The diagram below shows an extended spread of stakeholders, beyond the focus of our earlier model. It should be noted that one key stakeholder which does not fit neatly into the diagram is the library schools, which as discussed above are within HEIs themselves, and are likely to have a strong influence on the 'Librarians' box in the diagram, and yet they are separate from the institutional context of most eLib projects. This omission highlights the complexity of their potential involvement, without intending to diminish their importance.
The involvement of publishers and related professions has proved to be more crucial to eLib's success than might have been predicted - not only because of the thorny issues of copyright and charging mechanisms, but also because the constant requests from and negotiations with eLib project staff have strengthened many publishers' resolve to become more fully involved in electronic publishing ventures.
On the other hand, the local community and its services, both commercial and public, are included in the diagram largely because, as a participant pointed out at the Workshop described earlier, most HEIs' mission statements include at least lip-service to the community around them, and some allow local public use of their main libraries. In theory, at least, there should be a point at which a cultural change towards electronic information provision and management in the institution should affect its potential users, sponsors and beneficiaries in the local community, even if they are not explicitly involved in the developments towards it.
The list of stakeholders could of course be extended further. When considering the local (or indeed national) general public, much discussion has been made elsewhere of the potential for schools and colleges in further, secondary and even primary education to benefit from electronic resource provision (assuming they gain Internet access). However, we have limited our considerations to stakeholders who are directly, at least officially, intended to be affected by the strategic and cultural direction of UK HE.
As stated earlier, the predicted effects on various stakeholders (most notably librarians and academics) that were shown in our initial model have not emerged strongly from evidence examined in this Study. There is no doubt that the effects predicted in the model are taking place, but in general eLib projects have not yet provided sufficient impetus to directly initiate them. As shown earlier, the effects of eLib projects are unfortunately limited at present for librarians who attend training courses and then are unable to change their working roles to take advantage of new knowledge, and for academics who remain unconvinced of the credibility of new forms of scholarly communication and/or information seeking.
Human-centredness: For a future programme like eLib to encourage attempts at positive cultural change, there should be greater support and encouragement for projects to take a 'people-centred' approach, even where their project is largely on the 'D' side of 'R&D'. For example, the benefits of including some potential user representatives in the design and development process are well-established in systems development, but are not always obvious to people when rushing into a small-scale applied project in a library. The opportunity for consideration of evaluative aspects of the programme was necessarily limited in eLib due to the late involvement of the Tavistock, who strongly advocated such aspects. In a future programme, obviously, it would be best to include an emphasis on socio-organisational considerations and on user-centred design from the proposal stage onwards, forcing projects to build them into their workplans. Without this, other priorities are bound to dominate, especially where funding is stretched so tightly that projects depend on sacrifice and goodwill from non-funded staff.
Institutional context: Related to this, it seems that projects need to be encouraged to explicitly consider the institutional context of their work - the way in which their own HEIs are likely to dictate its development, relative to the needs both of those institutions and of others that could potentially benefit. As discussed earlier, often projects have apparently assumed that their developments were unique and suffered from unique problems, causing them to miss opportunities to learn from similar projects elsewhere, and yet have simultaneously failed to recognise the ways in which the context of their own organisation was affecting the impact, transferability and sustainability of their work. eLib was to some extent intended to encourage small-scale innovations that did not have to be generalisable to the whole HE community, but perhaps more could be done in future to encourage projects to explicitly recognise and tackle their own local limitations from an early stage.
Management of T&A: In eLib, Training and Awareness projects largely emerged from a somewhat arbitrary set of proposals by institutions that wished to pursue particular training course developments. Although the T&A activities have been among the more successful programme areas in terms of fulfilling their self-set objectives, as noted earlier, the authors of the present report agree with the Tavistock Institute's conclusion that T&A should be defined from the needs of the stakeholder community, and projects awarded via more carefully targeted calls for tender. The specific T&A targets we have identified are described in this report. Overall, for future programmes we would recommend a careful initial scoping study prior to soliciting bids, and frequent evaluation and updating of T&A objectives over the course of a programme, to ensure maximal relevance to stakeholders' needs.
Middle-management: As argued earlier, most of the Training and Awareness programme area within eLib has focused on running courses and awareness-raising activities for academic library staff at a fairly low level of seniority. In future programmes, more training and awareness activities should be initiated that aim explicitly at the middle-management (budget-holding) levels in academia. Library managers, and heads of academic departments, need to be involved personally if they are to move their staff into new ways of working, both formal and informal, and hence effect cultural change. Such courses would focus on awareness of the generic issues affecting all innovations of this type - e.g. basic technical grounding and updating on the latest available resources, understanding of rights issues and other legal aspects such as the Data Protection Act, and learning from the experience of institutions that had already undergone processses of reorganisation and/or cultural shifts.
Professional skills: At the same time, at the level of supporting the staff who attempt to implement and manage these innovations, more training and awareness activities are needed regarding new professional areas. These might include project management skills for technology development projects (a distinct area from ordinary management, as shown by the literature on the subject and the existence of specific courses by bodies such as the Open University); again, understanding of generic issues such as rights management; and negotiating and team-building skills.
Library schools: One of the strongest points made in our interviews and workshop was the urgent need for a much greater involvement of, and partnership with, the various UK library schools. There is no doubt that library schools already give librarians many useful and relevant skills for the electronic library. Yet they are frequently criticised for failing to keep pace with the developments in the Internet and the other information resources, let alone with current thinking about how such innovations can be best implemented and managed. The rapid progress in electronic/hybrid libraries must be fed back into library schools' curricula somehow, if librarians are to graduate equipped for the new technologies and the parallel cultural expectations that they're creating.
It is recognised that there are obvious difficulties with this: firstly, with the amount of inertia inherent in academic curricula, especially where subject to quality assessment procedures and other bureaucracy that can prevent rapid updating of course content. Additionally, library schools are unlikely to play a large role in development projects themselves, on the whole, seeing themselves as academic departments whose focus is research and teaching. Thus a development-centred programme like eLib does not have an obvious means of involving library schools in its work. However, we still conclude that any similar future programme must be designed so that library schools are explicitly involved (with earmarked funding, where necessary), rather than depending on ad-hoc submission of proposals for training (see also the discussion of this above).
Publisher relationships and rights: Ownership of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in materials such as lecture notes, monographs and journal articles created by academic staff is not well understood. In general, UK copyright law means that copyright in lecture support materials certainly belong to the HEI, in research articles probably belong to the HEI, and in textbooks and monographs probably belong to the lecturer, irrespective of the time and the place that they were created. In practice, few HEIs have chosen to assert their ownership. The development of materials in machine readable form has brought the issues of respect for copyright, and copyright ownership higher up the agenda; however, the law makes no distinction between the types of media involved. Whilst most HEIs have policies in place regarding respect for copyright, and some HEIs are now beginning to develop coherent policies regarding IPR ownership, some are avoiding the issue or do not realise what issues there are to be addressed. There is a definite need for educating both academics and management in HEIs on issues to do with IPR ownership, and also the wider legal issues of criminal liability, data protection, and defamation, and such efforts should be seen as part of the efforts to achieve cultural change. Meanwhile, individual projects in eLib have had to struggle with attempts to define, and obtain permissions or licences for, the rights covering individual items. The amount of duplicated and wasted effort has become increasingly obvious.
It has long been recognised that coordinated collaboration with publishers, to solve these issues and the related ones of charging, ownership and access, etc., ought to help avoid wasted effort and hugely facilitate the move towards electronic publishing. No such initiatives had succeeded in the early 1990s, however, which is partly why eLib was allowed to develop its piecemeal approach whereby project after project harassed the same publishers for rights agreements to the same materials. We cannot be sure of the degree to which this irritating and time-wasting situation, as opposed to more general trends, has contributed to improving publishers' approach to the issues, but certainly there is now a series of coordinated strategic initiatives between the UK HE representative bodies and the main UK-based academic publishers. It is to be hoped that these can improve the situation for all concerned.
Such badly-needed initiatives will hopefully reduce in future the time and effort which has put in by project teams at the grass-roots level in eLib, which left them considerably less time to develop their technologies (let alone to contemplate their cultural impact or additional human-centred needs). Furthermore, initiatives to break the deadlock over rights and related issues are helping publishers themselves to undergo the necessary cultural changes for them to realise the potential of electronic resource provision.
It is not clear, however, at what level(s) such initiatives must take place: at present it is the JISC/Publishers' Association level, but time will tell if this is the most appropriate.
Central expertise provision: During the course of eLib it has been obvious that certain individuals (e.g. Prof. Charles Oppenheim, regarding copyright management) and organisations (e.g. the Tavistock Institute, regarding evaluation) became pivotal resources for projects across programme areas. Some of these resources arose in an ad-hoc way, out of goodwill and cooperation (the spirit of which is strong in libraries especially, and in HE in general, despite the past decade's emphasis on competitiveness), while others (such as the Tavistock) were explicitly funded to provide advice and training. It is suggested that in future, a set of such centrally-funded resources should be assembled from the start of a programme. Areas that appear to have required such sources of advice in eLib (judging from email lists, Ariadne articles, interviews and informal sources) included:
In European Commission research and development programmes (especially in the 'Telematics' area), cross-project requirements in such areas are addressed via 'horizontal actions': projects which are funded specifically to support other projects by giving advice, training or written information, or by actually performing activities such as user evaluations. Such 'actions' are often themselves collaborative multi-institution projects, and hence subject to the same overheads and complexities as the projects they are supposed to help. It is probable that such activities would not be useful in programmes on the smaller scale of eLib, where the management of official 'horizontal activities' would probably be too unwieldy and bureaucratic to enable them to give rapid, simple and useful response to other projects' needs. Therefore a central pool of 'consultants' may be a more appropriate model.
With the provision of such resources, project teams would be able to devote far more effort to the implications of their developments (for cultural change and otherwise), and less effort to 'reinventing the wheel' by solving problems to which others could already have provided the answers. Projects would also feel less isolated and unique, and the consultants could act to some extent as communication 'conduits' so that projects realised their commonalites through contact with them. This would encourage the notion of a 'culture' within the programme itself; the lack of this notion for many project teams in eLib made them less likely to perceive the overall Follett objectives as being relevant to their own little developments. Encouragement to feel part of a culture can only help projects to consider cultural change.
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The Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) was funded
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