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The Impact of the Internet on Research Universities

Examples from Distance Education & Digital Libraries

William Y. Arms

Department of Computer Science

Cornell University

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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.

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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?

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Technology in Education

Technology Example Date

History

Time sharing Dartmouth Basic 1964

Television Open University 1972

Personal computers Apple University Consortium 1984

Campus networks Carnegie Mellon Andrew 1986

Current

Internet Digital libraries 1991+

Web Distance learning 2000+

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Course Web Sites

One third of Cornell

courses have web sites

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eCornell

For profit, non-degree executive and professional courses

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Technology in Education and Distance Education

Question 1: Quality

Is it good education?

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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(Preliminary data; please do not quote)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?

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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 1972.

The British Open University

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• Currently 215,000 students.

• Over 2 million students since 1972.

• 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

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Technology in Education and Distance Education

Question 2: Capital Intensive Education

What are the organizational options?

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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

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Columbia UniversityCambridge University Press

London School of EconomicsNew York Public Library

University of ChicagoUniversity of Michigan

British LibraryAmerican Film Institute

RANDWoods Hole

Victoria and Albert MuseumScience Museum

Natural History Museum

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Technology in Education and Distance Education

Question 3: Ownership and Intellectual Property

If course materials are assets, who owns them?

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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.

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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

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Digital Libraries

By creative use of technology:

Can we build libraries that are of high quality at much lower costs?

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Research Libraries are Expensive

library materials

buildings & facilities

staff

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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.

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computers & networks

The Potential of Digital Libraries

materials

open access

staff

?

staff

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Digital Libraries

Question 1: Economic Models for Open Access

Who pays for open access?

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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

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Old New

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

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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

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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.

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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.

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Digital Libraries

Question 2: Quality

What are the alternatives to peer review?

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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.

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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

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Digital Libraries

Question 3: Brute Force Computing

How far can computers be used for the skilled tasks of professional librarianship?

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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 powermay outperform human intelligence

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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

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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

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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?

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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.]

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Digital Libraries

Question 4: Automated Digital Libraries

What is the state of the art in automated digital libraries?

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Automatic indexing Lycos, Infoseek, Altavista, Google, ...

Query matching Vector methods (Salton)

Ranking importance Google (Page and Brin)

Archiving Internet Archive (Kahle)

Collection development ResearchIndex (Lawrence)

Metadata extraction Informedia (Wactlar)

Automated Digital Libraries: Examples

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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?

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One of Six Core One of Six Core Integration Integration

Demonstration Projects Demonstration Projects for the NSDLfor the NSDL

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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

10,000,000 digital objects

100,000 independent sites

Requires: low-cost, scalable, technology automated collection building and maintenance

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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

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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

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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

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Some Light Reading

William Y. Arms, "Automated digital libraries." D-Lib Magazine, July/August 2000. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july20/07contents.html

William Y. Arms, "Economic models for open-access publishing." iMP, March 2000. http://www.cisp.org/imp/march_2000/03_00arms.htm