- Email: [email protected]
An action research report on the Korean national digital library
Information & Management 39 (2002) 255–260
An action research report on the Korean national digital library Ook Lee* School of Commerce, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Qld 4072, Australia Received 12 June 1999; received in revised form 13 January 2001; accepted 16 March 2001
Abstract This paper presents the results of my action research. I was involved in establishing and running a digital library that was founded by the government of South Korea. The process involved understanding the relationship between the national IT infrastructure and the success factors of the digital library. In building, the national IT infrastructure, a digital library system was implemented; it combines all existing digitized university libraries and can provide overseas information, such as foreign journal articles, instantly and freely to every Korean researcher. An empirical survey was made as a part of the action research; the survey determined user satisfaction in the newly established national digital library. After obtaining the survey results, I suggested that the current way of running the nationwide government-owned digital library should be retained. # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Digital libraries; Action research; IT infrastructure; Web technology; Electronic copyright
1. Introduction This paper describes a digital library project that was initiated by the South Korean government, while building the national IT infrastructure. Since South Korea is a developing country, its national IT infrastructure is not as well articulated as that in developed countries, such as the USA. National IT infrastructure can be defined as the vision of broadband communications that are interoperable as though they were a single network, easily accessible and widely distributed to all groups within a single network and to all groups within the society bringing business, education, and government services directly to households and facilitating peer-to-peer communication throughout society [9]. South Korea embarked on building its
*
Tel.: þ61-617-3365-6759; fax: þ61-617-3365-6788. E-mail address: [email protected] (O. Lee).
IT infrastructure in 1994; the effort was then officially called the ‘‘Korea information infrastructure (KII)’’ project [6]. The Ministry of Education decided to establish a nationwide digital library as a part of the national IT infrastructure in 1996. An agency called Korea Research Information Center (KRIC) was established in the beginning of 1997 and this built a national digital library called Research Information Service System (RISS). A study was made on how the national digital library was perceived by users and results provided insights for implementing digital libraries, given the less sophisticated national IT infrastructure.
2. Action research as a research method This effort was conducted using action research. This had the advantage of taking into account the full richness of organizational interactions [8]. Such
0378-7206/02/$ – see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 3 7 8 - 7 2 0 6 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 0 9 4 - 5
256
O. Lee / Information & Management 39 (2002) 255–260
studies are characterized by the researcher applying positive intervention to the client organization, while gathering field data about it [7]. These characteristics provided a solid ground for my decision to use action research in this study. The concept and method was originally defined by Susman and Evered [15], where action research is split into five stages: diagnosing, action planning, action taking, evaluation, and specifying learning. Firstly, an on-line survey of users of RISS was conducted in order to assess user satisfaction with the digital library service. Secondly, for action planning and taking, KRIC went forward by maintaining the current system. Then, for evaluating and specifying learning, the performance of the digital library was evaluated; this identified many problems, which, in turn, became a source of valuable lessons learned in establishing and running a nationwide/ nonprofit digital library in South Korea.
3. RISS: a nationwide/free of charge digital library In the minds of bureaucrats of the Ministry of Education, it seemed to be a waste of valuable resources when they realized that many major university libraries were in the process of building their own digital libraries. Other national institutions, such as the Library of Congress and National Library of South Korea, were also planning to build digital libraries. In contrast to the US, where many entities, such as universities and institutions created their own digital libraries, the South Korean government determined that a nationwide digital library should exist as a single entity in the country. It was also deemed necessary that the digital library should encompass all information needed for research and that its services should be free of charge to anybody who was eligible. The following are the objectives of KRIC, the government agency that is in charge of establishing and running the digital library, RISS [10]: To establish a nationwide research information sharing system. To nourish the advanced research environment by providing up-to-date research information. To organize a nationwide research information network.
To integrate and maintain the digital libraries of Korean universities and institutions. To conserve the national budget by efficiently managing research information.
4. A survey of the users of RISS The users of RISS were surveyed. The total number of registered users was estimated to be 10,000: only a person with research needs is allowed to become a user. Thus, university professors, graduate students, researchers at research institutes, and undergraduate students with recommendation from faculty advisors are typical users. KRIC requires any applicant to provide a valid e-mail and IP address so that they could verify the users identity. In the survey, since the e-mail addresses of all registered users were available, direct e-mail questionnaires were sent through the Internet. Out of 10,013 users, 5556 answered the complete questionnaire. The following are the results: 1. What is your attitude toward the RISS user interface? Favorable Unfavorable Do not know
90% 7% 3%
It is clear that most of the users like the interface, which is based on the WWW with graphical notation. 2. Which service of the RISS do you use most frequently? Overseas research information service Union catalog service Journal article service Research support information service Internet classification service BBS
72% 13% 10% 3% 1% 1%
Most of the advanced research information, such as internationally acclaimed academic journals, is written in English and the material is located overseas. KRIC is able to provide full-texts of those articles electronically through its overseas
O. Lee / Information & Management 39 (2002) 255–260
research information service: this is its most popular service. 3. If you have chosen overseas research information service in question 2, answer the following: What is the most inconvenient aspect of using the overseas research information service? Difficulty in obtaining a full-text of the desired article Difficulty in using the interface Slowness of the system
95% 2% 3%
Users were not able to obtain full-texts of the desired articles from the service even though it was supposed to provide full-texts free of charge. This difficulty arose from the fact that KRIC could not afford to pay for the copyright of every article requested. 4. Are you satisfied with RISS overall? Rate your satisfaction from 1 (very negative) to 5 (very positive). 5 4 3 2 1
22% 23% 35% 15% 5% A surprisingly large number of users answered that they had a good impression of the service and quite a few users were very satisfied. This indicated that the national digital library of South Korea was well received by users and should be retained.
5. Analysis of results The KRIC was unable to buy full-text articles of every desired foreign journal and provide them to Korean researchers without additional charge due to the astronomical price demanded by the copyright owners. The overseas information service companies that negotiated with KRIC demanded that they be paid by the ‘‘number of sites’’ concept rather than the ‘‘number of users’’ concept. In other words, if KRIC intended to provide the overseas information to everybody in Korea, then it would have had to pay for all the
257
sites that could provide KRIC service. Considering that all universities and research institutions could be potential sites, there could be more than a thousand sites. The KRICs proposal was that paying by ‘‘number of users’’ should be applied, since there were relatively few users on the system at a given time because this system was available only for registered researchers. The action researcher observed many fruitless negotiations between KRIC and the information companies. The KRIC had to resolve this issue in order to achieve the true goal of providing all requested research information free of charge. Here are summaries of problems at KRIC and RISS that were observed during action research. 1. Even though web technology is state-of-the-art, there were times that the system was very slow, probably due to the large number of users logged on. Limiting the number of users on the system logging on simultaneously could solve this problem. 2. The BBS should be more frequently used, since this is the only place where users and the system staff can interact. The usage of the BBS is low, probably because of lack of trust between users and KRIC staff. This can be explained by considering the Korean culture: the people are distrustful of authority due to a long history of oppressive military dictatorship. 3. The copyright problem should be solved. One suggestion was that KRIC, as a part of South Korean government, could act as a national contractor to overseas information companies. For example, for a service like FirstSearch, KRIC could pay a fixed fee and obtain the right of distribution of all articles from them to anybody in South Korea. If the South Korean government is serious about building a digital library system as a part of the national IT infrastructure, it should consider spending a significant amount of money to pay for a national license.
6. Developing digital libraries Digital libraries should provide several different capabilities to scholars. For example, some merely need
258
O. Lee / Information & Management 39 (2002) 255–260
computerization of the traditional library catalogs: ‘‘electronic cataloging’’. Others expect the library to provide new approaches to acquisition and storage; new modes of interaction with patrons [4]. This new concept is made possible through the development of IT, especially the Internet. To aid in the development of this promising technology, in 1993 the US government introduced legislation and a number of funding initiatives with the digital library as its prominent theme. In 1994, there were many talks, panels, tutorials, workshops and conferences on digital libraries. Lunin and Fox [11] note that the 102nd and 103rd Congress, as well as President Clinton and Vice president Gore, called for digital libraries to help preserve and extend the USs global competitiveness. They also called for the creation of an integrated virtual national digital library in the US. There were also many independent digital libraries functioning well in US. These include projects in: the University of Michigan [3], the Illinois [13], the Alexandria [14], and the UC Berkeleys [17]. This made sense, since in the US, there were already many established digital libraries and coordinating them into a networked digital library was possible. However, in developing countries where few digital libraries exist, a physically centralized version of the national digital library should be a more plausible option than the US-style networked national digital library. While many are interested in establishing and running a digital library, only a few have the perspective to look at the digital library from the users point of view. Namely, a user might not want to use the digital library, because its interface is difficult to use, not because it contains no interesting documents [5]. The design of the user interface is almost as important as the copyright issue for the success of the digital library. This aspect is the primary reason that, with web technology, the digital library has become much more popular with users who find the interface attractive. A good real-life example is the case of Japans national digital library. Japans National Center for Science Information Systems (NACSIS), which is the national digital library of Japan, was established in 1986, when there was no web, not to mention the Internet [12]. Over the years, they have provided services in a very cumbersome Unix environment to which one had to telnet from home. In 1997, the staff
of KRIC, including the action researcher, visited NACSIS for the purpose of acquiring useful insight on establishing and running a national digital library. It was observed that transition to the WWW-based interface was only partially completed; i.e. the telnet Unix system was still the common interface of the Japanese national digital library. Incidentally, NACSIS was concerned about the low subscription/usage rate by Japanese researchers, who were supposed to be the active beneficiaries of the Japanese national digital library. The more astounding fact was that the engineers at NACSIS knew that the real cause of the low subscription/usage rate was the cumbersome interface and they agreed that they should move into a web-based system quickly. But it appeared that the NACSIS organization was too bureaucratic and resisting change. A better example of a national digital library in utilizing web technology was found in another Asian country: Singapore, which implemented a national digital library called timely information for All, relevant and affordable (TiARA). This system was a multi-agency collaborative effort by the National Computer Board, the National Library Board, The National Science and Technology Board, and participating libraries [16]. It provided users with on-line access to a network of library catalogs, local and international databases, and links to a vast range of interesting and informative Internet web sites. In other words, this national digital library successfully utilized web technology by having library information available in a convenient and stimulating format. Naturally KRIC decided to utilize top-of-the-line web technology in creating RISS, which was, thus, able to satisfy users and achieve the high subscription/ usage rate.
7. Social and user perspectives on the digital library Only a few studies have been made for the purpose of identifying new social and user phenomena in the digital library. Covi and Kling [2] showed that just building a digital library would not be enough; the digital collections, storage, and transmission should be useful to people who use them. They discussed what constituted effective digital library use; they saw the
O. Lee / Information & Management 39 (2002) 255–260
digital library system as a human activity that unites readers, authors, librarians, and researchers with electronic materials, resource streams, computer equipment, and know-how. An emergent community of research and practice whose members are involved in the social informatics of digital libraries is described in Bishop and Star [1]. They suggest that an inferior IT infrastructure cannot support the active use of the digital library. For example, poor children in a less developed country will find it extremely difficult to experience the world of the digital library simply because the national IT infrastructure is not there to support their use of digital libraries. As a public asset, the digital library concept has to be examined from the social and user point of view. People have to feel the need to use a digital library rather than a physical library; the digital library has to be at least as useful. Three critical success factors were observed to draw people to the digital library during action research: 7.1. Critical success factors for the digital library 1. Content: People must find something useful in the digital library; it may or may not be available in a physical library. 2. Interface: The interface must be easy to use. The interface is the librarian of the digital library; if it is easy to use and understand, people will use it. 3. Speed: The waiting time at the librarians help desk in a physical library has its analog in the waiting time for digital responses; if the digital library is fast, people will use it. All these factors were considered carefully when KRIC implemented RISS. But as for content, even though KRIC tried hard to get the copyright matter solved and to provide full-text articles from overseas, it was still unable to reach an agreement with overseas information sellers. Thus, even with other interesting information on KRICs web-based digital library system, it was predicted that researchers would be disappointed from the standpoint of the contents; this later proved to be true in the empirical survey. When KRIC built its system, it asked the government to install fiber-optic communication cables to KRIC. Thus, theoretically there should have
259
been no speed problem. However, many users complained that the system was slow. There could be two reasons for this. One reason was that too many people tried to use a few very popular information services. The other was that the Korean national IT infrastructure was still not sufficiently sophisticated; i.e. people using computers at home had a hard time transmitting and receiving on the Internet due to outdated telephone lines.
8. Conclusion This article has introduced the South Korean governments initiative in creating a national digital library. Since the national IT infrastructure of South Korea was not yet well developed, there were many problems. For example, the services were provided with good web technology but not many people were using the Internet due to lack of a good national IT infrastructure, such as fiber-optic cables for fast and reliable data communication. Even if personal computers were widely available at homes and offices, the phone billing system was out-of-date; there was also no unlimited local calling rate in South Korea. Therefore, using the Internet was not only slow but also very expensive. As a conclusion of the action research, it was suggested that the future success of the national digital library would depend on the following two factors. 8.1. Critical success factors for the national digital library 1. The national IT infrastructure should be further developed so that many people can use the web at a faster and cheaper rate. 2. The copyright issue should be resolved before the national digital library can function as a benefactor to researchers by providing free-of-charge full-text articles from overseas.
Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Prof. Sibley for valuable comments and tremendous help in revising this paper.
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References [1] A.P. Bishop, S.L. Star, Social informatics of digital library use and infrastructure, Journal of the American Society for Information Science 31 (Annual Review of Information Science and Technology) (1996) 301–401. [2] L. Covi, R. Kling, Organizational dimensions of effective digital library use: closed rational and open natural systems models, Journal of the American Society for Information Science 47 (9), 1996, pp. 672–689. [3] L. Crum, University of Michigan digital library project, Communications of the ACM 38 (4), 1995, pp. 63–64. [4] E.A. Fox, R.M. Akscyn, R.K. Furuta, J.J. Leggett, Digital libraries, Communications of the ACM 38 (4), 1995, pp. 23–28. [5] E.A. Fox, D. Hix, L.T. Nowell, D.J. Brueni, Users, user interfaces, and objects: envision, a digital library, Journal of the American Society for Information Science 44 (8), 1993, pp. 480–491. [6] K.H. Jeong, J.L. King, National information infrastructure initiatives in Korea: vision and policy issues, Information Infrastructure and Policy 5 (2), 1996, pp. 119–133. [7] S. Jonsonn, Action Research, in: H. Nissen, H.K. Klein, R. Hirschheim (Eds.), Information Systems Research: Contemporary Approaches and Emergent Traditions, North-Holland, New York, NY, 1991. [8] N.F. Kock, The effects of asynchronous groupware on business process improvement, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Waikato, New Zealand, 1997 (unpublished). [9] K. Kraemer, J. Dedrick, K.H. Jeong, V. Thierry, J. West, P.K. Wong, National information infrastructure: a cross-country comparison, Information Infrastructure and Policy 5 (2), 1996, pp. 81–93. [10] KRIC, Korea Research Information Center, 1998, http:// www.kric.ac.kr.
[11] L.F. Lunin, E.A. Fox, Perspectives on digital libraries: introduction and overview, Journal of the American Society for Information Science 44 (8), 1993, pp. 440–445. [12] NACSIS, National Center for Science Information Systems, 1998, http://www.nacsis.ac.jp. [13] B. Schatz, Building the interspace: the Illinois digital library project, Communications of the ACM 38 (4), 1995, pp. 62– 63. [14] T.R. Smith, J. Frew, Alexandria digital library, Communications of the ACM 38 (4), 1995, pp. 61–62. [15] G.I. Susman, R.D. Evered, An assessment of the scientific merits of action research, Administrative Science Quarterly 23, 1978, pp. 582–603. [16] TiARA, Timely information for All, Relevant and Affordable, 1998, http://www.digilib.org.sg. [17] R. Wilensky, UC Berkeleys digital library project, Communications of the ACM 38 (4), 1995, pp. 60. Ook Lee is a senior lecturer at the School of Commerce of the University of Queensland. He served as a professor of MIS at University of Nevada at Las Vegas, North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, USA, and Hansung University in Seoul, Korea. Previously, he worked as a senior information research scientist at Korea Research Information Center in Seoul, Korea. He has published in Journal of Software Maintenance, Electronic Markets, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communications, and authored a book titled ‘‘Internet Marketing Research: Theory and Practice’’. He received his PhD degree from Claremont Graduate University, MS degree from Northwestern University, and BS degree from Seoul National University.
An action research report on the Korean national digital library Ook Lee* School of Commerce, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Qld 4072, Australia Received 12 June 1999; received in revised form 13 January 2001; accepted 16 March 2001
Abstract This paper presents the results of my action research. I was involved in establishing and running a digital library that was founded by the government of South Korea. The process involved understanding the relationship between the national IT infrastructure and the success factors of the digital library. In building, the national IT infrastructure, a digital library system was implemented; it combines all existing digitized university libraries and can provide overseas information, such as foreign journal articles, instantly and freely to every Korean researcher. An empirical survey was made as a part of the action research; the survey determined user satisfaction in the newly established national digital library. After obtaining the survey results, I suggested that the current way of running the nationwide government-owned digital library should be retained. # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Digital libraries; Action research; IT infrastructure; Web technology; Electronic copyright
1. Introduction This paper describes a digital library project that was initiated by the South Korean government, while building the national IT infrastructure. Since South Korea is a developing country, its national IT infrastructure is not as well articulated as that in developed countries, such as the USA. National IT infrastructure can be defined as the vision of broadband communications that are interoperable as though they were a single network, easily accessible and widely distributed to all groups within a single network and to all groups within the society bringing business, education, and government services directly to households and facilitating peer-to-peer communication throughout society [9]. South Korea embarked on building its
*
Tel.: þ61-617-3365-6759; fax: þ61-617-3365-6788. E-mail address: [email protected] (O. Lee).
IT infrastructure in 1994; the effort was then officially called the ‘‘Korea information infrastructure (KII)’’ project [6]. The Ministry of Education decided to establish a nationwide digital library as a part of the national IT infrastructure in 1996. An agency called Korea Research Information Center (KRIC) was established in the beginning of 1997 and this built a national digital library called Research Information Service System (RISS). A study was made on how the national digital library was perceived by users and results provided insights for implementing digital libraries, given the less sophisticated national IT infrastructure.
2. Action research as a research method This effort was conducted using action research. This had the advantage of taking into account the full richness of organizational interactions [8]. Such
0378-7206/02/$ – see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 3 7 8 - 7 2 0 6 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 0 9 4 - 5
256
O. Lee / Information & Management 39 (2002) 255–260
studies are characterized by the researcher applying positive intervention to the client organization, while gathering field data about it [7]. These characteristics provided a solid ground for my decision to use action research in this study. The concept and method was originally defined by Susman and Evered [15], where action research is split into five stages: diagnosing, action planning, action taking, evaluation, and specifying learning. Firstly, an on-line survey of users of RISS was conducted in order to assess user satisfaction with the digital library service. Secondly, for action planning and taking, KRIC went forward by maintaining the current system. Then, for evaluating and specifying learning, the performance of the digital library was evaluated; this identified many problems, which, in turn, became a source of valuable lessons learned in establishing and running a nationwide/ nonprofit digital library in South Korea.
3. RISS: a nationwide/free of charge digital library In the minds of bureaucrats of the Ministry of Education, it seemed to be a waste of valuable resources when they realized that many major university libraries were in the process of building their own digital libraries. Other national institutions, such as the Library of Congress and National Library of South Korea, were also planning to build digital libraries. In contrast to the US, where many entities, such as universities and institutions created their own digital libraries, the South Korean government determined that a nationwide digital library should exist as a single entity in the country. It was also deemed necessary that the digital library should encompass all information needed for research and that its services should be free of charge to anybody who was eligible. The following are the objectives of KRIC, the government agency that is in charge of establishing and running the digital library, RISS [10]: To establish a nationwide research information sharing system. To nourish the advanced research environment by providing up-to-date research information. To organize a nationwide research information network.
To integrate and maintain the digital libraries of Korean universities and institutions. To conserve the national budget by efficiently managing research information.
4. A survey of the users of RISS The users of RISS were surveyed. The total number of registered users was estimated to be 10,000: only a person with research needs is allowed to become a user. Thus, university professors, graduate students, researchers at research institutes, and undergraduate students with recommendation from faculty advisors are typical users. KRIC requires any applicant to provide a valid e-mail and IP address so that they could verify the users identity. In the survey, since the e-mail addresses of all registered users were available, direct e-mail questionnaires were sent through the Internet. Out of 10,013 users, 5556 answered the complete questionnaire. The following are the results: 1. What is your attitude toward the RISS user interface? Favorable Unfavorable Do not know
90% 7% 3%
It is clear that most of the users like the interface, which is based on the WWW with graphical notation. 2. Which service of the RISS do you use most frequently? Overseas research information service Union catalog service Journal article service Research support information service Internet classification service BBS
72% 13% 10% 3% 1% 1%
Most of the advanced research information, such as internationally acclaimed academic journals, is written in English and the material is located overseas. KRIC is able to provide full-texts of those articles electronically through its overseas
O. Lee / Information & Management 39 (2002) 255–260
research information service: this is its most popular service. 3. If you have chosen overseas research information service in question 2, answer the following: What is the most inconvenient aspect of using the overseas research information service? Difficulty in obtaining a full-text of the desired article Difficulty in using the interface Slowness of the system
95% 2% 3%
Users were not able to obtain full-texts of the desired articles from the service even though it was supposed to provide full-texts free of charge. This difficulty arose from the fact that KRIC could not afford to pay for the copyright of every article requested. 4. Are you satisfied with RISS overall? Rate your satisfaction from 1 (very negative) to 5 (very positive). 5 4 3 2 1
22% 23% 35% 15% 5% A surprisingly large number of users answered that they had a good impression of the service and quite a few users were very satisfied. This indicated that the national digital library of South Korea was well received by users and should be retained.
5. Analysis of results The KRIC was unable to buy full-text articles of every desired foreign journal and provide them to Korean researchers without additional charge due to the astronomical price demanded by the copyright owners. The overseas information service companies that negotiated with KRIC demanded that they be paid by the ‘‘number of sites’’ concept rather than the ‘‘number of users’’ concept. In other words, if KRIC intended to provide the overseas information to everybody in Korea, then it would have had to pay for all the
257
sites that could provide KRIC service. Considering that all universities and research institutions could be potential sites, there could be more than a thousand sites. The KRICs proposal was that paying by ‘‘number of users’’ should be applied, since there were relatively few users on the system at a given time because this system was available only for registered researchers. The action researcher observed many fruitless negotiations between KRIC and the information companies. The KRIC had to resolve this issue in order to achieve the true goal of providing all requested research information free of charge. Here are summaries of problems at KRIC and RISS that were observed during action research. 1. Even though web technology is state-of-the-art, there were times that the system was very slow, probably due to the large number of users logged on. Limiting the number of users on the system logging on simultaneously could solve this problem. 2. The BBS should be more frequently used, since this is the only place where users and the system staff can interact. The usage of the BBS is low, probably because of lack of trust between users and KRIC staff. This can be explained by considering the Korean culture: the people are distrustful of authority due to a long history of oppressive military dictatorship. 3. The copyright problem should be solved. One suggestion was that KRIC, as a part of South Korean government, could act as a national contractor to overseas information companies. For example, for a service like FirstSearch, KRIC could pay a fixed fee and obtain the right of distribution of all articles from them to anybody in South Korea. If the South Korean government is serious about building a digital library system as a part of the national IT infrastructure, it should consider spending a significant amount of money to pay for a national license.
6. Developing digital libraries Digital libraries should provide several different capabilities to scholars. For example, some merely need
258
O. Lee / Information & Management 39 (2002) 255–260
computerization of the traditional library catalogs: ‘‘electronic cataloging’’. Others expect the library to provide new approaches to acquisition and storage; new modes of interaction with patrons [4]. This new concept is made possible through the development of IT, especially the Internet. To aid in the development of this promising technology, in 1993 the US government introduced legislation and a number of funding initiatives with the digital library as its prominent theme. In 1994, there were many talks, panels, tutorials, workshops and conferences on digital libraries. Lunin and Fox [11] note that the 102nd and 103rd Congress, as well as President Clinton and Vice president Gore, called for digital libraries to help preserve and extend the USs global competitiveness. They also called for the creation of an integrated virtual national digital library in the US. There were also many independent digital libraries functioning well in US. These include projects in: the University of Michigan [3], the Illinois [13], the Alexandria [14], and the UC Berkeleys [17]. This made sense, since in the US, there were already many established digital libraries and coordinating them into a networked digital library was possible. However, in developing countries where few digital libraries exist, a physically centralized version of the national digital library should be a more plausible option than the US-style networked national digital library. While many are interested in establishing and running a digital library, only a few have the perspective to look at the digital library from the users point of view. Namely, a user might not want to use the digital library, because its interface is difficult to use, not because it contains no interesting documents [5]. The design of the user interface is almost as important as the copyright issue for the success of the digital library. This aspect is the primary reason that, with web technology, the digital library has become much more popular with users who find the interface attractive. A good real-life example is the case of Japans national digital library. Japans National Center for Science Information Systems (NACSIS), which is the national digital library of Japan, was established in 1986, when there was no web, not to mention the Internet [12]. Over the years, they have provided services in a very cumbersome Unix environment to which one had to telnet from home. In 1997, the staff
of KRIC, including the action researcher, visited NACSIS for the purpose of acquiring useful insight on establishing and running a national digital library. It was observed that transition to the WWW-based interface was only partially completed; i.e. the telnet Unix system was still the common interface of the Japanese national digital library. Incidentally, NACSIS was concerned about the low subscription/usage rate by Japanese researchers, who were supposed to be the active beneficiaries of the Japanese national digital library. The more astounding fact was that the engineers at NACSIS knew that the real cause of the low subscription/usage rate was the cumbersome interface and they agreed that they should move into a web-based system quickly. But it appeared that the NACSIS organization was too bureaucratic and resisting change. A better example of a national digital library in utilizing web technology was found in another Asian country: Singapore, which implemented a national digital library called timely information for All, relevant and affordable (TiARA). This system was a multi-agency collaborative effort by the National Computer Board, the National Library Board, The National Science and Technology Board, and participating libraries [16]. It provided users with on-line access to a network of library catalogs, local and international databases, and links to a vast range of interesting and informative Internet web sites. In other words, this national digital library successfully utilized web technology by having library information available in a convenient and stimulating format. Naturally KRIC decided to utilize top-of-the-line web technology in creating RISS, which was, thus, able to satisfy users and achieve the high subscription/ usage rate.
7. Social and user perspectives on the digital library Only a few studies have been made for the purpose of identifying new social and user phenomena in the digital library. Covi and Kling [2] showed that just building a digital library would not be enough; the digital collections, storage, and transmission should be useful to people who use them. They discussed what constituted effective digital library use; they saw the
O. Lee / Information & Management 39 (2002) 255–260
digital library system as a human activity that unites readers, authors, librarians, and researchers with electronic materials, resource streams, computer equipment, and know-how. An emergent community of research and practice whose members are involved in the social informatics of digital libraries is described in Bishop and Star [1]. They suggest that an inferior IT infrastructure cannot support the active use of the digital library. For example, poor children in a less developed country will find it extremely difficult to experience the world of the digital library simply because the national IT infrastructure is not there to support their use of digital libraries. As a public asset, the digital library concept has to be examined from the social and user point of view. People have to feel the need to use a digital library rather than a physical library; the digital library has to be at least as useful. Three critical success factors were observed to draw people to the digital library during action research: 7.1. Critical success factors for the digital library 1. Content: People must find something useful in the digital library; it may or may not be available in a physical library. 2. Interface: The interface must be easy to use. The interface is the librarian of the digital library; if it is easy to use and understand, people will use it. 3. Speed: The waiting time at the librarians help desk in a physical library has its analog in the waiting time for digital responses; if the digital library is fast, people will use it. All these factors were considered carefully when KRIC implemented RISS. But as for content, even though KRIC tried hard to get the copyright matter solved and to provide full-text articles from overseas, it was still unable to reach an agreement with overseas information sellers. Thus, even with other interesting information on KRICs web-based digital library system, it was predicted that researchers would be disappointed from the standpoint of the contents; this later proved to be true in the empirical survey. When KRIC built its system, it asked the government to install fiber-optic communication cables to KRIC. Thus, theoretically there should have
259
been no speed problem. However, many users complained that the system was slow. There could be two reasons for this. One reason was that too many people tried to use a few very popular information services. The other was that the Korean national IT infrastructure was still not sufficiently sophisticated; i.e. people using computers at home had a hard time transmitting and receiving on the Internet due to outdated telephone lines.
8. Conclusion This article has introduced the South Korean governments initiative in creating a national digital library. Since the national IT infrastructure of South Korea was not yet well developed, there were many problems. For example, the services were provided with good web technology but not many people were using the Internet due to lack of a good national IT infrastructure, such as fiber-optic cables for fast and reliable data communication. Even if personal computers were widely available at homes and offices, the phone billing system was out-of-date; there was also no unlimited local calling rate in South Korea. Therefore, using the Internet was not only slow but also very expensive. As a conclusion of the action research, it was suggested that the future success of the national digital library would depend on the following two factors. 8.1. Critical success factors for the national digital library 1. The national IT infrastructure should be further developed so that many people can use the web at a faster and cheaper rate. 2. The copyright issue should be resolved before the national digital library can function as a benefactor to researchers by providing free-of-charge full-text articles from overseas.
Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Prof. Sibley for valuable comments and tremendous help in revising this paper.
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[11] L.F. Lunin, E.A. Fox, Perspectives on digital libraries: introduction and overview, Journal of the American Society for Information Science 44 (8), 1993, pp. 440–445. [12] NACSIS, National Center for Science Information Systems, 1998, http://www.nacsis.ac.jp. [13] B. Schatz, Building the interspace: the Illinois digital library project, Communications of the ACM 38 (4), 1995, pp. 62– 63. [14] T.R. Smith, J. Frew, Alexandria digital library, Communications of the ACM 38 (4), 1995, pp. 61–62. [15] G.I. Susman, R.D. Evered, An assessment of the scientific merits of action research, Administrative Science Quarterly 23, 1978, pp. 582–603. [16] TiARA, Timely information for All, Relevant and Affordable, 1998, http://www.digilib.org.sg. [17] R. Wilensky, UC Berkeleys digital library project, Communications of the ACM 38 (4), 1995, pp. 60. Ook Lee is a senior lecturer at the School of Commerce of the University of Queensland. He served as a professor of MIS at University of Nevada at Las Vegas, North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, USA, and Hansung University in Seoul, Korea. Previously, he worked as a senior information research scientist at Korea Research Information Center in Seoul, Korea. He has published in Journal of Software Maintenance, Electronic Markets, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communications, and authored a book titled ‘‘Internet Marketing Research: Theory and Practice’’. He received his PhD degree from Claremont Graduate University, MS degree from Northwestern University, and BS degree from Seoul National University.