PANEL ON MEETING THE NEEDS OF PEOPLE
Chaired by:
Richard E. Quandt
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
c/o Department of Economics
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544-1021
quandt@princeton.edu
[Ching-chih Chen]
We are back to the program, and I would
like to turn the chairship to Richard Quandt from the Mellon Foundation.
He has been very gracious to take time from his very busy schedule to be
with us, and he has been making enormous contributions at this conference
via his active interaction with us. Since the first paper of this session
chaired by him is his own paper, let me take the chance to introduce him.
Richard is Professor of Economics at Princeton University since 1990 and
is heavily involved with the Mellon Foundation. He is specifically responsible
for Mellon's major programs related to the Former Soviet Union (FSU) countries.
In the area of libraries and information centers, Mellon has contributed
a substantial amount of money to help many key library and informa-tion
organizations, particularly, the national and major university libraries
in at least more than six or seven countries in Eastern Europe. When I
first knew about this in late 1992, it was to automate their libraries
with automated inte-grated library systems. Since then, these activities
have expanded and we look forward to hear what he has to say. With that
brief introduction, Richard, thank you again for taking your time to join
us here.
[Richard Quandt]
Thank you very much for your very kind
words. I am sure that I am being put on the program here at the beginning
so that I can be a good example to the rest of the speakers in this session
in terms of keeping in time with the schedule.
9______________________
PANEL ON MEETING THE NEEDS OF PEOPLE
ASSISTANCE FOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN EASTERN EUROPE
Richard E. Quandt
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
c/o Department of Economics
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544-1021
quandt@princeton.edu
Introduction
It has been my good fortune, since December 1989, to be in charge of the Mellon Foundation's East European program. From the very beginning, the Trustees' guidelines for East Europe were to provide Foundation assistance for (1) promot-ing economics and management training and the transformation of the East Euro-pean economies to market-oriented economies, (2) modernizing and upgrading the infrastructure of universities and other institutions of higher learning. Several years after the beginning of the program in January 1990, a third objective was added, and (3) enhancing the effectiveness of agriculture.
Consequently, the East European program of the Foundation has been much more narrowly focused than the general activities of the Foundation, which include substantial programs in culture and the arts,1 professional education and scholarship and research, conservation and the environment, public affairs,2 and demography and population studies. The underlying philosophy was that the East European activities of the Foundation would not become part of a permanent program but instead were a short-to-intermediate response to the sudden and unexpected political changes in 1989. In light of the limited horizon for these activities, it appeared important to concentrate the Foundation's resources in order to make a lasting impact. Partly for the same reason, the Foundation decided to operate exclusively in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, the last of these recently having become the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
It is worth noting that a number of foundations have been active in the region. Among the earliest were the Soros Foundation(s)3 and the Ford Foundation, soon to be joined by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Rockefeller Brothers' Fund, the MacArthur Foundation, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Mott Foundation, and a number of others. In 1990 alone, the assistance provided for East European causes by the top 15 or so U.S. foundations amounted to about $50 million. For the last 3 years, the Mellon Foundation has been making grants for the benefit of the region at the rate of approximately $8 million per year. The largest contributions in East Europe have been made by the Soros Foundations, which currently have a spending level in excess of $100 million per year.
It would be misleading not to acknowledge the very substantial contributions of USAID and USIA, as well as of the European Union and various West Euro-pean governments through their TEMPUS and PHARE programs. Most of the activities supported by these agencies have had economics and management training as well as other types of training and research as their objectives. Rela-tively small portions of the support provided by U.S. foundations and govern-ment agencies or by European agencies has gone toward infrastructure invest-ment, with a notable exception being the World Bank, which has supported major investments in an educational infrastructure in Hungary.
In the subsequent sections I provide a brief overview of the Foundation's activities in promoting informational efficiency.
Support for Libraries
The Foundation has had a long-standing interest in libraries, and its concern for libraries received recent expression in a volume by Cummings, Witte, Bowen, Lazarus, and Ekman, entitled University Libraries and Scholarly Communication (1992) and in a paper by Ekman and Quandt, entitled "Scholarly Communication, Academic Libraries, and Technology." Upon investigating the conditions in which East European research libraries operated, it rapidly became clear that they faced a number of exceptionally serious problems that would seriously retard their catching up with the Western world. First, for nearly five decades they were seriously hampered in acquiring Western scholarly materials, partly because of their shortage of Western foreign exchange, and partly because of ideological hostility toward Western materials, at least in the humanities and social sciences. Second, libraries--in complete conformity with Communist ideology--were merely repositories of knowledge, with no pretense of offering service to library patrons; essentially all libraries were closed-stack, and cataloguing systems extremely archaic, irrational, and nonuniform in the extreme.4 Third, hardware and software to improve the efficiency of acquisitions, cataloguing, circulation, and so on, were notably absent, except for a few scattered personal computers (PCs) running ISIS, a Unesco-distributed product.
The Foundation's response was on three fronts:
• Second, the Foundation began to support various book and journal donation programs originating in the United States. Some of these were small, volunteer efforts by isolated academics at U.S. universities, others were on a larger scale and more organized, such as those of the Sabre Foundation. Books and journals were often, particularly at the start, donated from retirees, estates, and the like. In more recent years, various organizations have concentrated on persuading publishers to provide very low-cost and often entirely free subscriptions to a variety of journals (for a limited number of years) that the organization would then distribute in East Europe. Hundreds of thousands of books and journals have been shipped to East Europe, and although not all programs of this type have been equally successful in ensuring that truly needed materials were delivered, on the whole, the donation programs have made an important contribution to providing much needed scholarly and teaching materials.
• Third, perhaps the most significant
action by the Foundation was to enable East European research libraries
to begin automating their operations. The pattern by which this occurred
differed markedly among the several countries. In Hungary, the National
Széchény Library organized consortia of anywhere from nine
to a dozen university, college, and municipal libraries and applied for
grants on behalf of the participating members. Each of the participants
in these consortia tended to have extremely modest requests. By and large
they aimed at making marginal improvements in their operations by introducing
CD-ROMs, faster PCs, or better printers. Most of them continued to rely
on ISIS, and although the improvements that they could introduce as a result
of the Foundation's grants definitely improved library operations and patrons'
access to relevant modern information, in most of them no quantum jump
occurred in the way in which they were doing things. A few notable exceptions
are provided by separate grants made to the Agricultural University, which
purchased TINLIB, and the Kossuth Lajos University in Debrecen, which purchased
Voyager.
The automation efforts at these institutions are well advanced, and I have been repeatedly struck by the rapid learning, skill, and almost single-minded devotion of the participants in these efforts. Two additional university libraries--those of the University of Wroclaw and Copernicus University in Torun--received com-parable grants, and the National Library received a $900,000 grant. Wroclaw also selected VTLS and joined the Polish VTLS group, whereas Torun opted for Dynix.6 The National Library is in the process of selecting a system.
The advantages of collaboration, which came into being in Poland more or less accidentally, were so persuasive that the Foundation decided not to fund individual library requests for automation any longer, except perhaps in excep-tional circumstances, so as to emphasize the consortial approach. Two Polish consortia came into being. The first one, which we call the Lublin Consortium, is one of four institutions: Marie Curie Sklodowska University, Catholic University Lublin, the Technical University of Lublin, and the Academy of Agriculture. I visited all four institutions on a particular trip to Lublin and argued that they could derive great benefits from adopting the identical integrated system, because (a) training costs would be diminished, (b) system adaptation costs would be diminished, (c) more favorable software and hardware discounts might be obtain-ed if they committed themselves to using the same system, (d) general hardware economies might be realized if it turned out that n institutions needed fewer than n servers, and (e) better service might be provided if the institutions committed themselves to producing a unified OPAC. In fact, the Lublin institutions adopted this philosophy, signed an agreement of collaboration, and received a grant of about $900,000 from the Mellon Foundation and a further grant of $200,000 from the Soros Foundation, which marked the first explicit collaboration between these two Foundations. The Lublin Consortium also opted for VTLS.
The most ambitious of these consortia is the Krakow Consortium, centered at Jagiellonian University and the University of Mining and Metallurgy, which includes a total of 14 academic institutions.7 The resulting proposal was a com-plex document and succeeded in demonstrating that the 14 institutions needed only three servers for the project. The success of the enterprise crucially depends on the completion of the Krakow FDDI ring, which is currently perhaps 80% to 90% complete, and on the presence of a determined and capable management team that is capable of coordinating library, computing, network, and adminis-trative decisions. The Foundation funded this venture with a grant of $1.2 million and the Soros Foundation contributed $300,000. There is no question that if the 14 institutions had decided to automate independently of one another, the total cost would have been much larger and the final product not nearly as powerful as it will ultimately be.
In the Czech Republic and in Slovakia, the Foundation took yet another approach. Rather than await the fortuitous formation of a consortium of institu-tions who happened to acquire identical systems, the Foundation encouraged the formation of the Czech and Slovak Library Information Network (CASLIN), consisting initially and still at present of the National Library in Prague, the National Slovak Library in Martin, the Brno State Library, and the Bratislava University Library--arguably the four most important research libraries of the two republics. An attractive feature of the consortium was that it consisted of two Czech and two Slovak libraries, committed to an identical hardware and software approach. The Foundation made a $1.1 million grant to the consortium, supplemented by a sizable grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts, which decided to acquire Ex Libris' ALPHA system running on DEC equipment. It is my expectation that one additional single library and two additional consortia, consisting of a total of six more libraries, will soon join CASLIN.
Much of the cost of introducing automation has consisted of creating the necessary local area networks and links to wide area networks. Fortunately local funds have become more easily obtainable for these purposes than used to be the case, so the foundation has not had to bear this burden alone. The networks have or are being created, equipment has been installed, librarians have been and are being trained, various software modules are in operation (usually acquisitions is first and circulation last), and retrospective cataloguing and database creation are in full swing. The impression I get by talking to librarians who have been parti-cipating in these automation efforts is that their work has been enormously demanding and at the same time enormously satisfying. The majority of libraries has access to the Internet; they have Gopher and Mosaic, and are taking advan-tage of what these tools can offer. I think it is fair to say that a revolution is taking place in East European libraries.
Computing and Networking
Quite apart from the needs of libraries, the Foundation was concerned with the state of electronic networks and computing facilities in Eastern Europe, particu-larly during the early days of its activities in the region. I recall visiting the Computer Center of a Polish University and realizing that I had more computing power on my desk in my office than the entire university Computer Center.
In the early days, connection to wide area networks was hampered by U.S. Department of Commerce regulations. Export licenses were required for all kinds of equipment that could be used for networking. I recall having a conver-sation with an official in the Department of Commerce in early 1990, whereby I tried to convince him that various East European universities ought to be able to connect to EARN. He asked me to explain what this "EARN thing" was, and I did my best, and then he asked what kinds of things one could communicate to an East European scholar over the EARN network. Being unfortunately in a face-tious mood, I replied to the effect that I could, for example, tell a scholar in Budapest that I would meet him for a drink at 5 p.m. on next Monday in Buda-pest at the Hilton. In that case, the official said, it would clearly be illegal to export equipment to make this possible because such export is legal only if the information conveyed is in the public domain, and clearly my cocktail plans were not in that domain.
Eventually, these hurdles were swept away and the Foundation made a series of grants to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the (then) Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences to improve connections to wide area networks and to upgrade computing equipment. A few greater or lesser grants were made to individual universities for similar purposes: two Hungarian universities received grants for large Vax computers (József Attila University and Eötvös Lóránd University) and one Polish university (Adam Mickiewicz in Poznan), one Slovak University (Comenius in Bratislava), and one Czech University (Palacky in Olomouc) received grants, well in excess of $1 million, for building compre-hensive internal university networks. George Mason University received two grants: one to spread the culture of networking with advice and equipment in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia, and another, as an exception to the geographic guidelines under which the Foundation has been operating, to do the same in Romania.
My sense is that all these grants have had the intended effects of integrating East Europe into the world of information exchange and processing as we know it. Fortunately, my sense is that the local authorities have also realized the importance of these developments, and local funds have been more easily availa-ble for these purposes than was the case five years ago. As a result, although the Foundation has been ready, even in recent times, to make (relatively smaller) grants for such purposes when it is clear that for some reason local funds will not be available, my expectation is that this part of our activities will decline substan-tially in the next year. The challenge that is now facing East Europe is that the original bandwidths that have been installed are increasingly not sufficient, in light of the greatly awakened interest to make sophisticated use of electronic communication. We must hope that the East European governments will be wise enough to allocate funds for upgrading bandwidths and router capacities before frustration sets in.
Conclusions
The world of computing, communicating,
and of libraries has changed massively in the four Visegrad countries in
the last five years. Learning has, on the whole, been rapid; talented and
motivated people have been engaged in bringing about these changes; scholars
and students have been adapting to these changes; and these countries are
on the threshold of participating in the general discourse of scholars
in the Western world with no handicaps. That is not to say that other countries,
somewhat more neglected by Western Foundations than the four Visegrad countries,
are in the same favorable position. The Southern tier--consisting of Bulgaria,
Romania, Albania, and the former Yugoslavia--continues to be in a more
or less pitiable condition with respect to the information revolu-tion,
as are most of the countries carved out of the former Soviet Union. We
have made a good start in bringing the information revolution to the countries
of the former Eastern Bloc, but the job is a long way from being finished.
REFERENCE
Cummings, Anthony; Marcia L. Witte;
William G. Bowen; Laura O. Lazarus; and Richard H. Ekman. (1992). University
Libraries and Scholarly Communica-tions: A Study Prepared for the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation. Published by American Research Libraries for
The Mellon Foundation.
Q & A_________________
DISCUSSIONS
[Dave Penniman]
When you said that Mellon was committing its program to the short-term and medium-term programs, what is that in number of years?
[Richard Quandt]
Very fair. It means that even at this moment, as we speak now, we are beginning to shift our directions. We are not going to disappear overnight by any means, and I expect that we are going to continue to make grants through 1995 and 1996, but perhaps on a diminishing scale. And this means that, for example, in Poland we will end up automating about 30 of the most important research libraries in the country. After we have done this, what is the marginal value of automating the 3lst? The answer has to be that it is less than the first 30. So, for this reason, we are beginning to look at other regional places. I am specifically being charged by the Trustees to investigate the desirability of possible programs in the Baltic countries. No decision on this has been reached. But, I would expect that even the decision is positive; 10 years from now we will surely not be making grants in Eastern Europe.
[Unidentified]
What about Romania?
[Richard Quandt]
In Romania, we have made one grant an exception. Somebody said yesterday that e-mail is important to keep the bad guys from coming back. We made a grant to George Mason University, believing that e-mail can help Romania in developing electronic connections. That seemed to be such a valuable thing to do, so we made an exception. We are basically neglecting the southern part of Eastern Europe on the grounds that it is economically and politically less stable, and therefore the results might be unpredictable and possibly unproductive.
[Richard Hsieh]
When you describe financial support provided by your institution, did you say your institution also supports librarians in other countries as well?
[Richard Quandt]
Not directly, because we generally feel that connectivity which the libraries need depends greatly on the existence of the city and inter-city links. And, by and large, our experience is that the governments have been doing a reasonably good job, and certainly an increasingly good job in providing this. For example, in Poland, there are currently FDDI rings which are 80% to 90% complete. Essen-tially all Polish institutions in those cities have direct connections. To be sure the connection between Kraków and Warsaw is not quite what it ought to be, the bandwidth needs to be increased, but I think that it will happen.
[Marinus Swanepoel]
My question is whether the Mellon Foundation has South African program?
[Richard Quandt]
The Mellon Foundation has had a small program. About two or three years ago, we offered four or five grants to traditionally black African institutions. But these were the only ones we made there. Yet, the international program of the Foundation is under discussion, even as we speak, and the only one that is likely to be with us permanently is our Latin American program. What exactly we are going to do in South Africa or Eastern Europe, or other parts of the world, are under discussion.
Also, I should have mentioned that the Foundation has an electronic digital library activity, and I want to mention that if you want to know more about this, you can gopher to: ARL.CNI.ORG, then select "scholarly communication," and after that, select "scholarly communication, technology and academic libraries."
[Don Riggs]
I think that I would be remiss if I didn't mention our project funded by the Mellon Foundation, with a strong interest and support of the President of Mellon Foun-dation, Bill Bowen. This is a digitizing project from 1990 back to the very beginning of 10 economic and history journals. This is earth breaking, and to have the support of such a Foundation in this endeavor is just great. The project is called JSTOR, being the storage of journals. It is full text, online, with soft-ware which the University of Michigan developed for the TULIP project, which involved nine universities digitizing Elsevier scientific journals.
[Richard Quandt]
Thank you very much, Don. We are excited about that too.
[Yakov Shraiberg]
When are you starting in Russia?
[Richard Quandt]
That too is under discussion, but I don't have an answer for you. That's the truth. I think that we should proceed to the next speakers: Elizabeth Kirk and Lisbeth Levey of AAAS will speak.
[Lisbeth Levey]
I think that I have to start by saying
that the institutions with which I work are connected to the information
highway, but they are proceeding more slowly than anybody else in this
room. I represent the AAAS Sub-Saharan Africa Program, and, in addition
to my paper, there are a number of brochures describing our programs on
the back table.