But more important, perhaps, than due accreditation are the benefits of timely publication of scientific discoveries. Very often, especially today, a scientific breakthrough hinges on the exchange of research. It has also become custom that once a scientific discovery is made, the details of that discovery are publicized so other scientists may test the validity of that discovery.Thus the scientific journal has arisen. But poring through the volumes of various journals can in itself be a very time-consuming task.
For scientists at the University of Californina at San Francisco (UCSF), the only hospital in the University of California system solely devoted to the health sciences, this was a particularly time-consuming task due mainly to logistics. Faculty members are spread across 143 different clinics, hospitals and other medical service sites in and around San Francisco, so it is difficult for them to go to the campus's main library to do research. "Our faculty members are spread throughout San Francisco, so some of them are four and five miles away at other smaller campus," said Richard Lucier, UCSF's univeristy librarian and assistant vice chancellor for Academic Information Management.
So instead of the faculty bringing themselves to the library, UCSF faculty members decided to bring the library to them. Through a cooperative effort involving the UCSF faculty, about 20 publishers and various university presses, the universtiy staff developed a plan to put some of its scientific journals "online."The goal of this project, Lucier said, is to "make the geographically dispersed nature of our campus a non-issue" and to preserve the look of the journal pages.
Needs defined
Past online experiments for "online libraries" could produce only Ascii text, and charts and graphics were severely limited. In the health sciences, this poses a particular problem because so much of this type of literature is image-based. Software was needed that could store both on-line text and images.
Another potential problem was the fact that faculty members had different makes of computers with different operating systems on their desktops, so the on-line archive would have to be accessible through PCs, Macintoshes and Unix-based workstations. "We needed a very large server and storage technology that would allow us quick access to full text and image material," Lucier said.
The UCSF faculty also wanted windowing and multitasking capabilities.
Hardware and sofware selections
After a brief search for software, the UCSF faculty selected AT&T Bell Laboratories' RightPages -- software that has both on-line text and image storage capabilities. There was no hardware search, Lucier said. He wanted to go with the hardware he was used to. "Sun was the technology to go with," he said. "My experience [with Sun] has always been very positive, except for a few little glitches here and there. They've made a lot of inroads into the academic and scientific arenas."
The system runs on a Sparccenter 2000, which is used as the file server, and a variety of Sparcstations, used mainly for programming and accessing. Additionally, the library runs 10 Sparcstation desktop workstations, including three Sparcstation 10 machines.
RightPages stores each journal article as a text file and each page of a journal as a photographic image, complete with the diagrams and photographs that appear in the paper versions.
In January of 1994, the system went online. Presently, about 150 people have access to 75 journals from 20 publishers from their remote sites. A reader who enters the system views a screen of "stacks" symbolizing available journals. The cover of each journal's most recent issue appears on the top of each stack. To access a journal, the user clicks on the desired cover, which opens that issue to the table of contents. To read a particular article, the user clicks on the listing in the table and the issue opens to the beginning of the article. Once in the article, the user can read it on screen or print it to a laser printer. The printed page looks like a photocopy of an actual journal page.
Faculty members can also search for key words or phrases that appear in the text of any article on the system. For instance, if a doctor needs to review articles that mention the central nervous system, he or she types in central nervous systemand from this request, the system generates a list of articles. The user selects articles from this list for online reading or printing. A "user profile" option notifies users via e-mail when a certain publication has come online. It can even notify them when an article on a certain subject has appeared in any of the 75 journals.
Pitfalls
Despite the "openess" of the system, there currently is no office-based access for Macintosh- and Windows-based clients. Those users must go to a designated near their offices, though all that is expected to change shortly. "We're a little nervous about [providing Macintosh and Windows access] because we simply don't know if the infrastructure will support it," Lucier said. "While we can make certain kinds of guesses, our experience has been that until you actually do these types of things, it's not actually clear."
There have been other technical problems with the system, mainly with the interface between the server and the jukebox that stores the journal pages in electronic form. Another problem has been getting the electronic journals online at least as early as the paper versions. Currently, many of the journals have to be scanned in because electronic versions are not available from their respective publishers. Lucier said this difficulty is being worked out.
For the users, the biggest complaint has been a lack of content. "We selected these 20 publishers from a core of journals from molecular biology and radiology, but once you give somebody something, they want more, " Lucier said.
"I guess the other complaint is a lack of network connectivity. Depending on where you are, you have better or worse network connectivity right now... That's why we're doing a retrofit of the network here. It's very hard to get an institution like this to commit $20 million to upgrading the network." But even with the complaints, users are happy they don't have to traipse over to the UCSF library just to discover the issue they need has not yet arrived or doesn't provide any articles relevant to their research. It has met with enthusiasm, so much so that the "digital library" has even been extended to faculty of UCLA on a test basis. "We're trying to broaden access to understand better how one of these digital libraries can serve a wide regional area and what kind of technology and infrastructure are necessary to be able to do that," Lucier said.
Library of the future?
With the development of this "digital library", it begs the question, Is this the library of the future? Are overdue books, no eating rules and "Sh-h-h" soon to be things of the past?
"Oh, absolutely!" said Lucier. But he cautions, it's a pretty good idea to return that overdue book soon."The paper-based libraries are going to continue for some time simply because we have so much content in that fashion right now."
This system currently supports only 75 journals with issues dating only back to January 1993. The UCSF Library has a collection of 800,000 volumes and 3,300 jounals, all of which support the health science fields. Scanning in all those publications would be an expensive and time-consuming monstrosity. And those are just the technical issues. There are all sorts of copyright ramifications that need to be considered.
"The technical issues are not always what keep things from becoming a reality," Lucier said.
So it is unlikely the whole of the UCSF library, or any other library, will be online anytime soon. But as new publications start to appear in electronic forms and old publications are scanned in, a trip to the library may become more and more synonomous with turning on your computer.