1 The Impact of the Internet on Research Universities Examples from Distance Education & Digital Libraries William Y. Arms Department of Computer Science Cornell University

2 Universities and Cost In 1978, a Cornell education cost one Chevrolet per year. In 2001, a Cornell education costs one BMW per year. Every year, costs have gone up faster than average income. The costs of research universities are dominated by personnel. Major reductions in unit costs require different use of personnel.

3 Technology in Education and Distance Education By creative use of technology: Can we teach more students, to a high level, with less faculty per student?

4 Technology in Education TechnologyExampleDate History Time sharingDartmouth Basic1964 TelevisionOpen University1972 Personal computersApple University Consortium 1984 Campus networksCarnegie Mellon Andrew 1986 Current InternetDigital libraries1991+ WebDistance learning2000+

5 Course Web Sites One third of Cornell courses have web sites

6 eCornell For profit, non-degree executive and professional courses

7 Technology in Education and Distance Education Question 1: Quality Is it good education?

8 Skepticism In a recent survey by JSTOR of faculty in social sciences and humanities, only 17% thought that distance education was as good as conventional campus-based education. (Preliminary data; please do not quote) What is the evidence?

9 Distance education: Students at home, with limited access to tutors, summer schools. Technology used as appropriate: Printed materials, home experimental kits, videos, computing, etc. Academic standards: Full degree programs, external control of quality. Longevity: First students in The British Open University

10 Currently 215,000 students. Over 2 million students since Ranked in the top 10% of all UK universities, for teaching quality. [Ranked after Cambridge, York, Oxford, Imperial College, London School of Economics, Warwick, University College London, Durham and Sheffield.] Higher Education Funding Council, 1997 The Open University

11 Technology in Education and Distance Education Question 2: Capital Intensive Education What are the organizational options?

12 Capital Intensive Education Conventional course: Major cost is faculty time. Costs are repeated every year. Technology in education and distance education: Course materials are a major expense. Marginal cost of delivering course is low. Consequences: Economies of scale Universities need access to capital Course materials are an asset

13 Columbia University Cambridge University Press London School of Economics New York Public Library University of Chicago University of Michigan British Library American Film Institute RAND Woods Hole Victoria and Albert Museum Science Museum Natural History Museum

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15 Technology in Education and Distance Education Question 3: Ownership and Intellectual Property If course materials are assets, who owns them?

16 Recommendations of a Cornell Committee 1. The university policies on intellectual property should be independent of the media in which ideas are expressed. 2. Creators of works should have control over the intellectual output resulting from their research, teaching, and writing. 3. When there are multiple creators of an individual work, the control should be shared among the creators. 4. When the university contributes substantial resources to the development of specific materials, it has a right to share in the control and returns.

17 MIT to make nearly all course materials available free on the World Wide Web Unprecedented step challenges 'privatization of knowledge' CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- MIT President Charles M. Vest has announced that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will make the materials for nearly all its courses freely available on the Internet over the next ten years. He made the announcement about the new program, known as MIT OpenCourseWare (MITOCW), at a press conference at MIT on Wednesday, April 4th. MIT Press Release, April 4, 2001

18 Digital Libraries By creative use of technology: Can we build libraries that are of high quality at much lower costs?

19 Research Libraries are Expensive library materials buildings & facilities staff

20 The Open Access Web Before the web Few people had access to scientific, medical, legal information With the web Much high quality information is available with open access Free services organize this information and provide access to it "Please can I use the web? I don't do libraries." Anonymous Cornell student, circa 1996.

21 computers & networks The Potential of Digital Libraries materials open access staff ?

22 Digital Libraries Question 1: Economic Models for Open Access Who pays for open access?

23 A False Assumption Incorrect thinking The only incentive for creating information is to make money -- royalties to authors and profits for publishers Correct thinking Many creators do not require revenue Marketing and promotion Government information Academic research They want their materials to be used

24 OldNew Books in Print (subscription)Amazon.com (advertising) Medline (pay-by-use)Grateful Med (external) Journal (subscription)ePrint archives (external) Westlaw (pay-by-use)Legal Information Institute (external) Inspec (subscription)Google (advertising) Examples

25 Before You Ask... The open access information is sometimes a poor substitute Much good information is not available with open access But every year the proportion of important information that is available with open access increases

26 Open Letter We support the establishment of an online public library that would provide the full contents of the published record of research and scholarly discourse in medicine and the life sciences in a freely accessible, fully searchable, interlinked form. Establishment of this public library would vastly increase the accessibility and utility of the scientific literature, enhance scientific productivity, and catalyze integration of the disparate communities of knowledge and ideas in biomedical sciences.

27 Hypotheses for Scholarly Information The dominant force is author pressure, which emphasizes open access rather than closed access. 1. A mixture of economic models will coexist. 2. Eventually, we will have open access to most scientific and professional information. 3. The most common economic model will be that information is published by the producing organization.

28 Digital Libraries Question 2: Quality What are the alternatives to peer review?

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30 Observations about Peer Review At its best, it is superb. At its worst, it validates junk. Some topics can be reviewed from a paper, e.g., mathematics. Some topics cannot be reviewed from a paper, e.g., computer systems. "Whatever you do, write a paper. Some journal will publish it." Advice to young faculty member, University of Sussex, 1969.

31 How can readers recognize good quality materials? How can publishers maintain high standards and let readers know? How can a scientist build a reputation outside the traditional peer-reviewed journals? A sample of one: William Y. Arms Quality without Peer Review

32 Digital Libraries Question 3: Brute Force Computing How far can computers be used for the skilled tasks of professional librarianship?

33 Brute Force Computing Few people really understand Moore's Law -- Computing power doubles every 18 months -- Increases 100 times in 10 years -- Increases 10,000 times in 20 years Simple algorithms + immense computing power may outperform human intelligence

34 Brute Force Computing Example Creators of the world champion chess program (Deep Thought later Deep Blue) -- moderate chess players -- simple tree-search algorithm -- very, very fast computer hardware

35 Example: Catalogs and Indexes Catalog, index and abstracting records are very expensive when created by skilled professionals -- only available for certain categories of material (e.g., monographs, scientific journals) -- contain limited fields of information (e.g., no contents page) -- restricted to static information

36 Equivalent Services Information discovery I used to be a heavy user of Inspec. Now I use Google instead. Why are web search services the most widely used information discovery tools in universities today?

37 Thinking out of the Box For information discovery, particularly with untrained users: automated indexing of full text is at least as effective as manually produced indexes and catalogs [Demonstrated repeatedly in experiments going back to the original Cranfield experiments.]

38 Digital Libraries Question 4: Automated Digital Libraries What is the state of the art in automated digital libraries?

39 Automatic indexingLycos, Infoseek, Altavista, Google,... Query matchingVector methods (Salton) Ranking importanceGoogle (Page and Brin) Archiving Internet Archive (Kahle) Collection developmentResearchIndex (Lawrence) Metadata extractionInformedia (Wactlar) Automated Digital Libraries: Examples

40 Digital Libraries Question 5: A National Science Library (NSDL) Can we build a very low cost national science library using the methods of automated digital libraries?

41 One of Six Core Integration Demonstration Projects for the NSDL

42 How Big might the NSDL be? The NSDL aims to be comprehensive -- all branches of science, all levels of education, very broadly defined. Five year targets: 1,000,000 different users 10,000,000digital objects 100,000independent sites Requires: low-cost, scalable, technology automated collection building and maintenance

43 Levels of Interoperability: Metadata Harvesting Agreements on simple protocol and metadata standard(s) Example: Metadata harvesting protocol of the Open Archives Initiative (MHP) Moderate-quality services Low cost of entry to participating sites Moderately large numbers of loosely collaborating sites Promising but still an emerging approach

44 Levels of Interoperability: Gathering Robots gather collections automatically with no participation from individual sites Examples: Web search services (e.g., Google) CiteSeer (a.k.a. ResearchIndex) Restricted but useful services Zero cost of entry to gathered sites Very large numbers of independent sites Only suitable for open access collections

45 Technology Demonstrations 1. One Library, Many Portals 2. Coherent Services across Heterogeneous Collections 3. Easy Integration of Participating Collections 4. Variable Levels for Integrating Collections 5. Tools to Create New Collections

46 Some Light Reading William Y. Arms, "Automated digital libraries." D-Lib Magazine, July/August William Y. Arms, "Economic models for open-access publishing." iMP, March