Citation
Abramson, A. (2000), "Solutions for Delivering Digital Content in the New Academic Enterprise", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 17 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2000.23917aac.004
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2000, MCB UP Limited
Solutions for Delivering Digital Content in the New Academic Enterprise
Alicia Abramson
A buzzword used quite frequently at EDUCAUSE this year was the term "partnering". Gone are the days when academic computing centers simply bought hardware and software from vendors today, they collaborate with vendors (who have all transformed into "Internet Businesses"), to develop solutions to the challenges academia faces, many of which are driven by the Internet. These include a seemingly infinite demand for digital data, Internet connectivity, and basic computing services.
The program description for this session promised a discussion of "Internet-based business partnerships" and "how Internet solution providers can develop tools to plan for technology transitions, to select the services and products most relevant to its needs and to drive institution (and student) compliance with the intuition's desired standards tailored specifically for an academic enterprise". However, the actual focus of this session was on the development of "server clusters" for the support of various campus computing needs at the academic computing centers of the Penn State University and Cornell. This reviewer was disappointed that there was no meaningful discussion of how Internet-based partnerships are beneficial to the "new academic enterprise" and that there was no description of the tools that Internet businesses provide to help with the technology planning process. The only Internet-based business partnerships discussed featured Dell on the business side of the equation, with Dell's hardware featured as the primary solution specifically the Dell Pentium III (Xeon) based PowerEdge server line.
The session began with an introduction by Scott O'Hare, VP of Dell's Higher Education business unit. O'Hare started off with the frequently-made observation that the Internet is revolutionizing the worlds of business and higher education. He suggested that higher education faces a crucial problem that many old, established companies like the New York Times and IBM faced when the rules of business began to be turned upside down by the Internet: the loss of "market share". Witness how Yahoo!'s market capitalization of $46 billion (after only five years of operation) has overshadowed the Times' market cap of $7 billion (after 150 years of operation). The old businesses were forced to compete in the new Internet economy, in order to maintain their strength. Similarly, if bricks and mortar educational institutions are to survive the challenge that their online competitors pose (for example, the University of Phoenix), like business, they must move substantial parts of their operations to the online world but this can be an expensive proposition. This is where the "server cluster" (powered by Dell) comes in.
A server cluster involves assembling a network of PCs, with one or more PCs acting as central servers for distributed nodes on a network. The advantage of this configuration over traditional centralized mainframe installations is the accessibility to high-powered node computers which access server applications and data while distributing the processing out to the nodes (thereby maintaining optimal server performance). Essentially, according to O'Hare, the PC server cluster provides the flexibility and power needed to support "hyper collaboration" and innovation on university campuses while at the same time lowering costs and allowing IT personnel to provide better customer service. All of this presumably positions universities to compete in the new educational marketplace.
A key element of the PC server cluster strategy is cost it is now possible to use Pentium-based PCs to achieve the computing power that once was available only through expensive supercomputers at a fraction of the cost. An undertaking that illustrates this point is the LION-X project at Penn State University (http://cac.psu.edu/beatnic/Cluster/). Russell Vaught, Senior Director of Academic Computing at Penn State, spoke at length about the nuts and bolts of the hardware configuration, supported operating systems, programming language environments and system performance metrics of the LION-X cluster. The setup includes a single Pentium III 400 MHz server which supplies 1 MB of cache memory to each of the 32 Pentium III 500 MHz nodes. While Vaught mentioned early on that part of the goal of the project was to build a prototype that could be used by other departments and research units on campus, he did not follow up on whether that goal was met. Vaught listed, but did not discuss, several research units that have tested the LION-X cluster, including MM5 Weather Model System researchers, and the Penn Earth and Mineral Sciences department. Vaught's talk was often hard to follow as he sped through background material and focused on minute technical details frequently without providing context. Another weakness of the presentation was its abrupt end, without any discussion of the impact, success, or future directions of the LION-X project.
The last speaker, was David Lifka, Associate Director of the Cornell Theory Center. Lifka discussed a project similar to LION-X at Cornell, called the AC3 Velocity Cluster (http://www.tc.cornell.edu/UserDoc/Cluster/). Lifka stated that the primary goal of the AC3 Velocity Cluster is to provide students and researchers with a multi-purpose, high-performance computing system based on the Windows 2000 (formerly NT) platform. In addition to using relatively inexpensive "commodity" hardware to provide high-end computing resources, an advantage to this setup is that Windows is the "native language" of most students today, which reduces the learning curve associated with accessing powerful computing resources in the past (e.g. learning UNIX). A challenge that the project developers face is implementing a decentralized administration model for the cluster, using the built-in "trust relationships" of the Windows 2000 network operating system. This is no easy task given both the necessary technological and cultural changes involved in a transition to this model.
The session was tied up in a few sentences from Dell's Scott O'Hare, which included a prediction that there will be "radical winners and losers" in both business and higher education, due to the new competitive environment of the Internet. This is no doubt true for institutions of higher education as they become increasingly commoditized. Unfortunately, this session did not present a meaningful case for the importance of academic/corporate partnerships in enhancing the ability of this "new academic enterprise" to succeed in this brave new Internet world.
Scholarship and the Management of Information in the Age of the Electron
Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential (Bush, 1945).
"We have a scholarly communication system in trouble", according to Stanley Chodorow, an EDUCAUSE featured speaker. Over the past 20 years, the cost of scholarly journals has increased almost four times as much as the rate of inflation. This rate of increase continues to outpace library budgets and contributes to the erosion of the ability of academic institutions to sustain and grow the body of knowledge produced therein. In addition, electronic publishing is changing the nature of scholarly communication as we know it. While it is providing new ways for scholars to share and develop knowledge, it is also chipping away at our ability to manage, organize and preserve an exponentially growing body of published scholarship. Chodorow, a Medieval historian and Chair of the Board of Directors of the Council on Library Resources, delivered an engaging talk that included a brief history of the formal Western system of scholarly communication, an economics lesson and a description of how the system that we know today is changing in ways that are both exciting and alarming.
Chodorow traced the beginnings of formal scholarly communication to the ideas of Francis Bacon, the sixteenth/seventeenth-century philosopher and author. It was Bacon's idea of the "universal project" of exploring the world to attain knowledge that influenced the development in 1660 of the first formal Western scholarly society, the Royal Society of London. Soon after the formation of the Royal Society, learned societies began popping up throughout Europe, and eventually in the USA. The function of these learned societies was to allow their members to meet regularly to present the results of their philosophical investigations and scientific discoveries. Out of this practice, in 1665, sprang the first scholarly journal: Philosophical Transactions. Chodorow described this innovation as a landmark in the "self-conscious act of building a scholarly communication system".
The scholarly journal in particular has formed the basis of an academic economy in which scholars exchange their discoveries and knowledge with colleagues, not for money, but for recognition, rank, and reputation. And for most of the last 300 years, scholars have been the primary producers and consumers in the knowledge economy that revolves around print journals. A relatively recent development in this economy, noted Chodorow, can be traced to the post-World War II education boom in the USA. The growth of the US educational system, combined with an emphasis on "useful research" at the major land-grant institutions, created larger markets for the knowledge produced in those institutions. Journal publishing became recognized as a profitable enterprise, eventually resulting in a shift of the control of the journal publishing and distribution process to commercial publishers from the scholarly societies and university presses.
With this shift in roles in the knowledge economy, academia has become a captured market for a product incubated there and produced by scholars. Escalating costs force libraries to cut journal subscriptions undermining the library's mission to support the research, teaching and learning of the university community. Scholars depend on journals to both publish and conduct their research, which in turn influences the tenure and promotion process. Yet faculty and universities are incapable of reining in the price of these journals. The required release of copyright to the publishers is the final insult in a predicament where it seems that many of the benefits of intellectual property flow out of the gates of academia and into the pockets of private enterprise.
Enter the Web. Created as a way for scientists to circumvent the barriers that time and distance present to the scholarly communication and collaboration processes, the Web has, in a short time, become a vast electronic store of late-twentieth-century scholarship. Web-based electronic journals are proliferating, and in some cases, universities and scholarly societies are using the Web as a way to circumvent the traditional publishing process. Libraries in particular, feeling hostage to the ever-escalating costs of printed journals, have advocated the idea of shifting to Web publishing as an alternative to publishing in print journals, thus shifting the means of production and distribution of scholarly journals back to the producers.
But Chodorow cautioned that the Web is not the light at the end of the tunnel in this crisis of scholarly publishing, and in fact produces a unique set of problems that add to the crisis. Chodorow insisted that the "quest for [technological] solutions is a sideshow" and that technology will continue to change the system, but will not repair it. Chodorow argued that, with the importance of established print journals to the tenure and promotion process, most faculty are "not about to jeopardize their careers for a noble principle" by publishing exclusively in online (often unproven) journals. And while the number of "legitimate" electronic journals may be increasing, Chodorow believes that electronic publishing, more so than print publishing, encourages mediocrity.
In Chodorow's opinion, the quality of scholarship is declining with electronic publishing. He believes that editorial authority and peer review are concepts that are being lost in the electronic publishing world. Why limit an author's piece when there is an unlimited amount of disk space to store the electrons it is written on? And then there is the issue of trust. Established print journals, after many years, develop a level of trust based on the reputation of the editors and contributors that is not matched by electronic journals today. Again, this plays into the tenure and promotion process. If Professor X publishes in a highly selective, peer-reviewed journal of high repute, Dean Y does not necessarily have to read the article to evaluate the work, as there is an implied quality for articles published there. But if Dean Y has never heard of the electronic journal the Professor X publishes in, he or she must do more work to figure out if Professor X's work is any good. In Chodorow's words, "universities are judgment organizations and technology is undermining this".
Another troubling result of electronic publishing for Chodorow is what he calls the "scholarship of accretion" for example, a layered discourse on a Web site that buries the role of participants in all its iterations, or a paper published electronically that is revised over time, so that it is never static, and consequently obscuring the development of the ideas therein. These problems make it harder for us to keep track of who said what, and when, or how certain ideas evolved, or from where they originated. Chodorow predicts that an inevitable result of this "scholarship of accretion" is the "End of Bibliography". Because bibliography depends on the publication of discrete units (e.g. articles and books) that show the development of a field, this activity will (and must) be replaced by greater activity in the creation of periodic review articles which can serve as history of disciplines at various points in time.
Chodorow concluded his talk by making a strong case for the establishment of strong editorial presence and peer review in electronic scholarly publications. While it may be true that "information wants to be free", Chodorow argues that, particularly for scholarly information, that may not be best. The challenge for librarians, of course will be to continue to develop systems and methods to selectively preserve and organize the electronic record of scholarship, in a way that will be usable tomorrow.
Reference
Bush, V. (1945), "As we may think", The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 176 No. 1, pp. 101-8.
Alicia Abramson is Director, Library Information Systems, University Library, California State University, Sacramento.abramson@csus.edu