TexShare and GALILEO:  
Comments on Managed Information Sharing
Harold Billings

In comparing the progress of the TexShare and GALILEO resource-sharing programs, I am going to take off my evangelical robes and replace them with more cautionary ones. I know that these words from an old spiritual must surely be familiar as it asserts:

I ain’t gonna study war no more
I ain’t gonna study war

Given sometimes to attempting too much prophesy, I am going to quit forecasting anything. With the same strong certainty as those verses, I am going to quit predicting anything.

Considering what TexShare and GALILEO are both accomplishing, I am especially insistent that I quit forecasting anything—anything at all.

The horizon that I have been looking at for some time appears to be here. These information-sharing programs have reached a point that is as far as I can see. What lies beyond I am simply afraid to consider.

What is here on this event horizon? The similarities between the two systems that we have heard about today, including the TexShare program that so many of us have worked to get in place for a number of years, are apparent. And there are far more similarities than there are differences between the two.

The benefits of these new information-sharing systems are obvious—(1) they leverage resources through cost-sharing and consortial purchasing; (2) they remove distance and time as impediments to information access; (3) they leverage human skills through a pooling of talent; (4) they make distance information an easier service to provide in support of distance education, distance learning, and life-long learning through improved access to our collections by means of traditional and electronically enhanced interlibrary services; through the use of computing and new information technologies that provide electronic information access and digital library-based services; through easier scalability of programs and services (although this will certainly be challenged by the growth of TexShare from 53 participants in the past year to over 160 in the fiscal year that we have entered); and through the unbelievable linkages that hypertext enables.

There are, however, other similarities between TexShare and GALILEO—and among other information systems of a like nature—that concern me.

One issue that concerns me about them is the fact that these organizations represent—based on their funding and administrative direction—what I have called the application of "managed information." In fact, I have characterized such organizations as "Information Management Organizations"—IMOs! Yes, much like HMOs.

This type of managed information program represents a top-down, administratively directed resource-sharing program rather than the grass-roots type of library cooperative that we have become accustomed to over the past 20 years. A funding authority pretty well dictates the type and scope of information resource sharing that is available through these programs.

Members of managed information organizations can certainly benefit from their directed participation in such organizations because their administrations rightly see that resource sharing is an effective means to leverage resources. But those same administrations—or legislators, or other funding authorities—may believe that resource sharing is the panacea for all the problems that are so widely visible these days in the flow of scholarly information and knowledge. Librarians know that is not the case.

Experience is proving that electronic information tends to enhance physical collections, but replaces very little of it. Access to information in electronic format is extended to more users, improves the effectiveness of knowledge seekers, and reduces the rate of increase in the cost per information unit delivered to the user. But digital access has not yet demonstrated that it can reduce the total funding required to maintain currentness with the production of new knowledge or the publications that are a result of the learning and knowledge enterprise.

Our administrators may believe that funding for specifically local academic library interests is no longer as necessary as it was in the past. In paying for whatever level of activity that is appropriate or required for individual libraries to participate in the larger consortium, libraries may be losing a level of independence, losing a level of local choice that is not possible in the larger selection process.

Are we moving towards blanket order programs for electronic services like blanket book order programs on a multiple institutional basis?

Are we each going to have to help pay for information sources and services that our users may hardly ever require?

What sort of sense does it make to spend $23 million dollars over a three-year period for electronic access to all of Elsevier’s journals, as I understand is the case, for 40 libraries in the state of Ohio? It does not seem to me that the libraries in Texas could each benefit by access to all 1,200 or so of these scientific and technical titles. I would certainly prefer to see such a sum directed in a manner that would better assist the patrons of our libraries gain access to information that meets their specific needs.

Are we lifting all boats in such a tightly directed use of resources, or are we potentially reducing ourselves to a lower common denominator because more resources are going into common programs for the many, rather than more fully supporting our centers of excellence from which the many may draw information riches that might not otherwise be assembled?

A component of managed information that must be devised is a means to customize a program so that it meets the academic needs of individual institutions.

Many of the new programs, like those that we have reviewed today, have state-based funding. Assuming that most libraries, especially those that are publicly-funded academic institutions, have a first obligation to their home program, where is there room for participation by these institutions among those many other regional, national, and privately-established consortia whose programs are increasingly resembling one another?

Considering that our moneys must go inevitably to participation in our statewide consortia, where will we find the resources to sustain our affiliation with the programs of those other organizations? Are we going to wipe out these middle-ground groups?

Since many of us belong to university systems, or to institutions whose first calling must be towards some other consortium whose funding sources and programs are closer to home, what are we to do about the potential conflicts among these organizations?

Let me use my library as an example. UT-Austin’s membership obligations are much like those we just saw listed for the University of Georgia. As a member of the University of Texas System, our first obligation is really towards any UT System-based library resource-sharing program. And in our case, having just been assigned responsibility for managing the newly established UT System-wide Knowledge Management Center, this fact is even more of an imperative.

Because we have tried to play a leadership role in the development of TexShare since its conception, and since we still have a major responsibility—in a formal partnership with AMIGOS, under contract with the Texas State Library—for managing its technical and programmatic services, we clearly have an obligation to participate in TexShare’s activities.

We have also been an active member of AMIGOS for over 20 years, and while there are AMIGOS technical programs that we use that do not conflict with our participation in other organizations, there are programs like interlibrary services where participation in them, where the expenditure of funds for them, and where an agreement to standards for them may conflict with those of other organizations in which we hold membership.

In addition, we have become a player—a bit-player, it must be granted, to this point at least—in the Big 12+ Library Consortium. The activities of that group have also centered on interlibrary services and the prospective sharing of access to electronic services to achieve reduced costs through collective purchasing.

I won’t pursue the potential issues relating to similar activities that UT-Austin engages in as a member of the Association of Research Libraries, as a member of RLG, as a member of a new tri-institutional Berkeley/Stanford/Texas set of cooperative initiatives, as a member of a newly-established partnership of the five Texas ARL libraries, or of our participation in and obligations to the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM) for which we serve as Secretariat.

Due to efforts to include this state in the virtual Western Governors University membership, questions may also arise regarding the role of Texas libraries in that venture.

Another issue that concerns me—and it should be evident and follow from the examples that I have just cited—is that I am afraid that programmatically we are running into ourselves from several directions. . . regardless of our fiscal obligations, or envisioned opportunities, or whatever else it is that may be driving our libraries into programs like TexShare and GALILEO and the UT Knowledge Management Center. How many resource-sharing programs can we belong to when the programs consist only of interlibrary services and cost-shared, consortial electronic information services? As Peggy Lee sang, "Is that all there is?"

As a conceiver of, as a designer of, as a payer for, and as a strong believer in the kind of program that TexShare and GALILEO represent, I hesitate just a bit in sounding too loudly these cautionary notes. But I just don’t see where these organizations are going beyond where they are at the moment. Or at least I am not at all going to forecast what is going to become of them and of those organizations with which I believe we are going to compete.

I do know several things that these digital utilities need.

• They need more content. They need to incorporate more multimedia content. They need to incorporate course content to support the distance learning programs that are growing so rapidly. They need to incorporate digital versions of locally held treasures like those in the Library of Congress American Memory Project so that children and ordinary citizens can enjoy and learn from these information objects that each of us may hold in our library, but which are simply too distanced by geography or wealth from everyone whom they might benefit.

• These systems need to be filled with vastly more digitized information of quality than exists at present. A national digitization program is required much like the one for preservation that has proved to be so successful.

• The information available on the Internet needs—as we all know—to be identified for quality, to be cataloged and organized and tagged so that library users can make the best use of the best that’s there, just as we would want in our physical collections.

So I just cannot forecast what may become of TexShare and GALILEO and their managed information relatives across the country beyond today’s horizon.

I do know that they represent the foundations for potentially wonderful learning systems that we simply cannot now imagine. And I know that we must support them and make them serve us in our mission like any other tool.

For they are tools, and we must make them do what we require—not let them make us unknowingly lay waste the information infrastructure that our physical collections have so long sustained.

I promised that I am going to quit forecasting. But in thinking about cooperation I am going to return to that old spiritual one more time:

I ain’t gonna study war no more

I ain’t gonna study war

Gonna join hands with ev’ryone

Gonna join hands with ev’ryone

Good luck to GALILEO and TexShare and to all of us as we join cooperative hands.

This paper is based on comments made in response to a presentation on the TexShare and GALILEO resource-sharing programs at the first joint meeting of the Texas Council of State University Librarians, the Texas Community College and Junior College Librarians, and the Texas Independent College and University Librarians in Austin, Texas, September 26, 1997.