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Accessing Transportation Information Resources
Worldwide
St. Petersburg, Florida
Tuesday, July 31, 2001
9:45 AM
The Future of Information Access: A Private
Sector Perspective
Chris Pringle
Senior Publishing Editor, Elsevier Science Ltd
The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB, UK
E-mail: c.pringle@elsevier.co.uk
Introduction
I represent Elsevier Science Ltd, the world's largest academic publisher,
and the leading publisher (outside TRB) of research on transportation
in particular. My private sector perspective is therefore primarily
concerned with the academic world, and is international in scope.
However, I believe it is also relevant to the practitioner world,
and - of course - to the particular situation in the US.
The past 20 years have seen many changes, with more to come. In
this brief presentation I first review some of the major changes
in the transportation industry; then the even more radical changes
in the information industry; touch on some factors that remain unchanged;
and discuss the consequences.
Changes in Transportation
The transportation industry has undergone major structural changes
in recent years (see Billington & Wenban-Smith, 2000).
More and bigger problems
First and foremost, transportation problems are more serious and
complex than ever before. Constantly increasing passenger and freight
traffic is hitting time and space constraints, causing congestion,
environmental problems, and raising social issues of access, mobility,
equity and safety.
Professionalisation
So the industry is getting more demanding, resulting in increased
professionalisation - it needs more highly qualified people to run
it.
Interdisciplinarity
Increased complexity also promotes interdisciplinarity: engineers
need to talk to economists, planners, etc, far more than they ever
used to.
Privatisation
Perhaps a more drastic change outside the US, this is still being
implemented in some places; its ramifications for regulation, etc.,
are still being worked through in others.
Outsourcing
Partly as a result of the above factors, much central planning expertise
has been done away with. Governments and industry are now more dependent
on buying in expertise from a much expanded pool of consultants,
who are all having to increase their expertise and specialise to
compete with each other.
All these changes combine to generate greater information demand:
more people need more information of more different kinds.
Changes in Information
The dramatic developments in information technology are by now very
familiar.
E-mail and www
Email and www enable far greater access to far more information,
far faster - often almost instantly, and also far greater functionality.
Rapid and sophisticated searching, linking, usage tracking, multimedia,
and citation tracking both backwards and forwards have all become
possible.
E-books and Print-on-Demand
These are relatively new technologies whose applications and economics
are still being worked out by publishers and readers.
Huge and growing archive
In the 15th century, it was possible for the Renaissance man to
have read a substantial proportion of all the significant literature
ever written. Now it is difficult to keep up with output in the
most specialised subjects. The archive grows; the rate of adding
to it increases. This of course has always been true, but now it
is truer than ever. The body of knowledge is vast; consider the
500,000+ abstracts in TRIS alone.
All these changes in the information world can result in information
overload.
What stays the same
Those are the big basic changes. Some fundamentals remain the same.
Librarian's role
Librarians continue to use their traditional strengths: subject
knowledge, selectivity, organizational skills to help people identify
and get the info they need (Cortelyou & Kleiber, 2000).
Peer-review process
In academia, the peer-review process as managed by journal editors
and referees and supported by publishers remains crucial because
of the dependence of academics' careers on their publication records.
Publisher's role
The publisher's expertise and entrepreneurial role, in identifying
information needs and commissioning or generating and disseminating
the information to meet those needs, continues. Publishers' independence
is also important.
Market mechanism
A huge quantity of free information of all kinds is now available
on the web. Unfortunately, much of it is worth what you pay for
it. The role of price in establishing the value of information (Okerson,
2001), and in producing revenue to support further investment in
creating and disseminating information, is still a valuable one.
Networking
A vital source of information will always be personal communication
with colleagues. Although a great deal of this is now carried out
by email, often through newsgroups and discussion lists with colleagues
one has never met, ultimately there is no substitute for personal
contact.
Integration is the Answer
How can we reconcile the twin problems of information demand and
information overload? Put simply: in the electronic environment,
how will people (whether academics or practitioners) find all the
information they want, and yet not drown in information they don't
want? Integration is the answer: integration on several levels,
enabled by technology.
Integration of different types of information
It is now possible to collect many different types of information
in the same virtual space on the web. An extensive but not necessarily
exhaustive list could include journal articles, databases, e-books,
teaching materials, reports, statistics, software, multimedia, and
community information such as listings of conferences or organisations.
Information from different sources
The owner of the virtual space need not, and probably could not
own all the information integrated in it. Integration requires partnerships,
alliances, between various information providers: commercial publishers
such as Elsevier; government agencies such as BTS; national academies
(TRB), professional bodies (ITE et al), international organisations
(OECD, PIARC …). An obvious example is the hosting of TRB's
TRIS database within BTS's National Transportation Library.
Not just Collection but Connection
Simple collection of assorted information on the web is in itself
nothing new, as it only replicates what bookshops or paper catalogues
have always done. The real advance is in how information items can
now be functionally connected to each other or to the user. Reference
linking to lead the user from one article to the next is now commonplace.
Citation tracking, both backwards and forwards, so authors can see
the impact of their work, and usage data tracking so librarians
can assess the value of their electronic subscriptions, both exist
and are being refined (Luther, 2001). Intelligent customized alerting
services are being created to automatically inform users of relevant
new publications. Tailored search engines are being developed, such
as Elsevier's Scirus specifically serving the scientific community.
Package deals that would not have been practical in the print era
become viable in the electronic environment.
Integration of users
New technology has also made possible integration on another level,
that of the users themselves. University library consortia used
to exist to decide how to parcel out the territory to avoid duplication
of collections. Now they are increasingly coming together to get
consortium subscription deals which give all the members access
to everything. ScienceDirect has signed deals with the university
systems of whole countries (Taiwan, Ireland, etc). I can foresee
this trend being followed by government agencies: local or metropolitan
authorities uniting to negotiate arrangements with information providers,
or Departments of Transportation negotiating on their behalf. Professional
societies wishing to obtain benefits for their members could also
follow suit. And at the level of the individual researcher or professional,
email discussion lists offer a forum to meet people with common
interests and a route to relevant information.
Conclusion
Present and future information demand and information overload will
be reconciled through integration on several levels in the electronic
environment. Collection of and functional connection between different
types of relevant information will be made possible through partnership
between different publishing agencies. This, together with the increasing
influence of organised bodies such as consortia representing users,
will facilitate discovery of relevant information, filtering out
irrelevant material, and will support the widest possible entitled
access to the information required.
Footnote: Elsevier information services
ScienceDirect
Elsevier's own contribution to information integration is ScienceDirect®
<www.sciencedirect.com>.
ScienceDirect® is the premier electronic information service
for the interdisciplinary research needs of academic, corporate
and educational institutions, offering comprehensive coverage of
literature across all fields of science. Designed to serve needs
of the researcher, ScienceDirect is the unsurpassed single source
for scientific, technical and medical information on the Internet.
Researchers can access a critical mass of the world's STM journal
titles and full-text articles (today over 1.2 million articles),
search the leading STM abstract and indexing databases (providing
coverage of over 30 million records) and link out to articles from
an array of STM publishers - all through a variety of platforms.
TransportConnect
Elsevier's service dedicated specifically to the transportation
community is TransportConnect <www.transportconnect.net>.
TransportConnect comprises over 1500 articles and abstracts from
12 transportation and safety journals, together with a bookstore,
sample chapters from reference works, and a newsletter. Plans for
the further enhancement of this popular service through partnerships
with other information providers are being implemented at the time
of writing.
References
Bill Billington & Hugh Wenban-Smith, "Transport Skills
for the New Millennium". London: Landor, 2000
Catherine Cortelyou & Michael C. Kleiber, University of
California, Berkeley, "Tomorrow's Technology in Today's Library",
TR Update 5, June 2000
www.elsevier.com/locate/trupdate
CrossRef: The Central Source for Reference Linking
www.crossref.org
Judy Luther, "White Paper on Electronic Journal Usage Statistics",
The Journal of Electronic Publishing, March 2001
www.press.umich.edu/jep/06-03/luther.html
Ann Okerson, "What price 'free'?", Nature, 2001
www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/okerson.html
Scirus - search engine for scientific information only
www.scirus.com
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