The EPrint Links Project

These pages last updated
18 June 1999

ABOUT
the project
PARTNERS
R&D centres and publishers
PERSONNEL
PAPERS
produced by the project
PRESENTATIONS
at conferences and seminars
PROJECT RESOURCES
hosted by or accessible through the project

Funders

About the Funding (an ELiB view and a view of ELiB)

The US Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) [1], funded by three agencies of the USA federal government: the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NSF/DARPA/NASA). I understand this has been mostly a large-scale computer science research program. But the title and the subject area make it an obvious point of contrast with eLib. After attending a couple of their conferences, my sense is the word seemed to be "ASQ-not", meaning "don't automate the status quo". The participants aimed (properly) to be innovative and free-thinking, leaving aside the constraints of existing practice. The results are exciting and extraordinarily interesting, but it is very hard to determine how many of these ideas might be effectively deployed in real life situations. It is notoriously difficult to transfer new technology from experiment to practice, but this is clearly harder the more distant the experimental context from real life.

By contrast, the eLib program characterised itself right from the start as "development" rather than research. The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [2] , which is the parent organisation of eLib, does not fund research in the same way the NSF does (or, for example, the UK Research Councils do). Rather, the mission of the JISC is to stimulate and enable the cost effective exploitation of information systems and to provide a high quality national network infrastructure for the UK higher education and research councils communities; in this context, JISC funds a number of development programs aimed at supporting universities by piloting the use of appropriate new technologies. Unlike the fundamental research characteristics of the NSF and similar agencies, JISC's projects are concentrated at the near-market, practical application end of the spectrum. Both are needed. The eLib work is still research, despite a curious disdain for the word in some quarters.

An important precursor of eLib was the UK Higher Education Libraries Review. This was set up by the Higher Education Funding Councils (HEFCs, which fund universities in the UK) to look into the needs of libraries across the sector. It followed major changes which occurred in the late 1980s, notably the doubling of the number of universities through re-classification of tertiary level but largely teaching institutions. The Review, chaired by Professor Brian Follett, reported in 1993 [3]; the report was one of the most influential of recent times and resulted in several initiatives, large and small, unlocking significant spending (totaling more than 100 million).

Chapter 7 of the Follett report related to the implications of information technology in improving operations and capabilities of over-stretched libraries. The original eLib program grew out of the effort to implement that Chapter 7, and needs to be understood in that context. The program did not, in itself, attempt to create the electronic library, or even to project a particularly coherent view of such an endeavour. Instead, it aimed to address a number of important possibilities which had been identified in the review process. Some 5 years later, although our understanding has moved on in many ways, several of those early projects have still a few months to run. It takes a long time to get big programs rolling.