were done in our library.

Statistics available

Library System in Russia. There are several groups of libraries in Russia clustered according to user communities, collections, supervising and financing institutions. With respect to collections there are:

• school libraries, children libraries and libraries for youth; the target groups are the youngsters.
• public libraries and trade union libraries which build their collections keeping in mind common people;
• special libraries (central and corporate SciTech libraries, Academical libraries, University libraries, etc.). The target group consists of students, scientists and specialists. We have chosen two groups of Russian libraries for comparative analysis of the Project results. Position of special libraries and documentation centers was investigated on the ground of questionnaires. We have replies of 53% regional libraries and 67% of central scitech libraries.

The technical awareness of these groups is roughly equal, see Table IV; staff awareness and enduser awareness of these groups (estimated by themselves) are given in Table V and Table VI.

Fig.1. Library System in Russia. Public Libraries and SciTech Libraries. Arrows indicate direct subordination. Dotted lines indicate coordination. Dotted frames indicate groups under comparison

Regional libraries. In total there are 48,9 thousand public libraries (38,6 thousand of them are in rural area). Total stocks comprise 901,8 mln. volumes, the number of users is 52 mln. There are 10 major Federal level libraries.

On the local level there are 77 Russian regions supplemented with 12 national entities. We'll consider here regional libraries but not national ones. These libraries cover whole territory of Russia. They have universal collections, the total stock - 138,8 mln volumes, the number of users - 2,6 mln. The attendance of these libraries has grown 2-3 times during last three years because of drastic increase of books prices, introduction of new programs in the secondary schools and high schools, necessity to change profession for not to be unemployed.

In average each library has 23 LAN connected PCs, more 2 CD readers. Several libraries have bought integrated systems of computerization (TINLIB, LIBER, VTLS, ALEPH). Ministry of Culture initiated the networking of libraries. The first step was "LIBNET" project (1993-1994) which provided mutual access via switched public telephone lines to independent catalogs of 5 major Moscow region special libraries. On the provincial level the networking starts slowly. There are several academic and commercial networks in Russia, but due to very high costs of commercial X.25 and TCP/IP networks Russian libraries are forced to use low quality and unreliable public telephone switched lines.

SciTech Libraries. Special libraries now are in more difficult position compared with public ones. Special libraries are under the same pressure as the Russian industry and science are. Amidst special libraries we'll consider here central scitech ones thus excluding corporate scitech libraries, academical and university libraries. (University science in Russia is relatively weak if compared with Western traditions. For instance, university scientists is 7 times less equipped than average Russian scientist.)

The Russian National Public Library for Science and Technology (NPLS&T) is the major library of scientific and technical libraries system. The NPLS&T has 160 PCs, 90 of them are in a LAN. The library databases include: Russian Union catalogue of ScieTech literature; OPAC; 11 specialized and 18 subject-oriented; 4 databases have English version with abstracts. More 60 databases on CD-ROM are accessed locally on 7 workstations and remotely via local CD-network connected to LAN.

Central SciTech libraries are part of information systems of Federal Ministries, all of them are in Moscow. Total stock is 9,2 mln volumes, there are 62 thousand registered visitors. Most of CSTL are centers of the subsystems that unite affiliated scitech corporate libraries ( ca 7 000) of institutions and enterprises. All CSTL and about 40% of the lower level libraries have IBM- and DEC-type computers which are changed now by PCs.

Fig. 2. Publications in Russia, books and brochures, thousand titles

The issuing of books and booklets in Russia is shown on Fig 2. Having reached the level of 50 000 titles a year in the late 1950s - early 1960s, the country kept it stable till the second half of the 1980s. And then - the dramatic fall to the publishing level of 1940-ties. This drop is a structural one: publishing of political literature reduced by 10 times, while the amount of reference publications remained at the same level. Publishing of children's literature and fiction increased thanks to the new private publishing houses. There are ca 7000 registered publishing houses in 1995 compared with ca 200 publishing houses at the mid-eighties. The dynamics of books and booklets publications on science and technology fits in with the general situation, see Fig 3.

Fig. 3. Subject Publications in Russia, thousand titles

The reasons of reduction of scitech publications are:

Fig. 4. Acquisitions of NPLS&T, thousand items

Decreasing the number of authors. Several very strong teams of physicists and computer science specialists in Ukraine, group of mathematicians in Beylarus and Georgia, physicists and astronomers in Armenia, chemists and economists in Baltic republics stopped to publish in Russian. The most active part of Russian young scientists have emigrated: the losses in high tech laboratories (electronics, physics, biology) are 17%-25%. Estimations indicate that 40%-45% scientific results in nuclear physics, high energy physics, plasma physics, computer science are published in English directly.

Besides numerical losses there appeared economical and psychological obstacles to publish. Russian industry has not free market competition yet so there is no motivation to improve quality or to reduce prices.

Large libraries suffer from wide spread disobedience to Mandatory Copy Act obligations. The stipulated by this Act quantity - 25 mandatory free of charge copies - is neglected. As soon as more 80% of publications are made in Moscow and S-Petersburg the regional libraries are not informed. The difference in acquisitions between the same level libraries could be astonishing, more 7 times. Estimated total 1994 publications in Russia were ca 30400 titles.

The dynamics of the NPLS&T acquisition of domestic and foreign literature is shown on Fig. 4. The Interlibrary Loan requests for domestic books is presented in Fig. 5. One could see drastic fall of the requests on ILL and DD. The informational isolation is augmented by unacceptable growth of transportation costs. In eighties the price of business trip from Siberia to Moscow equalled one-week salary of librarian; in mid-ninties the same business trip will cost as 6-month salary of the same librarian.

In the document delivery one should mention the multifold drop of the domestic and East European countries transactions. The demand on Russian STI reduced due to pronounced orientation to the West markets. Quite opposite, the supply of scitech documents from Russia to the West has grown twofold during 1994.

Fig. 5 Interlibrary Loans (ILL) and Document Delivery (DD) Activity

CD project in Russia. The CD applications are very common now for all kinds of Russian libraries. Optical compact disks have emerged at Russian market in early 90-s. Despite CD holds less 3% of audio/video entertainment market this part of market is growing steadily, see Table VII. Russian 1994 domestic CD publishing was 500 titles, approximately 9 mln copies. Legal import was 10 mln copies and illegal import or illegal production altogether equals 10 mln disks.

Many CD projects began as part of Russian conversion of military industries program. Till now capacious consumer market exists in education, entertainment and banking. CD ROM with special information production is strongly Western customer oriented. For many institutions CD publishing is not a business (profit oriented activity), but is an ambitious declaration of existence, of high-tech community membership. Choice of CD-ROM with special information is rather limited. Data reliability and updating are serious problems for many Russian databases.

Statistics. Librarians of both groups highly appreciate the importance of a full text grey literature CD-ROM development but only regional libraries are seriously planning to start deposition of electronic documents, Table VIII. The difference of intentions here is striking!

To complete this final part of comparison we present here the financial ability of libraries, Fig. 6, and self assessment of obstacles, Fig 7.

Fig. 6. Acceptable cost for full text CD-ROM, percent of replies

Fig. 7 Obstacles to participate in deposition of electronic documents, percent of replies

So summarizing the difference between central scitech and regional public libraries one should emphasize different scenarios of relevant publication, different strength of supervising bodies and different demand for information from target groups. Common features for these library groups are lack of money and striving to new technologies.

Availability of results. The project ideas were presented and discussed at the following meetings:

1. The First International Conference on Grey Literature (GL'93) Amsterdam, The Netherlands 12-17 December 1993. The videotaped Cluster Session report by Dr. A. Zemskov, Dr. V. Komov, Ms. N. Miakova "GL in Russia: Acquisition, Access, Perspectives" was presented. Printed paper is available at NPLS&T.
2. Libraries and Associations in the Transient World: New Technologies and New Forms of Cooperation. International Conference Crimea'94, Eupatoria, Republic of Crimea, Ukraine. 23-28 May 1994. Ms. E. Sergeyeva (NPLS&T) report "Information Service on Foreign CD-ROM Databases". Conference proceedings pp. 104, 105. Available at NPLS&T.
3. ONLINE/CD-ROM Conference and Exhibition INFO'94 Tel-Aviv, Israel 1-5 May 1994. Report by Ms. M. Zaluzhskaya (NPLS&T) "User Service with CD-ROM Databases in Russian National Public Library for Science and Technology". Available at NPLS&T.
4. Information Management for Company Excellence, 11-th Congress and Exhibition IDT'94 Paris France 31 May - 2 June 1994. Report by Dr. A. Zemskov, Ms. A. Skvortsova, Dr. Y. Shraiberg "Les Ressources d'information de la bibliotheque National Publique Russe pour la Scince et la Technique".
5. Role des media optique en general et des CD-ROM en particulier en Russie de nos jours comme un moyen d'optimiser les ressources d'information speciale. Report by A. Zemskov at IDT'95 conference, June 13-15, Paris, France. Printed paper is available at NPLS&T.
6. Libraries and Publishers, IATUL Seminar, Sheffield UK, 4-8 July 1994. Report by A. Zemskov "Access versus Holdings: CD or Paper?".
7. Russian regional libraries and central scitech libraries in mid-ninties. Comparative study. Libraries in Europe's post-communist countries: their international context. International Librarians' Conference August 3-5 Krakow-Przegorzaly, Poland. Proceedings of fourth international conference of slavic librarians and information specialists. PTB Krakow. pp. 45-57.