PANEL ON MEETING THE NEEDS OF PEOPLE

Acute or Chronic? Scientific Information in African Research Libraries: Ailments and Remedies

Lisbeth A. Levey

Director, Project for African Research Libraries
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Washington, DC 20005
llevey@aaas.org

Setting the Stage

We all know intuitively that access to current scientific information is essential to teaching and research in these fields. At a special AAAS Roundtable on Career Strategies for African Graduate Students in January 1993 in Boston,1 several speakers (both panelists and student participants) identified access to current journal literature as crucial to their ability to return home and become productive researchers. Earlier, in 1984, African scientists, participating in a seminar coor-ganized by AAAS in Côte d'Ivoire, increasing placed "the number and timely delivery of major non-African journals" high on their list of recommendations to AAAS.2

In 1987, in an effort to meet at least some of the needs of African institutions requiring journals but having no money with which to purchase them, AAAS launched what was then called the Journal Distribution Program and which is now part of the Project for African Research Libraries. For AAAS to focus on enhancing the flow of journal literature to Africa was natural, because it is a major scientific publisher and number among our affiliates in the leading non-commercial scholarly publishers in the United States. With funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, and the Agency for International Development, AAAS is now providing current subscriptions to more than 200 journal titles to research libraries hard put to find adequate fund-ing to pay for their own subscriptions. The journals are donated by the scientific and learned society publishers; grants cover air shipment to Africa.

At the time the journals effort started, we viewed this initiative as an innova-tive response to an acute crisis; seven years later I would say that the crisis may be chronic--unless we, the stakeholders, begin to approach access to research information differently. Why do I say that? In 1992, AAAS surveyed some 30 sub-Saharan African university and research institute libraries to assess the extent to which these libraries are able to cope with declining (and frequently erratic) levels of funding (see Figure 1). The libraries selected to be surveyed reflected a representative mix: large and small, general and specialized, relatively well off, and lacking entirely in resources. Most were anglophone, three were franco-phone, and one was Lusophone.
 
 

Our report, A Profile of Research Libraries in Sub-Saharan Africa3 is based on this survey. It demonstrates that external funding continues to be crucial to accessions. We found that 8 libraries would have no current journals at all were it not for donor support. Another 16 libraries have internal funding to subscribe to fewer than 200 serials. Thus, more than two thirds of the research libraries included in this study lack sufficient financial support from their own institutions to maintain even a minimal serials collection. The remaining libraries have some funding of their own, but not nearly enough to suffice. None of us likes to think that outside intervention will be necessary indefinitely, but the truth is that cut-backs in donor assistance for subscriptions could have an extremely deleterious effect on libraries that are already struggling for survival.

The University of Zimbabwe (UZ) is a case in point. Although the university has traditionally emphasized the information needs of researchers when making budget allocations, it has found itself unable to make ends meet in recent years. UZ's current predicament epitomizes both problems and potential solutions per-taining to collection development and is therefore worth a closer examination. In the early 1980s, when the value of the Zimbabwe dollar began to fall, the univer-sity decided to earmark 45% of its foreign currency allocation (almost as much as all faculties combined received) to the library, which has used these funds to favor the acquisition of journals at the expense of book purchases. Even so, the University of Zimbabwe has seen the value of its serials collection dwindle in the past decade by almost one third, despite international donor support--from the Ford Foundation, SAREC, and the AAAS journals initiative (see Figure 2). In Zimbabwe and elsewhere in Africa, library collections have been decimated by budget cuts coupled with a concomitant decline in the value of local currencies and escalating serial subscription costs. The situation throughout the region would be far worse were external support withdrawn.

Current Funding Base

• Library receives 45% of UZ foreign currency allocation ($70,000 in 1993)

• 4-year grant from SAREC (SEK 600,000)

• 4-year grant from Ford Foundation ($100,000)

• AAAS journal donations (valued by university as worth about $20,000 annually)

Number of Journal Subscriptions

• In 1988, about 3,000 titles

• In 1993, about 2,000 titles

Given that no dollar, be it U.S., Canadian, or Zim, will buy what it once did, how might African research libraries maximize their scarce financial resources? Let me begin by saying that traditionally journal literature has been the crux of the matter for scientists and engineers who want to keep abreast of developments in their disciplines. Today, in the United States and in other industrialized coun-tries, however, electronic communications are increasingly being used to transmit research information. These new ways of sharing scientific information together with the rising cost of journal subscriptions have revolutionized how U.S. re-search libraries do business. Increasingly, they are canceling nonessential journal subscriptions and replacing them with electronic databases and document delivery services.

Although access to online bibliographic databases is not yet feasible for most African researchers, having CD-ROM on site coupled with reliable document delivery can provide a viable alternative. In fact, CD-ROM could be crucial to the ability of African institutions to make better use of the limited financial resources available for library development. For that reason, implementing CD-ROM technology has become integral to library planning in Africa and other developing regions of the world.

In a paper presented at a 1993 workshop for university librarians from Eastern and Southern Africa, which was coorganized by AAAS and the University of Zimbabwe, Helga Patrikios, UZ Medical Librarian, reviewed the creation of a minimal acquisitions policy for journals at the university's Medical Library and discussed the effect of CD-ROM on journal accessions. In the mid-1980s, work-ing with a Journal Review Sub-Committee, library staff put together a list of 343 core journals to which the library now subscribes through the support of WHO and university allocations. In 1988, the Medical Library acquired its first CD-ROM workstation and a subscription to MEDLINE, and, as Mrs. Patrikios wrote, "the context of this core collection was radically altered" because Zimbabwe's health practitioners now had access to the entire National Library of Medicine database of citations from over 3,000 journals from 70 countries.4

With the advent of CD-ROM, the UZ Medical Library, like its counterparts in North America and Europe, is now able to weigh the advantages of ownership versus access. Which journals are so essential that the library must own them and which ones can safely be canceled, knowing that researchers will have access to information on what is being published in these journals through CD-ROM databases? In her paper, Mrs. Patrikios presented three options, each of which relies on combining journal subscriptions with CD-ROM databases and docu-ment delivery services to satisfy requests for full-text documents. She estimates that it might be more cost effective to cancel about half of the medical library's journal subscriptions and use the money saved to subscribe to CD-ROM data-bases and document delivery services.

CD-ROM came up for discussion repeatedly during that 1993 workshop because we all see it as a way to put up-to-date scholarly information in the hands of African researchers, cheaply and practically. If used properly, CD-ROM has the potential of making phrases such as "information famine" or "information isolation" terms of the past. But CD-ROM is not a mantra to be invoked or a patent medicine to be swallowed; rather, it is a technology, and a fast moving one at that must be implemented carefully and thoughtfully. Otherwise it will not fulfill its promise. CD-ROM drives can sit idle and neglected, just like any other piece of equipment.

A range of infrastructure issues must be addressed, and I spend a little bit of time examining four of them:

CD-ROM Equipment

Even relatively uncomplicated technologies require forethought when it comes to selecting equipment. In the case of CD-ROM, choosing the most appropriate microcomputer and deciding how many CD-ROM drives to purchase is critical. Large databases such as MEDLINE eat up memory on the hard drive as well as require a large amount of RAM. The Health Information Center in Mozambique, for example, can no longer install MEDLINE updates because of inadequate hard disk space on the center's computer. And, on a visit to Nairobi last month, I was told that the Kenya Medical Research Institute is facing the same problem. How many workstations to install is yet another consideration, for the number determines how many users can be accommodated at any one time. Remember that one workstation equals one user, and most sub-Saharan African research libraries are lucky to have even one or two stand-alone workstations.

Furthermore, although there is nothing mysterious about CD-ROM techno-logy nor its software, problems occur that require troubleshooting. Typically, donor agencies provide little in the way of guidance or training to their grantees. Although there are now pockets of CD-ROM proficiency in several African countries, numerous obstacles hinder the sharing of information on CD-ROM. This means that librarians who need CD-ROM assistance or advice frequently have no recourse within Africa. For that reason, librarians attending a AAAS CD-ROM marketing workshop in Accra in January 1993 were unanimous in their request that we include an appendix on troubleshooting tips in our manual, Marketing CD-ROM Services .5 The appendix was written by the University of Zimbabwe Medical Library and the Association of African Universities, based on their experiences with CD-ROM.

From what we have seen, AAAS believes that there is a desperate need for more expertise in Africa, so that installation, maintenance, troubleshooting, and training in CD-ROM (and related technologies) can take place without outside intervention. I very much hope that a newly established consortium of African schools of information science will address this particular problem.

CD-ROM Databases

Which CD-ROM databases to acquire is a critically important question; yet, many African librarians have difficulty in evaluating and selecting the databases most relevant to their university's needs because they lack the tools with which to make appropriate decisions. Questions that need to be asked to evaluate data-bases include the following:

As a result, African universities are hard put to make appropriate decisions concerning the best allocation of scarce resources, which means that many of them are subscribing to CD-ROM databases that are inappropriate to their needs. These databases, which can be very expensive (as much as $14,000 annually for the version of Science Citation Index with abstracts), also take up a lion's share of a library's budget, leaving little room to acquire other materials--additional databases, document delivery services, serial subscriptions, books, and other reference materials. Moreover, although database acquisition might be under-written by donor funding at the outset, grants (or loans in the case of the World Bank projects) expire,and librarians must wrestle with the dilemma of finding money to pay for subscription renewals, thus calling into question the longer term sustainability of CD-ROM utilization at their institution.

To meet these needs, we are now planning an evaluation of CD-ROM data-bases in the sciences and social sciences, to begin in January 1995 and to be carried out in collaboration with five African universities. Each university has been assigned a discipline and will be given a number of databases to review. Project activities at each university will be coordinated by a librarian and an end-user, who will also be jointly responsible for choosing the evaluation team to assess the databases. The universities and the disciplines for which they will be responsible are as follows:

What makes this initiative different? First, we are not suggesting that AAAS or any other organization creates a list of useful CD-ROM databases. Our objec-tive is to provide sufficient information to enable African institutions to reach those decisions themselves. Second, the African users of the material contained in these databases will be integral to the evaluation process. Third, information professionals and end-users rarely interact as equals; in this project, however, each group, working with the other, will have a vital role to play.

Before moving on to the next item, I return to the question of database covera-ge because it is an important but complex issue. As I indicated earlier, some database publishers make a concerted effort to capture developing country litera-ture. Other publishers are U.S. or European centric. To some extent it depends on the type of literature the database covers and the selection criteria used by each database publisher. Databases that index only journal literature, for exam-ple, include very little African research information because only a handful of African journals manage to stay in business for more than a year or two and very few of them maintain a regular publishing schedule. Thus, databases such as Science Citation Index and MEDLINE do contain research results from the con-tinent, primarily by indexing articles published by African scientists in U.S. or European journals. African research information, therefore, is likely to be better represented in those databases that cover all kinds of research information, including gray literature. Agris, Popline, and CABCD are three examples that come most readily to mind.

In addition to the CD-ROM database evaluation, AAAS will address this issue in a workshop on enhancing African coverage in the international commercial databases, which is to take place in Harazingn July 1995 at the same time as the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. We are coorganizing the work-shop with the African Publishers Network (APNET) and will bring together a small group of African publishers, researchers, and librarians. We also hope to involve a few major database producers, such as CABI.6

Promoting CD-ROM Services

In addition to revolutionizing the process of information retrieval, CD-ROM also has the power to transform library services. With CD-ROM, libraries that have been perceived as passive storehouses of information can become active informa-tion providers. The promise and the power of CD-ROM, however, is dependent on the skills and enthusiasm of librarians. Some African librarians have become experts in marketing techniques, a skill that until now has not been required of them (or of any other librarian for that matter). Others have been less aggressive. In general, AAAS has seen that user statistics range from institutions in which CD-ROM has not been heavily utilized to those in which CD-ROM has totally transformed library services. The University of Zimbabwe Medical Library has been extremely assertive in promoting CD-ROM, both on and off campus. And, by way of comparison, the UZML now does about as many literature searches annually as does the University of Witwatersrand Medical Library, which serves a larger community of users and has more equipment and staff. In general I would say that more attention needs to be paid to promoting CD-ROM services. The hardware and database subscriptions are just too expensive to permit the technology to be underutilized.

Costs and Sustainability: AAAS CD-ROM Pilot Project

In January 1994, the Sub-Saharan Africa Program launched a three-year CD-ROM pilot project that addresses many of the concerns that we all share. Although we are calling it a CD-ROM project, the parameters of this initiative have extended to include a major study of the economics of African research libraries.

The project, which is being carried out in seven universities, combines the provision of CD-ROM databases in the sciences, engineering, and social sciences with document delivery assistance in order to:

Each university has appointed management teams, composed of representa-tives of the end-user community and the library, to be responsible for project direction at their institution. Actively involving library users is integral to the success of the project, for it is they who must be satisfied with the CD-ROM/ document delivery concept.

During the course of the project, participants will collect data at each pilot site (for example, which journals are being used or requested following literature searches). I am positive that user statistics will demonstrate that subscriptions to a number of very expensive S&T journals could safely be canceled at some insti-tutions, provided that faculty members and students have access to information on their contents through CD-ROM (or other) databases.

I think that this exercise is extremely important. One of the patterns that I have noted with dismay over the past few years is what I call a "feast or famine" approach to library acquisitions. Because of the need to spend grant funds over a specified period of time, libraries sometimes purchase journal subscriptions based on how much money is available rather than on research and teaching priorities. This practice severely hinders rational journal acquisitions. Grant and other funds might be better spent on subscriptions for a minimal core collection of serials, subscriptions to essential CD-ROM databases, and a large cache of document delivery coupons.

In conjunction with the CD-ROM pilot project, we are planning two analytic studies: one focusing on the critical question of readership and patterns of library usage within the African scientific/academic community and one on the econo-mics of African research libraries, particularly how they fare vis-à-vis overall university budgets, as well as their position within the context of university funding for teaching and research. This latter study is crucial to the overall success of the pilot project in particular and library development in general, for it is futile to discuss the sustainability of African university libraries without a better understanding of both their funding history and their future funding potential.

Other Electronic Media

CD-ROM is not the only appropriate medium for transmitting research informa-tion electronically, and before closing I discuss briefly the potential of electronic networking in library development. I start, however, with a disclaimer -- my comments are not focused on the Internet, which is not yet widely available north of the Limpopo, but rather on the Fidonet, a "store and forward" e-mail system that is becoming increasingly popular in the region. It can be used on dial-up telephones with slow modems (as slow as 1200 baud), and the software com-presses data and corrects transmission errors automatically.

Several libraries with which we are working use e-mail routinely to send messages--the health information center in Mozambique, the University of Zim-babwe medical library, Bunda College of Agriculture in Malawi, and the Univer-sity of Zambia, to name four of my most active e-mail correspondents in Africa, although the Addis Ababa University library has just come online, and we expect the University of Ghana Balme Library to follow suit in December. The Univer-sity of Zambia Computer Centre, incidentally, has established one of the most viable e-mail networks in Africa, linking up almost 200 sites nationally. In her paper at the 1993 Harare workshop, Regina Shakakata described a very impres-sive pilot project to deliver medical information electronically to Zambia's hard-pressed health care professionals. In addition, the University of Zambia is to achieve full Internet capability by the end of the year (we hope), with a leased line to South Africa. Although the connection will be very slow because they are using a 9600 baud bandwidth, it is a start. AAAS hopes to facilitate online sear- ching at the University of Zambia, with some very modest financial assistance.

Once a nucleus of African research libraries has e-mail and actually uses it, some of the long-distance troubleshooting that I referred to earlier could be handled through computer conferencing or messages from one librarian to another. Fidonet software supports bulletin boards and conferences, so this is all technically feasible. Note the qualifier "technically" in that sentence, because establishing a sustainable e-mail conference would also require a critical mass of committed people and a knowledgeable conference moderator.

In another development, which I find very exciting, African libraries are just beginning to access research databases via e-mail. Once again, this is not inter-active access, but it is the next best thing. The Pan-American Health Organiza-tion (PAHO) has developed an innovative system called BITNIS to facilitate developing country utilization of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) online databases. Users construct their bibliographic searches on Grateful Med software, after which the file is transmitted electronically to NLM, where the BITNIS software modifies it for processing by the NLM computer. Search results are then returned by NLM's computer to the gateway PC, where BITNIS converts them for transmission to the recipient's PC. A few months ago the University of Zimbabwe Medical Library became the first African library to try BITNIS, and it worked, "just like a piece of cake," wrote Helga Patrikios in an e-mail message to me on April 15. She plans to use BITNIS not only to access NLM databases for which she does not have CD-ROM subscriptions, such as Toxline, but also, when circumstances warrant, to keep abreast of the latest records indexed in MEDLINE, which only reach the CD-ROM version two or three months after they appear in the online version. The medical libraries of the University of Zambia and the University of Nairobi are also using BITNIS now.

Moreover, PAHO is not the only group working to make research information available in an electronic format other than Internet. The United Nations Deve-lopment Programme, for example, has developed a gopher that can be searched by users who do not have e-mail access. A number of African organizations, such as PADIS, have also developed their own databases. PADIS is now explor-ing the possibility of mounting its databases onto two gophers--one maintained by the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex and one at the University of Pennsylvania, which serves as the main gopher for the African studies commu-nity in the United States.

Finally, earlier this year, the Sub-Saharan Africa Program published a User's Guide to Electronic Networks in Africa to serve as a "first cut" at describing the major networks and giving instructions on how to access them. We plan to revise the Guide and publish a second edition, which will contain material on new networks, particularly those in South Africa, and information on Internet, for our long-term goal is to promote Internet connectivity within Africa. But until African universities and research institutes are hooked up to that great "informa-tion highway," I, for one, am willing to settle for a few viable alternatives, even if they have one or two potholes. I think that if we look together for creative solutions we can go a long way toward demonstrating what it takes to build a viable library--not quite a library without walls, but a long way from the situation as we know it today.