T U L I P - THE UNIVERSITY LICENSING PROGRAM:

EXPERIENCES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Katherine Willis, Ken Alexander, William A. Gosling, Gregory R. Peters, Jr., Robert Schwarzwalder, and Beth Forrest Warner

Willis is director of corporate relations, Information Technology Division, School of Library and Information Studies and Alexander and Peters are systems research programmers, Computer Aided Engineering Network, College of Engineering. Gosling is assistant director for technical services and library systems and Warner is head, library systems office, University Library. Schwatzwalder is senior associate librarian, Engineering Library. All are with the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

The distinctions that once governed the library, publishing, and information technology professions are rapidly blurring as digital sources of information become increasingly available and easily accessed. No longer does acquisition of a physical artifact define the boundaries among participants in the information production life cycle. Instead, digital libraries hold out the opportunity for anytime, anywhere access to information in many formats, which can be personal- ized or customized. New technology-mediated struc- tures have the capacity to stimulate collaborative intellectual activities such as research and learning by reducing barriers of distance (geographic and organiza- tional) and time.

While the vision of the digital library is becoming increasingly clearer, librarians, publishers, and informa- tion technologists have substantially less understanding about how they will make the transition to the new information environment.

In 1992, Elsevier Science Group invited nine research universities 1 to join with it in designing and implementing a pilot project of significant scale in order to better understand the technological, economic, and social implications of digital access to scientific publica- tions. They called their three-year pilot effort The University Licensing Program, or TULIP.

R E S E A R C H G O A L S

As a primary goal, Elsevier and the universities decided that they would prototype technical, economic,

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and organizational infrastructures that have the potential of lowering the effective unit delivery cost of scientific information to the scholar. This, in turn, required that they determine the technical feasibility of network distributionofjournal information; prototype organiza- tional and economic models for network distribution; and study user behavior under different economic and distribution scenarios.

O P E R A T I O N A L P L A N

To achieve these objectives, the group selected 43 materials science journals that Elsevier agreed to provide in machine-readable form. These journals are made available in their entirety by Elsevier to project participants based on current subscription profiles. All items in each issue are included with a unique identifier linking the citation/abstract information to the appropri- ate page image (with the exception of advertising, which is included but not indexed). In addition, the universities receive an ASCII file containing table of contents, citation, and author abstract information for each issue and item. This information is structured in a three-tier record format beginning with journal level, then issue level, and finally item level detail. Data at each level are organized and presented with tagged fields. Elsevier also provides an ASCII file containing the uncorrected text of items, which is produced using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The images themselves are in TIFF 5.0 format with a scan resolu- tion of 300 dpi. The standard CCITT Group IV compression method is used to compress each image but, even with compression, the 43 journals yield over 10GB/year. The files are provided by Elsevier to Engineering Information (El), which redistributes them on a biweekly schedule over the Internet to the partici- pating universities, based on each institution's subscrip- tion profile.

With Elsevier supplying the publications in digital form, each university agreed to develop the technologi- cal infrastructure to deliver the information electronical- ly to its scholars; to implement methods for testing different economic models; and to collect behavioral information from its users. Although each institution created its own proposal to achieve these objectives, a number of common project elements emerged:

Eight of the institutions distribute the information from a server managed locally; the ninth obtains and prints the images from an EI server;

O Each institution includes in its user community all university faculty, students, staff, and those who use public access terminals in the library;

Security for the files is maintained through pass- word and uniqname or computer account; the most common authentication strategy is Kerberos;

Delivery of ASCII citations/abstracts to the desktop provides the lowest level capability;

Subscriptions are held to 65-100 percent of the journals; in general, each site is making available images only to those titles for which there is a paper subscription;

Several universities expect to test more than one financial model;

All of the institutions place emphasis on measure- ment of use and behavioral assessment.

Methods for managing and distributing the files represented the most substantial difference among the approaches taken by the institutions.

T H E UNIVERSITY OF M I C H I G A N

To take advantage of the opportunity that TULIP presented, the University of Michigan put together a cross-functional team. Three members represent the University Library, including both systems and public service librarians; three computer scientists come from the College of Engineering; and one team member is associated with the Information Technology Division and the School of Information and Library Studies. Each of these, in turn, has access to a range of associ- ates who play important, specific roles in the Universi- ty's TULIP implementation. Michigan was able to begin electronically distributing the journals in Spring 1993 and continues to develop its project rapidly and effectively because of this multi-departmental team whose members have unique professional expertise.

The team began by designing an approach based upon their knowledge of the materials science faculty and students and the campus information technology infrastructure. But as a design goal, they selected strategies to develop and test that will have broad applicability to campus information resource access and delivery.

The Campus Environment

Materials scientists are found in the College of Engineering, the medical school, dental school, and Departments of Chemistry and Physics, making this a very broad and diverse user community both in specialization within the domain and in their technologi-

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cal capabilities. The majority of researchers are associated with the Engineering College, which has a Department of Chemical Engineering and a Department of Materials Science and Engineering as well as materials-oriented faculty in the departments of electri- cal, civil, nuclear, and mechanical engineering. Over 400 graduate students, staff, and faculty make up the core user group. A significant number of undergradu- ates are also expected to use TULIP given the increas- ing emphasis upon third- and fourth-year design classes in the Engineering College.

Most of the researchers and students use Unix- based workstations although some rely on personal computers. Approximately 30,000 devices of various types are attached to fiber backbone rings that encircle the campus. This wide availability of networked computers at Michigan, coupled with their degree of integration into the engineering and science curricula, has established a user community ready for digital information resources. This interest in digital informa- tion is further reinforced by the size of the campus, with researchers physically dispersed across two miles, and the University Library's need to eliminate any duplicate journal subscriptions. The paper-based TULIP titles are divided between three branch libraries--En- gineering, Chemistry, and Science--resulting in the materials scientists traveling among several locations.

Technical Strategy

To ensure that all of its users have access to the TULIP journals, the team decided to implement two parallel strategies. The first integrated the citation and abstract information into the University Library's library management system (LMS). Although screen display of the full text is not possible through this approach, its users can select and print the article. The second strategy, called TULIPview, evolved from an information systems project in the Engineering College called the Desktop Information Resources and Collabo- ration Technology, or DIRECT. Its users may access the full text displayed on their workstation as well as the choice of any printers attached to the campus network.

As shown in figure 1, the TULIP system at the University of Michigan consists of a server, which stores the journal articles in digital format. A student or researcher can access the system either using a terminal emulator, which connects to the library management system, or an X-windows user interface that attaches to the server to perform searches and retrieve journal articles. Approximately twice per month, the developers can draw from E1 the most recent journal issues via the FTP protocol for storage on the Michigan server. These biweekly files vary in

size, but are on the order of 500 megabytes each, which presents serious storage issues. Despite being stored with TIFF Group IV compression, each journal page is on the order of 50 to 100 kilobytes. The images account for the majority of the size of the datasets. The server is currently a DEC 5000 workstation with about a dozen gigabytes of magnetic storage. This is sufficient to hold about one year's worth of journals. Considering that this storage maintains only 37 journals, it is easy to see that scaling the project to include all of the University's subscriptions on magnetic disk is not a reasonable solution yet. As a result, the project team decided to create a hierarchical storage strategy based upon use. Magnetic storage is used for the citation and ASCII text files, indexes, all current journal image files, and articles that have been used recently or frequently. Older issues will be written to CD-ROMs, joining 1992 back issues that, as the project got started, Elsevier provided on CD-ROM. Currently, the team is integrating a Kubik 240-disc CD-ROM jukebox into the system, both to deal with the CD-ROMs and to provide expanded storage.

The TULIPview user interface runs on Unix workstations supporting the X-windows windowing system. TULIPview enables both interactive and passive searching. Interactive searching has both a simple mode for beginners and a more advanced mode that allows complex queries. Beginners can type terms they are looking for in boxes that represent different fields within the data, such as article title, journal title, author, abstract, or full text. Figure 2 presents a sample screen image of a search.

The more advanced mode allows Boolean and proximity operators. By clicking on the title of an article displayed as a result of the search, the researcher can view its abstract. If it indeed appears to be a useful article, the scholar can then either read the page images of the article on the screen or print it. While the user is reading the abstract and deciding whether to view the full article, the page images are being fetched from the server and scaled to fit on the screen. As a result of this scaling the images are about a third of their original resolution, but they are still quite readable. On paper, the images are printed at their full resolution of 300 dots per inch (dpi).

The second kind of searching supported by TULIPview is passive searching, also known as profiling or notification. When a user finds a parti- cularly useful search, that search query can be stored as a profile. Whenever a new dataset is received, these stored profiles are automatically run against all of the new articles. Abstracts of articles that match the profile are formatted and sent as an electronic mail message complete with a table of contents.

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MICHIGAN TULIP SYSTEM

Data from Elsevier

many GBs

CDs from Elsevier

i L

Any X-windows workstation

TULIPview "

~server stubs -~

Dec, Sun, HP... I

I I

MIRLYN (NOTIS) " ext-based interface o article abstracts ,,

print ,~ print server [ r e q u e / I ?n ix / appletalk~ _

print / ,-- jobs printer ~ . [ p r ~

Figure 1: Mich igan T U L I P System

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Figure 2: Sample TULIPview Search

For the system to work, several programs must be executed by the server. As new information arrives, it is indexed using a search engine developed at Michigan. A server program built around this search engine accepts connections from TULIPview clients and performs searches and retrieves documents. A notification program runs stored profiles against all new articles. A print server program accepts print requests, converts article images to printable format, and sends them offto any of several hundred laser printers around campus. The TULIP server also runs a package called CAP (Columbia AppleTalk Printing), which allows it to print to AppleTalk printers as well as Unix printers. As a result faculty or students can search and view articles on their desktop workstations and then print

those they select on the closest or most convenient printer.

As a parallel and cooperative effort to the work being done through DIRECT, the University Library is testing the feasibility of integrating the TULIP data into its existing online library management system, the NOTIS LMS/MDAS software. 2 The first phase of the project has involved creating and maintaining a citation file, which is accessible using the MDAS portion of MIRLYN.

When new datasets are received from El, the citations are reformatted into a MARC-like record structure and loaded into the MASC (Material Science) file in MDAS. Using this file, faculty and students are able to search by author, title, or keyword; build table

-- TULIP - THE UNIVERSITY LICENSING PROGRAM - - FALL 1994 43

Search Request: K=(COATINGS NEAR TECHNOLOGY).JT. AND Material Science Search Results: 14 Entries Found Keyword Index

DATE TITLE: AUTHOR: 1 1993 Observation of deep dislocation structures Didenko A.N 2 1993 Tribological behaviour of chemical vapour Huang T.H 3 1993 Plasma-sprayed coatings for titanium alloy McKee D.W 4 1993 Effects of N + B ion implantation on the t Dehua Y 5 1993 Tribological behavior of TiC thin films gr Sessler W.J 6 1993 Investigation of the composition of Ag, Ni Galinov I.V 7 1993 Effects of C on tribological properties an Lin W.L 8 1993 Annealing behaviour of HI3 steel implanted Tonghe Z 9 1993 Thermomechanical experiments and numerical Perrin N

I0 1993 An r.f. ion beam source and direct ion bea Khan H.R II 1993 Factors influencing the @k-Al"20"3 @+ @a-A Fredriksson E 12 1993 Reactive sputtering in the ABSOTOM system Sproul W.D 13 1993 Announcements: Second ASM Heat Treatment a 14 1993 Announcements: Third International Symposi U1 Haq A

STArt over HELp OTHer options

NEXT COMMAND:

Type number to display record MARk

Figure 3: Sample Table of Contents Display Generated by a Keyword Search

of contents displays "on-the-fly" by searching for a keyword combination of journal title and date; request that the item be printed; or "hook" to local holdings information for paper copies of the journals. Figure 3 shows a sample table of contents screen generated by a keyword search.

When a user requests a printout of a specific article, a message is sent to a Unix server in the library. This print request is composed of an article identifier, a printer name, and a user name. A program on the server then sends the request on to the TULIP server for printing at the selected printer. While users of the library's system are not able to directly view the articles online, this approach has allowed the project team to make the TULIP information available to those without high-end workstations or ethernet access.

Economic Models

Like the other universities, Michigan plans to test at least two and possibly three economic models in the next phase of the project. While meshing TULIP with the information technology infrastructure presented challenges, developing workable economic models for digital information potentially offers more difficulty due to the complexity and far-reaching nature of the issues involved. This next phase raises both significant philosophical and policy questions as well as requiring

a computer-based charging mechanism for a distributed computing service that has not existed on the campus.

As libraries and publishers have begun exploring the issues involved in providing journals digitally, they have raised significant and legitimate concerns about the ease with which articles can be distributed without authorization and resulting compensation to the pub- lisher. As a research university, Michigan recognizes an obligation to its scholars and students to ensure access to essential intellectual resources, yet it also realizes that the availability of information in a digital form challenges traditional paradigms of free and open access. One of the underlying issues that requires examination is whether offering journals in electronic format at the desktop is simply a value-added service providing convenience, or a radical shift in the way information will be used by scholars and obtained by libraries, eliminating paper formats. The shift to digital storage also requires a change from university spending on library facilities, brick and mortar, to university support of new storage media. As a pilot project of significant scale, TULIP offers an opportunity for testing funding assumptions and for identifying key areas for resolution by university administrators, librarians, technologists, scholars, and publishers.

Consequently, the project team spent several months considering its strategy and seeking advice from faculty economists who have expertise in information modeling and from practitioners such as the director

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of the University Press who is both an economist and a publisher. Based on the input received and their own deliberations, the team decided that the first economic model will charge only for the printed article; citation, abstract, and screen display of the full text will carry no fee. The initial pricing will be $1 for the first page plus $. 10 for each additional page, with a maximum charge of $5. This places the fees above the cost of photocopying the paper copy or the costs to faculty through a campus document delivery service, but below charges through commercial services. From June until September 1994, TULIP users will be advised of the fees and told how much their article selections would cost. Fee collection is planned for September. Since the team wants to understand the elasticity of the fee, it will reduce charges until they are eventually below those of the campus document delivery service. Similarly, as they assess the use of TULIP, they may raise the fees, although in setting the $5 initial charge they believe they are at the maximum that the faculty and student market will bear.

Since faculty and students can access this service from anywhere and can print to their own desk-side printers or any other printers attached to the campus network, the mechanism for charging must be electronic rather than mechanical. By September 1994, Michigan expects to offer a wide range of infrastructure services to support the distributed computing environment it is building. The automatic billing service is one of these. Essentially a debit function, faculty, staff, and students may charge against an account that they have opened containing actual dollars. The TULIP team plans to use this system as the basis for its fee collection. As an article is selected for printing, the TULIP server will send its cost to the selector and ask for confirmation that sufficient funds are available. Once that is re- ceived, the cost of the printed article will be deducted from the authorized account.

Behavioral Study

Since understanding their researchers' and stu- dents' use of and satisfaction with electronically distributed journals is essential to all the participants' future planning, each university has agreed to maintain log files and to implement surveys throughout the project. This aggregate information should provide useful insights into the value and effectiveness of digital journals for scientists. As an obvious first step, each institution must develop promotion and training for faculty and students. The University of Michigan team implemented a broad publicity effort that included two direct mailings to relevant faculty members; the distributionoffliers to graduate students in appropriate departments; articles in departmental, Engineering

College, and university publications; and the develop- ment of promotional/instructional handouts, sign-on messages, and posters. Despite these efforts, survey results indicate that almost 30 percent of respondents have not heard of the project. This suggests that diffusion of new approaches is a slow process and that reaching beyond the early adopters is a communications challenge.

Although TULIP has been available to Michigan's materials scientists only since April 1993, some usage data have been collected. Prior to starting TULIP, data were collected on the use of unbound issues of those Elsevier/Pergamon titles held at the Engineering Library (issues remain unbound for six to twelve months to facilitate the browsing of new journals). These paper copy use data, from January 1989 until October 1993, serve as a baseline to determine any decrease or increase in use once the same information is available digitally. Table 1 presents the average quarterly use of 21 TULIP journals in the 15 quarters prior to TULIP implementation and the usage data from those same titles after the onset of the program. While there is over an 18 percent increase in the use of the print journals, these data are preliminary and may not reflect general trends. Given the high variance in the use of some titles from quarter to quarter and the fact that October-December corresponds to a period of high library use, a chance deviation of this magnitude is possible.

A survey now in progress to determine the characteristics and interests of the Michigan materials scientists suggests a group that is highly diverse in terms of research interests, but is homogeneous in its members' emphasis upon the journal literature as a source for technical and scientific information. Of the 31 researchers who have responded to date, 24 rank journals as very important and 5 rank them as important (2 on a scale of 1-5). Given this stress upon the journal literature, it is interesting to note the data in table 2. The top quarter of titles were derived from the tally of digital transactions, the results of the paper copy use analysis, and the user survey. (Since any of these sample only a portion of the possible user pool, the top quarterlies were chosen because they represented titles of sufficiently broad interest to illustrate possible trends.) Table 2 displays the scores of these popular titles resulting from the three methods. Analysis indicates that there is no strong correlation among the results suggesting that additional research is needed to better understand the users.

The electronic logs provide additional information specific to the TULIP user. These distinguish among users by faculty and students and identify each user's department. To respect the user's privacy, anonymity is maintained. The logs show how researchers actually

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Table 1: Baseline Data for Use of Unbound Copies of Elsevier/Pergamon Journal Issues Versus Unbound Usage Data after the Start of the TULIP Program

Journal Baseline Data Average Use / Quarter

Journal A 4.27

Journal B 4.00

Journal C 3.07

Journal D 2.00

Journal E 9.27

Journal F 13.00

Journal G 2.47

Journal H 0.64

Use During TULIP Fourth Quarter 1993

0

0

5

6

12

2

5

1

Journal I 3.13 10

Journal J 3.64 5

Journal K 10.55

Journal L 1.73

Journal M 2.13

14

2

0

Journal N 3.27 0

Journal O 4.00 3

Journal P 3.00 0

0.82 Journal Q

Journal R 10.07 18

Journal S 1.40 0

Journal T 1.93 9

Journal U 6.87 15

Total 91.26 108

use the files: viewing the abstract, printing the abstract, displaying the full text, and printing the full text.

During the Fall 1993 period, there were 1,960 accesses of the journals by students through TULIP- view; 444 of these viewed the abstracts and 224 went on to display the article. Sixteen (16) printed the abstracts, while 88 printed the article. This almost 3:1 preference for screen display is surprising given the content density of the articles. As a preliminary hypothesis, the team suggests this difference may be caused by the relative slowness of printing during this

time period. Even with improved software and desktop printers, two minutes per page was required. However, understanding why the researchers prefer screen viewing clearly warrants more specific investigation.

Conclusions

TULIP is providing library, publishing, and information technology professionals with a test environment of substantial scale and diversity from which both models and policies for digital libraries can

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Table 2: Comparison of High-Demand TULIP Journals Top quarter o f titles were taken from online use rankings, paper copy use data (1/89-10/93), and faculty

survey results. Numbers represent raw V scores.

Journal TULIPview Use Paper Copy Use Survey Result

Journal A 273 NA 9

Journal B 219 64 1

Journal C 164 NA 5

Journal D 155 19 4

Journal E 93 NA 0

Journal F

Journal G

Journal H

Journal I

Journal J

Journal K

Journal L

Journal M

Journal N

Journal O

Journal P

91

86

81

75

52

44

31

30

30

30

29

0

Journal Q

NA 3

NA NA

NA 3

4 1

139 5

73 12

60 5

103 3

47 5

37 5

93 1

40 12

9 7 Journal R

be developed. Having completed the project's first year, it is possible to conclude that storage and printing present the most significant technical issues. However, rapid advances in technology coupled with the steady reduction in prices suggests that these are short-term problems. The implementation of funding models is a more serious concern since this requires serious rethinking of traditional approaches to information access and use by all the stakeholders. While librarians and scholars discuss the financial implications of digital information, their institutional administrations are less likely to understand the changes in funding processes that will be required. Finally, attempts to understand and anticipate how scholars will use the digital re- sources require a variety of carefully designed studies with a large enough population to make conclusions that are reliable and generalizable. It is simply too early

in TULIP 's evolution to predict generalized user behavior.

NOTES

1. The universities participating in the TULIP project are Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Instituteof Technol- ogy, University of California, University of Michigan, University of Tennessee, University of Washington, and Virginia Polytechnic and State University.

2. The University of Michigan University Library currently uses Release 5.1.1 of the LMS (Library Manage- ment Software) and Release 3.1 of MDAS (Multiple Database Access System) running under MVS. Our local implementation of the NOTIS system is called MIRLYN.

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