Open access to digital libraries

The Web as an Open Access Digital Library
William Y. Arms
Cornell University
[email protected]
October 21, 2000
The web as a library
This talk examines the potential of the web as a low-cost library for everybody. It looks
at the technical and organizational contributions that digital library research is making to
the quality of the collections and to the services available on the web.
Conventional libraries are expensive and research libraries are particularly expensive.
Even in the United States, few people can afford good access to scientific, medical, legal
and scholarly information. In less affluent countries the situation is worse; even the best
universities cannot afford good libraries. With the growth of the web, this situation is
changing. An ever-increasing amount of high quality information is available on the web
with open access. Anybody connected to the Internet has access to this information at no
charge. Moreover, free services, such as the web search services, are emerging that
organize this information and provide access to it. Already, many people use the web as
their library.
This talk looks at three aspects of this transition. The first is the economic forces that are
making high quality information available without charge. The second is the use of lowcost automated tools to replace expensive tasks that have conventionally been carried out
by professional librarians. The third looks at some challenges, where digital library
research is needed to enhance the development of the web as a library for all.
Open access publishing
Open access is one of the marvels of the web. Vast collections of high-quality
information are available for everybody to use without payment. Creating and
distributing this information is expensive, yet individuals and organizations provide it
freely. Here are some examples of information previously available only at considerable
expense that is now available openly.
The National Library of Medicine's PubMed service provides medical information
that formerly required a subscription to Medline.
• The commercial product Books in Print used to be the only list of currently published
books. This information and much more is now provided on the web site of
Research articles in many branches of physics appear first in the arXiv archives at
Los Alamos National Laboratory before being published in conventional journals.
Cornell's Legal Information Institute provides legal information that was previously
available only through expensive publications or the online services Westlaw and
Sometimes, the open access service is not as good as the fee-based service, but often it is
a genuine substitute. And these are just a few examples. With a web search engine and a
little ingenuity, a user can find high-quality information about almost any topic, from
Texan wildlife to international taxation. In some disciplines, all the primary materials
needed to teach an advanced course or carry out research are available with open access.
This abundance was not anticipated. Early digital libraries assumed that restrictions on
access were essential for high-quality information to be distributed over the Internet.
This misunderstanding came from a mindset that the only incentive for creating
information is to make money -- royalties to authors and profits for publishers. A glance
at the web today shows that this view was wrong.
Most open-access web sites do not generate revenue. They are supported by external
funding, usually by the producers of the material on them. When the web provides an
efficient channel to reach the desired audiences, existing budgets have been transferred
from print products to the web. Marketing and promotion are obvious examples;
government information is another. In many other cases, organizations have developed
new budgets to publish open access information on the web. The publication of scientific
research is an important example. Ten years ago, very little scientific research was
available free of charge. Today, huge volumes are online with open access.
In areas such as these, the creators of the information have strong incentives to have their
materials used. Their interests are best served by eliminating barriers to use. The result
is that every year additional information is provided with no restrictions on access.
Automated digital libraries
For the web to function as a library requires more than high-quality collections. Services
must be provided to manage the collections and help people use them effectively. The
term "automated digital library" can be used to describe a digital library where all tasks
are carried out automatically, including tasks that were traditionally carried out by skilled
professionals. These include selection, cataloguing and indexing, seeking for
information, reference services, and so on. Each of these activities requires considerable
mental activity, the type of activity that people are skilled at and computers find difficult.
Good services in automated digital libraries do not replicate the procedures of classical
librarianship. Automated libraries provide users with equivalent services but rethink the
way that they are delivered. The contrast between web search engines and conventional
library catalogs is illuminating. Almost everything that is best about a library catalog is
done badly by a web search service. On the other hand, web search services are strong in
ways that catalogs are weak. It is wrong to claim that conventional catalogs or indexes
are superior because of their quality control and it is equally wrong to claim that the web
search services are superior because of their coverage and currency. The value to users
depends on what the user wants to achieve.
Consider the choice between Google and Inspec as tools to discover information about
computing. In computing, almost every significant result first appears on a web site and
only later reaches the printed journals, if ever. Hence, a web search service such as
Google is more up to date and its coverage is broader than Inspec, which is restricted to
formally published materials. In computing, substantially the same information is often
available from several sources. Google provides a direct link to an open access version.
Inspec references the official version, which is usually printed or online with restricted
access. By conventional criteria Inspec has much higher quality, but for many people
Google's broad coverage and convenient links make it the better tool.
Brute force computing
Simple algorithms plus immense computing power can often outperform human
intelligence. The rate of progress in computing power is described by Moore's Law, that
the number of transistors on a semiconductor doubles every eighteen months. This is
roughly equivalent to saying that computing power increases 100-fold in 10 years or
10,000-fold in 20 years. Few people can appreciate the implications of such dramatic
change, but the future of automated digital libraries is likely to depend more on brute
force computing than on sophisticated algorithms.
Here are some current examples of how this computing power is being used. Each
example is the direct result of research in computer science or digital libraries.
The web search services are the state-of-the-art in automated information discovery.
Computers can index every word in a billion pages (roughly the size of the web) and
search the indexes for simple patterns almost instantaneously.
To decide how closely a document matches a query would seem to require human
judgment, yet standard methods of information retrieval do remarkably well. They
use the power of computers to match word patterns as a surrogate for the human
ability to relate concepts. A basic method, developed by Salton at Cornell University,
represents each document as a multi-dimensional vector and uses the angle between
the vectors to measure the similarity between two documents.
Evaluating the importance of documents would appear to be another task that requires
human understanding, but Google's ranking algorithm, developed by Page and Brin at
Stanford University, does very well and is entirely automatic. It ranks web pages by
analyzing what other pages link to them.
Citation analysis is a long-standing success story of applying computers to library
information. Automatic systems are becoming capable of extracting a reference from
a document and linking it to the digital object that it references. Currently, the most
versatile system for reference linking is the SFX system, created by Van de Sompel
and colleagues at the University of Ghent.
ResearchIndex is a digital library of computer science materials, created entirely
automatically by Lawrence and colleagues at NEC. It makes extensive use of citation
analysis and reference linking.
There are a number of projects that extract metadata from digital objects
automatically. Perhaps the most remarkable is the Informedia project, led by Wactlar
at Carnegie Mellon University. Informedia has the extremely ambitious goal of
providing access to segments of video, such as television news, entirely
Challenges for digital library research
The development of the web as a library that is open to everybody is a powerful and
welcome trend. Research in computers science and digital libraries can claim credit for
much of the success. However, the web as a library presents challenges that need to be
the subject of further research.
Perhaps the most worrying is quality. In conventional publishing, publishers and libraries
play an important role in evaluating the quality of materials. On the Internet, with most
information mounted by the creators, it is hard for users to distinguish good information
sources from inaccurate, sloppy, malicious or fraudulent information. With a few minor
expectations, the user is forced to make private decisions on what information to respect,
based on very limited clues. Automatic linking of quality measures to online information
is one of the topics that we are beginning to study in our work for the NSF's National
Science Digital Library.
The next is permanence. Important information on web sites may be supported by
transient organizations. Yet, increasingly, vital information exists only online.
Information integrity is the subject of the Prism project, led by Lagoze at Cornell as part
of the NSF's Digital Libraries Initiative, but this is a huge topic and much more work is
needed. One success story in automatic preservation is the Internet Archive, directed by
Brewster Kahle. Each month, a web crawler gathers every open access web page. The
Internet Archive preserves these files for the future and mounts them on computers for
scholarly research today. Without the work of the Internet Archive many of these
materials would already have been lost.
Final thoughts
Automated digital libraries built on open access information offer to provide the Model T
Ford of information. The Model T Ford was the car that brought motoring to the
American public. Nobody would claim that it was equal to the handcrafted cars of its
generation, but few people could afford a hand-built car. Automated digital libraries
cannot approach the personal service available to the faculty of a well-endowed
university, but few people have easy access to a major research library. The low cost of
automated digital libraries is already bringing scientific, scholarly, medical and legal
information to new audiences.
These ideas were first explored in two earlier papers, both available with open access:
[1] William Y. Arms, Economic models for open-access publishing, iMP, March 2000
[2] William Y. Arms, Automated digital libraries, D-Lib Magazine, July/August 2000
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