How do you browse a library with NO BOOKS?
Excerpt from Strategy for Business, issue 16. - Autumn 2004
You'll have read some of those ‘looking into the future' predictions that sound so silly a few years later. One of them said we'd all be flying around in personal helicopters by now, and living in machines. Another thought we'd sustain ourselves with protein pills instead of meat and two veg.
Well, in Sweden, one of them might have come true – the one that said PCs and e-publishing would put an end to books.
Up to 90% of the new material coming into Swedish medical libraries is electronic. No paper. No gold blocked covers. No need for shelves or feather dusters for the cobwebs.
Of course, such a preponderance of e-information presents problems of its own. How do you browse? Read? Link? Pay?
Enter Fujitsu, and a portal system that will revolutionise the way Sweden's libraries catalogue, present and allow access to their information.
LIBRIS, the department at the Swedish Royal Library that's responsible for national library systems, is determined to handle electronic resources as well as they already handle printed material.
The trick, of course, is to integrate both into the same system, so that users have just one place to look for every type of information…and there are plenty of types of information! Searchable databases cover everything imaginable, from art to astrophysics, medical science to music, youth studies to zoology, and it's rare for any field of knowledge not to publish new material every day.
A shared project with individual savings
There are 1,500 libraries in Sweden with as many different specialisms, users and needs, so the new system, though centralised, won't be standardised.
In the first phase, 55 of these libraries will be invited to join the LIBRIS portal. Each library will be able to choose how information is presented – the interface is ‘environmentally dependant' and library defined. They will also decide how they want the basic system to work. A steering group of 15 libraries is working with LIBRIS and Fujitsu to create the pilot and to recommend formats and structures for the rest of their colleagues.
The whole arrangement will be based on sharing: all libraries will have equal rights in the system, which will be matched with responsibilities.
Of course, each library could have bought its own portal application – there are plenty of them in contention. But by sharing the investment this way (and employing Fujitsu to make a centralised system work), universities have avoided spending up to €100,000 each and even smaller local libraries won't have to lay out €10-20,000 for a standalone solution.
The user is the winner
But it's the user who will really feel the benefit. Instead of searching twenty or so different interfaces for what you want, you need just one, and results are delivered (with content if required) the same way.
You don't need to tell the portal where to search – it will check the internet, local storage and other databases in a single pass – and tell you whether files found are free or chargeable.
Need a document sending somewhere else? Just click and it's done. Want to arrange an inter-library loan? Click again.
How to browse
And browsing? It's so easy – bring up extracts or the full text of an article in one click. Read or skim it, and if you see a reference to information elsewhere, just click and the full text of its source will be presented to you almost instantly, even though it may be in another database.
So shall we have a go at predicting the future? Within two years, Swedish LIBRIS Libraries will have more users, happier users and better-informed users. Who will still drive cars, eat food and read books?
