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Technology, libraries and the geographies of information: A case study of the University of Southern California

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Technology, libraries and the geographies of information: A case study of the University of Southern California

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Content TECHNOLOGY, LIBRARIES AND
THE GEOGRAPHIES OF INFORMATION:
A CASE STUDY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
Copyright 2002
by
Farid Azfar
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(GEOGRAPHY)
August 2002
Farid Azfar
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHE L N CALIFORNIA
The Graduate : • chool
University F irk
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089T695
This thesis, written by
Under the direction o f AtS... Thesis
Committee, and approved jy all its members,
has been presented to an - . ' accepted b y The
Graduate School, in par, ial fulfillment o f
requirements for the degrt * o f
i! can o f Graduate Studies
D a t e Aug> f tr 90112
THESIS C C
/ i , r t P. L — .
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ii
Dedication
Mohammad Azfar, my paternal grandfather, passed away on the 11th of September,
soon after I began to write this thesis. My maternal grandfather, Syed Saeed Jafri,
passed away on the 18th of March, around the time its first instantiation was
completed. Their absence signifies the passing of an era: as they engaged in
countless pursuits over the course of immensely remarkable lives, both of them
touched the lives of more people than we will ever know. They have inspired and
motivated me in more ways than I could possibly recount. This thesis is dedicated
to their memory.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank: Carolyn Cartier, my academic advisor, for supporting the
pursuit of independently formed ideas and interests, and for the guidance essential
to implement them; John Wilson and Bill Dutton, members of my thesis
committee, for providing further guidance and advise at various stages of the
process; the numerous unnamed individuals I interviewed, who were generous with
their time as well as their insights; the Graduate School at the University of
Southern California, for providing me with a generous fellowship that allowed me
to devote full attention to my own work over the course of my Masters program;
and the wide range of individuals that constituted the web of personal support that
developed over the course of my two years in Los Angeles. I claim responsibility
for all errors.
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iv
Table of Contents
Dedication ii
Acknowledgments iii
List of Acronyms vi
Abstract vii
Chapter 1: Introduction 1
Chapter 2: Political Economy of Emplaced Access Creation 60
Chapter 3: Information Geographies of Technological Change 112
Chapter 4: Digital Archive Projects at USC: Modulating Virtual Access 166
Chapter 5: Conclusion: Further thoughts: Reality and Theory 197
Bibliography 208
Appendix 226
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V
List of Acronyms
ARC: Archival Research Center
ArcIMS: Arc View Internet Map Services
ARL: Association of Research Libraries
CIO: Chief Information Officer
CIS: Collection Information System
CST: Center for Scholarly Technology
ESRI: Environmental Systems Research Institute
GIS: Geographic Information Systems
HTML: Hyper Text Markup Language
ICT: Information and Communication Technologies
IDA: Integrated Digital Archives
ISLA: Information Systems of Los Angeles
JSTOR: Journal Storage
LAWPA: Los Angeles Works and Projects Administration
MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
NGLI: Next Generation Library Initiative
NRC: National Research Council
OASIS: The Online Academic Student Information System
OBP: Office of Budget and Planning
OCLC: Ohio College Library Consortium
POP: Post Office Protocol
PPP: Point to Point Protocol
SAT: Scholastic Achievement Test
SST: Social Shaping of Technology
UCLA: University of California, Los Angeles
USC: University of Southern California
VKC: The Von KleinSmid Center Library
WASC: West Association of Schools and Colleges
WTO: World Trade Organization
WWW: World Wide Web
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vi
Abstract
This thesis analyzes perceptions and opinions about historic and ongoing
technological changes at the University of Southern California library and relates
them to wider globalizing processes using a geographical conceptual framework.
Embedded case studies - of the Information Services Division, the Collection
Information System, and a wide range of digital archives - are assessed through
documentation that has been made public as well as information gained from a
series of in depth interviews with key individuals directly involved in these
transformations. The first chapter of this thesis establishes a series of globalizing
contexts in which change has occurred. The second chapter illustrates the process
by which virtual access was privileged over physical and local access in response
to rhetoric about technological change as well as distinct and concrete globalizing
processes. The next chapter focuses on how the technological core for the digital
library - a system with significant implications for access - is being created in the
context of numerous layers of uncertainty that are financial and institutional as
well as technological and conceptual. Next, virtual access related projects - mostly
digital archives - are discussed in the context of these uncertainties and constraints
as well as new ones, such as legal and financial ones imposed on a global level:
combined, these sections depict an institution ostensibly devoted to the creation of
information access whose existence, within a series of contexts, determines the
ways in which technological change affects this endeavor. The constraints and
contexts relate to the ways in which global, urban and local scale factors intersect
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and co-generate to propel the trajectory of institutional change under globalization.
Technological changes are among the factors and processes operative at multiple
scales that affect the ways in which emplaced social, cultural and economic
relations at the scale of the university determine how, why and how much
information is made accessible.
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Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1. Research Topic
The conception of this thesis began with the following question. How is
technological change factored into decision-making at the University of Southern
California (USC) libraries? An upper management level library administrator
delivered the following response: “this question assumes a logic that doesn’t exist in
how things work here” (pers.comm., anon., 2001a).1 Here I strove to take up this
challenge and attempt to discern not one but numerous logics that intersected to
culminate in the present condition of USC’s library, paying particular attention to the
creation of digital archives. “All major trends of change constituting our new,
confusing world are related,” says Castells, “and we can make sense of their
interrelationship” (2000, pp. 4). If chaos exists in the USC library, it is not
considered here to be the chaos of complete nihilistic disorder, but that of
immeasurable micro-processes that coalesce, in disparate and unpredictable ways
into conditions that we think we can recognize, convert into systems and name:
“integrated digital archives,” “collection information system,” “next generation
library.” While the case of USC might be unique, the execution of such an analysis
'This person requested that their identity be concealed. This citation format will be discussed in the
next section.
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should illuminate how access-creation might be understood in relation to
technological change and institutional restructuring; and increasingly so as parallel
studies are completed.
As it developed, this thesis began to form around the question of how one institution
battles with the complications of information access in an era where neo-liberal
policies and exultations about technology are aligned and co-generative in different
ways. I have striven to understand how an institution’s contribution to access is a
complex function of the visions, motivations and capabilities of individuals within it
that are involved in a highly dynamic ecology of games (Dutton 1999) that is made
increasingly intense and intellectually challenging with the advent of information
and communication technologies (ICTs).
In a conclusion, I will bring together the perceived contributions of this thesis -
paying particular attention to geographical matters - and align these ideas with larger
theoretical debates. The condensed version of this conclusion is: technological
changes are among the factors and processes operative at multiple scales that affect
the ways in which emplaced social, cultural and economic relations at the scale of
the university determine how, why and how much information is made accessible, or
is not. Each of the chapters of this thesis will address points leading up to this in
different ways, charting a progression of change across time.
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In the rest of this chapter, I will discuss the theoretical backdrop, catalogue the
various political economic contexts and provide a brief description of the case and
the methodology employed in the rest of the thesis. After this introduction, the
second chapter will emphasize how rhetoric about comparative advantage, talk about
electronic libraries, the realities of institutional reorganizations among libraries on a
global level, and the increased valuation of urban space has required the creation of a
new organizational paradigm with a particular set of implications for access.
Specifically, I will discuss changes in the context of the institution at large, paying
attention to the process through which the Information Services Division (ISD) was
created. I will catalogue the responses of individuals to these changes as evidence for
the confusion they have caused in directing peoples’ motives. I will show that there
was no single process at hand: technological change in the context of globalization
affected different processes at different scales within the institution in different ways.
Although it brought individuals into closer contact with each other and created new
possibilities for new sets of connections, it was tied and linked to the ideology of
new technologies that was, in turn, linked to a wider synthesis of political economic
and discursive forces that led to the privileging of digital collections over analog
ones, greatly affecting the way information was made accessible at the local scale.
Access, this chapter demonstrates, is created according to the logic as well as the
illogic of operations within particular places that exist in a number of wider contexts.
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In the next chapter, I will focus on how technology itself is linked to these political
economic forces and how its integration affects the creation of access within the
context of the institution. What were the specific spatial effects and realities of
technology? Here, I will describe the development of a spatial-temporal Geographic
Information Systems (GIS“) based digital library system, evaluating the many
technological factors at stake. I will seek to show that the technological coordination
of disparate games is easier said than done: by focusing on the technologies chosen
for the Collection Information System (CIS), I will seek to demonstrate how
technological decisions with implications for access are made in a context where
there are multiple notions of a user. These different visions, this chapter will seek to
show, exist in a particular kind of dynamic technological context that allows for
some of them to perpetuate over others. In particular, this chapter addresses three
points of my conclusion. At the conclusion of this thesis, I determine that technology
has an epistemologically problematic effect: it blurs a number of different games as
it resolves different ones simultaneously. By illustrating the ways in which
technological systems that exist in particular places, and are energized by motives
specific to those places, are interlinked with those at other scales, I hope to
demonstrate how this blurring might occur and what it conceals about the place-
related nature of the creation of information access. Secondly, different visions exist
among different users, demonstrating that technology is always socially shaped, and
that this ‘social’ shaping is very much hinged upon the games of each of the
1 1 Technological systems used for spatial analysis and modeling. They will be described in greater
detail in a section at the beginning of Chapter 3.
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individuals responsible for these respective visions and the larger and more global
technological structures and institutions that are tied to systems of exchange, like the
contractual process necessary for creating an Oracle database.1 1 1 Global and place-
related factors are acutely reciprocal in this case. Finally, it is determined here that
technological change is both place-induced and catalytic of place-specific
contingencies: the geographical becomes increasingly important because cyberspace
is embedded in real space and the institutions through which it is created are
emplaced. This is also evident in each of the other chapters.
The fourth chapter will again discuss the drive for comparative advantage in the
context of legal and financial challenges to the creation of free information imposed
by the neo-liberal regime. But within the constraints of these contexts, the creation of
access to information can also be linked to globalization as much as it relates to how
the Internet allows information to become more widely accessible and in the way in
which it allows people to create new connections with each other through
communications technologies that allow for new forms of social relations that are
directly related to new kinds of information. To describe this, I will focus on a few
selected projects that use digital archives in a particular manner. Unlike the other two
chapters, this one is located very much in the present, and focused on the relationship
of individuals or agents to the place under question within the context of the
3 This is discussed in detail in Chapter 3. Briefly, this involves the need for the client institution
(USC) to solicit the creation of a contract with the database provider and company that is Oracle, to
serve as the technological core for the database that will become the Collection Information System,
the central part of the university library.
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globalizing processes described. Within particular places, games occurring at
different scales within the local ecology of games affect the way in which
information is made available on urban, regional and global scales. All of these
processes are transformative of the place under question. Despite the way in which
technology blurs processes, one truth is established: digital libraries are not libraries
in digital form; they are related yet unique repositories of information. Subsequently,
the second conclusion is that while the Internet and digitalization did allow for new
geographies of information, constraints imposed by wider political economic forces
such as copyright restricted the extent to which this could happen. The larger
purpose is to highlight the unpredictability of technological change as well as the
dynamic potentials it offers, even as political economic and cultural forces on greater
scales affect the way in which information is made accessible.
1.2. Case Study and Time Frame: The History of Change at the USC Library
1.2.1. Early History
As described above, these chapters document events across a chronological time
frame: from the creation of the Information Services Division to the creation of its
technological base to the resultant set of changes. Dutton (1999, pp. 15) describes an
“ecology of games” as “a larger system of action composed of two or more separate
but interdependent games.” This thesis will trace these games and the subsequent
institutional response across an approximate time frame of eight years, focusing
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roughly on the time period following the creation of the Information Systems of Los
Angeles (ISLA) project (1994); onward to the creation of the Information Services
Division (ISD); and the subsequent inception of the “Next Generation Library
Initiative” (NGLI) (Shepard 2001), representative of the institutional imperative
towards large-scale digitalization; onto the present. I will strive to be temporally
specific as I evaluate spatially dynamic processes that led to the current condition of
the library.
How does the institution purport to perceive this condition? The paragraph about
libraries in the USC catalogue is as follows:
As the role of libraries throughout the world is being transformed and
redefined by the information revolution, the Information Services Division
(ISD) at USC is responding to this new environment by extending access to
library resources in a variety of ways. These include the use of technologies
that provide services and information electronically, the cultivation of
cooperative agreements with other libraries, and the enhancement of
collections selected to meet the specific needs of the USC community. As a
center for scholarly endeavor, the libraries make a unique contribution to the
efforts of ISD, particularly within the university’s mission of instruction and
research. Service, new information technologies and traditional collections -
all of these are here for the USC community. (USC 2002a, pp. 12)
What is the process through which the library became merely one of the service
centers of the ISD, something that makes a “unique contribution to the efforts of
ISD,” an organization with a larger mission? This thesis will not outline all of these
changes in chronological order; partly because the information is not always
accessible but mostly because it is an unsuitable strategy, considering the questions.
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It will, however, describe in detail what has happened in the last 15 years, which
should explain much about the nature of these priorities.
It is useful to obtain some kind of a historical perspective. Is everything that is
occurring completely new and unprecedented? The early history of the library
(SSHC 2002) indicates otherwise. The first library at USC started in the school year
of 1880-1881. The collection was stored in a set of buildings that no longer exist for
the first 40 or so years. In the late 1920s, a fundraising campaign was generated by
the endowment from President Rufus Von KleinSmid, whose name can currently be
seen in the VKC Library. The Doheny family donated $1,000,000 in 1930 for a new
library that led to the opening of the Doheny Memorial Library in 1932. But by the
time of the inception of Doheny, there were already other libraries on the campus,
among them the Hoose Library of Philosophy (1924), the Stowell Research Library
for Education (1923), and the Clarence E. Rainwater Library of Sociological
Research (1926). The professional schools already maintained departmental libraries:
Fine Arts, Law, Mathematics, Medicine, Dentistry, and Theology. Combined, these
libraries held close to 129,000 volumes.
Two things are clear from looking at this very early history. First, the practice of
targeting funds towards particular endeavors is not a new one; it is central to the way
in which an institution that is embedded inside of another one is able to operate. The
second point is that the relative placement and organization of information was
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already decentralized, with numerous subject libraries already operational, from the
beginning: the devolved nature of information distribution is not a product of
globalization or information technology-related change, although there are ways in
which these things affect the nature of the decentralization and devolution, as the
second chapter will discuss. Indeed, the changes in the last fifteen years have been
immensely significant. The dynamism reflected in changes at the earliest stage of the
library’s transformation are reflected in the current period, as the institution
continues to reinvent itself at an accelerated pace, as the next section will discuss.
1.2.2. Timeline
The following are the basics of the recent timeline, following by an initial discussion
of key digital library projects, like ISLA, IDA and the CIS, that are mentioned here
and throughout this thesis:
1988: The James Irvine Center for Scholarly Technology (CST) is started as a joint
effort sponsored by the USC Libraries and Academic Computing in order to create a
bridge between the two departments and to provide a technology-based outreach
initiative. It is housed in Doheny (CST 2002). Much of the drive towards
technology-based change in the early part of the institution’s history was led by the
CST.
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1994: The Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Library is built primarily for technology
applications, providing much-needed facilities for student work and computing (CST
2002).
Email service is established with the use of Post Office Protocol (POP) email servers
(Networker 1994). With the arrival of Point to Point Protocol (PPP), dial-in to USC
Net skyrockets. A period of immense growth begins with the addition of new web-
related services to the information infrastructure (Networker 1994b).lv
The Information Systems of Los Angeles project (ISLA) - a digital archive of Los
Angeles-based materials, central to the Collection Information System (CIS) - is
conceived (ISLA 2001). They are discussed in detail later in this section.
1995: Over the summer, the USC Library puts together its own website (Networker
1994).
1996: The Online Academic Student Information System (OASIS) is formed, a
forum on which various university functions (ex: registration) are consolidated and
placed online (Networker 1996). The features of Homer - the USC library catalog -
evolve significantly into the creation of a workable online card catalogue.
I V A quote from Networker (1994b): “With the explosive growth of the WWW comes a commercial
viewer whose popularity has taken the Web client industry by storm. We like it so much we're
including it in the UCS PPP distribution software (and telling you all about it here).” This viewer was
Netscape.
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1997: The university libraries, under the leadership of newly recruited Dean of
Libraries and Chief Information Officer (CIO) Jerry Campbell, merge with all
campus computing departments, including Telecommunications and Student
Information Systems to create the Information Services Division (CST 2002).
1998: Leavey Library undergoes its first major renovation since it opened in 1994,
funded by a $1.2 million grant, in response to increasing demand for information
tools and resources, allegedly its most popular resources. The most visible change is
the complete overhaul of the second floor, converting the east wing into an
information common. Equipment is upgraded, and new computer stations and
meeting rooms are constructed (Flick 1998).
Independently of this, the first version of the Integrated Digital Archives is created
(ISLA 2001).
1999: The project to retrofit Doheny Research Library is begun (Networker 1998b).
It is closed for a year, with all materials organized through Leavey Library.
Individuals, including faculty members (Sipe et al 1999), issue various proposals
about what to do with the new Doheny, how it should be structured, what the
university’s priorities should be. ISD teams coordinate with the Federal Emergency
Management Agency.
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2000: Construction continues on Doheny Memorial Library. Work is completed on
the Collection Information System.
2001: Doheny Library is reopened in August (ISD 2002d)
The Archival Research Center (ARC) and its website are created and made
functional (ARC 2001). Physically housed in the Doheny Library, the university’s
main center for research, the research center is meant to serve as a central gathering
place for research and informal scholarly exchange. Many materials related to Los
Angeles are made available at the web address of the ARC.
2002: The spatial-temporal user mechanism for intra-library searching is due for
completion in June (Wilson 2001b).
1.2.3. Descriptions o f Related Projects: ISLA, IDA, CIS and GIS
The above timeline deliberately documents both technological and institutional
changes, to demonstrate how they all occurred concurrently in a manner that was at
least partially random. But it is necessary here to describe in greater detail the case
studies of the technological core, as they will be discussed in this thesis prior to
Chapter 3, where they constitute a central focus.
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The first important technological development was the creation of the Information
Systems of Los Angeles (ISLA). A group of individuals, with Professor of History
Phil Ethington in charge, strove to create a ‘regional meta-collection’ to “digitally
unite and provide public access to information owned and housed by many different
regional institutions” (ISLA 2001). USC is said to have “developed ISLA and IDA
to achieve a breakthrough level of integration in the region's archival collections, so
that the broadest possible audience can ask new kinds of questions about their
region, and to enable more effective and democratic modes of teaching and
research.”
The project was distinguished by the initial attempt of individuals involved to create
the digital infrastructure for the project themselves, using the resources and
technological expertise already existent within the university. The plan was to then
make this system available - to “sell” it - to other institutions. This digital
infrastructure was the IDA, the Integrated Digital Archives, which was:
A software system conceived, designed and written at the University of
Southern California for the purpose of creating and managing very large
digital library collections of primary research materials in heterogeneous
formats. It is a space-time-keyword-format structured search-and-retrieval
system, with special value to regional archival collections. Through it, users
will be able to search and retrieve archival objects (photographs, texts,
quantitative data, or audio-visual files), plus the authoritative cataloging
"metadata," by searching specific space, times, or keywords. (ISLA 2001)
Collectively, this project became known, in hindsight, as ISLA-IDA or ISLA/IDA.
In the third chapter of this thesis, as I provide a detailed discussion of the
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development of the Collection Information System (CIS), I will discuss how this
attempt was followed by an institutional response that transformed the nature of the
project. The goal of the CIS itself, according to the USC Digital Library Federation
Report “is to provide a robust, scalable, open and standards-based information
architecture to interactively deliver large numbers of digital objects via the web
along with integrated access to existing catalogs and indexes of non-digital
materials” (Shepard 2000b). What this means is that it is meant to serve two
purposes: 1) as the technological core of the library’s digital archive system, and is
designed with the understanding that needs and requirements might change, hence
robust (capable of incorporating different kinds of data formats) and scalable (able to
incorporate increasing amounts of data and users); and, 2) as the central core of the
library catalog for analog materials contained as part of the library’s regular
collections. In this way, its development affects all kinds of access: virtual, physical
as well as cognitive.
For the first of these purposes, a space-time-keyword-format search mechanism will
be necessary. This will allow users to search the digital archives based on location
(by clicking on a spot in a map), by time (the period for which the record pertains),
by any given keyword (like “Los Angeles”) and by format (like analog or digital).
It is important to note that this mechanism is based on Geographic Information
Systems (GIS), software systems used for spatial analysis and modeling that have
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proven to be beneficial to libraries with spatially relatable data (ESRI 1994).
Specifically, GIS constitutes software systems used to store, retrieve, manipulate,
analyze and display spatially related sets of data, often called “layers or themes.”
They are typically used by managers or planners to negotiate the analysis of large
amounts of spatial information and by researchers in the natural or social sciences to
engage spatial questions in a quantitative manner. The organization that has the
widest monopoly on the production of these systems is ESRI (Environmental
Systems Research Institute), notable for having created ArcIMS (Arc View Internet
Map Services), used in the ISLA and subsequent digital projects.
Their use in libraries is one among many possible ones. In the case of USC, GIS
technology has been used for all the purposes that is traditionally used for within
libraries (ESRI 1994): to create a system incorporating large amounts of digital and
spatial data (as in the ISLA), to create a geographical referencing system (as in the
space-time-keyword-format search mechanism), and as a general purpose indexing
system for library collections. As the ESRI report says, “because location is a
powerful way to organize information, as powerful as scientific classification or
history, GIS can be understood as a kind of user interface for virtually all
information processing with a spatial element” (1994 pp. 7). In this way, it has made
it possible to access almost all materials that are stored within a library that can be
geographically referenced.
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1.3. Methodology and Sources
This analysis will proceed in a roughly chronological order, focusing on particular
instances of change in order to provide an in depth analysis of the numerous issues at
stake. As I narrate and describe processes related to the creation of information
access, I will strive to elucidate their geographic relevance. In this way, the
descriptive endeavor will be tied to the analytic one on an incremental level.
It will not be possible to describe every way in which digitalization has affected
access at the USC, although several references will be made to changes that occur
throughout the organization. Subsequently, the method used will be that of an
“embedded case study” (Yin 1994), as I strive to describe particular aspects of
change within a larger institutional context for insight into larger scale issues. As
opposed to a holistic case study, which constantly focuses on the entirety of an
organization, an embedded case study would observe the main unit of the
organization as well as a number of subunits. These subunits can be chosen
according to the dictates of the kinds of questions being asked. Accordingly, there is
a rationale for why I have selected certain aspects or certain projects in reaching my
conclusions. All of the sub-projects on which I have chosen to focus - digital archive
projects, the creation of a spatial-temporal search mechanism, the process of
choosing a database for a Collection Information System, and the process through
which the university and library underwent economic and financial transformations
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to digitalize - relate or appear to relate to the creation of new spatialities of
information. I worked with this constellation of projects also because people referred
me to each other as being especially informed about particular aspects of change
occurring at the university.
Twelve interviews were conducted. This decision was based on the assumption that
people are more likely to reveal their true opinions in person than in print;
furthermore, the interview format enabled people to better identify their sets of
connections with each other and their various positions within the institution,
revealing a far richer ecology than would otherwise be evident. In this way, the
account that is created is investigative as well as historical. These individuals are all
faculty members and librarians at the management level. For the purposes of
confidentiality discussed later in this section, their names have been concealed. It is
useful, however, to detail their roles here to demonstrate that I have tried to obtain an
even distribution of individuals involved in different aspects of the creation of
information access, and I have tried proactively to engage individuals in particular
positions of power over the dissemination and distribution of information. The
individuals chosen for the work, according to the above category, range broadly
across these functions. Combined, they cover the numerous sub-institutions and
departments that are embedded within USC that are involved in the production and
dissemination of information: internal and external communication, technological
development, the production of archives, costs of management and institutional
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change, collection development of traditional analog resources, scholarly activity and
production. These include individuals that produce information technologies as well
as those that consume it. Specifically, it includes those individuals that work globally
and produce globally as well as those that produce local systems for local
consumption. A list of interviews and positions is in an appendix.
An important matter that needs to be clarified is that of ‘Human Subjects’. It is
notable that the individuals interviewed are not the subjects of this research, which is
about technology, organizational change and globalization: their insights, input and
first-hand knowledge, however, directly illuminate matters essential to this research.
According to the Institutional Review Board guidelines for human subjects research,
research using observational or ethnographic methods is “exempt” unless the
information would allow subjects to be identified and if the disclosure of the data
would reasonably place the subjects at risk or harm (NSF 2002).
With this in mind, it is necessary to maintain that I will strive to make it clear that the
individuals interviewed not be identifiable by any means within the organization.
Each individual interviewed was asked whether or not they would like their identity
revealed; all but the first three (listed as pers.comm., anon., 2001a, 2001b and 2001c
respectively) agreed to be identified. In the course of the thesis, however, I have
chosen not to identify any of the individuals, including those that sent e-mails
verifying their statements, in order that they not reasonably face any risk or harm.
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19
While in some cases, I will refer to the kind of work individuals perform in the
organization - when it is important to the analysis - 1 will be suitably broad as to not
identify any one person. There is one exception to this - where the level of
identification might be revelatory: in this case, the individual’s compliance with the
nature of the research has been ascertained.
Information gleaned from these interviews was synthesized with that obtained from
documentation about the case study that exists on the university’s website,
publications distributed to different forums including a faculty newsletter, online
journals operated through the university’s computer science department and library
program, and department-specific documentation about technological changes
directed towards particular funding bodies. These are instances of the kinds of
primary materials that happen to exist in the form of a paper and electronic trail of
institutional changes at multiple scales.
1.4. Local Context: Character and Ethos of the University of Southern
California
The changes described in this thesis occur within the context of a place: at the local
scale, this context is that of the university. In this section, I describe the kind of place
that USC is, in order to foreground the nature of the place-specific ethos, a matter
that will be discussed extensively throughout this thesis.
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USC is the oldest independent teaching and research university in the west (US
News 2002). It has the largest student body of any private university in the west,
with 15,059 full time students (Stanford, the next highest, has 6,342). It is, in a
number of different ways, a university with a location-centric identity: its placement
in Los Angeles affects both the rhetoric and the reality of the institutional ethos. It is
the largest private employer in Los Angeles, contributing around $3 billion annually
to the gross regional product; it has trained an astounding amount - by 1930, it was
the majority - of the region’s bankers, lawyers, dentists, doctors and film-makers; an
equally remarkable proportion of graduates choose to stay and work in the region; its
architecture graduates were instrumental in redesigning post-1940 LA, with a great
amount of the city’s skyscrapers being USC alumni creations (USC News 2002). Its
relationship to Los Angeles has been noted by sources independent of the institution.
There is now much discussion of the university’s wide role in community service,
through its hospitals as well as its business and community organizations (pp. 13).
Secondly, there is a long record of USC graduates obtaining powerful positions in
the public and the private sector by virtue of exceptionally strong alumni relations
(Weiss 1999). But it is necessary to also say that the place-specific identity is both
urban and regional on a wider scale: literature on the university emphatically places
emphasis on the role of the university in “establishing a widening network of
service and partnership among the nations of the Pacific Rim” (USC 2002a, pp. 13).
As we will see in the third and fourth chapters, this larger scaled identification - that
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with the Pacific Rim as well as that with Los Angeles - greatly affects the way in
which information is made accessible.
The ‘University of Second Choice’ slogan - once attributed to USC in reference to its
perceived status as a second choice school in relation to UCLA - is increasingly
inaccurate. Changes in the institution’s self-respect and prestige, for instance, have
been significantly augmented over the past few years largely because of a striking
rise in student selectivity. In 2001, the average GPA of entering freshmen was a 3.91
and the average SAT score was a 1319; in 1997, the average GPA was a 3.7 and the
average Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT) score was a 1215. In 1990, the average
SAT score was a 1070 (Basinger 2002). This must be considered with the fact that
SATs were weighed differently prior to 1994; individuals who took the exam before
that period have scores that are roughly equivalent to those today that are
approximately 100 points higher (Braswell 1992). But in either case, the new kind of
freshman USC is now attracting is supposed to be far more intellectually curious,
more interested in the value of an education for its own sake (Payton 2002). This
year, more students came to USC for its academic reputation than in the history of
the institution: 79.6%.
Much of the change over the last 10 years can be related to the tenure of President
Steven Sample, who began by establishing five priorities: “strengthening the quality
of undergraduate education, developing the Health Sciences Campus into a world-
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renowned center of excellence in clinical research and care, recruiting a larger
number of the best doctoral and post-doctoral students, expanding USC’s tradition of
public service by focusing on the neighborhoods immediately surrounding the two
campuses, and improving the quality of USC programs and services while
conserving resources” (USC 2002 pp. 17). From the outset, the creation of a research
library was not on the agenda.
This is not out of a lack of resources. Sample’s central contribution is an instigation
of a massive increase in endowment, changing the context in which all financial
decisions are made within the university. According to figures tabulated by The
Chronicle o f Higher Education, USC is the first university in history to receive three
gifts of $100 million or more (USC News 1999). Under Sample, the university’s
endowment has quadrupled, to $2.1 billion this past year. It appears to be in the
midst of what might be called a capital campaign that, in university-speak, would
allow for the potential of a modern-day Renaissance. It has transformed not only
financially but also physically with a great amount of focus on building, renovating
and improving. It is an increasingly wealthy place whose wealth is fixed and
emplaced in the amount and in the architectural specificities of its built landscape.
But these changes are particularly interesting when seen in the context of the fact
that there is still insignificant attention paid to the library, the implications of which
will be observed throughout this thesis. They reflect a prioritization that is
institution-specific as it is revealed that this particular set of decisions were made in
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response to and in perpetuation of a certain set of ideologies. A matter that has direct
implications for the research library is that USC has devoted more attention to its
professional schools - law, business, engineering and medicine - and its programs in
film, communication, music and drama, but not on its graduate research programs
that are part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
In the following quote from the university catalog, the only mention of a library is
with reference to the building of Leavey:
Since Sample took office, USC has marked several major milestones.
Chemistry Professor George Olah, director of the Loker Hydrocarbon
Research Institute, won the Nobel Prize. The university enrolled the most
academically talented freshman classes in its history, topped the $200 million
mark in sponsored research for the first time and completed a comprehensive,
university-wide strategic planning process designed to take USC to the next
level of academic excellence. It also surpassed its initial $1 billion
fundraising goal two years ahead of schedule, and increased the goal to $2
billion. USC became the only university to receive three separate nine-figure
gifts in one campaign - $100 million from Alfred Mann to establish the
Mann Institute of Biomedical Engineering, $120 million from Ambassador
Walter Annenberg to create the Annenberg Center for Communication, and
$110 million from the W. M. Keck Foundation for USC’s School of
Medicine. In addition, several important new facilities have opened including
the USC University Hospital, McAlister Academic Resource Center in
Heritage Hall, the W.M. Keck Foundation Photonics Research Laboratory,
the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Library, and the USC/Norris
Comprehensive Cancer Center expansion project. Under Samples’ leadership,
USC was named College of the Year 2000 by the editors of Time magazine
and the Princeton Review for the university’s extensive community-service
programs.(USC 2000, pp. 17)
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All of these factors can impact how individuals at all levels within the institution see
its importance as a serious teaching and research university and, hence, the
importance they place on the creation of an adequate research library.
In order to establish a leadership position in graduate education, we plan to
build on those of our programs that are already distinguished and establish
new strengths that emerge from the unique characteristics of USC. (Sample
2002, pp. 5)
Although this is mentioned as part of a drive to create a $100 million endowment for
the support of graduate education described by Sample in an alumni magazine,
strikingly evident is a rhetoric about comparative advantage, one that will be
revealed repeatedly as this investigation descends in scale to the functioning of
different sub-units within the library. And again, of all the talk about recruiting
advanced graduate students and providing them with ‘support’ in their intellectual
quests, there is no mention made of the libraries, just a commitment to what is
vaguely called “world class facilities” (ibid). This strategy may not be specific to
USC but it can be seen to have had a range of cultural effects, many of which will be
discussed in the second chapter of this thesis, that relate to distrust and contention.
As the ‘L-Rap’ report (Sipe et. al.) discussed in that chapter suggests, individuals do
not necessarily believe that the administration has taken the steps necessary to make
improvements in the library commensurate with wider transformations in the midst
of this institutional Renaissance. Much of the confusion and contention described in
the following chapters can be related to the existence of the place-related tensions
this suggests.
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A quote from an article in The Chronicle o f Higher Education is revealing:
Over the last 11 years, Mr. Sample's strategy of making substantial changes
and then aggressively promoting them has transformed USC from an
institution once derided by its rivals as the University of Second Choice into
a selective one that is increasingly viewed as "hot." All along, he's been
raising boatloads of money.
Some higher-education scholars, who are reluctant to speak for attribution,
have criticized Mr. Sample for his relentless marketing. "There's just a lot of
image-making going on here, more than usually goes on with presidents,"
says one researcher. But the results are indisputable. (Basinger 2002)
Again, there is a conflation between marketing strategies, allegations of wealth
mongering and lack of academic seriousness that is associated with the cultural
characteristic of the place. The most accurate definitions of the character of this
place would focus on counterposing this conflation with relatively positive accounts
such as those find in the catalogue or those of Noscoe, who is quoted in the Basinger
article as saying:
Professors admire the president, who has helped bring them better students,
improved facilities, and enhanced the institution's reputation. The Academic
Senate responded to Mr.Sample's letter by issuing a vote of confidence in his
leadership.
The ambiguity that these accounts suggest is prevalent among different units and
parties within the university (the library, the faculty) in relation to the actions of the
president as well as the range of competing self-perceptions. These will be
investigated in Chapter 3.
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1.5. Globalization in the Library: Contexts of Change
Birdsall (2001) has argued that librarians have been “lulled into thinking the
challenge facing them is solely technical...the potential transformation of libraries
due to development in information technology cannot be divorced from political and
economic forces driving technological change.” But very little of the discussion
surrounding the restructuring of libraries explicitly locates these transformations in
the material and cultural context of broader political economic processes: instead,
much of the rhetoric maintains its focus on the specificities of technological change.
The incomplete picture this creates can be related to what Birdsall also says about
the “ideology of information technology” that leaves the dissemination of
information to the market, and “promotes a fatalism that encourages political
passivity by claiming that our fates are determined by inevitable technological
change, the natural laws of the free market, and the uncontrollable gale forces of
global creative destruction.” In this section, I will seek to offer an introductory
glance at how this set of connections might be made between what happens at the
library and what happens in larger contexts related to the neo-liberal regime,
focusing on main texts in geography and related disciplines.
Specifically, a set of discernable yet related and mutually reinforcing processes
constitute what is often called ‘globalization’. As Held and McGrew argue, the
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concept has expanded to encompass the diverse and multiple emphases given to
“material, spatial-temporal and cognitive aspects” (2000, pp. 3). When I refer to
globalization, I seek to focus on each of these contexts, and hence use it in a manner
consistent with the following definition:
Globalization has emerged as a common term, yet is an unwieldy conceptual
idea used in diverse contexts and to signal, or disguise, a variety of different
cultural, economic, and political positions. It is fundamentally associated
with the increasing internationalization of capitalist practices, through firms
and transnational corporate activities in the world economy, backed and
challenged by political forces, accompanied by cultural forms, and mediated
by local resistances. (Cartier 2001, pp.l)
Many of these processes can be observed interacting upon the institutional landscape
of USC. It is crucial to maintain that the particular configuration of globalizing and
hence individually general and widespread processes affecting the university create
an atmosphere - when placed in relation to each other in the context of the place
under question - that is fundamentally unique and nonreplicable. In other words, in
the context of USC, these processes have a particular set of meanings and
consequences that relate directly to the way their association and interaction with
each other is mediated by place-specific factors. Specifically, at the outset, it is
useful to establish that there are numerous globalizing contexts at stake because
under consideration here is a digital library, an academic library and a university.
Accordingly, the globalizing contexts are multiple: that of increasingly integrated
and homogenized and streamlined libraries; that of efficient and competitive high-
tech universities; of the urban and regional location of USC in the midst of a major
world city; and that of the Internet and technological systems themselves. While the
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body of this thesis will discuss these processes in accordance with their specific
contexts, it is useful to foreground them here.
But globalization is not just about the rise and impact of the neo-liberal regime.
There are multiple social and cultural processes that are directly related to these.
Partly, these relate to Harvey’s discussion of postmodemity (1989): the ‘space time
compression’ of which he speaks - the changes in the human experiences of space
and time - are directly related to the new kinds of information being made accessible
through digital archives as well as the new ways in which people have been able to
communicate with each other since the rise of the Internet and that of e-mail. As
much as these global changes in communication and dissemination capacities have
affected USC in certain kinds of ways, they have affected people and units within
USC in particular kinds of ways: as an aspect of cultural globalization, their effects
are suitably multi-tiered and place-specific.
Before proceeding, something needs to be said about the way in which the university
and the library serve as alternating subjects of this inquiry. As much as universities
operate within the financial context of these political economic changes, what
happens at libraries like USC occurs within the financial contexts of universities’
responses. Accordingly, the rise of the neo-liberal regime can directly be related to
processes of change in libraries that affect the ways in which access has been created
in different and specific ways. Before access and neo-liberalism are related, it is
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useful to investigate the relationship of the university to the library in the context of
these political economic changes. How do these all relate to USC? Again, there are
different scales of activity here - that of the university and that of the library - the
former far more profit-driven than the latter; in fact, the university can be seen to be
profit producing and the library, as many of the interviews indicated, profit
consuming. Yet the transformations at both of these scales are in response to many of
the same set of globalizing forces and rhetoric, with both levels of transformation
affecting each other. The disjuncture that exists between different levels of local -
places within places - transformations in response to global and urban processes is a
crucial aspect of the tension that digitalization has caused in the USC environment.
Moreover, it is the global and globalizing processes themselves that can be seen to
have transformed the spatial relationship of the library to the university. In prior eras,
individuals working within the library would actually be physically located within
the demarcated space of the library within the demarcated space of the university;
with the advent of the ISD, these spatial scales have become difficult to discern in
terms of organizational hierarchies as people who are librarians have moved around
and formed affiliations throughout the university. To the notion that spatial
processes interacting upon places at different scales have effects on access at
different scales - a central finding of this thesis - we can add that some of these
‘places’ (the library vs. the university) are more ‘public’ or ‘private’ than others.
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1.5.1. Flexible Accumulation
The creation of a global economy has been allied in deep and inextricable ways with
processes of technological change in the context of the transition from Fordism to
flexible accumulation. Dicken (1998) has discussed how economic activity has
moved out of the boundaries of nation states, with the resultant configurations still
fixing themselves in particular places. The global economy that has been created was
and continues to be related to processes of technological change: Dicken explicitly
relates the pace of technological change with flux in the world market and the
volatility essentially linked to globalization. For Harvey (1989), the emergence of
flexible modes of capital accumulation and later rounds of “time-space compression”
results from the essential set of processes that capitalism undergoes in resolving its
crisis tendencies, that are very much facilitated by technological changes, including
those of information technology. Combined, these are greatly linked and reinforcing
of new forms of cultural exchange and production. It is in an era of globalization that
the changes occurring in the library have occurred. The ethos that this new set of
reorganizations and technological changes elicits, according to Harvey, relates to
postmodernity. The Internet is central to this.
What exactly are these flexible modes? Castells (2000) describes the ‘Information
Technology Paradigm’ on which the creation of the ISD to be discussed is arguably
operating. The aspect of this paradigm most pertinent to this study is that related to
the notion that:
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Not only are processes reversible, but organizations and institutions can be
modified, and even fundamentally altered, by rearranging their components.
What is distinctive to the configuration of the new technological paradigm is
its ability to reconfigure, a decisive feature in a society characterized by
constant change and organizational fluidity. (Castells, pp. 71)
He also warns that:
We must stop short of a value judgment attached to this technological
feature...because flexibility could be a liberating force, but also a repressive
tendency if the rewriters of rules are always the powers that be...It is thus
essential to keep a distance between assessing the emergence of new social
forms and processes, as induced and allowed by new technologies, and
extrapolating the potential consequences of such developments for society
and people, (ibid)
Specifically discussing the culture, institutions and organizations of the
informational economy, he says that:
The rise of the informational, global economy is characterized by the
development of a new organizational logic that is related to the current
process of technological change, but not dependent upon it. It is the
convergence and interaction between a new technological paradigm and a
new organizational logic that constitutes the historical foundation of the
informational economy...this organizational logic manifests itself under
different forms in various cultural and institutional contexts, (pp. 164)
Some of these shifts will be discussed in the body of this thesis wherever they
emerge in different contexts in relation to USC, from interviews or discussions of
management stmcture.
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1.5.2. Professional Context: University Libraries
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Other sets of globalizing contexts in which the library operates are less institutional
and more professional, in that they relate to the way particular kinds of librarians or
academics operate across space. The largest context that links this is the advent of
the World Wide Web (WWW) in the 1993 era, before which the convergence of
public services, technical services and libraries could not really be seen to be a
movement. As Schwartz (2002) suggests, the movement was in full swing by the late
1990s. Moran (2001) discusses how business process reengineering, a standard
practice a few years ago that involved changing the management styles and asserting
new goals, is being increasingly abandoned in favor of modifying the actual
organizational structure, moving away from rigid hierarchies to flatter and more
flexible structures. She places what is happening in libraries - increased automation,
changing information needs and user expectations, reduced budgets and the need for
staff to have more autonomy - into the context of what is happening to institutions
and organizations at large.
Some of these are related more specifically to the university than to the library. A
body of work (Agre 2000, Armstrong 2001, Bates 1999, Harris 2000, Katz 1999,
Noble 1998) has recently emerged on the interaction between technology,
globalization and higher education. The assumption that automation is an inevitable
part of the new “knowledge-based” society - that it will necessarily improve learning
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and create wider access - has been challenged by those that have focused on its
coercive nature, tracing the incursion of market forces into the realm of higher
education (e.g. Noble 1998), demonstrating how individuals and forces with
commercial interests in mind have catalyzed the commodification of knowledge and
information on consumers such as students and professors, accelerating the process
through which information and knowledge become just another service. In The
Social Life o f Information, Brown and Duguid (2000) argue that a tunnel vision
approach to technology in libraries and higher education, in general, emerges from
an unthinking use of electronic products that is driven by the commercial interests of
higher education leaders, and by proxy, the leaders of their libraries. This implicates
the manner in which the purpose of libraries continues to be the creation of access to
information rather than as showcases for information technologies. Katz (1999) has
discussed the intense slate of restructurings that have occurred at universities in
recent years, often based on competition from technology-based and explicitly profit-
driven universities, which have affected the ways in which attention has and will
continue to be paid to digital libraries as part of larger financial plans. Slaughter and
Leslie (1999) discuss how the globalization of the political economy under late
capitalism has destabilized the traditional patterns of university work, leaving
faculty, who have historically been more insulated by the market by positioning
themselves between capital and labor, firmly in the marketplace as the nature of their
work becomes increasingly entrepreneurial, often as part of technology-related
projects. Webster summarizes:
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The reality appears to be that universities across nations have been shaped
decisively in a limited direction - namely one that makes universities most
responsive to contemporary capitalism’s needs and strictures. What has been
called the neo-liberal consensus, which today is hegemonic around the globe,
demands that marketization principles and practices permeate the entire
social domain. This has meant that the relatively autonomous space that
universities have occupied has markedly diminished, not as universities have
become more plural, but rather as market forces have worked more decidedly
on universities themselves to develop in directions favorable to commercial
life. (2001, pp. 87)
Among the manifestations of this he cites are the “routine insistence from research
councils that projects to be funded will be driven, not by intellectual curiosity, but by
their contribution to improvements in competitiveness” (pp. 87). He speaks of the
much greater representation of business interests on university governing boards and
the development of courses having specific connections, regarding students as
‘customers’ who must be satisfied that their ‘investment’ in education gains a
satisfactory return. As Armstrong discusses, these changes - in relation to those that
occur directly because of initiatives like distance learning - will serve to challenge
the organizational structure and institutional meaning of the entire university, and, by
proxy, the library (2001, pp. 479). What happens there is not insulated from any of
these changes.
Some of these organizational changes in the university and in the academic library
profession can be seen in the context of flexible accumulation. They are also related
to globalization as they lead to the homogenization of practices among professions
(institutions like the ISD, for instance, are being created elsewhere) partly because of
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an increased need for a sense of security in the context of this flux; and partly
because of the greater degree of integration afforded by the technologies central to
this globalization. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) survey showed that
library reorganizations are more often situational than strategic. The challenge for
libraries is to “develop new strategies, involving new alliances and partnerships to
support print and digitally based research, and to support academic programs
designed and delivered in a flexible learning environment at a time when overall
resources are declining” (Eustis and Kenney 1996, pp.l). In the case of USC, the
‘situation’ that causes this is both locally and globally specific: some of the
constraints are those that affect all libraries, and some of them are specific to USC.
1.5.3. Professional Context: Digital and Electronic Libraries
What are the global trends in the study of all digital libraries themselves, including
those in the public domain? By itself, Schwartz’s edited collection, Restructuring
Academic Libraries: Organizational Development in the Wake o f Technological
Change, records detailed responses to prospects of restructuring the library as an
organization, something that is defined in terms of the development of boundary-
spanning library services that are allied with computing center services in the
mission to deliver networked information resources across the campus. While each
of the approaches detailed involves collaboration or merger of some sort, some of
them are more closely based on couplings of independent streams of problems,
solutions, participants and choice opportunities, fostering collaborative alignments
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between internal and external organizations, and initiating an integrated approach to
information access related projects. This reflects and forebodes a certain kind of
unpredictability and instability in which random individuals take advantage of
opportunities that happen to come their way. A second kind of restructuring involves
collaborative alignments with entities both inside and outside of the organization.
Related to this is the development of state and regional consortia - something that is
old news for librarians: coordinated collection development began to become a
standard call to practice in the latter half of the 1970s and the early 1980s. These
kinds of practices are being revisited in light of the new conditions afforded by the
Internet.
Parts of this thesis will seek to show the implications these changes might have for
access. This coordination leads to a definite reduction in information access as each
library is only able to hold a certain amount of materials and fewer institutions need
to actually buy books. This leads to a reduction on the local scale (it takes longer for
any book to reach any institution as there are fewer books on the market), regional
scale (fewer books are available in libraries in any given region) and the global scale
(reduced demand for academic monographs). The neo-liberal context in which these
changes are being made can, as a result of these increased costs, be related to the
reduction of access to information on numerous scales. Many have also discussed
how the trend has begun towards the elimination of the Collection Development
Officer, or the absorption of the position into technical services or public services,
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and the provision of many of its functions to reference librarians, in response to
technological imperatives and user needs (Bryant 1997, Cline 1997, Demas 1994).
The diminishment that occurs in collection development initiatives reflects the
reduction in access at all of these scales.
All of this is furthermore energized by rhetoric of the sort championed by
McCullagh:
The traditional role of the library as the information heart of the university is
being questioned as information technology makes information ever more
easily accessible. Libraries ignore this fundamental change at their peril.
Traditional functions may disappear overnight. To meet this challenge,
libraries must review their role, determine their priorities and position
themselves to lead their institutions confidently into the next century. This
will not be without pain - it requires a dramatic rethinking of the workforce
we need and the services we offer. The challenge for libraries is to develop
new strategies, involving new alliances and partnerships to support print and
digitally based research, and to support academic programs designed and
delivered in a flexible learning environment at a time when overall resources
are declining. Successful strategies will almost certainly demand
organizational change, together with effective application of new
technologies. (1999, pp. 1)
The linkage of flexibility and declining resources is telling in the contemporary
political economic context. Furthermore, it is useful to note that the creation of
access, in this context, constitutes the point above about the need to “support print
and digitally based research.” This rhetoric is part and parcel of the reality of this
political economic context.
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1.5.4. Legal/Financial Context
Among these situational constraints are legal and financial ones imposed upon
libraries in the forms of copyright laws, themselves instituted and initiated because
of negotiations within an increasingly competitive publishing industry. Copyright
laws prevent libraries from placing entire books online (although there are some e-
books available through USC’s online server); they also affect the way in which
digital archives can be accessed by users at different scales (Bowman 2001,
Ginsburg 1993, Litman 1996, Morrison 2001, Schepp 2001, Weeks 2001, USPTO
1995). In many cases, these copyright laws have become stricter because of the way
the web makes it easier for more people to access information. This demonstrates
how the Internet and globalization do not combine to create a world with freer access
to information; the reduction of certain constraints leads to the imposition of others
as the financial security in which information is produced gets threatened, disturbing
the larger order of the prevailing economic regime. These will be discussed in
Chapter 5.
1.5.5. Technological Context
Technological systems themselves are creating a different kind of global context. For
instance, the use of GIS systems in one library encourages their use in parallel
institutions, as the question becomes one of standardization; as individual changes
aggregate to form into ubiquitous trends, we can see how they affect the global
distribution of technological systems. Also on a global scale, there are structural
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linkages among technological systems that determine this convergence between
producers, consumers and technology. Here, another aspect of Castells’ information
technology paradigm is applicable: the “growing convergence of specific
technologies into a highly integrated system, within which old, separate
technological trajectories become literally indistinguishable...differentiation is
blurred by the growing integration of business firms in strategic alliances and
cooperative projects, as well as by the inscription of software programs into chip
hardware...one element [of any technological system] cannot be imagined without
the other” (pp. 71-72). Hence, USC’s use of GIS required it to build a specific set of
alliances not just with the GIS provider (Environmental Systems Research Institute -
ESRI) but also with Oracle (the database provider) because of the fact that the
system it chose was mostly compatible with Oracle infrastructure. This was because
of the set of connections made on a larger scale by the producers of the technology.
This will be discussed in Chapter 3.
It is important to maintain that technological limitations cause a series of problems
related to access: longevity-related issues in the context of digital archives are a
useful example here. Temporal problems related to access are written into the data
because of the kinds of technologies under use (Arms and Borgman 2000). Although
offering the possibility of perfect preservation, digital information also raises many
pragmatic barriers to long life. It is often stored on media with short life spans; it
may require reading equipment that has an even shorter life span; and even
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transferring the data to another medium is not enough: Software may be needed to
interpret and/or view the data. Thus, unless the reading software is also preserved
(which may involve in effect preserving entire computing environments), some
digital information cannot be meaningfully archived for long periods. Added
complexity is associated with some of the new digital works that contain dynamic,
interactive digital documents, because they are not fixed in form at publication; they
evolve and change. As a result, exactly what the appropriate archival practices are
for capturing the essence of these new genres is unclear. Indeed, these practices
likely will vary from genre to genre and, in some cases, unless an archival function is
designed into the digital object explicitly, fully archiving a record of its evolution
over time may be impossible.
1.5.6. Urban Regional Context
Geographers have also demonstrated that it is counterproductive to focus on the
‘global’ to explain global processes: there are a number of scales in between the
local and the global on which it is necessary to focus in order to explain what is
happening. In The Regional World, Storper (1997) discusses regional conditions of
economic development. The ongoing agglomeration of economic activity in
particular places is creating regions; the development of these regions, in turns,
depends on the particular constellation of factors that are relevant to them. A crucial
component of the argument is that networked economic activity is being recentered
into these emerging regional formations, shifting the emphasis away from processes
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defined by nation state space. Correspondingly, the particularities of the regions
under consideration greatly affects the ways in which globalization occurs. This is
interesting for the purposes of context but also because it is specifically applicable to
the case at hand. Partly, the nature of regional formation in Los Angeles leads to a
particular kind of valuation of the urban space in which USC exists: this makes it
possible to situate what happens at the university in the context of the specificities of
these global processes. The way in which the space for books and the space for
meetings or computers is negotiated and contested, as discussed in the second
chapter, occurs within this context.
The urban/regional context in which USC exists is also important because of the
technologically-oriented workforce the region attracts, creating a relatively high
proportion of technology-related jobs (Scott 1993) as part of the first information
technology revolution which Castells deems to have been “American, with a
Californian inclination” as opposed to the first one, which was British. As he says:
The metropolitan character of most sites of the information technology
revolution around the world seems to indicate that the critical ingredient in its
development is not the newness of the institutional and cultural setting, but its
ability to generate synergy on the basis of knowledge and information,
directly related to industrial production and commercial applications. The
cultural and business strength of the metropolis makes it the privileged
environment of this new technological revolution, actually demystifying the
notion of placelessness of innovation in the Information Age. (2000, pp. 61)
The fact that USC is losing information technologists to other jobs has to do with the
urban political economy of information technology. Technology jobs proliferate in
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Los Angeles; what is different from the Northern Californian Silicon Valley context
discussed by Castells is the proportion of technology jobs. This aspect of the regional
economy will be discussed in Chapter 2. Other relevant aspects of the urban context
include the way in which the increased valuation of space (Harvey 1988) in the
context of the city might affect how decisions are made about the creation of new
infrastructure and the prioritization of digital archives related to the ‘Urban
Initiative’.
1.5.7. Temporal Context.
It is necessary, furthermore, to place all technological changes in a temporal context
that greatly affects how we incorporate spatial and political economic factors. The
unified (which does not necessarily mean unchaotic) response of an entire
organization to these technological changes, as opposed to individual responses, has
not always been omnipresent: it is something that became prominent in the mid
1990s, as reflected in the Association of Research Libraries report by Eustis and
Kenney (1996). The change in the nature of the organization response is reflected in
the content of Networker magazine at USC, dedicated towards keeping individuals
informed on technological developments (Diamond 1996, Networker 1994, 1995,
1996, 1998, 1999, 2000). Prior to 1995-96, there was little discussion about the
organizational aspects of technological change; there was, however, much discussion
about new technologies and how they might benefit various parties. These issues
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create a window into the worldv of what happened as actors at USC geared towards
its survival in the context of global financial and technological changes, allowing us
to relate these two spheres. The economic and financial are masked in this set of
processes: the institution is seen to be responding to the kind of globalization that
allowed the increased domination of the new technology market by a few players.
It is useful to discuss here the work of Massey, who articulates ‘layers of investment’
(1984, pp. 118) that represent the ways in which any given local or regional
economy has responded to a unique combination of global changes, processes and
constraints - social and economic - whose aggregate effects are witnessed in
divisions of labor, uneven regional development, and alterations in its built
environment. These represent the complex way in which political economic forces
can be seen to affect any given institution, reflective of the way the components of
institutions and places have different and individualized relationships with
globalizing processes that affect the globalization of the institution in aggregate
form. The USC library is usefully approached through this analytic perspective: as
this section indicated, there are numerous kinds of global and regional processes
whose effects have accumulated to create a particular kind of local environment.
v Ever since 2000, Networker was closed and Networker Now (NN 2000) was instated as its
replacement, something that is continually updated and makes it very difficult to peruse archives.
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1.6. Theoretical Backdrop: The Geography of Information
In the context of a wide body of literature about the digitalization of libraries (Arms
2000, Lesk 1997), the emergence of which was directly tied to the rise of the Internet
in the early 1990s and the increased practice of the digitalization of information,
Borgman (2001) wrote a book about ‘access to information’ in the age of the Internet
from the perspective of an information scientist. Borgman’s work was notable for its
focus on the concept of access rather than libraries per se or the Internet. As it has
emerged fairly recently, it summarizes much of the prevalent knowledge about
practices and problems in a field that has only recently attained prominence from a
logistical and technological perspective. Other scholars who have discussed ‘access’
through this lens included Dutton (1999), Couclelis and Getis (1999) and Arms
(2000).
While Borgman’s and these individuals’ use of ‘access’ is both synthetic and
polemic, it constitutes only one angle from which the impacts and significance of
analyzing and affecting changes among digital libraries might be considered. The
thesis that follows will explore ways to expand, reformulate, sharpen and enhance
our understanding of the notion of ‘access to information’ - what it is, how it is
created, why it is important - from a geographical perspective. This engagement
with the empirical in defining the theoretical is merited by the fact that each of these
forms are created and enabled by a specific set of institutions (composed of agents)
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that modulate, control and direct the ways in which information flows and is,
ultimately, made accessible to people: these institutions can hence serve as lens or
heuristic devices to define our categories.
To effectively understand the spatialities of information, it is important and useful to
focus on the point where two crucial processes - its production and consumption -
are seen to converge because it is at this interstice that a truly sophisticated
perspective can be obtained on the nature of access. One of the most useful ways of
doing this is by focusing on particular institutions where both these processes
constitute prime and central activities. A university and, specifically, a university
library is ideal for this purpose because of its very nature as a place - spatially
grounded, based in a particular kind of an institutional ethos, having a character that
is functionally unique - where the nature of the dynamic of these processes has been
greatly altered because of the existence of the Internet. It is from such a ‘place’
(Massey 1994, Agnew 1987, Pred 1984) that agents mediate spatial processes that
are driven by external and internal priorities and that, in effect, determine the
geographies of the information.
That institutional effects often transcend local boundaries is consistent with a large
body of contemporary geographical literature on scale (Agnew 1993; Howitt 1993;
Marston 2000; Swyngedouw 1997). If we focus at a higher scale, we can see how
this place/institution is part of a larger body of systems and networks of financial,
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legal and logistical collaboration. If we descend in scale, it is clear that the
place/institution must be seen as a conglomeration of agents that exist within its
confines, all of whom have diverse and individual aims, sometimes determined by
affiliations they have in networks outside of the scale of the institution, sometimes
determined by a number of independent goals they might have within its context that
may not necessarily correspond to the goals which they have been assigned (Dutton
1999).V I As all of these processes appear to occur simultaneously, intra-institutional
processes can be seen to implicate extra-institutional changes.
There is no doubting that the Internet has led to the proliferation of the kinds of
things we consider to be information: from listserves to organizational websites to
online magazines and newspapers. As the quantity of information available to those
with Internet access has increased exponentially, its very nature commercialized and
commodified, legal, ethical and financial problems have arisen over diverse and
crucial issues and been hotly debated by social scientists and cultural theorists:
copyright, censorship, information overload, security (Bell and Kennedy 2000,
Jordan 1999, Landow 1992, Loader 1997). Many have now written to counter the
naive assessment that there is no geography of the Internet (Adams, 1997, Batty
v l “An ecology of games,” he says (p. 15), “is a larger system of action composed of two or more
separate but interdependent games.” Games are distinct from goals as they relate to projects whose
rules and outcomes any given player cannot control. As individuals make decisions based on their
roles within their particular sets of games, the development of communities or, in our case, systems
which might lead to “tele-access” can subsequently be seen as the “outcome of an unfolding history of
events driven by the often unplanned and unanticipated interactions” among these individuals. The
“ecology of games” emerges in the context of a multitude of theories about organizational and
individual behavior that have influenced thought throughout the social sciences including geography,
sociology and political science (Graham 1998).
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1997, Couclelis 1996, Dodge 1998, 2001, Droege 1997, Graham 1998, Taylor 1997),
specifying that “cyberspace is hardly immaterial in that it is very much an embodied
space” and “should be treated as an extension of the geographic realm, not as some
disembodied, parallel universe” (Dodge 2001, pp. 1). Even though the rules of
cyberspace might, in fact, be different from those of real space, their determination is
fixed as a result of grounded and virtual processes. In this respect, I see my work
clearly fitting into the broader sub-discipline of cybergeography as it catalogues and
analyzes such a set of processes in the context of one institution that is part of many
which create, as it were, the Internet as it exists.
In 1994, Birdsall’s The Myth o f the Electronic Library first explored the ways in
which responses to the realities and discourse surrounding virtual space would
change the kinds of ‘places’ libraries were becoming. While the approach was not
explicitly geographical, it painstakingly documented the ways in which conceptions
of the institution’s function might be altered in response to the interactive spatial
reconfigurations related to globalization and the alleged advent of an age of
information. A few years later, geographers and spatial thinkers (e.g. Batty 1995,
1997, Castells 1996, Mitchell 1995, Moss and Mitra 1998) started to develop
analytic categories and concepts to come to terms with the realities and implications
of cyberspace. Many of these accounts, however, tended not to focus on the ways in
which cyberspace was produced and paid more attention to its cultural and
phenomenological effects and implications. While spatial change was an obvious
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analytical and interpretive target for geographers and newly emerging
cybergeographers, research on place tended to be restricted to the ways in which
technological changes could be seen in relation to larger globalizing processes as
they affected the structures of cities (Graham and Marvin 1996, 2000). In other
words, place was often assessed as a passive receptor of these processes; the
dialectical relationality and mutual reciprocity between place-specific and spatial
processes articulated by other geographers (e.g. Agnew 1987, Massey 1994, Pred
1984) was yet to be integrated into the cyber-geographical approach. This changed
with the publication of Janelle and Hodge’s edited collection Information, Place and
Cyberspace: Issues in Accessibility (1999) which focused on the ways in which the
accessibility of technological systems does and does not depend on the place-related
aspects of technological production. In this respect, I gain inspiration as well as
theoretical categories from this collection and the work that followed in its vein.
Beyond this, geographers and spatial thinkers (Smith 1984; Harvey 1989; Lefebvre
1992; Massey 1994 and 1995; Castells 1997; Swyngedouw 1997) have long explored
how institutions and places are transformed by and transformative of globalizing
spatial processes: this work will serve as a preliminary exploration of how this
spatial thinking might be useful when applied to libraries, a particular type of local
institution, and books, objects that have been left largely unproblematized by
geographers. To say that globalizing forces affect the local includes and conflates an
enormous variety of spatial entities - the public institution, the book, the mind - each
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of which have distinct and varied implications for the structures of our society. By
applying geographic concepts to the library sector and by using the library sector to
understand these multiple scales within and transcendent of the local, I wish to make
an initial foray into adding to the richness of this scale in the large universe of
geographical inquiry. At the same time, I hope, a spatial understanding enabled by
geographic concepts might positively affect how we choose to transform our
institutions in the future.
Specifically, this thesis will make use of spatial concepts, what might be the central
geographic variable. Geographers have historically called for a socialization of
spatial analysis as well as a spatialization of social analysis (Gregory and Urry 1985,
Cox 1995, Sheppard 1995), much of which has had to do with a reading of Marxian
historical materialism. In addition to this, work by geographers critical of the
Marxian tradition has focused on the significance of the role of cultural aspects of
change in the production of space (Cosgrove and Jackson 1987, Duncan and Ley
1993). Human geographers have now long seen space and time as being relational
and mutually reciprocal in their constitution. More specifically, for Massey (1999),
space necessarily entails plurality and multiplicity. In this respect, as space
constitutes the constantly changing configurations and constellations discussed in the
thesis, it starts to serve as the web or the framework on which the larger conceptual
infrastructure for the thesis is built. It is invoked every time a ‘spatial’ process is
discussed; and central to the larger process through which scaled changes transform
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a place. The scaled places under discussion are all spatially connected. Every
discussion of cyberspace, furthermore, entails an acknowledgement of spatial change
and importance.
This thesis has been influenced by all of this literature and can serve as a case study
for how their respective contributions might be fused when we look at one
institution’s experience with ICTs. A more explicit exploration of how these
different theories might be seen in relation to each other and further expanded will be
made in conclusion, after engagement with the case study. Attention will also be paid
to the ways in which information is being made available - or not - to Internet users
at large; not just the defined users of the library.
1.6. Categories: Kinds of Access
How might institutions help us in the essentially and inherently tricky task of
defining ‘access to information’? This section attempts, in some small measure, to
address, at the least, a particular facet of their meaning by showing where and how
the institution has been created in material terms. In many ways, the kinds of access
that might be created are not only linked to but defined both by the kinds of
information that an institution produces and retains as well as the kind that is
traditionally thought of as being restricted: access, is, in this sense, an inherently
relational term. Questions of access, in so many ways, ground questions of
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information; the latter, in turn, infuse meaning into the former. In this respect, a
discussion of the kinds of information that are made “accessible” is inextricable from
one about the kinds of access that are created, or are not. The kinds of things
considered ‘information’ in this thesis are, correspondingly, defined by the kind held
to be the mission of traditional libraries: the kinds of things that might help, for
instance, a scholar living in a place with little or no access to libraries. While the
kind of information discussed in this thesis corresponds in many ways to what is
known as ‘knowledge’, categorizing it as such will not de facto complete the
definition: even the leading proponents of the concept of a ‘knowledge society’
(Drucker 1993) advise caution in its use, ‘knowledge’ being the loaded word that it
is. It is, subsequently, important to be careful in not drawing too fine a distinction
between knowledge and information.v u
In transitioning from a definition of information to a definition of access, it is useful
here to again inspect the theoretical tool-kits of others. In his discussion about “tele
access,” Dutton describes how ICTs shape access to information by changing how
you “get information, but also alter the whole corpus of what you know and the
information available to you and others at any given time and place. ICTs play a role
in making some people information rich and others comparatively information poor”
™ While it might be wise not to maintain “scholarly” and “popular” appeal as overly discrete
categories — peoples’ interests and concerns are surprisingly diverse and agile — it is still necessary to
establish that the kind of information that people tend to want to access from libraries tends not to be
predominantly technical or financial; in spatial terms that is a role that is increasingly being taken up
by the bookstore cafe and by the Internet in general. While online bookstores have a very noticeable
set of effects on information access, the services offered by libraries are, inherently different.
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(1999, pp. 4). More specifically, Borgman defines “access to information” as
“connectivity to a computer network and to available content, such that the
technology is usable, the user has the requisite skills and knowledge, and the content
itself is in a usable and useful form” (2001, pp. 56-57). In both of these definitions, it
should be noted, the cognitive aspect of access - that which occurs in the mind - is
essentially linked to that which happens outside our minds and is created by material
and political forces.
I retain all of these elements in my conceptualization and redivide it into three broad
categories, which exist as elements in each of the kinds of access that will be
discussed by much of this introduction. In each of these categories of access, the
definitionality always emerges from some kind of an engagement between the
various modalities of the systems of information production (libraries make
information over which they have control and systems of its control available) and
consumption (people sometimes want to obtain, use or process this information).
These are two systems whose trajectories do not always coincide, as libraries can
create the wrong kinds of access, fail to create enough access, or create kinds of
access that reduces other kinds. Of course, the idea of ‘wrong’ here emerges from the
realization that there is a vast unfathomable body of knowledge, information, text,
ideas images and sounds to catalogue: across all of the kinds of access that will be
discussed, the role of the library in making things available will be as important as its
role in choosing among things to make available. Finally, production and
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consumption cannot be divided too neatly across these two trajectories of effect:
their effects are often fundamentally simultaneous and qualitatively
indistinguishable. The matrix of production and consumption was discussed and
diagrammatized earlier on in support of my chosen methodological framework.
Physical and virtual access to information are two categories with vastly different
geographical implications: these are the first two of the three kinds of access
conceptualized in this thesis. The slipperiness of this dichotomy is illustrated clearly
by the third kind of access: fundamental structures for information reception that are
created, evolved and constantly modified within minds, through education, training
and knowledge about knowledge. Like information, as an essentially human concept,
access is ultimately and deeply cognitive. The three forms of access to be discussed -
physical, virtual and cognitive - are interlinked and inextricable to the point that they
can ultimately only be understood in relation to each other. Still, they need to be
conceptualized differently as the amount and kind of effort to engage them differs
across them from the point of view of the agent.
1.7.1. Physical
These are all forms of access to information that might be studied in view of
grounded spatialities. From the institutional point of view, it concerns the ways in
which books are made available, collected, organized or selected by institutions
(Coyle 1998, Arms 2000). The chapters of this thesis will detail how this kind of
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access is increasingly being considered by the institution as being less important than
the next kind.
Apart from the kinds of books that are provided, physical access might also concern
the obstacles in place to arriving at them. Geographers have studied accessibility in
terms of and framed debates regarding real urban and regional environments, with
particular attention paid to transportation issues (Miller 1999, Ingram 1971, Pirie
1979). Information availability and access disparities also exist across a global scale,
if we consider the ways in which libraries have traditionally been developed in the
Third World (or not) and left out of traditional development plans (Agha and Akhtar
1992, Ashford and Hariyadi 1993, Tocatlain 1994) as well as the ways in which
access to Internet is greatly variable across global space (Warf 2001, pp. 6-8).
Further to this, behavioral geographers and environmental psychologists (Gollege
1995, 1999, Montello 1998) have studied spatial cognition, travel and wayfinding
behavior. Up until this point, no studies had yet been completed on physical access
to library facilities by geographers.
1.7.2. Virtual
There are many ways in which the kinds of insights gained from a study of urban and
real space opportunities can be applied to understanding how individuals might
choose to access the Internet: access to technology might be similar to having a car
in the real world, knowledge about what exists in cyberspace might be analogous to
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spatial knowledge about the urban environment, and skills in web navigation might
correspond to the ability to drive (Kwan 2001, pp. 22). On another level, the
provision of information over the Internet can be seen as a response to these kinds of
barriers.
All notions of virtual accessibility to information may not, however, be applicable
for understanding its manifestations in cyberspace (Couclelis 1996). Online library
card catalogues, electronic archives of primary materials, electronic journals - all of
these constituting the objects of virtual access as it will be discussed in this
introduction and thesis - often impose different kinds of barriers that prevent
individuals from accessing information (Janelle and Hodge 1999, Mumion et all
1998, Coyle 1998). All Internet resources are not equally available to all users as
institutions restrict the scope of those that might access their materials in different
ways (Huberman et all 1998, Tauscher and Greenberg 1997). Barriers to movement
abound (Kwan 2001, pp. 30) as many things are only made available to paid
subscribers and broken links and page construction hamper the functional potential
for access.
1.7.3. Cognitive
The ways in which people use information as well as the ways in which they choose
the information they use has to do with mental and intellectual systems, themselves
the product of factors that are cultural, linguistic as well as sociological, but which
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cannot be broken down into any of these categories, or said to be determined by
them. This form of access concerns the dialectical process through which people are
literally able to use the information that has been provided and organized; something
that is itself a function of upbringing, literacy and cognitive structure as well as mere
access to Internet services.
Geographers are giving increasing emphasis to how individuals map and understand
their world of information; in essence, the human ability and drive to understand the
world of knowledge (Golledge 1999, Janelle and Hodge 1999), particularly in light of
the ways in which the Internet resituates and recreates boundaries and categories within
systems of information. It has been anticipated that studies of cognitive processes
similar to those of the physical world, including those that focus on human spatial
cognition in terms of travel and wayfinding in behavioral geography and
environmental psychology (Allen 1999, Garling 1994, Golledge 1999 and Montello
1998) could be extremely useful to understanding spatial cognition as it relates to how
people conceptualize access to information on the Internet (Kwan 2001, pp. 22).
Individual users might be aided in navigating their worlds of information by applying
these traditional geographical methods of understanding access to cyberspace-related
issues (Fabrikant 2001, Kwan 2001). The use of spatial metaphors, including scale and
region in conceptualizing information worlds (Girardin 1995 and Fabrikant and
Buttenfield 2001, Fabrikant 2001b) is also emerging as a major topic of debate and
study. All of these studies support the notion that accessibility to information
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resources in cyberspace, even after connectivity is attained, depends on peoples’
knowledge and skills in using navigational aids and search tools. As individuals feel
increasingly lost due to the infathomability of cyberspace, unable to make the
additional mental effort and concentration necessary to decide which links to follow
and which to abandon, impedance in personal access to Internet resources might be
measured in terms of the amount of effort required, in similar ways in which this has
been done in the physical world (Kwan 2001, pp. 27-32).
Viewed together, these categories suggest that all forms of access are intertwined and
ultimately determined by the cognitive; furthermore, these definitions suggest that
access is almost always defined in terms of oppositionality, or barriers. For an
individual, the issues involved in virtual access concern matters that are distinct but
deeply interrelated with those of physical access: only certain people are able to
obtain digital access (those with the capabilities of using computers, those with
connection), many of whom might already have physical access. However, if we
transcend scale, we can see that, in other parts of the world, many who do not have
physical access to library-related information might benefit from whatever material
is placed on the Internet: this is particularly true as the Internet is increasingly seen
as a replacement for libraries (Hunt 2001, Menou 1994, Johnson 1991). What are the
cognitive access systems for people at each of these scales? What then should the
imperative be for an institution like USC in choosing the kinds of access in whose
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provision it is interested? These are questions that can be intermittently addressed
but not answered in the course of this thesis.
Like any institution, USC is a unique place, whose uniqueness continues to emerge
as the rich and chaotic contention within its social and political fabric is inspected
with progressively greater detail. It is, however, not isolated in its discourse or its
practices: similar processes, in all likelihood, occur at the many other institutions, as
the section devoted to changes in the library profession discussed. In order to get a
more concrete and material idea of these categories, it is now necessary to place
focus on how what happens at the institution is related to wider political economic
and global trends, ascending and descending our analysis as these matters are
examined at different scales.
In many ways, discussions about access can challenge, ground and spatialize a
technologically triumphalist polemic about information societies by identifying
nodes, systems and processes. It is a concept that must be understood, ultimately, in
the context of wider theoretical debates in which are implicated matters as important
as democracy, cosmopolitanism and globalization. This thesis should help, by
focusing on a particular institution in a particular place at a particular point in time,
in understanding what access might mean in material terms at the same time as it
allows us to consider and relate bodies of theory in geography and the other social
sciences which focus on the Internet, institutions and the geographies of information.
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As theory and reality infuse each other with meaning, the case of the university
library will alternate as the object of analysis and explanatory variable.
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Chapter 2: Political Economy of Emplaced Access Creation: A
Spatial History of the ISD
2.1. Introduction
In 1994, 1996 and 2000, novelist Nicholson Baker wrote a series of articles for The
New Yorker, the central theme of which was what happens when
“telecommunications enthusiasts take over big old research libraries and attempt to
remake them, with corporate help, as high-traffic showplaces for information
technology” (1996, pp. 50). Together, these essays can be read as an intricate and
complicated narrative of agents transforming places as their mental conceptions of
what the relationship of information to public service and socio-cultural needs should
be are altered by the prospects and realities of technology. Baker’s narrative can be
shown, furthermore, to trace how large-scale forces, including the restructuring of
the technological infrastructure affect the smallest scale of preservation decisions
(preserving microfilm over newspapers, for example) and, subsequently, influence
our abilities to think and imagine on larger global and historical scales. The intensely
varied set of responses to his articles - from librarians as well as administrators,
technologists and historians (Cox 2000, Darnton 2002, Golden 1997, Holmes 1998)
- clearly illustrated that there are a set of fundamental socio-cultural and spatial
issues that the restructuring of libraries under information technology address, trigger
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and invoke. These articles and corresponding debates led to a set of questions
pertaining to two deeply interlinked issues: a) the ways in which technological
change, as it occurs in the context of globalizing political economic forces, was
affecting local access to information; and, b) how it was influencing the nature of
intra-institutional communication regarding the relative needs for physical and
virtual access. While these may seem like distinct issues, this chapter should serve to
explicate their interrelation.
This chapter will strive to serve as a spatial, political economic and cultural history
of the merger of the library, computing services and telecommunications
departments into the Information Services Division, looking at the process as a
whole as well as smaller transformations leading to aggregate change. As such, it
will make use of the methodological technique of the embedded case study described
by Yin, as discussed in the last chapter. As this implies the worth of considering the
discourse surrounding and the details of this merger, I will focus on the imperative to
reconceptualize the role of the library at the scale of the university in the wake of
real and imagined technological changes. In engaging with these matters, I will look
at organizational theory as well as literature on scale, place, the ecology of games,
and globalization, employing the terminological and conceptual framework through
which the rest of this thesis is largely articulated. The primary sources of this inquiry
will include interviews and an electronic paper trail through which it is possible to
weave a set of connections and insights about organizational restructuring under
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technological change, much of which can be found in the nooks and crannies of the
institution’s website. Every decision that is made is not revealed this way - many
different interpretations might be provided of the way the merger occurred because
factors related to the political economics of the transition, such as the creation of a
flexible work regime, the transfer of funds to particular kinds of parties over others -
required the institution to mask various aspects of the processes. I will try to make
sense of the wider process of change using specific sources and information gleaned
from interviews and discussions with individuals who were, in some way, involved
in the history of these changes.
Institutional change is a complex and dialectical process. Accordingly, it is necessary
to maintain a critical clarity with regard to the central questions that will be
discussed:
• What does a history of the creation of the Information Services Division at
USC reveal about the new sets of place-related social and cultural relations
that emerge in the wake of real and imagined technological changes in the
context of the institutional restructuring driven by globalizing forces?
• How do these relations determine the negotiations by which virtual and
physical access to information is created at the local scale?
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• In what ways does the political economic mediate the relationship of the
global to the local? What are the other spheres that mediate this relationship?
What is the urban aspect of these changes?
Accordingly, the chapter will be an account of the merger briefly described in the
‘Introduction’, looking at what happens at the local scales of the university and that
of the library, urban and global scales. In the first section, I will provide a brief
account of the changes that occurred in the ISD and relate these to a wider political
economic context to which they demonstrate acute relevance. Following an
evaluation of instances of institutional rhetoric related to this context, I will discuss
ways in which this rhetoric has been received by various actors within the
organization in order to foreground a discussion of different spheres of activity in the
context of great organizational flux and confusion. To further specify the political
economic context, I will proceed with a discussion of how funds are allocated within
the university. The two subsequent sections will focus on how the spatial economic
implications of these processes at the scale of the urban and the local can be seen to
transform both the place under discussion and ideas about it. Before concluding, I
will discuss implications of all of these changes for different kinds of access.
The very basic and simplified account is that both virtual and physical access to
information is created in particular places. Agents and units at different scales within
these places - with different levels of power over the spatialization of information -
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are constantly in interaction with political economic forces at different scales in ways
that affect how this access might be created. The broader account that emerges can
support the notion that multiple political economic forces that are global and regional
in scope and origin affect the local institution in ways specific to the entity to which
they are linked within the institution. Hence librarians involved in cataloguing are
affected by the creation of large national databases like the Ohio College Library
Consortium (OCLC), collection development officers are rankled by increases in
book prices, and other administrators are required to demonstrate concern about the
price of space required in construction and reorganization. The effect of
globalization on the university and the library is, as this demonstrates, multi-tiered.
The way in which this process occurs is mediated by the different systems of
communication within the organization as related to these diverse spaces of activity.
This affects the different structural components of the local access-creating
infrastructure by supporting a system that favors virtual over physical access, a
matter that exacerbates communication and contention within the organization. As
the miscommunication is place-specific, we can see how the character of the place is
related to the reduction in physical access that might have served to perpetuate this
character.
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2.2. The Political Economy of the ISD Merger
What are the numerous political economies at stake? Firstly, all of these changes
emerge in the context of global changes in organizational hierarchies - in libraries
(Sherrer 1996, Kluegel 1997, Cline 1997, Bryant 1997, Edwards 1997, Eustis and
Kenney 1996, Farley et.al. 1998, Moran 2001, Schwartz 2002, McCullagh 1999,
Campbell 1994) as well as in other organizations (Duguid and Brown 2000, Harvey
1989, Castells 2000) including universities (Bates 1999, Currie and Newson 1998,
Webster 2002) discussed in the introduction to this thesis. The general resolution of
these articles can be summarized with the notion, articulated in Farley et al’s piece
that “the structure of an organization and the people within it...are the two primary
concerns which should be central to any strategy to manage change. The structure
should be flexible and organic to allow for innovation and creativity. Additionally,
human resource management should aim to minimize the negative impact of change
by responding to the needs of staff through communication and information sharing,
staff involvement, training and development, and job design” (1998, pp. 151).
Armstrong (2001, pp. 479) discusses how “new types of for-profit and non-profit
organizations are beginning to provide competition in targeted segments of higher
education. The arrival of Internet-mediated distance learning will greatly increase
both market penetration by these new organizations and competition between
traditional institutions of higher learning. Because this new competition targets only
selected activities of the research university, it risks to destabilize their organization
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and structure.” Hence changes related to distance learning can be seen to affect the
larger organizational structure of universities on a structural level. Of note here is the
fact that the article by Jerry Campbell (1994) on ‘Getting Comfortable with Change:
A New Budget Model for Libraries in Transition’ has been cited by a number of
these writers. This article was conceived as a reconceptualization of an earlier drive
to restructure reference services: Campbell advised other librarians that the
combination of technological onslaught and organizational rigidity produces an
unproductive anxiety that might be usefully prevented by the institution of planning
and team-building programs. As the rest of this chapter might indicate, these
programs - in function - did not result in eliminating this anxiety. What this reveals
is that the rigidity and organizational uncertainty that we find at USC might be
historically related to the character of the place through Campbell’s assessment. This
reveals furthermore that the relationship between the local (USC-specific changes)
and the global (changes throughout the library profession) is not one that is passive.
Increased flexibility and increased efficiency are directly at stake in the creation of
the Information Services Division, which involved a large and structural overhaul of
the old organizational flowchart. The new division was broken down into three major
“core” groups: public service, infrastructure and communications (Krieger 1998, pp.
2). Of these, all departments that came into contact with users were placed under the
Public Service Core. The individual offices here were to remain unchanged. All
maintenance and system information functions that supported the public needs -
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which the public did not otherwise see - were meant to come under the rubric of the
Infrastructure Core. The last core related to communications, all functions that
involved communications technologies. According to the article, concentrating in
one core the various customer centers for the libraries, University Computing
Services (UCS) and telecommunications was the first step towards building an
integrated “technology help desk” (pp. 5). Campbell, in this document, claimed that
he had no plans to lay off employees beyond the four positions that would be lost as
a result of consolidating ISD’s administrative office. In Krieger’s article, Campbell is
also quoted as saying: “I have tried to hypothesize an organization that’s more
serviceable, more flexible, more satisfactory for the university” (1998, pp. 1). It is
unclear what “flexible” would mean out of the context of threatening individuals’ job
securities.
Also, according to this article, the goal of the reorganization was to “increase cost-
effectiveness, improve customer service, integrate planning efforts and develop a
new service model for USC’s various information technology functions” (ibid).
There was no conception of access. Campbell was known to have said that he wanted
to phase out the terminology of “library, UCS (University Computing Services) and
telecommunication” in order to promote a sense of identity within a new
organization. For the purposes of efficiency and flexibility, new identities were
literally being engineered.
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A quote from ‘About ISD’, a clearer description of the mission of the Information
Services Division itself, provides further insight on the way attempts were made to
instill such an identity:
USC's information technology environment is rich in resources and
opportunities for students. The Information Services Division (ISD) is
responsible for serving the university community's IT needs - in networking,
library services, academic computing and telecommunications.
As the role of computing and libraries is being redefined in the information
revolution, ISD is responding to this new environment by providing access to
a variety of computer systems that are fully integrated in a university-wide
network that links USC to the Internet and by extending access to library
resources in a variety of ways. Specifically, ISD utilizes technologies that
provide services and information electronically, cultivates cooperative
agreements with other libraries, and enhances library collections in order to
meet the specific needs of the USC community. As a center for scholarly
endeavor, ISD makes a unique contribution to the university's mission of
instruction and research. (ISD 2002c)
It is of note that library services are the second service listed out of four, the other
three of which are purely logistical: this equation of the library with administrative
support is one element instigating outrage expressed by some faculty members and
librarians that will be discussed later in this chapter; it is useful, however, to
foreground it at this stage.
What are the specific ways in which global political forces affect the creation of
access at the local scale? Partly, this happens as processes at the scale of the library
and within the scale of the library are continuously justified by adhering to similar
processes at greater scales. Speaking of the condensing of the Education and Social
Work libraries in the summer of 1998, supposedly led by the drive to explore how to
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“best meet the information needs of the faculty and students in the Schools of
Education and Social Work” and “freeing subject librarians from the day-to-day
management of facilities,” ISD officials said:
These moves mirror prevalent trends in library services at colleges and
universities around the nation, where administrators are systematically
closing specialized libraries, moving towards online rather than print
resources, and warehousing infrequently used books and other materials to
make room for computers and collaborative spaces. (Marks 1998, pp. 1)
These reasons are explained unproblematically. The privileging of virtual access
over physical access (that is, books) at USC emerges in response to trends as well as
in response to the conditions that are perceived to be directly linked to these trends.
In Marks’ article, Ferguson, the head of the ISD’s public service core says:
As the costs of personnel, books and journals continue to rise it’s no longer
possible to have many separate specialist libraries, each with its own staff and
duplicate resources. More importantly, the consolidation of subject libraries
gives USC flexibility to provide new and different services to its customers in
ways that are not currently possible. (Marks pp. 2)
This suggests numerous other operative factors related to neo-liberal political
economic regimes: the globalization of the publishing industry increased the price of
books; the new economy increased the cost of “personnel,” particularly in areas with
a great amount of high-tech workers like Los Angeles. Globalization has multi-tiered
effects on the USC library. And while the impossibility of maintaining subject
libraries is justified with an invocation of these depleted resources, the new
flexibility would allow the library to include more ‘services’. Whether or not these
are ‘electronic’ or ‘virtual’, this signals that these changes are not simply in response
to increased constraints: clearly operative here are changes in priorities. Based on
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what goals are these priorities being formed? The following quote from an interview
with Campbell is revealing:
The goal is to make this university more competitive in the next century,
when we know resources are going to be tight for everybody. How do we
gain a strategic advantage out of our ability to think outside the boundaries of
the typical organization? (Krieger 1997)
While focused on the university as a whole, this reveals aspects of the institutional
ethos governing its reinvention that will be discernable in library specific
transformations. These changes are not about the books, or even about the bytes.
They are about the survival of the institution. Literature about administrative practice
(Barley 1986) has discussed the concept of technology as an occasion for
restructuring: it will become increasingly apparent across the course of this analysis
that the proponents of these changes have been trained in this tradition.
2.3. The Rhetorical Component of Institutional Change
Much of this chapter will focus on responses to projects related to the merger as well
as associated matters on a smaller scale as I seek to demonstrate the various spheres
of activity and opinion within USC. In this section, however, I will focus on
speeches and statements directed at the whole establishment by the upper echelon.
Some of this language is representative of a larger trend energized by rhetoric (Bell
1974) about how institutions should and might need to respond to technological
changes that occur implicitly at scales greater than themselves, which they cannot
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necessarily control: a rhetoric of technological determinism. It is a rhetoric that can
be contextualized within the temporal context of the reality of flexible accumulation
(Harvey 1988 and 1989, Scott 1988) in the late 1990s; in an era where the drive for
efficiency and flexibility among all institutions is directly related to technology, as
discussed in the ‘Introduction’. As the last section sought to explain, numerous
statements suggest that this regime has had a direct linkage to the set of
organizational changes underway at USC and is particularly visible in the case of the
creation of the ISD. I will seek to show in this section that the messages sent are
veiled in a particular kind of language that directly relates to the need to establish
that since ‘change’ of all sort is beneficial to any institution, there should be fewer
controls placed on the set of transformations the institution is justifiably allowed to
galvanize.
Edwards, Ward and Bytheway (1992, p. 167) argue that information strategies
should be pitched at that level within the hierarchy of an organization at which
systematic patterns of behavior emerge - it is only sensible to devise a strategy for a
department or group of departments which have a degree of internal coherence and
shared purpose; that is, those that function as a system. Subject-specific librarians
and administrators (personal communication, Anonymous 200lg, 200lh) confirmed
that the lack of such coherence at USC was inherent to the decision to create the ISD,
after which the information strategy was used aggressively. In some cases, the
benefits of technology are used to mask what might otherwise be construed to be a
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strategy of convenience, the factor which most consider to be the driving force for
the creation of the ISD. The following quote, from Jerry Campbell’s “Greetings from
the CIO,” begins to reveal the kind of mentality that accompanied this merger.
In the early 1970s, paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge
advanced a novel rethinking of how life evolves known as the punctuated
model. Their revision of Darwinian theory proposed that instead of slight,
incremental alterations taking place over millions of years, species underwent
radical shifts that took place over mere thousands of years followed by
lengthy static interludes until the next catalyst for change came about. It's
interesting to take their model and apply it to a different realm: higher
education.
Since the founding of the first university in Salerno in the 9th century,
the course of higher education has fundamentally followed a steady path
through the last millennium. Yes, the forces of history - religion, warfare,
politics - have ushered in changes, but they have been gradual, and the basic
structure of educational process has endured: students gather at a specific
place, at an appointed time to hear a particular instructor.
In just the past few years, however, technology has wrought an agent
poised to shift the entire way we go about learning and to free us from rigidly
scheduled classes taking place at venues often far from home: the Internet.
(Campbell 2002)
It is up to the university, then, and individuals within it, to rise up to the challenge
that technology has placed before us. But the central problem with this attitude is its
reflection of a failure to truly articulate what the barriers to access have traditionally
been. As access is an inherently relational concept, it cannot be wholly defined
without a broader and wider understanding of its barriers. Certain assumptions that
are implicit within this rhetoric might be seen to directly influence how ideas of
‘access’ might be conceived. The technology that is clearly perceived as a ‘radical
shift’ akin to the cataclysms that have befallen evolving organisms has only shown
its effects (for, to ‘wrought’ an agent, it is necessary to be oneself an agent) over the
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“past few years.” But there is no recognition here of the fact that many of the
technological systems central to the Internet had been used by librarians prior to the
popular understanding of what is now known as the Internet. Librarians and
information scientists, in other words, have had a very special relationship to the
Internet that this broad technologically determinist rhetoric fluidly elides.
Also of note is the fact that libraries and information storage are not quite explicitly
mentioned in this particular piece. In this case, the focus is less on libraries and more
on distance learning: technology will free us from space (classes taking place at
“venues”) as well as time (we would no longer be “rigidly scheduled”). Yet, at the
same time, it is meant to reflect the overarching ideology of the Information Services
Division, which oversees and so also largely constitutes the vision for libraries.vul To
press this further, the creation of the ISD has allowed Campbell to issue rhetoric
about distance learning that is implicitly meant to substitute for a statement about
libraries because the two missions are fundamentally united in their merger of
technological and educational visions. There is no need to battle with problems of
virtual and cognitive access, this suggests, because all of these education-related
barriers are automatically and simultaneously transcended with the use of the
v l"The economy of distance learning is particularly interesting in this context. It allows the institution
to serve more students without having to expend human or physical resources on one-on-one
instruction: of particular note is the fact that there is no need for classroom facilities of any kind. This
trend might be linked to the central core of neo-liberal policies: a lack of concern with public duties or
societal concerns out of concern for economic efficiency. Armstrong (2001) discusses the numerous
ways in which competition from different distance learning providers might be greatly influential in
transforming the structure of educational institutions.
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Internet. This, again, emerges in the context of a wider body of rhetoric about what
the Internet will do that is hype which should be interpreted in the appropriate
political economic context: that of a blinkered neo-liberal technological
triumphalism that pervades even as people strive ostensibly to distance themselves
from it.
This leaves us with a wide set of contradictory notions about the kind of institutional
change the institution of the ISD is meant to elicit. What does it mean for it to be a
“center of scholarly endeavor” if its purpose is solely one of facilitation? What does
the merger suggest about the role that librarians will be meant to have in this new
organizational paradigm? In a nutshell: no one quite knows.
2.4. A Place of Confusion and Miscommunication
The meaning and reality of this merger is usefully approached through a
consideration of the comments of individuals interviewed - subject-specific
librarians, administrators, collection developers (pers.comm., anon., 2001b; 2001g;
200 lh) - the most prevalent of which was confusion: librarians and administrators
interviewed repeatedly professed to the existence of a culture of confusion about the
nature and extent of the university’s and ISD’s central operative and goal. This does
not necessarily mean that they were themselves confused. As I will explain later, this
culture is partially related to different spheres of influence within the organization.
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As much as these individuals spoke with conviction, confidence, fluidity, assurance
and excitement about the effects of technology on their professional work and
networks, as represented by the last chapter, they were weary, confused, skeptical,
angry and jaded about the institution’s response to technology, both that which was
planned and that which occurred inadvertently1 3 1 . Some had more positive reactions,
which I will also discuss (pers.comm., anon., 2002a; 2002b); still others were neutral
or non-disclosive (pers.comm., anon., 2001e; 2001f; 200lj). From all of this, a wide-
ranging set of effects can be extrapolated about the subsequent evolution of the
relationship between place and information: very broadly, access-creation and
reduction, these interviews seemed to demonstrate, are modulated by the
circumstances of and communication networks enabled by an institutional ethos
characterized by deep divisions, barriers and contradictory goals. These divisions in
goals had to do with a changing organizational structure in the context of ‘efficiency’
that made it hard for people to choose their roles: in other words, this confusion had
a local political economic context. The drive for efficiency can be contextualized
with control (hence power) over the allocation of financial resources (and,
subsequently, devolved power) to lesser scales of the organization. This will be
discussed in detail in the forthcoming section about the Revenue Center’s
management structure.
I X As they were all eager to discuss their work and circumstance, they would willingly discuss matters
indirectly related to the questions I asked but which they nevertheless considered relevant: this
confusion, in other words, did not result from a lack of engagement as the matters of which they
spoke were central to their day to day lives.
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That people are involved in their own games does not mean they have no
information about the games of others, or the games of the institution. The
geography of information, in this case, is shown to depend on the imperative to
consume as well as the better known and more intuitive drive for production: people
are often remarkably proactive about the kind of knowledge they desire to have
about their place and situation and, subsequently, strive to acquire. In this way,
technological changes have allowed individuals to better gain information about their
own ‘place’; this does not mean, as the rest of this section will indicate, that it has
allowed them to gain better information: in fact, the evidence points to the contrary.
Also, as the fourth chapter of this thesis will describe, technology serves as a
ubiquitous yet tailored communication tool that allows games to be coordinated
within the institution at the same time as it expands their possible reach and breadth:
it allows people to remove their focus from these intra-institutional games. A quote
from Agre is useful to describe how place, campus and institution can be
simultaneously viewed in relation to this matter:
A university campus is an extraordinarily diverse assemblage of places - it
is really a sort of meta-place that provides all of those places with a
common administrative apparatus and physical plant. Now turn this picture
on its side, and sort the university world in terms of the various types of
places that it contains. Put all of the world’s theater classes in one bin, all
of the physics labs in another bin, and likewise the mathematicians’
offices, registrars’ offices, parking offices, scheduling offices, network
administration offices, and so on. Networked information technology
creates incentives, or more accurately it amplifies existing incentives, to do
two things: first, to standardize all of the places in the university world in
which the same activities occur, and second, to interconnect those places
so that eventually they merge, in some useful sense, into a single site of
social practice. (2000, pp.3)
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Many of these individuals (pers.comm., anon., 2001c; 2001e; 2001f; 2001g) clearly
discuss how they have proactively attempted to understand what is happening at the
university level by reading most of their emails, taking note of the speeches of
Samplex and Campbell (and reading between the lines), and maintaining connections
with key individuals in order to tailor their particular roles to the needs and missions
of the university. Of course, this does not mean that they have necessarily understood
what is happening. Some of them develop highly individual personalized systems for
this process: an individual involved in a coordinating capacity (pers.comm., anon.,
200 le) speaks of how he/she has developed a system to filter emails from certain
places and people; sorting them to a specific directory: this information flow, we can
see, in this case, has a direct effect on the ecology of games. She knows that there are
certain people within the organization who have particular knowledge of what is
going on - she has learned to discern them from the “rumor mill.” Prime among
these is the person responsible for staffing transfers. In the same way as they use
technology to understand what occurs at different scales and in different places,
individuals use it to keep track of the institution’s changing policies at the local
scale: technology, in this respect, doesn’t hurt or help an exclusivity in focus directed
at institutional projects. While the technology doesn’t necessarily lead to access, it
helps them keep track of the changing games of which they are components. They
are all cognizant of the fact that their duties and obligations to their professional
x Sample’s speech (2001), for instance, made it clear that the challenge for all research libraries was to
“strike the right balance between paper holdings and electronic offerings.”
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communities (science librarians, archivists) are distinct from those they maintain to
the library and the university; that the university is at a stage where it has yet to
articulate a consistent mission; and that it is up to them to keep up with these
changes.
Of course, much of this communication has to do with the fact that individuals still
function within a certain spatial proximity to each other that has functional as well as
psychological effects: in their article on the role of campus in distance education,
Cornford and Pollock (2001, pp.2) show “some of the subtle and powerful...ways in
which the campus works to support higher education.” Many of these individuals -
(pers.comm., anon., 2002a; 2001j ; 2001a; 2001g; 2001h; 2001k) discuss the
importance of going to meetings in order to keep up on what is happening and
maintain a broader vision. Places, this demonstrates, are constantly transforming
because of processes that occur across scale: this changes the nature of the
relationship we might perceive between place and organizational culture. As much as
an organization’s culture is perpetuated through deeply embedded socially and
financially transitive mechanisms, technology allows individuals within it to access
other systems (through the Internet or other networks) and, hence, offers the
potential of challenging this perpetuation at the same time as it enables people to
either better understand their own institutional culture and align their goals with
those of their institution or, in an alternate scenario, to be confronted and frustrated
by the competing, vague and inconsistent rhetoric it might relay to them.
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Discussions with librarians suggested that the latter outcome was the case at USC.
Among the specific words and phrases causative of confusion was the ‘Next
Generation Library Initiative’ (NGLI), initially used by Barbara Shepard to define
the larger project within which the CIS was conceptualized. The NGLI is not central
to the creation of the ISD but is nevertheless a by-product of it that reveals some of
the issues that are integral to its meaning. In the project plan for the CIS, Shepard
(2001b) defines the NGLI as something that is meant to actively support USC’s
Strategic Plan by providing new multidimensional opportunities for its students and
faculty by supporting collaboration geared towards an institutional focus on the
Pacific Rim. Like the “information superhighway” or “tele-access,” it might have
come across, on the face of it, as an attempt to “capture the connections across policy
issues and sectors that can help provide a foundation for policy debate and actions”
(Dutton 1999, pp. 306). It was, however, perceived by some as a catchy phrase
devised to attract money (pers.comm., anon., 2001b; 2001g; 2001h), whose
functional effect and by-product was to muddle goals (pers.comm., anon., 200lg)
and create immense intra-departmental confusion (pers.comm., anon., 2001b). For
instance, although most librarians asked about the future of the library agreed about
the need for a hybrid combination of print and digital materials (pers.comm., anon.,
2001b; 200lh; 200le), many believed that this kind of a policy-driven connection
did not occur in a system where “everything is contextually defined and really
important issues get lost in the bureaucratic hogwash. This is complicated by a lack
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of administrative competence and inability to clearly articulate the main issues”
(pers.comm., anon., 2001b). While Shepard may have articulated its meaning in an
individual document (2001b), its diffusion and discussion across the university had
yet to take place. While access-creation might have been inherent to the NGLI at its
inception, its incorporation into the political economic gridwork of the university in
its attempts to strive for efficiency made it a little useless and redundant.
Individuals have diverse interpretations for why this confusion should have been
prevalent. Partly, this was seen to be a result of the rate (pers.comm., anon., 2001b;
200 lg) at which the merger occurred. The creation of the ISD and the subsequent
creation of subdivisions within it - two processes that occurred at a particularly fast
rate - involved shuffling built in hierarchies in ways that confused individuals’
perceptions of how the specificities of their roles had changed: partly as they were
made to report to different individuals, they didn’t know where they belonged or
what precisely they were meant to be doing (pers.comm., anon., 2002a). Other
factors were also operative. One person (pers.comm., anon., 2001h) attributes it to
size: collaborations such as this, he/she believes, should only exist at far smaller
institutions. The organization’s fault, in this respect, might have been its failure to
follow through on the organizational development process it had catalyzed
(pers.comm., anon., 2002a). Although the Center for Scholarly Technology was
created to keep this transition smooth (Karen Howell, the current director of the
center was available to speak to me), this was, according to an individual involved in
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this transition (pers.comm., anon., 2002a), a functionally difficult process. All of
these comments suggest that there was an incompatibility between the organizational
restructuring strategies chosen from among the ones used globally and the nature of
the organization at hand. A failure can be perceived here to link and articulate how
the same globalizing forces can have significantly different implications and effects
depending on the socio-cultural character and financial structure of the place under
consideration.
These tensions appear to have been reinforced by the urban regional context of the
new economy of information services in Los Angeles in the late 1990s, with a great
amount of jobs being created for computer scientists and information professionals,
most of which would pay higher than the library.3 4 1 Many persons (pers.comm., anon.,
2001a; 2001c; 2001g; 2001h) discussed how people were uncertain about
x l The historical basis of this situation before the Internet-related boom is described in Allen Scott’s
(1993) ‘Technopolis: High-Technology Industry and Regional Development in Southern California’.
According to the’ Metropolitan New Economy Index’ (NEI 2002), Los Angeles ranked 29th out of the
top 50 cities with the most jobs in high-tech, at the rate of 3.4%. For the rate of jobs for managers,
professionals and technicians as part of the major workforce, however, it was ranked at 42n d , with
31% as opposed to the 40, 46 and 30% available at Atlanta, Austin and Boston respectively. Of
course, this figure is simply a ratio. Keeping into account the substantially larger size of Los Angeles,
it is safe to say that there are most likely more new economy jobs here than at these other cities, that
serve to detract IT workers from jobs in libraries. For further elaboration, it is interesting to note that
Los Angeles ranked eleventh in the list for the greatest amount of ‘ job churning’, based on the number
of new start-ups and business failures within each metro. It was significantly higher than New York
(at 41). On a more basic level, a study (MHRC 2002) indicates that for all jobs, pay levels remain
commensurate with the locations in which people reside: hence the average salary of Los Angeles -
$66180 - is 10.3% higher than the national meridian and ranked at 6th . It can correspondingly be
surmised how it might be harder to keep IT professional employed at the University of Southern
California than at the University of South Carolina.
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hierarchies™ and bewildered by flux and influx: as much as people are and were
brought in from the computer and information technology industry into ISD, the
retention rate was and is not very high because of salaries that were low relative to
those that were being offered in urban and regional proximity. Within the
organization itself, a great amount of fluidity existed about the set of roles any given
person might have assumed. As this instability is linked to its urban-regional context,
its effects on the character of the place - confusion and contention - could be seen to
be mutually reinforcing.
Apart from rhetoric that was contradictory, there were substantial comments that
individuals might have understood which nevertheless led to confusion in the context
of individuals’ knowledge of empirical realities as dealt from their particular
positions within the organization. Much of this confusion might also have arisen
from the belief - echoed in Campbell’s invocation of the ‘dinosaurization’ of the
traditional library (2002) - that whatever goals have previously existed are
necessarily outdated because of the potentials of technology. We must be ready for a
‘radical’ break because this break should happen; not because it implicates the
substance of our mission or because it enables a particular kind of purpose. Judging
from the responses, this was, understandably, difficult to communicate to individuals
- librarians or computer scientists - that had grown into their own roles within their
profession across a period of time. It is this disjuncture, perhaps - between what
x n The Center for Scholarly Technology, for instance, began reporting to the public services division
and currently has become independent, leading to the creation of programmatic changes.
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leaders and self-proclaimed CIOs like Campbell think about what technology should
do and the field-based grounded knowledge of those who understand what their
profession is about - that might constitute one of the many roots of the contention
and confusion that continues to characterize ISD’s creation of a place-specific
culture.
One of these individuals (pers. comm., anon., March 13th, 2002a) asserted that these
communication problems have been progressively ameliorated over the last year or
so (and it was a year ago that many of the other interviews, which contradicted this
statement, were completed) and have resulted in a reduced amount of contention.
According to this person, a deliberate focus on communication and understanding
has been made possible: individuals in the institution involved with
interdepartmental coordination have identified this as an imperative and started to
institute organizational structures that would create a system in which individuals
could be made accountable for their actions and, hence, proactively strive to
understand rhetoric and align their goals. While this person’s account by itself is not
proof enough of this fact, it must be maintained that the communication problems of
which I speak are both spatially and temporally specific: they are related to the early
period of a new structure’s inceptions; its growing pains, as it were. On a larger
scale, these changes must be situated in the late 1990s, the height of the cyber
obsession related to the new economy and the dot com boom: a merger for the
purposes described had a different political economic reality as well as a different
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political economic meaning during these times that it would have five years before or
later. Issues of Networker (2000), a magazine that was developed in order for the
university and library community to stay in touch with technological developments
and relate them to locally specific issues, reveal that there was an increasingly
widespread interest in these issues across the university. That this magazine sought
to allow people to retain a grasp over the fast-paced set of changes in their profession
suggests that the uncertainty existed beyond the scale of the institution; the numerous
letters sent by professionals and users unrelated to the university (ex: Networker
1998) attests to this. An issue that inaugurated a new format in 1996, claimed to
leave behind (pp. 1) “its roots of stark techno-talk for a more conceptual thought
provoking theme;” it promised readers the opportunity to “find features on
technology’s effect on our world and workplace, ourselves, and our futures.” Here it
sought to appeal to not only “computer power-users” but also those with a casual
interest (1996, pp. 1).
2.5. Professional Identities and Spheres of Games
Some individuals interviewed (pers.comm., anon., 200lg) also spoke of different
organizational cultures that were abruptly placed in contestation with each other
upon the creation of ISD. The cultural and the political economic reinforced each
other as change did not occur on a even playing field. Differences in roles were
partly reinforced by difference in skills and in attitude. One of these groups was
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rising in the institutional hierarchy at the expense of the other. This was not, by any
means, an equal relationship: the librarians would have to adjust to the world and to
the world-view of the technologists; they would not be calling the shots; ‘merger’,
everyone basically knew, was a euphemism. This would, it was anticipated, help
create the kind of place that Campbell’s and the ISD’s generic statement on their
respective WWW sites suggest, where there is, in fact, no difference between
librarians and information scientists™1 . One of these species, it was hoped (to further
the evolutionary biological metaphor), would make the other extinct by subsuming
its habitat. This view is compatible with another individual’s (pers.comm., anon.,
2002b) claim that the “birds of a feather flock together” syndrome is only partly
accountable for the way in which the functions of libraries, telecommunications and
computing continue to remain fairly distinct in a supposedly integrated organization.
Much of this, according to this informant, had to do precisely with the revenue-
center system of accountability, which requires the ISD budget to balance and the
ISD’s client (which happens to be USC at large) to be convinced that the financial
support it provides is rationally expended. In function, this has generated a
necessarily significant degree of accountability between services and users. Among
all the rhetoric about dissolving the distinctions between librarians and information
scientists, this mechanism would allow the university to directly coordinate -
without having to micromanage at each of the scales - the priorities that it had
x l" As Campbell (2001b) himself says, “Forward-looking university planners are starting to see the
bureaucratic walls dividing phones, libraries, and computers as artificial, counterintuitive, and even
detrimental to the smooth operation of a complex organization.”
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articulated for itself. The dissolving of this distinction appeared to have been a
gradual and deliberate process, accelerated not for the purposes of access but as a
convenient rationalization of this reduction in expense.
These two views are not, however, entirely compatible. The second person - one
who is involved more in the technological aspect and far less in the organizational or
analog aspect - sees the merger to have engendered a greater common understanding
that has led to an increased sense of shared objectives. The way that ideas are
articulated among people with different kinds of expertise has not changed; the
major transformation has been in the understanding that “we are one team rather than
three potentially competing teams”: the shared responsibility has, in the informants’
estimation, reduced competition. How can we reconcile these views? It would be
crude to discount the latter’s views just because others’ interpretations - especially
those of the faculty, to be discussed in the next section - tend to coincide more
closely with that of the individual involved in organizational and analog duties. As
the bulk of this analysis is about the prevalent view, perhaps we can surmise that
communication is itself uneven and that the technologist has a necessarily unique
notion of the organizational reality because her or his professional situation exposes
her or him to a particular range of projects and corresponding cultures of interaction
based on the games in which she or he happens to be a player. Assuming that both
are providing an accurate assessment of the situation that they are witnessing, it can
be surmised that there are a number of intersecting yet independent spheres of
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activity or ‘games’ that continually create the culture of place through their
interaction. To escape a purely dualistic and relativistic approach, we must start to
conclude that information is better distributed in certain spheres within the library,
where communication systems are more effective; among them, those of the
technologist, who is located in a sphere that is more in tune with what the
organization wants.
This is one of the many places in which the cultural meets the political economic.
Forces in direct opposition to each other operated - after the ISD had been created -
to create a culture of pockets, spheres and games that did not always coincide or
interact. These spheres are part of the culture of place that determines access. These
pockets are related to the political economic context of change and restructuring.
Information about information, in this case, had direct effects on the culture of place.
This dynamic relationship between place, culture and information is central to the re
conceptualization this chapter strives to produce of how institutions control ‘access’.
In other words, different cultures operating within the place at hand, all of them part
of more global cultures of interaction (often based on professions, such as cultures of
librarians or computer scientists) affected the ways in which information was and
was not made accessible.
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2.6. Revenue Management Center and Scales of Information Access
Institutions have in built mechanisms for transferring orders and, subsequently,
becoming particular kinds of places. The perpetuation of institutional culture in the
place of the university occurs through a series of specific spatial and political
economic and financial processes descending in scale, energized by an
organizational imperative best represented by the management structure of the
Revenue Center. The following quote is taken from a report of the Office of Budget
and Planning:
Under responsibility center management, each revenue center is accountable
for the full costs of its operation, including its share of the support and
service functions provided by university administrative centers. These
support costs are sometimes called “overhead” or “indirect” costs to
emphasize that the revenue center does not directly manage the expenses.
Examples of services funded through the allocation of indirects are building
maintenance, library operations, payroll, and enrollment services. (OBP
2002, pp. 30)
Business needs and imperatives are devolved to lesser organizational scales within
the university in the form of imperatives issued by the center. The goal of the
administration is to ensure that each department is motivated and well resourced
enough to complete its goals (pers.comm., anon., 2002a; 2001e).
This management structure allows for scale-specific systems of access. Once the
revenue management team delegates funds and authority to a specific sub-sector,
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another set of revenue management-related processes (and, subsequently,
coordination of games) occur at a lesser scale: that of the smaller libraries. It is
clearly understandable how this devolution might have had a direct impact on the
spatiality of information. The kinds of collections that are assembled - their relative
virtual and physical components (pers.comm., anon., 2001c) - depend very much on
the nature of the demands of the specific academic departments to which they are
aligned, particularly in the case of smaller librariesx lv (pers.comm., anon., 2002a):
many librarians are reluctant to abandon the set of interlinkages they have forged
with academic departments at the local scale in favor of some vague and engineered
strategic plan. Although most people involved in programmatic work do know about
the ‘Strategic Plan’, librarians, according to this person, tend to work on visions that
are wider than those of the institution, although they might converge across time as
financial imperatives impose themselves. Their decisions are only responsive to
university priorities as much as they are communicated because this response is not
essential: although political economic control ultimately prevails as the units that do
not comply - if this is a matter considered significant enough - can simply not be
funded as well in subsequent years. There is also a global relationship here: as the
relative preponderance of virtual vs. physical information creation changes in
different disciplines, different geographies of information become created at the
smaller scales of the university.
X I V The Social Work library, for instance, owns no books of its own (NN 2000).
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But the crucial thing to be said about the management structure of the Revenue
Center is that it controls costs, not revenue - the amount of money allocated being
dependent on the mercy of numerous deans (pers.comm., anon., 2002a) - all of
which might be responsible for what one person calls the ‘climate of fear’ that
pervades the institution (pers.comm., anon., 2001b). This mentality is related to the
fact that the same amount of money is now perceived to exist for a far wider range of
possible projects with the advent and potential of digital technology (pers.comm.,
anon., 2002a; 2001a; 2001e; 2001g). Very plainly, the budget has remained the same
while the demands have increased (pers.comm., anon., 2002a): as one of them says,
USC is an institution that “wants the best out of its libraries at the same time as it
starves them” (pers.comm., anon., 2001g). Combined, all of these decisions
nevertheless occur within the set of financial capabilities offered by the Revenue
Center that determine the kinds of access to information the university as a whole
can be seen to provide.
Is this perception correct? It is ultimately unclear whether there is, in fact, a decrease
in funds on the scale of the entire institution: as an article in the Chronicle o f Higher
Education (Basinger 2002) says, there has been a four-fold increase in the
university’s endowment over the past decade since Sample assumed tenure in 1991.
The USC catalog itself supports this as it explains how USC has been receiving
record-breaking increases in endowment (USC 2002a, pp. 17). The problem of
funding exists on a scale beyond that of the Revenue Center: it is arguably related to
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the fact that libraries have not been targeted with funds by a university that has
transferred resources from the analog to the digital. Professional schools - the law
school and the business school, for example - in addition, have their own libraries
that do not share funding with Doheny (Brecht 2001), the university’s main research
library, might not prioritize the development of a research library. The university and
individuals within it are not alone in being implied in these priorities; very much at
stake is the fact that its benefactors have particular visions for it. In a powerful
critique of the failure to operationalize so many of the visions individuals had
circulated for the ‘New Doheny’ before it was actually built; in particular, those that
related to a focus on books and collections, Kamuf (2001, pp. 4), Professor of French
and Comparative Literature, explains that the funds were lacking (emphasis added)
“because the libraries have not been targeted in any of the university’s recent capital
campaigns.” Why? Kamuf posits that this was mostly because they were considered
to be “in such a rapidly changing environment for libraries,” where their shape was
as yet considered elusive and it was considered correspondingly unwise to pour
resources into what looked increasingly like “old technology.” The ongoing transfer
of resources to projects like the Collection Information System (CIS) away from
what one of these individuals (pers.comm., anon., 2001g) calls “the bread and butter
of the university” (its analog collections) is predicated on the institutional decision
that it cannot compete with larger research universities in regular collection
development and subsequently must develop its own comparative advantage in the
digital realm, a move that was described by this person (pers.comm., anon., 2001g)
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as “a gamble” and in anticipation of “a wave of the future.” The financial
considerations of a university following a business model that would allow it to take
full advantage of the prevailing neo-liberal system can be implicated here in
affecting the character of the place; in this respect, the effect is not a simple top-
down one, but reflective of a choice that individuals at the local scales made to
engage with global scale pressures in the context of a greater history of decisions that
have not benefited the creation of access (Sipe et al. 1998, Kamuf 2001). While the
informants might not have consciously engaged with the structural characteristics of
these systems as they relate to neo-liberal political economies, they commonly
invoke effects that can be attributed to them. It is furthermore unclear that the
individuals responsible for the changes, as they might be working within the system,
actually recognize it as such. Regardless, it is this set of choices that both emerges
from and generates the character of the place through its interactions with these
ideals for the institution. Some librarians suggested that technological change was
subsequently pushed aggressively from the upper reaches of the administration
(pers.comm., anon., 2001b; 2001g; 2001h) in anticipation of such a wave. The
framing of access was nowhere to be seen. As Kamuf said:
Every year as we watch the acquisition budget fall further behind the
increasing costs of print and electronic materials, we are hard pressed to see
how ISD has protected the research interests of the faculty and students who
depend on the library, (p. 4)
Her recommendation:
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dissolve ISD, or at least ...extricate the library division from its top-
heavy flow chart. Let’s admit that we made a mistake, as California did when
it deregulated its power utilities. Certainly our mistake has to be easier to
undo if we do not delay any longer. And let’s get serious about finding and
committing resources to the improvement of the research libraries; otherwise,
we risk just repainting the facade. (2001, pp. 4)
It should be clear from this that there is serious opposition to the creation of the ISD.
As the next section demonstrates, this opposition existed far before the current
instantiation of the ISD was operationalized, and that it focused very much on its
spatialization and emplacement.
2.7. Virtual and Physical Access and the creation of an ‘Information Place’:
Reactions to Institutional Policies, Divergent Visions and Place-Specific
Outcomes
The ISD represents, for many individuals, the institution’s inability to listen to
employees that had particular ideas for the kind of information spaces that different
people had wanted to be created. This literally has implications, in many ways, both
for the spaces and places that constitute libraries. As Agre (2000, pp. 3), Comford
and Pollock (2001) show, the ‘information place’ of which we speak is still a
campus: the contestations over information are, subsequently, deeply implicated in
spatial contestations.
Kamuf’s concerns were shared by those of the writers of the L-Rap report (Sipe et al.
1999). that listed the most urgent general library issues as articulated by a team
called the LAS Research Caucus. They called, sharply, for an articulation of
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principles that would preserve the concept of the library. “Both books and electronic
materials,” the report said “need to be considered as crucial elements of the library
for the foreseeable future” (pp.l). Book acquisition needed to be given particular
budgetary attention, (ibid) “commensurate with the kind of support it receives at
institutions with which USC likes to compare itself.” The Revenue Center’s
management structure, it claimed, had made USC’s deficit in this regard even more
severe over the past few years. As discussed in the section devoted to the Revenue
Center, the management structure perpetuated the processes that led to the
perpetuation of a certain kind of place-specific information culture as
decentralization occurred concurrently within the context of reduced funds allocated
to collection development. In this context, the creation of this report was like a local
resistance movement to larger scale globalizing forces discussed as they manifest
themselves in the Revenue Center and Strategic Plan.
The individuals behind L-Rap were united in their response to the ways in which the
acquisition and placement of books affected changes in characteristics about ‘place’.
Specifically under concern was the relationship between place and information: that
the place would become defined by the kind of information it held, a factor which
USC needed to consciously consider - one which it did not. They insisted that more
space was needed for books and journals: the relegation of books to outside locations
like warehouses (these local changes in the control of information occurred in the
context of a larger urban space, where the ‘information space’ of books can be seen
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to expand outwards from the scale of the institution itself) appeared to directly reflect
the university’s reputation as a second-rate large private university. Throughout the
report, the writers demonstrated the linkage between libraries and a particular kind of
institutional environment - that of a ‘serious’ research university - that had never
quite existed at USC, a place, which the report expertly demonstrated, had always
starved its libraries, consistent with the account of one of the interviewed individuals
(pers.comm., anon., 2001h). The following is a quote from the section of the report
about the principles of the library:
Both books and electronic material need to be considered as crucial elements
of the library for the foreseeable future. Book acquisition in particular needs
to be given a strong level of support, commensurate with the kinds of
budgetary support it receives at institutions with which USC claims to want
to compare itself. (The WASC Accreditation Study of 1988 emphasized the
weakness of the USC library, and the need for greatly increased library
support, a weakness that Revenue Center Management has over the last
decade only made more severe.) In many important fields print media are not
likely to be superseded any time soon by information in digital media, and
the USC Library needs publicly to recognize that fact, if we are to remain a
viable research institution. We need to affirm and protect (i.e., commit
resources to) books, serials, and library expertise itself (in cataloguing,
storing print media in a rational and useful fashion, circulation, purchasing,
etc.). In particular, we must not conjure with imaginary or partial data,
declaring, for instance, that 30% of scholarly research data are already
available in electronic form. In most fields this is simply not true, and in any
case the faculty of the University, and not ISD, should be making those
determinations. In general, the faculty should be fully consulted before any
changes in acquisition policies are implemented, for the fields in which these
faculty members teach and conduct research. Such decisions must be made
on a field-by-field basis, reflecting the current state of scholarly
communication and research in that field. The Library should develop an
appropriate ongoing consultative mechanism for this purpose...W e need to
maximize the utilization of space on campus for books and other valuable
resources the library houses, and to preserve in the library things that can
only be done (are appropriately done) in the library. Many of the most
valuable research resources, moreover, are not necessarily the high
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circulation items, and high circulation alone must not determine which items
remain in a highly accessible campus location. Collaborative work spaces
should under no circumstances take up space architecturally suited to the
significant storage of books and journals. (Sipe et.al. p. 2).
The institution is considered here to be lacking in attributes, such as viability and
seriousness of mission, that relate directly to the kind of concern for information
access within the USC administrative structure. These comments suggested that, as a
local scale institution, USC was a place that needed to come to terms with larger
criteria of judgment; that the library, as an information place physically located
within the larger place under consideration was affecting perceptions of place. But
while the writers of the L-Rap report insisted that “Collaborative work spaces should
under no circumstances take up space architecturally suited to the significant storage
of books and journals,” a quote from Networker about Leavey library said:
To make space for the second floor Information Commons, library staff have
had to reduce the size of Leavey’s book collection. The thinning process,
which was completed in early March, used a formula developed by ISD
statistician Masoud Farajpour. Based on circulation statistics, the formula
determined which books were getting the least usage. Librarians reviewed
these books individually to decide whether they should remain in the
collection, be moved to an off-campus storage facility, or be given away. The
books that remain in Leavey are intended to constitute a high-usage
undergraduate collection, with emphasis on current materials.
Of the more than 25,000 books earmarked for removal, half were shipped to
an off-campus storage center. These books remain part of the library’s
holdings and can be retrieved on request. The other half were donated to local
schools and libraries; unclaimed books were offered free of charge to USC
students. (Flick 1998)
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Apart from the fact that it is unclear why local schools would need to be using books
that were so arcane that they were unused at a major research university, this
suggests something about institutional mentality that can be well illustrated by the
following quote from the ISD website, which declares “but of late, the practice of
volume-counting has become rather meaningless” and asks itself:
What difference if a document lies in Doheny Library or the University of
Wittwatersrand? Today, scholars are finding that they rarely need to set foot
in a library. Most research involves sitting at a personal computer connected
to the Internet accessing a wealth of electronic information resources. ISD
provides resources that enable the USC community to send and receive email
and take advantage of the World Wide Web and other Internet resources.
(2002c)
To begin with, it is clear that scholars do, in fact, set their feet in libraries more often
than rarely, unless ‘scholars’ are meant to denote stereotypical undergraduates that
never consult secondary sources. Related to this, there appears to be confusion about
what is meant by access to a “wealth of electronic information resources” when very
few of these are actually books, which are not, by any means, predominately
available online. More specifically: does access mean access to substance or access
to catalogues about where this substance might exist? The problem with this rhetoric
is that it tends to be used by corporations to market items: the reason why it
infuriates so many is that many do not consider libraries to be corporations, and
information to be a commodity. Also of note about this rhetoric is the fact that it will
be and has been used as part of the strategy to justify the depletion of analog
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resources, and subsequently reduce physical access in order to better the
infrastructure for virtual access.
2.8. Beyond Local Effects of Global Processes: The Significance of the
Urban/Regional Context
This is not to say that there is no need for the undergraduate reading spaces that
Leavey provides. Speaking from this perspective, one of the individuals interviewed
(pers.comm., anon., 2002a) highlights the fact that these spaces and computersx v did
not exist to any significant extent prior to the construction of Leavey. A perspective
on learning focused on the importance of ‘place’ would have to acknowledge the
viability of this: reading spaces are important for students; they do affect how well
people work and interact. Their existence is central to the kind of place a university
might become. Still, it is unclear whether the construction of Leavey had to do with
the historical need for this kind of space at USC: as Charlene Crockett says “perhaps
if the Internet had languished more quietly in the background for a longer period of
time, the original Information Commons might have been adequate for several more
years. But the phenomenal expansion of resources available on the Net has rewritten
the formula for the computing needs of USC users” (Flick 1997). These changes are
very much perceived to have been determined by the Internet.
x v Notably, non-USC users are unable to use the computers at Leavey because of the kind of contract
the university has with Microsoft: again, global scale financial and legal constraints act upon the
creation of local physical access (pers.comm., anon., March 13th , 2002a).
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But the problem emerges when this is viewed from the perspective of greater scales
- that of the institution at large - which required the substitution of one imperative
for the other - as well as that of global financial and spatial reconfigurations in their
effect on the valuation of information space. As this substitution occurs in the
context of globalization (Harvey 1974, 1988, 1989, 2000X V I , Katz 1986, Sassen 1998,
XXV) imprinting itself on a global city space, we can add a new scale to this inquiry,
making a link between globalization, urban valuation, and information space.
Borgman says:
Storage space for books is expensive, especially in the centers of major cities.
Today, public spaces for people to gather, to browse current publications, to
read, and to use resources on site are usually viewed as higher priorities.
(2000, pp. 187)
While in this instance Borgman was referring to public libraries, the same matrix of
considerations - between meeting and interactive space and those for books - can be
seen operational in a university library: this will be evidenced in the forthcoming
quote from Lombardi. This can be seen in action in a quote from OBP (pp. 33) which
reminds us that all of these changes are happening in downtown Los Angeles, a
major world city, a place where, even for a relatively wealthy university like USC:
Space is costly. The accuracy of current and future space usage data is
important for budget projections. Deans and directors are asked to review
how well current space is serving the needs of curriculum, research, and
other program activities and to describe any changes in future space
occupancy. A section of the forecast worksheet (Measures of Activities, page
X V 1 Here he calls value “a distinctive spatiotemporal construction depending upon the development of a
whole array of spatiotemporal practices” (pp. 108)
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2) contains summary information on each center's allocation of space among
offices, classrooms, and laboratories, with room to indicate future plans. The
weighted average cost of net square feet occupied by the unit is shown at the
bottom of the Measures of Activities page. Detailed space occupancy and
cost data are provided to each center as part of the forecast package, (pp. 7)
The processes involved in controlling information, this indicates, are directly related
to the institutional upper echelon’s need to know about what is happening at smaller
scales so that it can be managedxvu. This need to know is directly related to the high
cost of space in the context of alleged resource constraints. But this invocation is by
itself meaningless: anyone can say their resources are constrained; the question is
how much they are constrained relative to other universities that, for instance, like
USC, that are able to make space for books. Do other universities make these same
decisions under these same constraints?
It is likely that this language was similar to that used in internal discussions. As
Lombardi (2000) says in his description of a scenario between a library administrator
and a university president: “This aversion to physical library space began in the mid
1980s at least and grew into a full-blown phobia by the end of the 1990s. Talk to a
university president about expanding the library,” he says and you get a conversation
x v “ There are different processes by which this information is communication: new committees, for
instance, occasionally arise allowing the upper echelon to learn of what is happening on lesser scales.
The Committee on Information Services, for instance, is composed mostly of faculty and librarians, a
joint advisory group of the Academic Senate and the Information Services Division. It advises the
Chief Information Office on matters related to information resources and technologies. The CIO, in
turn, informs the committee on current issues and challenges associated with these resources and
endeavors. (ISD 2002b).
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that reveals this process of substitution as the university president cleverly negotiates
the conversation with the librarian to result in the following questionnaire sent to the
faculty, after the librarian warns the president of the faculty’s likely disapproval of
the plan:
The university has $80 million in construction funds. Which one of the
following projects should have the highest priority?
A. A Library at a minimum of $80 million
B. A science building at $30 million
C. A general faculty office building at $20 million
D. A classroom building at $20 million
E. Renovation of our old space at $10 million
F. All of the above except of the Library building
Recognizing defeat for the moment, the librarian begins planning to
expand remote storage. We do not build new library space much anymore
unless for computer centers, for computer labs, for classroom and seminar
space, or for study halls. The books go into remote storage, the computer
catalog lets us recall them on a 24-hour or better turnaround, and
complaints about this policy barely rise to the audible.
It is eerie how much the changes described by Lombardi can be witnessed at USC.
As globalization is, as Jameson (1998, p. 55) says, “a communicational concept,
which alternately masks and transmits cultural or economic meaning,” the spatial
and financial decisions made within the university do correspond to the cultural and
discursive environment in a manner that is more dialectical than direct as the
political economic is usually masked. If the spatialization of value that can be placed
on the past in light of external technological developments is indicative of the vision
that individuals create for society, its desires and presuppositions are firmly mapped
in the spaces the USC library accords for different functions. The use of space for
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reading rather than books has, it might be conjectured, a particular set of cultural
effects on place. The prioritization of one set of notions about the role of information
and traditional library practices eventually results in particular spatial manifestations
such as that of Leavey Library: shiny, new, high-tech, spacious and sparsely stacked.
The place that this creates can only be projected to generate the kind of the ethos by
which it was conceptualized and built. This way, the relationality and the dialectic is
furthered™”.
There is another compelling way in which the urban emerges in the context of these
mediations between the local and the global. The system is supposed to favor
projects that reflect the university’s Strategic Plan, with its recommended focus on
collecting the Pacific Rim and Los Angeles-specific materials for which USC is
known. This is related to what is perceived to be happening within the profession, at
a global scale, as it moves towards a paradigm based on sharing and lending among
libraries (pers.comm., anon., 2002a; 2001g; 2001h; 2001a; 2001c) with an increased
focus on competitive advantage and the institution of an agreed-upon research
comprehensive library in any particular region, one that would house the greatest
amount of resources; from which the others would routinely borrow (pers.comm.,
anon., 2002a; 2001 g): the lesser libraries, correspondingly, would reduce their
x v ‘ “ From another urban perspective, what happens at USC relates to what happens in the city because
it becomes part of the city in the context of which it was created. Leavey can equally be considered to
relate to the reality and discourse about the kind of place that Los Angeles is, when viewed by
individuals that look at its construction from outside (people, in other words, might equate the style
and construction of Leavey to its location). Its integration into this reality has much to do with how it
might be perceived to relate to the rest of the institution spatially, economically and culturally.
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respective collections and acquisitions. The consolidation that this suggests occurs at
a scale greater than that of the library itself. Subsequently, the financial restructuring
that is triggered by the demands of globalization can be seen to have a parochializing
impact on the information geographies of a particular institution. As this might
happen at other institutions, it might create a widespread or even global culture of
parochialism as places only collect information related to themselves. In the next
chapter, I will again discuss the Urban Initiative.
2.9. Implications for the Realities of Access
This chapter has discussed how the cultural aspects of a place that controls the
creation of information access changes in tandem with transformations at different
scales and because of different political economic forces. In doing this, it has
discussed the ways in which access has been considered and incorporated in the ISD
merger plans. But it is useful to briefly discuss the ways in which access has and has
not been created. On a wide scale, anonymous administrators (pers.comm., anon.,
2001b; 2001c) and writers of the L-Rap report all attested to the fact that collection
development was hardest hit by the new budget: physical access to information was
reduced in the name of virtual access. In the Faculty Forum on library challenges
(2001, p.2), Campbell emphasizes the relatively high ranking of USC’s library
among those of private university libraries, in contrast to the perception that exists
within the university. USC, he says, is 12th among private research universities in
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America: we must remember here, however, that holdings are only part of the criteria
evaluated, which include volumes held, volumes added annually, number of current
serial titles, total library expenditures, and total number of professional and support
staff (which would include ISD staff). The last two categories, in particular, could
greatly boost the ranking of a university with a second-rate collection. Furthermore,
Campbell’s statement evades the account that this chapter has related which is best
summarized by another statistic from the Association of Research Libraries: the
amount spent on monographs as a percentage of total library expenditure. Out of the
112 major university libraries surveyed by the Association of Research Libraries
(ARL 2001), USC’s ranks 91st for the year 2000: 8% of total expenditures are spent
on monographs. As there is no field within the ARL tables for digital expenditure,
the priority afforded to digitalization cannot be accurately deduced. An institutional
ethos that explicitly commands the neglect of the functions of a ‘traditional’ library
is, however, clearly suggested by this figure. Lastly, this is not a recent matter: as the
L-Rap Report (Sipe 1999) mentioned, a WASC Accreditation board found the
library collection to be inadequate as far back as 1988.
On another level, the increased pressure to virtualize combined with a lack of
increase in funds has privileged the collection of certain kinds of information
(pers.comm., anon., 2002a). There are two noticeable trends here. Firstly, because
diminished funds have led to a reduction in journal-acquisition, those that are
acquired tend to exist at disciplinary interstices as the need exists to serve the
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greatest amount of disciplines possible (ibid). For example, journals on biochemistry
are more prevalent within the science library than, say, specialized journals in either
biology or chemistry because it allows for a compromise among biologists and
chemists: access is unevenly created, this shows, across disciplinary boundaries,
favoring work at the interstice of disciplines that is less specialized. If this set of
games is ignored, it might be erroneously assumed that this bent is a result of the
institution’s interdisciplinary vision. This affects the kind of information that is made
available and, subsequently, the kinds of places the library and the university
become.
Secondly, this same person (pers.comm., anon., 2002a) speaks of the ways in which
libraries in the humanities and science collections are managed in different ways
because of the different kinds of information retrieval and communication systems:
scientists tend to use more digital information. Although the ‘strategic plan’ did not
conceptualize this as such, it has become necessary to abandon the notion of an ‘all
inclusive’ approach and recognize the fact that the same amount of funds exist in a
context where there is a demand for digital materials above and beyond the
established demand for analog. Subsequently, inherent in the format shift towards
digital necessitated by this restructuring is a content shift towards scientific
information: not something that would please all establishments within the
university. The creation of spheres of influence and communications, this indicates,
is not entirely random.
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These problems are exacerbated with those of inadequate cognitive access. Campbell
goes on (p. 12) to detail the series of issues related to physical access that might have
affected the sense that he acknowledges among faculty and students that the libraries
are inadequate, having apparently demonstrated that they are not: these include
incomplete library holdings in the online catalog (approximately 1/5 of all books are
not represented and are, hence, functionally invisible); incorrect records in the
catalog for books lost or stolen with no records; lack of an online database of serial
holdings (which constitute the most heavily used portion of the library collection);
overcrowding on library shelves; and antiquated physical facilities. All of these are
logistical issues related to the realities of physical access and the cognitive
geographies of hybrid virtual and physical information spaces that become so evident
when mistakes are made in cataloguing. The reduction in cognitive access that
results from this disorganization has direct effects on physical access as it means, in
function, that the books that cannot be located cannot be used or read. It is the effect
of matters like these on the corresponding psychology and ethos of place that leads
the writers of the L-Rap report to so ardently protest. Relating these to the political
economy of the transition might possibly increase and exacerbate the anger.
That the resultant access is related to the organization of information indicates,
furthermore, a temporal aspect that is, in various ways, essentially associated with
the spatial: for instance, the fact that, when materials are not found within the stacks
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at USC’s Doheny library, one must submit a “search” that could take up to two
weeks (if successful) as library staff themselves do not necessarily know where
misplaced books might be. This as well as the notion that everything that a library
does not own might be acquired through “interlibrary loans” and hence need not be
collected in each library separately proves to be particularly disadvantageous to
scholars, for whom immediate access is essential for the sophisticated and rapid
development of arguments that broach deep and broad topics; in particular, for those
scholars that realize that their argument would be supported or enhanced by a body
of work that did not necessarily inform its conception in its original instantiation.
The time lags associated with these forms of information organization and
institutional policies, subsequently, might benefit those scholars completing the kind
of work that requires them to ignore bodies of work whose place and importance
emerges along the course of their writing. Some kind of cumulative difference,
lacunae or vacuum in institutional intellectual activity, discourse and production
might be conjectured to exist. If no books exist on Internet law, for instance, in the
Doheny library (which I was told they do not, because they have been misplaced and
cannot be replaced), there might, in fact, be no one studying it at an institution that
prides itself in its cutting edge research on ICTs. These are some of the ironies of
globalization, a multi-edged sword that affects different spheres of activity at
different scales both outside and inside the institution.
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2.10. Conclusion
This chapter has striven to make some points about the effects of restructuring,
regardless of the rationale, on organizational culture, information and place. It has
narrated the process by which the upper echelon’s failure to clearly conceptualize
and communicate a shared vision across the institution has enabled the perpetuation
of contesting views about the relative importance of virtual and physical access in
the university library. More specifically, it has shown how confusion and contention
reinforce each other across and between institutional scales, as individuals at work
within the institution are shown to respond to this discourse by creating their own,
often based on their particular set of games and in reaction to each other. In the wake
of the creation of the ISD, this set of processes can be said to have led to the creation
of a certain culture of ‘place’ that could be defined by the deep and widespread
miscommunication this suggests.
In addition, I have striven to demonstrate that individuals play games from different
points within the institution that affect the ways in which information is made
accessible in different ways at different scales. There are spheres of games.
Contestations about the future of the library related to deeper individual and
collective visions, subsequently, can be seen to affect how information is made
accessible at these respective scales. These specific geographies of information at
smaller scales aggregate to create a particular place-based geography of information
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at the entire local scale when viewed from a macro perspective. In this respect,
locating scales within the place of the institution and situating initiatives or rhetoric
at these respective scales makes it possible to discuss how these different
organizational cultures can exist and interact, yet be able to prevail over each other.
Global and political economic factors affect the way the institution operates in a
number of different ways. Flexible accumulation practices require libraries to
restructure their operations in response to the ‘trends’ at other institutions. The
particularly frenzied nature of this restructuring might be partly attributable to the
fact that this restructuring occurred in a particular global moment; that of the dot
com boom of the late 1990s. In another and related wider global context, libraries are
increasingly required to integrate with other institutions technologically because of
changes in practice that occur on a global basis. The same kind of strategies affect
the way in which the university is able to function as a private profit making
organization and, hence, determine the ways in which the library and different
projects within it are funded. Rhetoric, finally, is the most global of all of these
globalities. Each of these processes interact with different spheres of influence
within the institution as they are transmitted to and by different actors. As they
intersect and interact with and affect units and agents within the place under
question, they greatly implicate the way in which information may or may not be
made accessible by it and within it.
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There are also recurring ways in which the urban emerges in the context of these
local-global mediations. The urban initiative requires the library to collect Los
Angeles-specific materials in the context of an ill-conceived ‘Strategic Plan’. As the
university exists within an intensely globalized city, space is construed to be
particularly valuable, as partially demonstrated in the quote from the Office of
Budget and Planning (OBP 2002) (while the office might have insisted that “space is
costly” even in a rural or suburban environment, the significance of the statement
would have been distinct from the one that emerges when we take the location into
account), and illustrated by actions such as the sending of books to urban
warehouses. The spatial economy of information technology workers affects the
composition of human resources within the university library and general
organizational flux. The university, finally, is part of urban space so the things that
are constructed become part of the city.
In either case, the contradictions within institutional rhetoric about technological
change can be traced to confusion and contention that existed among librarians,
contributing to the creation of a place-specific ethos. The institution’s subsequent
prioritization of virtual over physical access has appeared to have exacerbated the
contentious aspects of this ethos. Having said this, this chapter and this thesis is not a
diatribe against digitalization: something that is neither synonymous with nor
antithetical to the creation of access. The next chapter will benefit from this account
as it describes the process by which the CIS was created, and point out that it is
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problematic to entirely blame the CIS or its creators for the decline in attention given
to collection development instead of ascribing it to the institutional decision to
substitute one for the other: the analysis must ascend in scale within the local to see
how access is negotiated by use of a technology. The way in which the systems are
developed, ultimately, will be shown to depend on the attention that is or is not given
to the nature of the library’s various users. It will require the administration to see
how user development, as a related policy issue, “entails issues of access” (Dutton
1999, pp. 307). This is evidenced in the process by which the Collection Information
System was developed and chosen. The subsequent chapter will seek to illustrate
how information access is created in a technologically dynamic context by virtue of
individuals’ efforts and initiatives as part of and in response to intra and extra-
institutional games, focusing on digital archives.
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Chapter 3: Information Geographies of Technological Change: The
Creation of the Collection Information System
3.1. Introduction
This chapter discusses the creation of the USC library’s Collection Information
System, the technological core of the university’s digital archivesx,x, focusing on
how the way in which particular kinds of technologies have been used (GIS
softwaresx x or Oracle databases) within the larger technological, institutional and
political context has affected the creation of access. The USC case study is used here
to understand the process of this integration and shed light on how the technical
literature on digital libraries and GIS might be integrated with broader theory on
information and communications technologies in organizations: ‘ecology of games’
(Dutton 1999), SST or the social shaping of technology (Williams and Edge 1996) as
well as key insights from geography. Since the focus will be on the university’s
digital collections, the individuals interviewed and the systems considered will not
X I X The space/time/keyword/format search mechanism is part of the Collection Information System,
the goal of which, according to the USC Digital Library Federation Report (Shepard 2000a) “is to
provide a robust, scalable, open- and standards-based information architecture to interactively deliver
large numbers of digital objects via the web along with integrated access to existing catalogs and
indexes of non-digital materials.”
x x That GIS has been incremental to libraries’ transition from analog to digital (ESRI 1994) makes this
an interesting process to discuss in light of debates about institutions and technological change. While
many of the systems this chapter will discuss are GIS-based, it will focus on these technologies only
as much as they are related to the larger set of technological infrastructures employed in the CIS. GIS
itself was discussed in greater detail in the first chapter.
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be considered representative of the whole institution but of a sub-project within it;
albeit a large one. In this way, it will be consistent with the larger methodological
framework of the embedded case study (Yin 1994) as it evaluates the creation of the
CIS as part of a wider set of processes implicated in USC’s interaction with
technological changes, systems and potentials.
Specifically, I will be concerned here with the ways in which technology is produced
and consumed in spatial contexts that it proceeds to transform. The previous chapter
discussed the institutional and political economic context in which technological
change was incorporated into the institutional decision making process; this chapter
will focus on the inherent spatialities of technology. As Price (1999) has discussed
the ways in which the technological infrastructure of satellite systems creates the
potential for particular kinds of exchanges, while remaining mired in larger political
economic and social contexts, I will seek to demonstrate the same for the library
infrastructure under consideration. The central question will be: what does the
example of the creation of the CIS as the core of the digital library at USC reveal
about the ways in which technological systems, as they are used within organizations
devoted to the management of information, affect the ways in which access is
created?
The first three sections will describe three layers of unpredictability and uncertainty
- technological, conceptual and institutional - each of which are related to and
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constitutive of different kinds of globalization, of processes that occur at scales
greater than to be completely fathomable by individuals at the local scale. To
describe how individuals dealt with these layers of unpredictability, I will then
provide a step-by-step description of the evolution of the CIS, which will also
interpret how the aforementioned factors might have interacted in the development
of the system as it stands and is conceived to expand. The discussion and narration of
the social shaping of technology at USC will focus on the institutional and
technological scales that have been discussed and exposed and emphasize the
reasons why particular kinds of technological choices were made, with
correspondingly specific implications for access. Before concluding, I will discuss
some of the implications this case might have for the relationship of geographic
categories to debates about technological determinism.
It will become clear here that the goals that the system is intended to fulfill are not
stable or uncontroversial; that the boundaries of the project are not clearly defined;
and that the environment within which the project is taking place has direct and
indirect effects on the ways in which access is created. It will be observed that these
changes occur dependant on processes that occur across scale and originate in
particular places. Particular attention will be paid to how access to information is
controlled and created by processes that occur according to the laws and disorders of
a particular place, where a place is a spatial locations that manifests a certain
specificity within the context of more general macro level processes, one that is both
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constitutive of and constituted by social relations, that contains open and porous
boundaries, and that retains myriad inter-linkages and interdependencies that sustain
its specificity (Massey 1994). Political economies of globalization are implicated in
different ways: partly as what happens at USC occurs in response to global trends
among similar institutions and partly as it occurs within the constraints imposed by
global and pervasive technological systems whose production and consumption
occurs within a political economic context of neo-liberalism under late capitalism.
Access is conceptualized within these social, economic and technological contexts
and created in operation under their constraints. This happens as place-based
technological systems control the way in which information can travel both into and
out of an institution.
3.2. A Spatial Reading of Technological Context
Before zeroing down on the specifics of the case study, it might be useful to look at
literatures on databases and information systems to articulate an understanding of
how local and place-based information infrastructures - servers, databases, digital
archives - function through technological systems and processes that exist across
scale: the way in which any individual or institution is able to ‘act’ upon the systems,
subsequently, partly depends on their place-specific scale of influence. The ways in
which access (in this case, ‘access’ is the product of the ability of different library
users to use and process the system’s products) is created are partly a function of the
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sophistication of relational databases, how appropriately modeled they are, and how
expressive they are of their respective metadata (Baptista and Kemp 1999). In a
manner similar to that which other chapters use to discuss how individuals’ games
required interaction across scales as represented by institutional affiliations and
changes, this section will describe the interconnections inherent in these
technological systems. It is the corresponding ways in which it helps clarify the
spatialities of access creation that makes ‘scale’ a useful and interesting concept as
part of the larger endeavor of understanding the geographies of digital information.
These interconnections and global changes in the development of technological
systems, furthermore, are constitutive of one form of globalization, whose effects
can be clearly witnessed at USC: their production and consumption occurs in
accordance with the demands of the global market for technology under late
capitalism; and the resultant information infrastructure that is created extends
unequally yet broadly across regions, cities and nation states. These are all ultimately
accorded local meaning: as much as these changes are related to transformations
happening among the entire industry - hence, on a ‘global’ level - they combine to
create a particular configuration of changes that are specific to USC. Finally, as the
creation of this infrastructure perpetuates the use and production of the Internet and
new communication technologies, it is directly tied to structural alterations in the
perception of time and space central to the contemporary age (Harvey 1989).
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The first technological scale under consideration here is the Internet, which, after
emerging from an ecology of games that was multi-local in its scope, achieved
proportions, reach and scope that are best but not accurately described as global.
Other systems within and powered by the Internet are involved that emerge from
local initiatives but have multi-local (but not necessarily “global”) effects. In
particular, this would refer to protocols like Z39.50, which defines a standard way
for two computers to communicate for the purpose of information retrieval
(Borgman 2001, p. 77; Arms 2000, p. 217): as it has allowed institutions to share
catalogs by communicating between servers, and emerged for the purpose of
coordinating among technological systems from particular places, it is directly
related to the potential geographies of information. The creation of these systems can
be interpreted in the context of a more global drive for efficiency among the
producers of the information, as information has increasingly become defined as a
commodity in the neo-liberal context. The same can be said for software, like
ArcIMS, which emerges as the result of a particular kind of demand that is perceived
by the creators of technology, sometimes from within their own organizations
(ArcIMS is the backbone for the largest GIS provider, Environmental Systems
Research Institute’s [ESRI’s] Geography Network) to which the organization then
caters (ESRI 2000). This has been produced, in addition, by a powerful organization
that pushes its own products in an attempt to obtain much of its dominance of the
GIS market.™ Finally, there is the local scale of the institution itself, which is
™ As the website for Internet Ware defines itself as a consultant to ESRI as “With ESRI's
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comprised of servers and databases and archives: projects that are begun and
conceived at USC, but which have impacts in different places, as allowed by the
potentials of information infrastructure. The morphology of the technological
systems, in other words, implicates the potentials for access; they exist, furthermore,
in a political economic context that this section will also strive to elucidate.
All of these different components of an information infrastructure (Borgman 2001)
are interconnected through concrete and abstract networks - the GIS at USC, for
instance, are linked to systems of data that exist both intra-institutionally and extra-
institutionally - in ways that allow the greater scaled infrastructure to affect how the
smaller scale systems are conceived. The concept of ‘scale’, in this regard, is
furthermore useful in relating the concept that lesser scales are networked with larger
ones and that the ways in which we affect access, while often limited to the scale of
our project or design, can often transcend this scale because of the complex,
changing and multi-scalar nature of technological systems themselves. The Internet
constitutes one of the global entities with which GIS systems are being increasingly
integrated (Baptista and Kemp, pp.34) partly because the Internet allows people to
create GIS-based digital libraries that they otherwise would not think of initiating
and would have no reason to. Because of the Internet, a prexistent infrastructure
overwhelming GIS market dominance and the release of their ArcIMS (Internet Map Server) tool as
the standard to deliver GIS to the internet, we can deliver on this emerging technology — on time and
within budget. (Business Ware 2002) ”
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exists for dissemination, which reduces the temporal and financial costs of initiating
a digital library.
Secondly, it enables a different form of information exchange: a large amount of
librarians are able to use metadata and make it interoperable in different ways
because of the very nature of the Internet as a middleware platform. Thirdly, the
Internet has led to the creation of search engines whose effectiveness will determine
the usefulness of future web-based GIS applications. As access can be seen to be
created by different people at different times, there are increasing efforts to
coordinate in this regard: Pradhan and Gittings (1999, pp.51), for instance, suggest
to GIS technicians that they help develop these search engines in order to maintain
and create new markets for their own work. Again, the purpose here is not the
creation of access: it is simply evidence of different sub-groups of technologists
fighting for survival in a complex and unpredictable market. The ways in which GIS
affects access, subsequently, must be seen to be part of processes that occur at a
global scale as the Internet affects the ways in which the GIS can be socially shaped
to develop. All of this depends on whether place-based agents make the right
decisions; or, in this case, the decisions that would lead to greater virtual access, and
not those focused on their own survival.
The integration of GIS with the Internet ultimately creates a different kind of access
problem: as the amount of data available greatly increases, the need expands for
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metadata, metadatabases™1 and sharing protocols that would allow users to make
sense of it. This is a cognitive access issue. Arms (p. 223) describes how there are
problems accessing geospatial data in the freewheeling style of search engines that
are not designed to handle focused queries. The aspect of access that involves
organizing information, in other words, must be considered along with the aspect
that involves the production or dissemination of information. Protocols like Z39.50
(which allows clients to simultaneously pass a single query to more than one server,
allowing them to be compiled into a single Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML)
page) (Arms 2000, Borgman 2001) and other metadata classificatory schemes that
emerge on scales greater than the organization are a response to this. The limited
search capabilities currently available may not be sufficient for databases that
contain thousands or tens of thousands of metadata files - effective search engines
must be able to query on a broad spectrum of metadata elements. This is where an
online metadata catalogue based on one or more metadata standards and
implemented in a Relational Database Management System (Pradhan and Gittings, p.
40) can come into play. In combination with the creation of these systems, these
protocols are useful and relevant to those that exist within certain networks: while
not as ubiquitous as the Internet, it is not necessarily accurate to place them at a
global scale, as it is largely those who need digital data or exist at other university
libraries that are afforded access. It is important to note that technology producers on
X X I I There are scales or levels of accuracy of metadata within the information universe. You have a
geospatial data repository that has data at a low level of abstraction; then you have system, quality and
semantic metadata, with collection ontology at the top of the pyramid (Baptista and Kemp, p. 28).
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a global scale create these protocols (Z39.50, for instance, is created by the
American National Standards Institute) and networked databases. That they are
scaled outside of the institution means that they create and reduce access in ways that
the institution cannot directly affect. They are created and controlled in accordance
with the laws of highly competitive software industry, where all but a few dominant
entities have to battle intensively for market share (SIIA 2000, McChesney 1998).
Neo-liberalism and technological production are aligned in ways that are not
necessarily attuned towards the creation of access.
Technological systems are ultimately local: they exist as servers and computers in
particular places within institutions, enacting multiple processes that engage them
with bodies of information inside and outside the institution. Often, they exist as part
of servers and databases that are housed elsewhere; in this case, they are still local:
they operate out of particular places for particular reasons. The matter of the relation
between the culture and ethos of a ‘place’ and the access-related considerations taken
into account in their development is operative here: while technological systems, by
definition, exist in diverse places, any given place usually contains a particular
combination and configuration of these systems. This particular combination of
technological infrastructure, along with the changing social, political and economic
relations within the institution acts to subsequently shape the technology: place-
based configurations, in tandem with technology, perpetuate and recreate the culture
of place in dynamic ways. These configurations, in turn, affect the specificities of
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place that are involved in access creation. This will be discussed in the last section in
relation to the choice of Oracle as the core database of the CIS (it should be noted
here that Oracle denotes both the name of the database and the name of the company
that provides it).
The process of technological change, it has hopefully been demonstrated, is rapidly
dynamic across scale. As places are spatially connected in diverse ways, local
systems are based on their connectivity and compatibility with others and larger
systems. This connectivity is, however, itself challenged by the disparate and uneven
nature of technological development. Conversion programs exist to synthesize
incompatible geospatial data formats that are the most prevalent cause of
interoperability failures between systems. New data formats force new GIS users to
have upgrades: if server-side data conversion utilities are created, those who access
things over standard web browsers would have a far greater opportunity to access
information. (Pradhan and Gittings, p. 44). Programs and applications are also linked
because of the possibilities offered by new technologies: an application
programming interface, such as that used in the library GIS, is a “set of system calls
or routines for application programs to access services from operating systems or
other p rogram s,” in effect, allowing the program to work w ith programs on other
computers (ESRI 1994). While these do not solve all problems - the sorts of file
sizes and processing times required by today’s GIS operations will ensure that a lack
of network resources will remain a problem for producers and consumers of
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information alike - it shows that local systems, by virtue of the specifics of their
configurations, can greatly determine the kinds of GIS analysis that might occur over
the Internet. As storage capacity, speed and reliability increase, the nature of access
as a globally and regionally unequal commodity will also increase: the expansion of
the digital divide occurs concurrently with that of technological advancements. It is
necessary to acknowledge this in order to situate information and technology in the
material and spatial economic contexts of global inequalities (Hudson 1999, Guedon
1999).
This section has been descriptive and conceptual with little mention of the case
study. Partly, this is because the literature about the CIS produced by the library
alludes to and assumes the integration of its systems with larger processes but does
not necessarily explain the nature of that to which it alludes. It was necessary,
however, to establish that when a technological system is shaped from within an
organization, its creators do not necessarily have complete control over how this
happens because of the ways in which technological systems - from software
programs like ArcIMS to the Internet itself - exist and are created in a manner that is
partly independent of local constraints, much as the producers might strive to
anticipate these in determining what their market is. These products are not tailored
to specific access-related constraints but their marketization requires that they be
made competitive within everything else. In this respect, at the local scale, they
cannot affect how certain kinds of access are created for those even within their scale
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(other students) because of the limits and constraints of larger scaled technological
problems.
However, at the same time, actions directed at this scale might even affect how
access might be created at greater scales: partly because of the fact that they have
made information available in one system which happens to be linked to others, and
partly because they have set a precedent. This illustrates how the independence of
greater scale transformations from what happens at the institution is partial.
Technology - through its very natural modification and transformation - continues to
change the real and potential spatialities of information in ways in which we can
never quite fathom its entirety, precisely because of constant and potentially infinite
spatially significant reconfigurations. Both the realities of these reconfigurations and
the uncertainty and sense of flux they cause are part of globalization.
Access, as it emerges from the creation of information infrastructure also has a local
scale of effect, and access that is created on a local scale might have extra-local
effect: the scale of effect, in other words, is often distinct from the intention of the
person or institution that sought to create a certain kind of information availability,
because of the very linked and interconnected nature of the technological
infrastructure. Still, much as the ways in which access is ultimately created only
partly depends on whom it is meant to be created for, the potential that technological
systems have for access-creation, where each technological addition is integrated
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into a technological context it cannot really control, as they are continually
developed, depends only partly upon the will of the individuals that are its
consumers. The next section will demonstrate that there is no one such will in any
given organizational context or ‘place’.
3.3. User-configuration and Access-creation Through the ‘Social Shaping of
Technology’: Place and Concepts of Access
To determine whether a system creates access to information, there must first be
some kind of understanding as to who the user is. Users’ needs are not necessarily
met by the kind of GIS that is developed; this means, implicitly, that different kinds
of GIS might be developed for any given purpose. Of course, these analyses come
from organizational contexts where the focus is often on GIS as a tool for analysis: in
the case of USC, it is only the people who are the most proficient users - often the
producers of the technology - that actually employ it in this manner. However,
library users and students still come into contact with the maps on the Archival
Research Center through a GIS interface. Students using the library website
unwittingly become users of GIS as they search for items within the library.
“We cannot be all things to all people.” The most common statement heard during
these interviews, it begs and triggers the subsequent one: to whom, then, can the
library be what? The needs, geographies and behavior of the user as conceptualized
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individually and collectively in the context of the particular ‘place’ that controls the
creation and regulation of policies have enormous implications for access.
Accordingly, in the context of its larger mission as a digital library, USC claims to be
interested in “clearly identifying [its] audiences and the characteristics and
behaviors of these audiences for each of [its] systems and services” (pers.comm.,
anon., 2002a). Much of this, however, depends on what individuals believe to be the
relationship of the library to the university, and, subsequently, to scholarship. The
ongoing diversification of beliefs on these topics, as the last chapter might have
indicated, understandably makes coordinating among games a particularly fraught
and onerous endeavor. Five considerations, in particular, are operative, all of which
have to do with the ongoing transition from library as place to library as function that
is articulated by Birdsall (1994) in The Myth o f the Electronic Library as being
central to the crises inherent in the new ‘information society’.
1. Should systems be tailored to user behavior? For some, this is not nearly as self-
evident as it might seem, given the perceived intellectually problematic behavior
of certain users, particularly undergraduates at USC, known, at the most basic
level, for basing their scholarship largely on web searches (pers.comm., anon.,
2001b). Designers, the prevalent wisdom is, “need to first understand the larger
context that determines their information needs and purposes for using the DL,
that is, the context of the users' work; the individual user's specific work and
tasks; his or her information acts (including information searching, analyzing,
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repackaging); and, finally his or her DL use (Van House 1996).” Some
(pers.comm., anon., 2001a) believe that the appropriate response would be to
“join them, not fight them” and place all information on the web. This is
contestable, especially if we decide to acknowledge the beliefs of the faculty,
(pers.comm., anon., 2001b; Sipe et.al. 1993), who tend to have strong opinions
on these matters; opinions, many would argue (pers.comm., anon., 2001b), which
have been summarily ignored. The user behavior problem is reflective of a
deeper set of views that administrators might or might not uphold about the kind
of mission the library is supposed to have, which are inextricably related to
notions about the role of the university. While one of these individuals
(pers.comm., anon., 2001h), for instance, believes that the library is there to
‘serve’ whatever immediate needs may exist, another (pers.comm., anon., 2001)
believes that it has a deeper duty to more proactively expand peoples’ knowledge
of the diversity of options available in fulfilling their needs.
2. On whose behavior should it be based? Undergraduates? Faculty and graduate
students? An administrator (pers.comm., anon., 2001a) speaks of the transition
from “just in case” to “good enough” in metadata standards (that is, the quality of
detail in the data that librarians keep about each record of information): the
current standards have too many fields, and take away time and money from
other necessary work. This transition is based, arguably, on a vision of an
undergraduate user. While one person claims (pers.comm., anon., 2001c) the
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original systems were indeed based on a vision for undergraduates, another
person (pers.comm., anon., 2001e), more closely allied to the development of the
internal infrastructure, says the new systems are being developed in response to
the university’s mission as a research institute the primary clientele of which is
faculty and graduate students. Has the mission changed, or is this indicative of
intra-institutional confusion?
3. What can be done about the way in which user behavior changes? Some
individuals work to reconfigure users by initiating faculty-training programs and
classes (pers.comm., anon., 2001f). One person is known to have initiated a
project with engineering students to test a new initiative - in collaboration with
the Center for Scholarly Technology. An anonymous administrator (pers.comm.,
anon., 2001c) spoke of a project in which student engineers were designing
library projects for credit. The three games of user configuration, conception of
user behavior and development of technology were, in this case, inextricably
intertwined and co-generative on an intra-institutional level.
4. How many users? This consideration will be discussed in greater detail in the
following section as it directly related to the social shaping of technology; in this
case, the Collection Information System. This is distinct from the issue of
whether the system would be made available to non-USC users - whether or not
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it would be ‘locked’ - which relates to copyright issues discussed in the next
chapter.
5. One final question exists about the user: how global is he/she? The Internet
interface makes it difficult for institutional agents to know the number of users
that they now serve from around the world. As the university has no policy on
how to handle this new constituency of users for librarians (pers.comm., anon.,
200lh), how have they decided to handle such requests? Each of the librarians
discussed, in varying levels, how their first obligation was to their direct user
community (faculty and students) with many (pers.comm., anon., 2001c; 2001h;
2001c) saying they would be willing to process global requests. A subject-
specific anonymous administrator (pers.comm., anon., 2001c) speaks of how she
is more likely to serve global users who submit requests regarding special
collections that are uniquely maintained by the institution (and not accessible
elsewhere). Some individuals process as many global requests as possible,
especially when the culture of mutual collaboration has always existed in their
field (pers.comm., anon., 2001c). An archivist (pers.comm., anon, 2001 i) speaks
of how his staff receives approximately six global requests per week, with the
number rising.
Not everyone involved in the creation of archives had particular views about the kind
of user they were targeting. One of the technologists (pers.comm., anon., 2002b)
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identified a “wide range of users: administrators, catalogers, editors, reviewers, non-
USC content specialist contributors, USC users, and non-USC users.” While she/he
acknowledged that their target audience is USC-users, they do not really want to
“limit” themselves to that “client base.” She/he anticipates that users profiles will
grow and expand: while USC users might constitute those that have a need for
primary research materials related to Los Angeles and Southern California, they
might want to eventually leverage usage to clients who don’t fit the profile.
The different ways in which information technology has been used in organizations
(Huxhold and Levinson 1995) can be understood as part of larger debates over
whether organizations are and should be technocentric (cases where technology is
the factor by why decisions are made simply because it is possible, because others
are doing it, and because technologists have decided that it needs to be done) or
characterized by socio-technical computing (where technology simply supports
decisions as part of a larger democratic process that is specified by users, where there
is a demand p u ll). All of this affects and reflects the ways in which access is created
to information. It is difficult to understand the library in the context of theories about
information use in organizations because the very function of the library is the
provision of information: it is hence necessary to exercise caution in integrating its
case into debates about the use of IT as an organizational strategy. In any case, like
most real organizations and systems, when applied to dualistic models, USC exists
along the middle of this continuum. It is difficult to generalize across an institution,
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partly, as decisions are made within a scaled environment, in the context of
complicated political economic structures where people are involved in their own
sets of games. One instance of this complexity is the fact that much of what these
individuals do is of no cost to them; it is unclear whether all these people equate
Birdsall’s notion of the library as ‘function’ as being necessarily distinct from the
view that there still exists the need for ‘traditional’ library services driven and fueled
by the desire for information access rather than to provide a raison d ’etre for
computers.
Ultimately, each of these beliefs relate to how individuals within a particular place
conceive of place-specific policies and attitudes regarding access. Each individual
chooses the set of games in which they are willing to be involved in an era of greater
technological change, subsequently adding to accessibility in their own ways. In
many of these cases, further refinement of their roles is not exclusive of their desire
to cater to the global user community which technology connects to them and
incorporates instantly to their matrix of possible clients and, subsequently, games. It
is useful to consider the complicated nature of social relations and conceptions in
juxtaposition and synthesis with the previous section’s description of technological
morphology in order to initiate an understanding of the complexity of the issues at
hand. The next section will engage the interaction between these two spheres of
activity.
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3.4. Financial and Organizational Context
It is necessary, at this point, to describe the technological genesis of the Collection
Information System, starting from its birth as the Information Systems of Los
Angeles. In order to do this, it is necessary also to discuss the business model used to
develop the database itself: these will be discussed both in this section and in the
following one. The discussion will be related to but distinct from the business model
under which this database was incorporated in the larger plan of the university and
the library as discussed in the last chapter. The description of organizational change
that I will provide, in other words, is ‘embedded’ in the description of the larger case
study of the library and institution as a whole. Keeping in light of this political
economic context, I will seek to demonstrate how the technology was socially
shaped as different players had different inputs on the development of the system,
based on what they knew about the technology, what they knew about the substance
of the project and its mission, as well as what their individual goals and visions were
for the project.
A summary of the players and acts involved in creating the Collection Information
System is as follows. The germ of the Collection Information System was the GIS-
based ‘Information Systems of Los Angeles’ database initiated by Phil Ethington,
Professor of History, in 1994. Its aim was to provide public access to a “regional
meta-collection” of data owned by various Los Angeles-area libraries by creating a
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single web-based point of contact (ISLA 2001). In this respect, ISLA was reflective
of the regional aspect of the university’s strategic focusX X U I (Sample 1994) on LA-
area and Pacific Rim materials. The ‘Integrated Digital Archives’ (IDA), developed
over four years from 1994 to 1998, strove to incorporate a larger body of digital
material owned by the library, retaining this focus where deemed appropriate and
naming it the ‘Urban Initiative’. For various technological reasons to be discussed,
ISLA/IDA was not successful and Jerry Campbell, Dean of the Libraries, handed
over the project to John Wilson, Director of the Geographic Information Science
(GIS) Laboratory (pers.comm., anon., 200Ij), under whose aegis it morphed and
expanded into the Oracle-based ‘Collection Information System’, with a
substantially different technological and business model that constituted the core of
the “Next Generation Library Initiative.” To develop and maintain the system,
Barbara Shepard was hired, in September 2000, as the Director of Digital
Information Management, reporting to Lynn O ’Leary Archer, Associate Dean of
Resources and Services and the Director of the Archival Research Center, a
combined repository of all of USC’s digital materials. The system is still in the later
stages of its development; it will not be functional or accessible until the fall of 2002
(pers.comm., anon., 2001k). In the minds of the administration and librarians, the
“ ‘“ The fourth initiative of the ‘Strategic Plan’, also related to the ‘Urban Initiative’, discussed in the
last chapter: “Build upon USC's strong international base of alumni, students, and established
relationships and Southern California's position as an international center to enhance future global
opportunities for education, research, and career development. Because of the characteristics of
Southern California and of our students and alumni, focus efforts on the countries of the Pacific Rim
and of Central and South America.”
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NGLI, as it stands, represents the prospect of a more radical paradigm-shift than
“digital library,” which has the connotation of being supplementary (Shepard 2001).
That universities’ missions as educational institutions are becoming increasingly
subservient to their functioning as businesses is supported by a wide range of
literature on organizational restructuring, much of which (including Bates 1999,
Currie and Newson 1998, Webster 2002) was discussed in the last chapter. Parker et
al (1988) discuss how the technical specialists have to sell the technology to
businesses in such a system: in this case, however, Campbell had already “bought”
the importance of technology as a result of extra-institutional and discursive forces.
This decision was made in the context of an institution operating under the
constraints and conditions of a university striving to be competitive in economic and
financial terms; one that is run according to the demands of a company. Parker et al
(pp. 6 and 27) also categorize the distinct business and IT cultures of companies as
questions of ‘domain’: since most of the technology problems within the technology
domain are now solved, the biggest problem is now for it to prove the value of its
services to the business domain. The evolution of the institution, in this case,
involves less of a merger between domains than a set of interlinked processes
between them.
Do technology producers always gain prominence in these institutional settings?
Wilson’s ability to influence the ways in which projects were developed was,
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dependent on a number of factors including timing, connections and his historic
success in writing funding proposals, all of which are evidence that institutional
structure shifts occur within complex ecologies in which technological expertise is
but one factor (pers.comm., anon. 2001k). Campbell handed over the archives to
Wilson as part of his (Campbell’s) game for strengthening USC’s digital presence,
which was a result of his idea about the importance of technology: this idea is the
result of an institutional vision (Dutton 1999, pp. 85). As Wilson continued to
develop the GIS software for what was then ISLA - specifically, working on the
production of maps and the space/time/keyword/format search mechanism - it was
taken up by the institution and the library as something that could serve a part of
their mission. The process by which tele-access might “capture the connections
across policy issues and sectors that can help provide a foundation for policy debate
and actions” (Dutton 1999, pp. 306) had, on some level, begun. Although there are
certainly a number of different operative games, this demonstrates that they are
played within a political economic context where those with positions in power - in
this case, those that also favored the use of technology - have the widest and most
lasting effects. The technology, as a partial product of a number of different social
relations and cultural processes, acquired an influence of its own, as interpreted
amongst people within this interconnected yet asymmetric system of processes. The
unpredictability this indicates is deeply interlinked and co-generative with the
ecology of games.
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The insight about the business imperative might help in understanding a number of
points about the political economic context of these changes at USC. Firstly, the
point at which the ‘connections’ between different policy issues and sectors are
‘captured’ is crucial to understanding that the primary model was neither techno-
centric nor socio-technical: supply and demand were simultaneously created by
forces that included the library’s independent mission as a provider or arbiter of
information, the president’s mission for the library and larger changes in the
digitalization of libraries. Related to this is the fact that this decision was based on a
business model that emphasized the notion of comparative advantage. In the context
of a system that is both sociotechnical and technocentric, the business strategy of the
university is linked in complicated ways to the processes by which “access” is
created. Part of the difficulty in placing it within this continuum arises from the
discursive environment of an institution that is simultaneously a business and an
imparter/creator of information. While both these factors create an atmosphere of
uncertainty, there is, ultimately, one definite element of certainty: it is clear that the
reason GIS was incorporated into the library system had much to do with the
convincing and viable ways in which it had been “sold” as a technology to the
university by those who were its main users and experts (2001k), for a number of
different reasons, as will be discussed. In doing so, they created a demand for the
technology in response to the ways in which its presence intersected with the mission
of the university as a ‘cutting edge’ research institution: supply and demand were
thus always inherently linked in an essential and inextricable way, making it hard to
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distinguish between technocentric and socio-technical changes. But the way in which
access was or was not created - the extent to which this virtual access led to the
dismantling of a concern for physical access - was determined within the financial
context of an institution striving to maintain a competitive edge in a larger global
context.
3.5. Information Access in Uncertain Times: The Social Shaping of the CIS
The Social Construction o f Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology
and History o f Technology (Bijker et.al 1987) was a landmark work in the study of
science, technology and society. An edited collection featuring articles that focused
broadly on the social aspects of technological development, it gave prominence to
the notion of the ‘social shaping of technology’, that involves the presentation of
“technological development as a nondetermined, multidirectional flux that involves
constant negotiation and renegotiation among and between groups shaping the
technology”(p.l3). The book is simultaneously a forum for new work that was being
completed and an attempt to find a language or determine analytical and interpretive
categories: many of the issues under concern are borrowed from the sociology of
knowledge and, themselves noting the difficulty of demonstrating the ‘social
construction of technological systems’, they urge other historians and social
scientists of technology to do the same.
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It is under the influence of this tradition that this section will proceed. The
‘Collection Information System’ will comprise the core of the library’s digital
archive collection (Shepard 2001a; Shepard 2001b; pers.comm., anon., 2002a;
pers.comm., anon., 2001j ; pers.comm., anon., 2001k): while it is currently not meant
to include the rest of the collections (which are controlled by another library
management database called Sirsi), it is anticipated that it might eventually do so. I
will attempt to make connections between the social context of the construction and
the kind of technology that was constructed, paying particular attention to spatial
aspects such as ‘place’ and ‘scale’ in the context of an ecology of games. I will
narrate the process through which a GIS-based database evolved into the institution’s
technological core. I will consider how the technology used for the CIS and that for
the space/time/keyword/format search engine was shaped. In what ways did the
database use address the uncertainties about the user detailed in the section before
the last, and in what ways did it not? In what ways did it deal with dynamic, diverse
and rapidly changing constituencies of users with different capabilities? How did
different individuals conceptualize the various goals of the project? How did they
handle technological uncertainties? How did diverse games cumulate in the
development of a single system with particular kinds of effects on the geography of
information? As I describe the chronology of the evolution, I will evaluate and
interpret the implications of the ongoing process in accordance with the concepts and
terminology developed elsewhere in this thesis. The narrative format of this section
will hopefully serve to illustrate the importance of place-induced processes in
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determining how an institution is inclined to shape its technologies to create access at
different scales. Broadly, it should also serve to illustrate the dynamic and
unpredictable nature of technological change. Lastly, it will strive to explain how
things ultimately happen - how decisions are finally made - in the context of all of
these uncertainties.
Many have influenced the ways in which the CIS, and the library, at large, has
developed (pers.comm., anon., 2001k). On a larger scale, the players included Steven
Sample, the university’s president, responsible for the Strategic Plan that gives
weight to projects like these; individuals at ESRI, the leading GIS software
company, whose development of particular software systems has enabled the ways in
which the institution has been able to tailor access-creation systems; and those at
Oracle, who determine the set of available choices for the larger infrastructure of the
Collection Information System, both by providing a specific set of options to USC in
the form of contractual arrangements, and by actually producing the database.
Although their individual games may have been different, they have been
incremental to the creation and the “social shaping” of the GIS-based system under
consideration. Others include Li Hunt, who was hired as a map librarian and then
placed in the position of ISLA Project Manager. This has happened in the context of
the intersection of social relations, political economic structures and technological
systems; an intersection that is not necessarily conducive to the creation of access the
way it has been conceptualized by the producers of these technologies.
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The following genealogy emerged from the documents written about this process by
Barbara Shepard (2001a; 2001b) and discussions with the key individuals involved
with the creation of the infrastructure, notably John Wilson (Director of the GIS
Laboratory) and Wayne Shoaf (Teamleader for Electronic Records Management)
(pers.comm., anon., 2001a; 2001a; 2001j ; 2001k). The remarkable amount of
information I received from these interviews has been reduced and partly simplified
for the purpose of coherence: hopefully, however, it will still recount this history as
it truly happened so that the relevant spatial modulations are also preserved.
Stage 1: The Specificities o f Place and the Culture o f Technological Development
In 1994, the ISLA (Information Systems for Los Angeles) project was designed
initially as a digital archive database, containing Los Angeles-specific primary
materials, that the university would develop in order to sell to other institutions as a
technological prototype (pers.comm., anon., 2001j). The main players, at this stage,
were Phil Ethington and the university itself: John Wilson and Li Hunt were yet to be
hired. The base for the project was spatial information in the form of rudimentary
GIS archives. The project was tied to the IDA (the Integrated Digital Archives), its
technical backbone database, over the course of four years, from 1994-1998.
As it happened, the IDA project was never really completed because of a
combination of factors, including a lack of technical knowledge, inadequate financial
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commitment, and unrealistic goals. In the original conceptualization of the IDA, for
example, raster data (which fills designated amounts of space) was used instead of
vector data (which specifies objects): this did not correspond to the ways in which
this information would typically have been processed. An extremely technologically
complex air photo mosaic was devised where the quality of the picture was given
priority over the quantity of pictures catalogued. According to an individual involved
(pers.comm., anon., 2001k) 50 or 60 thousand more objects could have been
archived during this time period. The social constmction of technology - as
manifested in numerous subsequent sub-optimal design decisions - occurred in
accordance with the nature of the institution as a particular kind of social
configuration and ‘place’, reflective and productive of certain kinds of social
relations, according to this informant, in which there was a certain reluctance to think
through the reasons for doing things beyond the capability to do them.
Wilson also identifies the rate of expansion of individuals’ vision for the project to
have been disproportionately high compared to the project’s rate of progress and
accomplishment: with every incremental step forward, the desired and projected
scope of the project was extended far farther than the incremental progress might
have warranted (pers.comm., anon., 2001k). If part of this confusion can be
attributed to ‘place’, it can also be conjectured that the operative assumptions and
visions were attributable to the epoch under consideration. It is necessary to
remember that what appears to be overconfident and slightly egomaniacal in present
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times might not have been quite so self-evident in the early 1990s, when the Internet
was still only beginning to be understood, and where ideas about the ‘information
age’ were being circulated widely. In other words, there was much optimism and
hype about what was possible in a new age of information: this drive to create new
and cutting edge information systems was not entirely fueled by careful thinking. In
addition, it is possible to discuss these problems in light of the technological
uncertainties elucidated in the first section of this chapter. This does not, however,
detract from the significance of place as these changes were occurring at far greater
scales, with certain kinds of decisions only made in particular places. In other words,
the peculiar nature of this response when seen in the context of a global range of
responses to these changes can be partially attributed to the nature of the place under
question.
Ultimately, the project proved to be more expensive than had been expected: this
person estimates that $500,000 had already been spent at this early stage. A
demonstration of the ISLA database revealed that the system was far too slow and
user-unfriendly: it was considered that, as it stood, it would not serve as an effective
or efficient system for the purposes for which it had been developed - public access
to regional information owned by the library, such as photographs and historic
records related to Los Angeles. While it would be wrong to claim that they were
never taken into account, access considerations emerged only intermittently along
the project’s evolutionary trajectory
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Stage 2: Campbell’ s Meeting: Place, Scale and Access
A change in strategy was very much embroiled in financial considerations
(pers.comm., anon., 2001k). In 1998, Campbell, Dean of ISD, coordinated a meeting
that included himself, John Wilson (who had recently been hired), Phil Ethington,
individuals from the Center for Scholarly Technology and individuals from the
Information Services Division. The reason for the meeting, according to Wilson, was
for Campbell to “get all his ducks in the bath”: that is, to coordinate the various goals
that existed among the different players involved in the creation of this system. It
appears to represent a place-based consolidation of the geographies of information in
a financial context where the university was seeking to capitalize on its comparative
advantages; technological expertise necessary to create a database from scratch was
not one of these. The focus of the meeting was to decide whether the university
should invest more money in making the system more sophisticated in order to
increase its performance indicators. Two questions, in particular, were asked to come
up with an answer to this question: 1) Would the university be able to, in fact, sell,
or even use such a system that it would develop internally; and, 2) Would there be
commercial software available to complete the task? The first option would have
required the university, according to one of the individuals (pers.comm., anon.,
2002b), to divest resources to internal programming; the second option would have
required the university to pay an external software developer to fix the problem. The
former approach was considered to be disproportionate in cost to the projected
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benefit; the latter approach had no guarantee of results or ends. The answers to the
questions were, respectively, ‘possibly, but with a disproportionate amount of time
and resources spent’ and ‘yes’. The changes in software development between 1994
(when IDA was initiated) and 1998 (when this meeting had occurred) had changed
the answer of the second question from “no” to “yes.” Changes in a perceived global
context of technological availability, thus, had a definitive impact on the local
impetus to create a technological infrastructure explicitly suited to access. At this
stage, these considerations had much to do with what this person believed, as she/he
was the most technologically informed out of those present. This decision was
dependant, also, on the presumption that ESRI would be willing to partner with USC
in the most problematic part of the project (the geospatial component that is
discussed later in this section), leveraged by their desire to become associated with a
new groundbreaking concept of geospatial searching.
The change in an institutional decision was, hence, greatly affected by changes that
were happening at a greater scale. These greater scaled processes could be seen, in
tandem with place-based financial and logistical considerations, to have altered the
nature of the place under question. The spatial conglomeration that the meeting
represented served as a kind of place-intensive brainstorming session to remind
operative individuals about these other processes. While some financial
considerations were local (the amount of the budget), others were greater scaled (the
way in which ‘technology’ might develop): as the meeting involved an attempt to
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reconcile between the two, the relationality of ‘scale’ and ‘place’ becomes clearly
evident in the context of economic considerations. Individuals can be seen here to be
grappling with complexities at greater scales in order to make decisions that would
transform the place-specific configuration of technology, and, subsequently,
potentials for access.
This meeting was crucial because it signified a turning point in the business
paradigm as well as the technological core of the system. At the same time, so was
the organizational paradigm: as Wilson says, the effort, after this point was far less
team based. The change in paradigm reflected a focus on the most efficient use of
each person. Each person was assigned a task that was specific to his or her
expertise. The organization, on some basic level, had understood that individuals’
games - while possibility mutually reciprocal - were not identical. Its imperative, in
this case, was not the creation of access but of a more coherent management
structure. In contrast, another person (pers.comm., anon., 2002b) places less
emphasis on the shift in model, more of a “change of direction and modularizing of
the project” as “all of the essential and distinctive ISLA attributes are part of the CIS
project” but just not all being built at once by USC. A particular kind of financial*x ,v
and organizational agreement between institutions is said to be enabling the
development of a place-specific technological infrastructure. In either case, access
was affected as this decision led to the progression of a further series of place-based
X X 1 V This person estimates that approximately $500,000 that had been spent, at this point were now
considered, to a large degree, sunk costs.
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access-related processes. It is after this meeting that the plan for the development of
the Collection Information Systems was operationalized.
Stage 3: CIS: Technology, Agents and Place: Organizational Uncertainties
Continuing on this path, Jerry Campbell and Lynn O’Leary Archer hired Barbara
Shepard to create the technological base for the system to operate. Technology and,
subsequently, access-related changes accompanied changes in the personnel that
made up the place. Asked to conceptualize how she would envision this new system,
Shepard wrote a series of papers (2001) about what she considered to be the “Next
Generation Library Initiative,” the kinds of funds she would require, what the
specifications would be. Support for this project - both logistical and financial -
existed from within both sections of the newly formed Information Services
Division; the information technology group as well as the library group (pers.comm.,
anon., 200lj).
Access is placed within the technological and organizational language in different
ways depending on who happens to be in charge: each individual in charge, in turn,
affects the profile of access an institution or place creates as well as popular
conceptions. Under the auspices of the Archival Research Center, Barbara Shepard
(2000a, pp. 4) identifies five aspects of the ‘digital access mission’: maximum
exposure to the archival collections contained within the university and its partners;
integrated access provision to all types of resources owned and managed by USC and
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its partners including archival, bibliographic, digital images, a/v, full text, USC
theses, and faculty collections, to better support the research process; promotion of
increased use by both USC and non-USC audiences; broadening of audiences,
including commercial fee-based uses to assist with cost recovery and to help fund
scholarly activities on the collection; and increase visibility of collections and their
use to encourage further donations of collections. In light of this listing, again, it
would be disingenuous to claim that access was never conceptualized during the
creation of the CIS. Hired as a result of social relations reflective of the ‘place’ under
consideration, Shepard proceeded to alter or reconfigure them to a significant extent.
But Shepard, of course, operated within the context of the set of games that
happened to be under play within a particular place. The history of the technology as
detailed in the last section and chapter suggests that access was firstly not considered
by everyone involved and, secondly, that it was not conceptualized in the same way
by those who conceptualized it (not everyone, for instance, would agree with the
point about USC and non-USC users). Thirdly, and crucially, it was not necessarily
the only basis for the development of the system; this will be discussed later in this
chapter. The relative importance of access is contained within the language: if order
contains any meaning at all, it might be illustrative to note that this issue is listed
fifth, after “web access,” “interface,” “digitization selection” and “standards,”
respectively. Guedon (1999) suggests that, in a context where strong commercial
interests attempt to employ the shift in the digital environment to redefine the
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political economy of knowledge, librarians of virtualized libraries may well attempt
to empower institutions by placing human interaction at the heart of their operations:
this would involve placing this issue first.
Nevertheless, much as GIS-users, GIS-implementers and managers had provided
impetus for this project in its early stages, at this point, by virtue of a wider scale
discussion of access, it was transformed into something larger, surrounded and
energized by a new set of visions. The focus was now on the creation of the CIS,
which would “publish content on the w eb...be searchable on the w eb...and be
available 24/7/365” (Shepard 2001a, pp. 4). It had wider relevance for the prestige of
the university in the context of contemporary trends in university libraries. The first
chapter of this thesis begins to attest to the ways in which conceptions of access
might proliferate. Correspondingly, the vision for access changed as it became
increasingly central to the identity and self-conceptualization of the library as a
whole. It became part of the discourse surrounding the ‘place’, no matter how much
integrity we may or may not aspire to attribute or what we evaluate as its set of
functional results. Concurrent with the creation of the CIS and the reconstruction of
Doheny Memorial Library, the university’s main research library, was the creation of
the Archival Research Center of which Shepard speaks, an online portal which
combined all of these different objects into a single-point user interface.
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Stage 4: Oracle and Place
The CIS has been developed in the midst of this constant flux and reconfiguration
with an understanding of the diversity of games that any one technology might
potentially engage in an institution-specific project. In doing so, it signifies an
attempt to address the multiplicity of issues related to user behavior and
identification raised here through the creation of a technological system. The Digital
Archive Report asks itself: “with the wealth of relational databases like Oracle,
Sybase, Informix; how do you choose what to use? And how do you provide access
across disparate systems” (Shepard 2001b)? Oracle was chosen for CIS partly
because it is ‘robust’ (the foundation can provide a solid foundation for incorporating
different databases) and ‘scalable’ (can expand to include different systems across
time). The diversity of formats was one of the reasons why these materials were yet
inaccessible. A robust and scalable database was indeed needed, at this point, to
incorporate the various data and metadata types: the ISLA/IDA system had been
based on a “flat” database (pers.comm., anon., 2001j). It was also true that Oracle,
while not the only relational database that supported geographic datasets, was the
one that was conceived to have provided the best support.
In effect, it had pragmatic value for the institution on a merely contractual level as
well as logistical, technical and financial ones. But the spatial nature of the data and
the need to incorporate GIS-based data was, at this point, only one consideration
among many. Among the other reasons why it was chosen was the fact that it was
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already being used within the university and met the cost structure (pers.comm.,
anon., 200lj; 200le). Individuals at the information technology department had been
pushing for the use of Oracle independent of these needs and the decision to use it
was finalized during a second meeting that Campbell organized with Wilson and the
information technology staff, where it was made clear that it was already being
employed in various ways in different projects across the university, which had
already bought some ‘canned’ Oracle applications. This reveals the manner in which
companies like Oracle are able to dominate markets; it occurs in a context where
continuing the use of pre-established technological systems is the most financial
feasible option. As a number of different goals and needs were met by the multiple
services offered by a single information infrastructure: the need for substance,
access, organization and incorporation of the prospect of changing user groups were,
as one individual (pers.comm., anon., 2001e) says, not mutually exclusive. From the
university’s point of view, this made sense as it minimized technological
expenditures and it was considered that, in the next ten years, it would use it for
campus-wide database purposes. Again, these imperatives can be ascribed to place-
based financial constraints. Technological change, as it results from decision
making, all of this shows, is often responsive to technological and financial
conditions and collaborations between producers and consumers rather than to
considerations of access. As the next section should show, contractual arrangements
and time frame have and will have an effect on the kind of access that is provided.
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Stage 5: Access and Unpredictability
Specifically, not only were there different database models, there were also a variety
of licenses for the use of databases that the company issued to client institutions. The
university bought a $250,000 limited university site license for Oracle (pers.comm.,
anon., 2001k). What this means is that what the university does with the database is
restricted. Only a certain amount of users are able to access the information at the
same time as there were a limited number of ‘seats’ provided on such a license.
Contractual arrangements within technological systems, hence, could be seen to have
a direct impact on access creation.
This construction, in this context, involves a set of specific decisions that are made in
the wake of this uncertainty. For instance, at this stage, as the system is yet to be
functional, no deficit is expected: as Wilson (pers.comm., anon., 2001k) explained,
it is difficult to project the number of users in later years as prior trends are not
reliable indications at this stage in a system’s development. It is unclear how,
exactly, it will affect the way in which access is provided, as it will still depend on
how the database is actually constructed. This itself is also unclear as it is yet to be
determined how many people might want to access these materials. Data on usage
can only be obtained at three different points in time - say: 2001, 2002 and 2003 -
while the curve of data usage might be an exponentially driven one. This means,
essentially, that the data gained for these three years might be deceptive in showing a
particularly low user figure as this corresponds with the period during which users
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become familiar with the system. Hence, the way in which access is created is shown
to depend on how the technology is constructed on the local scale as well as the
options that exist for this within both the database structure and the kind of contract
that is developed with Oracle. There is a great amount of unpredictability inherent in
this strategy.
But as much as technological decisions are challenging in light of these constraints,
the increasingly dynamic nature of technology makes it possible, in certain ways, to
engage this uncertainty. One person discusses how the team has deliberately not
made any predictions regarding load and are, instead, focusing on the essential
integration of scalability into the system since they would ultimately want to support
“millions of digital objects being searched simultaneously by thousands of users”
(pers.comm., anon., 2002b). He gives the ISLA project as an example of one that did
not try to engage with this uncertainty: as the team had decided to deal with
scalability issues on a later date, they ended up building a prototype that was
completely unscalable without making significant alterations to some very basic
architectural design components. This lack of foresight led to the abandonment of the
system in favor of a different one. This in itself represents the process of place-based
learning from the past about greater-scaled processes.
Greater scaled processes, furthermore, are continually reconciled with locally
specific requirements in the creation of systems under this uncertainty: partly this
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happens through specific research projects administered by the project developers.
The choice of database and metadata standard, for instance, are mutually
determinative matters. In collaboration with Wilson, Wayne Shoaf, Teamleader for
Electronic Records Management, formulated its design over the course of a few
months (pers.comm., anon., 2002b; 2001j). It is an extensible and adaptable system
that has fields and subfields. Discussing how Dublin Core - a now standard
internationally employed metadata format - came to be used at USC, one person
(pers.comm., anon., 2002b) discusses how the process began by individuals at the
library in 1999 looking at how other libraries - the American Memory Project, the
California Digital Library - were using metadata. As the organizers felt they couldn’t
really test the usefulness of the digital library at USC without having tens if not
hundreds of thousands of objects in the archive to begin with, they decided to go
with the Dublin Core standard, which appeared to fit their requirements. As
technological choices affect each other in ways that make it difficult to decide based
on all criteria, individuals involved had to choose the criteria that they consider to be
the most important: in this case, according to this person (pers.comm., anon., 2002b),
the criteria was efficiency - with Dublin Core, they would not have to ‘reinvent the
wheel’. Partly this was because Dublin Core had significant international acceptance
as a standard, even though it wasn’t yet actually installed on a widespread basis and
they had specific technical concerns.x x v When gathering user requirements for the
x x v This person says, specifically, “we initially had some concerns about using it as a set of fields in a
table structure as opposed to a set of elements principally intended for meta-tagging in the header of
HTML pages since we couldn’t find any one else actually doing that.”
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CIS, the individuals behind it asked a wide range of mostly contributors and a few
end users for desirables through focus groups that developed initial lists of
requirements and larger, more diverse groups that were directed to brainstorm, the
results of which were prioritized by the diverse group, the resulting requirements
grouped by function. Local needs and access requirements were explicitly engaged
here, in the context of prevalent knowledge about how place-specific changes would
integrate with information infrastructure on a wider scale. In retrospect, Dublin Core
has gained ground in international acceptance and become more stable and
extensible. The way in which Dublin Core will be implemented in the CIS, according
to this person (pers.comm., anon., 2002b), also needs to anticipate the specificity of
end-user data needs: again, one of the ways he suggests for predicting these needs
involves looking at other digital archives and embracing standard metadata schemes.
The epoch in which these technological developments are made necessarily make it
difficult to anticipate design decisions that are not based on precedents. Local scale
and place-specific technological problems are deeply interlinked with the kind of
work that happens to have been created elsewhere as there is yet to be an adequate
supply of blueprints for this process.
Although the robustness and scalability of the infrastructure allow this delay in
decision making to occur, decisions will, ultimately have to be made. Technology
will not solve the problem in the absence of a vision for access in the long term.
These institutional deliberations will have a direct effect on the geographies of
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information, as the more seats that are accorded, the greater prospect there will be for
a wider potential for dissemination. These will still be constrained by the limits
imposed by the contractual process and the options offered by Oracle. Of course, part
of this unpredictability stems from the fact that possibilities for virtual access are
mediated, as always, by levels of cognitive access for the users: the people who will
access the information will be those who find it as well as those who find it useful.
What is the relationship of the creation of access through the use of Oracle and the
kind of place the university is? The use of Oracle for CIS will shape access by
mirroring but also by creating an organizational reality (Dutton 1999, pp. 120). It
will mirror it in ways that are not necessarily obvious as any given technology can be
used in a number of different institutional contexts: the decision to use it will,
however, perpetuate certain aspects of the place, as it now constitutes a structural
extension of it. For example, these extensions will directly influence the nature of the
place as they will allow for a particular set of connections and affiliations, including
but not restricted to those with Oracle itself. Documentation on the CIS suggests that
the choice of Oracle will allow the CIS to “interoperate with a variety of applications
including a GIS interface” (Shepard 2001b), provide “a common infrastructure for
all digital collections managed by ISD” (ibid), integrate “file administration of
archival materials with the management of the metadata” (ibid) and allow “for access
by a large number of users across the web” (ibid). While the Oracle infrastructure is
expensive and capital-intensive, it can integrate with external systems in a deeper
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more dynamic fashion than previous systems. Once it is implemented, however, the
kind of access that can emerge will be dependent on its compatibility and
interoperability with systems that are adopted elsewhere.x x v l As a place-based access-
controlling infrastructure, it is part of a much wider and more global project and
system. This narrative can be seen to have shown how place-based change occurs in
the context of scale relations and political economies - as the producer has control -
inherent to technological infrastructure.
3.6. A Consideration of Technological Determinism
The work of Bijker, Hughes and Pinch (1987), on the basis of which this analysis
was partly inspired, militates aggressively against technologically deterministic
accounts that were prevalent in the late 1980s. This analysis supports their beliefs by
highlighting the number of crucial, intersecting non-technological factors
incremental to the process of change that I will describe. The set of games of a few
peoplex x v " are, of course, only one among many within the larger institutional set of
X X V I Although Arms (pp. 71) says “it must be possible to search sensibly across collections even if their
materials are organized differently” (Arms, pp. 71), acknowledging, in essence, the ecology of
numerous technological games, the way in which this might be facilitated is indeterminate.
x x v “ As developed, the CIS needs to be interoperable with the space/time/keyword/format search
mechanism: it is up to the participants in both projects to coordinate these goals. The obvious person
to do it is the one who participates in both, the expert in GIS. While the CIS is being developed at
USC, the space/time/keyword format is being developed at this person’s former GIS laboratory in
Montana, to which it has been outsourced. In order for either project to be successful, this person has
to be cognizant: 1) of the various sets of games that are propelling both sets of individuals; and, 2) of
the various technological specifications and developments being made on either end and ensure that
they are coordinated. As an individual who is to be very much responsible for how these projects
might shape up, he/she must know about the ways in which systems are developed at different scales
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games and choices. Their games are, arguably, those most related to GIS and CIS
and are hence useful for tracing the path of the technology through the matrix of
institutional choices, actions and systems. They demonstrate that the way in which a
technology can travel through an institutional system depends on the diverse array of
goals of individuals both directly and indirectly involved in its implementation: on
the institutional ethos and beliefs regarding technological change and the status given
to its champions; on the very nature of technology as a set of systems that allows
certain things to implemented; and, finally, on the political economy of this
implementation. Political economic constraints include: who gets hired, what kind of
database is used, what the priorities are of the database producers. Access,
subsequently, is the result of how specific individuals, within this complicated cross
scalar set of processes, are able to hold on their individual goals and visions - why
are they doing what they are doing?, how will the way they do it affect how it is
done? - in the context of the potentially frustrating and confusing institutional
atmosphere - described by the last chapter and this one - that characterizes the place
under question.
It is useful here to integrate these insights with larger debates in order to explicate
their significance. Speaking of historians of technology and reacting to the large slate
of work on the ‘social construction of technology’ that followed Bijker, Hughes, and
and the implications of this for the kinds of systems that are developed and the nature of access
provided. Technological relations are partly a function of social relations and are hence to a great
extent random, as is the subsequent creation of access. This will constitute the focus of the next
chapter.
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Pinchs' edited collection (1987), Williams says, based on the reconceptualization of
technological systems that occured as MIT was being wired, of the work of
historians of technology:
We need to challenge two assumptions of our standard model: first, that
technology is material, and second, that society decisively shapes this
m aterial...If we insist upon the social construction of technology in an
unsophisticated way, we take off the table at the start one of the deepest
questions of our field. We need to examine technological determinism rather
than keep doing case studies intended to refute it (2000 pp. 660).
Later, she speaks specifically of MIT staff, who:
think that technology determines their working lives, and they
certainly do not think it is under their control. Are they suffering from a sort
of theoretical delusion, a mass attack of false consciousness?
The historian side of my brain says back to the administrative side: of
course technologies are socially constructed! Is there any other way? They
are created by human beings, not by nature. But technologies are no less
determinative of human behavior because they have a human origin. Indeed,
in many cases, they are designed precisely to maximize control over human
behavior. Social construction is not necessarily a refutation of technological
determinism, but may be its very source. The social aim may be to assert
control, to leave minimal room for democratic intervention. If the latest
Windows upgrade is designed so Lotus will crash, this is both social
construction and technological determinism.
Of course (my historian self continues to muse), this is really market
determinism rather than technological determinism. As a historian, I would
remind the MIT staff that they are really complaining about the tyranny of the
market: the endless releases, upgrades, the planned obsolescence of the whole
information technology business that forces them to make the trade-offs of
“technology” and “culture” that they do not want to make. To focus on the
socially constructed design of any one product misses the point - the larger
determinism of market-driven technology that profits from change for the
sake of change. (2000, pp. 664)
I agree with parts of this argument. The fact that technology should not determine
how we live, quite simply, does not mean that people in power do not consider it to
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do so. In this case, a blinkered proponent of social construction might tend to
conflate the ideological necessity not to be technologically determinist with the
intellectual necessity to recognize it as such. Focusing on the fact that the
technologies are, on some basic level socially constmcted, will not allow us to
escape the fact that technological determinism is a reality with which we must
engage. An individual who had one of the broadest visions out of all the librarians to
whom I spoke, referred repeatedly to the fact that we are in an “ever changing
context,” “technology changes and it forces change upon us and the way we work,”
“most people are averse to change and see it as unsettling and threatening” and
“those who hate change shouldn’t work in technology” (pers.comm., anon., 2002a).
That these statements might well have been derivative of larger rhetoric does not
mean that she is not responding to real constraints that she is witnessing in her work.
This leads to my next point. The market determinism of which Williams speaks is by
no mean separate or extricable from social determination or construction - a crash in
software is both discursively constmcted and determined by people - and both are
deeply implicated and intertwined in the creation of a particular kind of spatial
economy of information. An integrative spatial approach is useful here: not
necessary as the only approach but as a viable alternative to perceive the way in
which the various forces impinging upon the spatialization of information are
interconnected and even collusive. Keeping in account questions of ‘scale’ makes it
hard to be a technological determinist as it reminds us that even the widest and
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broadest processes are implicated and codetermined with ones that are more global;
and that the most local issue or constraint can affect the way in which we allow these
processes to affect particular geographies. As the case study of Oracle or GIS should
have shown, individuals respond to technological change (albeit in different ways),
however, these technological systems happen to exist on different scales because of
reasons that are themselves deeply embroiled in the relationship of technology and
society. In relation to information and access, the concept of scale is a simple yet
remarkably useful analytic tool to understand that there are different levels of
influence within society that affect the ways in which spatial processes - like the
diffusion of information - are modulated. In his article on “The Postmodern
University,” Webster details how “higher education is being pressured to change...it
is being brought further into line with market strictures, hence into concordance with
academic capitalism. Before getting there, however, there are many points of
resistance to be overcome” (2001, pp. 89). What Webster calls “academic
capitalism” can be related to the penetration of neoliberal practices and realities on
the organizational landscape of the university.
3.7. Conclusion
The way in which technology is shaped to create and remove barriers to the flow of
information depends on specific spatial processes that originate at different places at
different scales but affect the way in which the local institution functions. The nature
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of the place under consideration directly implicates the ways in which spatial
processes related to the accessibility that is created to information at different scales
are controlled and from where this control occurs. This is further complicated by the
fact that technological systems necessarily exist at different scales: what database or
technology is present at any particular institution is dependent on processes that
occur at other places and the way in which the technology is shaped depends on how
any given place-based system relates to others. Games specific and relevant at each
of these scales affect how access to information is created both for individuals at the
scale of the institution and those for all users. This happens in an atmosphere of
contention that makes it hard to see the link between social processes at different
scales and the corresponding technological responses.
The first three sections of this chapter sought to describe different layers of
unpredictability, within which different kinds of decisions are made that implicate
the creation of access. This chapter has demonstrated that the creation of access is
complicated by the dynamics and interlinkages among technological infrastructures,
difference in perceptions of users, and the specifics of social relations in the
particular places where they are created. Each of these aspects is affected by the
political economy of technological change in university libraries, the factor that
mediates the effects of global processes on place specific technological
infrastructures. Specifically, it is the combined influence of all these factors that
leads to the creation of infrastructural configurations that are unique to the place
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even if the individual technologies that are part of these configurations are globally
employed: they are the institution’s technological face.
A specific finding emerges: the prioritization of technology in the conception and
evolution of the CIS was a factor that existed from the seed of the project (the
Information Systems of Los Angeles) to its current stage as a CIS. At each of these
stages, as described, decisions were and continue to be made because of the nature of
technology or technologically related resources that happened to exist. Having the
GIS software at hand influenced the way in which the CIS was developed; the nature
of expertise and resources present affected how ISLA and IDA were developed; the
growing preeminence of Dublin Core affected the way in which metadata was
processed in the CIS; the preexistent institutional presence of Oracle ultimately
affected the way in which access was created. In each of these instances, user
considerations were secondary to the technology or technologically related resources
that were already available through other means. In some of these cases, it would be
wrong to ascribe this to a deliberate lack of concern with access: in the case of the
use of Dublin Core metadata in the CIS, for instance, the technical details of the
systems were highly complex and of the multiple considerations at hand, some had
to be selected as more important, as was the way in which the users were projected to
respond to them. In many cases, furthermore, it is not definite how much this is
related to the uncertainties described in the first chapter as it is unclear how much
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each of the individuals involved had engaged with or understood each of these layers
of uncertainty.
As individuals were seen to respond to technological potentials because of their
particular needs and games, the relationship of technology to institutional change can
certainly be seen as dialectic. However, as in all dialectics, one direction was the
influence of technology - as a material and a discursive force - on an institutional
infrastructure by proxy of its effects on agents. This sheds light on the need to
carefully distinguish ‘technological determinism’ as an epistemological and as a
ethical issue: while technology potentially affects everyone in different ways, its
widespread effects on the institutional environment under consideration
demonstrated some deep similarities of effect. It allowed for the perpetuation of
dynamic collaborations, for instance, whether or not it created them. Whether they
are caused by the ‘realities’ of technological change or the discourse by which it is
surrounded is immaterial here; this matter will be reconsidered in the conclusion.
As all of this suggests, technology has a fundamental epistemological effect as it can
appear to combine disparate goals for access in times of great uncertainty about the
user: an uncertainty that is itself exacerbated by the ways in which technology
extends and transforms the potentials and needs of these users as well as their
connection to each other. By simultaneously resolving a number of separate games,
technology blurs our ability to understand systems from an evolutionary perspective.
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An explicit conception of the ‘ecology of games’ is especially useful in
understanding technological impact.
Specifically, in the context of these findings, it is necessary to make a point related to
the lacunae in our understanding of institutional change. The major turning point in
the evolution of the CIS - the ‘radical break’, so to speak - was the meeting held by
Campbell in 1998 (as described in Section 3.5, Stage 2). It remains unclear why the
nature of the debate and issues at hand changed entirely in this meeting: what it is
about direct interaction that elicits deeper reconceptualizations that do not occur out
of the sum of each person’s independent knowledge as transacted through normative
communication (exchanges like phone calls or emails)? As a step towards
understanding the social shaping of the spatialities of access this is, surely, a crucial
question to answer: of the specific set of links that needs to be made between
communication and geography, this is a particularly pressing one, particularly as it
relates directly to matters of place and proximity. The importance of attending these
meetings is corroborated by one individual’s own emphasis (pers.comm., anon.,
2001k) on attending the meetings at Oracle, as well as another librarians’ articulation
of the importance, in her job as a bridge person between different constituencies at
the university (information technologists, librarians), that involved going to as wide
an array of meetings as might be possible, to keep track of what is ‘really’ going on
(pers.comm., anon., 2002a).
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Future approaches would involve the use of another method: ethnographic analyses
and participant observations of meetings between the different people involved in
these projects. To understand how the CIS had assumed the form it had, discussions
with each of these individuals - having read the work of Bijker et. al. (1987) and
Woolgar (1996) and become cognizant of “technographic” approaches to the
development of technology - have revealed the necessity of this. The interaction
between individuals involved in the various stages of the development of a
technologically based system (as opposed to a technology) - conceiving, developing,
marketing, funding - can be directly observed through such an approach. As we
know from the previous section, individuals’ work is motivated, driven and sustained
by what they know, something which results from what they have read, who they
have met and the things they have seen: by looking at meetings, it would observe
what happens when these beliefs are pitted against each other, or reinforced. By
allowing us to document the manifestation and circulation of individuals’ deeper
assumptions and priorities - in an arena partly determined by the social and political
structures inherent to organizational hierarchies - observations of meetings might
allow us to obtain a more complex and real understanding of how the development
of technological systems dynamically depends on differing sets of the deeper social
values of concern and, subsequently, implicate them. As we have seen, these have
direct yet complicated effects on the geographies of information.
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Chapter 4: Digital Archive Projects at USC: Modulating Virtual
Access
4.1. Introduction
That access is a fundamentally spatial issue is hard to dispute (Batty 1997, Castells
1996, Mitchell 1995, Moss and Mitra 1998). But the role of place in the production
of cyberspace was intensively rethought in the edited collection Information, Place
and Cyberspace: Issues in Accessibility, a volume that operates through the vision
and assumption that “there are significant structural linkages among information
resources, traditional places, and cyberspace” (Janelle and Hodge 1999, p. 4). The
specificities of place, according to this conception, affect what kind of cyberspace is
produced; indeed, they determine what we might call cyberspace as its production
originates from remarkably diverse places.
This chapter will discuss initiatives coordinated by individuals at USC - some of
whom also work on physical access related issues (such as collection development) -
that have the potential of creating virtual access on ‘global’ or ‘multi-urban’ scales,
the latter modified both by the realities of uneven physical access to the Internet as
well as deep divides in cognitive abilities or propensities to utilize the desired
information or knowledge. Along with place, this chapter will utilize concepts of
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‘scale’ (Agnew 1993, Brenner 1997, Howitt 1993, Marston 2000, Swyngedouw
1997) as articulated by human geographers to generate a more precise understanding
of the ways in which a ‘place’ that controls information is both transformed and
transformative in the ‘information age’. As much as the kind of information used in
digital libraries has ramifications for the intellectual life of a society (Agre 2001)
and, hence, democratic and cosmopolitan ideals, its dissemination within a place can
be seen to have a particular set of operative social and cultural effects. Accordingly, I
will refer to these aspects of the place under consideration as an ‘information place’.
Through this analysis, I will seek to show how part of the Internet - as we know it -
is created; in particular, the part of it that can be seen to be most closely consistent
with the mission of the ‘library’ in the form and ethos of its information and
knowledge provision. Each chapter in this thesis focuses on different sets of the
linkages described among “information resources, traditional places and cyberspace”
as described by Janelle and Hodge. This chapter emerges in the corresponding
chronological context: while the second chapter described the consequences of
restructuring an academic library and the third discussed interactions with
technological change, this chapter will discuss projects and individuals that strive to
make information that has traditionally been confined to particular places or
institutions available to the wider (but not exactly global) constituency of users
connected by the Internet. Of note here is the phenomenon of ‘invisible colleges’,
created out of incentives given by institutions of research for researchers to network
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themselves both professionally and technically with their peers in other universities
and research organizations; they are considered, in many cases, more ‘visible’ and
relevant to researchers than the physical campuses on which they reside (Crane
1972). The geographies of information are implicated in the ways in which the
provision of virtual access depends on individuals’ games that extend across and
beyond the boundaries of scale while they remain physically, logistically and legally
stationed within the confines of the institution, partly because of these associations,
which can also be construed as a ‘place’. It will try to elucidate the randomness and
complexity of technological change and access creation by focusing on the
complexities these initiatives introduce into understanding ‘organizational change’ -
a term that is broad enough to threaten meaninglessness - without simplifying the
processes inherent to it. Additionally, as this thesis has charted different ways in
which access is created in the context of distinct political economic constraints
relatable to globalization, this chapter will focus on local and urban constraints
relating to the institution’s drive for comparative advantage and global constraints
resulting from legal and financial barriers to the freedom of information diffusion -
in particular, the imposition of stricter copyright laws - which can be linked to the
perpetuation of neo-liberal economic policies. This way, it will seek to articulate a
tension that necessarily exists as factors across scale affect the way in which
technology both increases and reduces potential for access.
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The central questions to be considered will be: what does the example of digital
archive projects and the individuals behind them reveal about the relationship
between the ‘ecology of games’ and the provision of information and knowledge
access across scale? How does technology reduce or increase access in the context of
digital archive projects? How does this relate to discussions about globalization?
The first section will discuss the relationship between scholarly visions and
particular geographical configurations of information: I will pay particular attention
to the relevance of the urban and regional context in which the archives were created.
In doing this, I will hope to establish the worth of applying spatial concepts to
understanding the system of change within libraries. I will continue by discussing
other kinds of incentives and drives to create digital archives in the second section,
relating to the framework established by the first. Subsequently, I will seek to
highlight how scale relations afforded by preexistent networks between agents at the
library were partly concealed because of the nature of the Internet itself: discussions
with individuals reveal the series of institutional affiliations and processes that led to
the creation of a body of virtual archives. The section that follows will focus on the
example of one of these individuals - the creator of a database about a particular
region - to show how an institution’s games beyond the local scale can affect the
ways in which a place-based profile of access is created, and the set of processes
through which individual and institutional visions start to coincide and create the
foundation for a place-based ethos. In the last two sections, I will discuss constraints
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upon the creation of information access directly related to the nature of the
technology. First, I will discuss how the technology-related ‘Urban Initiative’ is
counter-productive to the endeavor of creating the broadest kind of access. Lastly, I
will discuss how copyright battles directly related to the advent of technology have
infringed upon the abilities of libraries to provide access to information at all scales.
4.2. The Creation of Digital Archives: Visions and Motivations
What does the Internet enable? This question is distinct from the technologically
determinist one of what it creates. It is relevant to the question of the implications of
what it is that motivates people to create the archives that will be discussed in this
section. A listing of ‘library faculty’ (ISD 2000) provides a remarkably rich picture
of the different set of issues in which associated individuals have generally been
involved.X X V I U In most professions, this diversity remains independent of professional
input and contribution to a more public realm of activity and thought; in professions
like information science, academia or journalism - where the bar on what we must
do on a day to day basis is raised, in many cases, lower - a far greater fluidity exists.
x x v '“ In some of the cases - such as that of John Ahouse, co-director of Special Collections, who
specializes in 19t h century music, Upton Sinclair and German; or Marianne Afifi, Director of
Electronic Resources and Special Projects Development - this is not surprising; these interests tend to
coincide with our perception of their job. Anthony Andersen, however, Client Services Librarian at
Doheny Library specializes in public policy issues, the Holocaust, and the music of Sir Edward Elgar;
Jean Campion, the librarian at the Science center specializes in Bargello; Stella Fu, head of the
Gerontology library specializes in Chinese knotting; Lynn Sipe, Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs, in
Buddhism and frogs. In some cases, librarians listed things that appear to be more closely related to
their personal, rather than professional interests - baking, travel, needlework - but these boundaries
are fluid, as we have to remember that librarians are, in fact, people with diverse interests.
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The nature of the library as a ‘place’ can, subsequently, be seen to be affected by this
particular kind of culture or ethos. This is crucial in assessing the impact of
technology on the library because individuals have used it to address their various
interests as they have arisen in ways in which they otherwise would not have. What
would otherwise have remained as ‘italicized’ listings in a directory of professions
and interests has, in many cases, directly added to the information universe that
constitutes the Internet as part of what exists on the website of any particular
institution because of the facility that technology affords: many attest to this
(pers.comm., anon., 2001c; 2001c; 2001h). It emerges that although the Internet does
not determine what people do, it allows for a particular set of processes that have led
to the creation of new bodies of information. These are the some of the cultural
effects of processes that might be related to globalization: the compression of space
and time (Harvey 1989) enables processes that lead to the creation of archives and
collaborations that further this compression. Observing these processes in one of the
spheres where it is occurring most intensely - the university library - is essential for
understanding the relationship of the future of the Internet to that of globalization.
A perusal of the USC Library website reveals a smorgasbord of digital archives, with
a bent towards regional materials. A further investigation would reveal that each of
these archives was developed individually and sustained by the drive of an individual
faculty member or librarian. These individuals were not always explicitly motivated
by the need to create a digital collections portfolio for USC, nor solely by the desire
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for personal advancement, but often by a vision or understanding of the need for a
particular kind of organization or dissemination of scholarly information. As Dutton
(1999, p. 14) says, speaking of the ‘ecology of games’, the “metaphor does not imply
that all players are simply self-interested”. Many of the individuals interviewed
attested to this (pers.comm., anon., 2001d; 2001c; 2001h). The aggregate of their
individual visions - themselves inspired by similar goals and sources - led to the
creation of conglomerations of information that were subsequently officially
appropriated by the institution in ways that might conceal their genealogies. This
section will categorize these visions as much as possible and discuss their effects and
implications.
4.2.1. Urban and Regional
The Integrated Digital Archives, one of these institutional appropriations, is a
product of a set of visions related to the various cultural and social practices inherent
and related to the place at hand, including the local (USC) and the urban (Los
Angeles): a necessary tension exists between these scales. Its mission is to make
digital material - photographs, maps, manuscripts, records, texts, other digital
formats - available from USC as well as its partners’ collections, with particular
emphasis placed on materials related to Southern California (Shepard 2001b). The
contents of this collection are primary (that is, non-narrative) materials related to
Southern California. Place-specificity, this demonstrates, is fundamental to the
conception of the substance of the archives. Information about regions, it also
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suggests, tends to be collected and retained within regional institutions. It has also
been called a ‘regional meta-collection’, however, as it seeks to “unite and provide
access to information housed and owned by many different regional institutions”
(p.l): in this instance, the spatial conglomeration of information (within institutions,
within regions and within regional institutions) and the place-based nature of
information are both explicitly evoked in relation to access.
Within urban regions, in addition, information tends to be collected within a wide
array of organizations, not all of them necessarily associated with or primarily
committed to preservation or dissemination. Apart from USC, through whose
website the IDA operates, the IDA uses the resources of institutions like the
Automobile Club of Southern California, the Chinese Historical Society of Southern
California, the Los Angeles City Archives, and the Huntington Library. It is not
within the scope of this thesis to explore whether the conglomeration of information
in non-academic institutions is a place-related or Los Angeles-specific pattern. In
either case, however, this does suggest a particular kind of place-based distribution
of information that is both urban and local: the purpose of the archive is to use the
integrative and open-ended benefits of the Internet and other virtual systems to
engage and partially resolve the tension that appears to exist. Virtual access, in this
case, inspires institutional agents to resolve tensions that exist within the realm of
physical access on an urban-local scale.
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4.2.2. Integrative and Interdisciplinary
This tension and barrier to access is related to a particular scholarly vision that calls
for the need to simultaneously view materials that are not necessarily thematically
related in any conventional sense. The vision is for integrative and interdisciplinary
work. The projects under IDA constitute only some of the numerous digital archives
that operate out of USC (Shepard 2001b) with this kind of a scholarly vision.
Another important example is InscriptiFact, which is a collection of “distributed data
and image base systems of ancient inscriptions and material culture archives from
the Near Eastern and Mediterranean World” (p.2): apart from USC, its participants
are West Semitic Research Library and the University of Illinois, involved by virtue
of their status as leaders in the application of photographic and computer imaging
techniques to capture and analyze visual data of ancient texts. Apart from making
primary and otherwise restricted materials accessible, a very specific scholarly
mission - one that is inextricably related to the geography of information - defines
this project. Because of the way in which the materials under question - Dead Sea
Scrolls, Hebrew, Aramaic and Canaanite texts from the Biblical period and earlier,
Mesopotamian documents and medieval Jewish manuscripts - are scattered
worldwide, they cannot be viewed together for detailed comparison and study:
InscriptiFact will seek to “bring these scattered materials together virtually” (ibid).
This particular vision is not specific to InscriptiFact: Phil Ethington initiated the
Information Systems of Los Angeles project because of the need for a user-interface
for the retrieval of regional materials that had hitherto been kept in different
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collections, inspired by a vision such integration would allow for interdisciplinary
work (pers.comm., anon., 2001d).
This problem and approach reflects the tension that exists between global and local
scales of knowledge distribution. Engaging with the ways in which the globally
distributed spatiality of topical information prevents integrative approaches, these
individuals have sought to create a particular kind of information place within the
realms of virtual space. The geography of information, both these examples suggest,
affects not just whether access is created to individual sets of information but the
ways in which the relative placement of different kinds of information in proximity
to each other affects the ways in which particular bodies of knowledge are formed.
The geographical/epistemological configurations this suggests, if we consider the
way in which collection and preservation occur on a global scale, are infinite.
4.2.3. Localized and Institution Specific Ambitions
Some of these projects, however, have been initiated by individuals’ ambition for
their department of their discipline. The 1939 Los Angeles Works and Projects
Administration (LAWPA) Household Survey cards project is among those that are
part of the IDA. The following is a description of this project submitted to the Digital
Library Federation by Barbara Shepard:
In 1939, the Los Angeles Work and Projects Administration conducted a
household census to profile each residence in the county. The 450,000
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survey cards, which are now part of USC Regional History Collection,
record the address, type of structure, condition, monthly rent or property
value, number of rooms, and occupant demographics. The first 100,000
cards have been scanned and metadata is being created for retrieval via
address and spatial coordinates. Additionally, as a companion to the cards,
the WPA 1930's Land Use Survey, prepared for the Los Angeles
Department of City Planning to map 460 square miles within the City's
boundaries, are also being digitized and described. Approximately 350
images have been completed. This WPA material will also be retrievable
via the spatial/temporal search interface being developed. (2001b)
Here it is useful to give an idea of the kind of vision under which this project was
running to make clearer the operation of the aforementioned points. Wilson
conceptualizes access as resulting, realistically, from a combination of information
availability and information retreivability. Correspondingly, he has a “two-pronged”
approach to his involvement: 1) develop the spatiotemporal systemx x lx and 2) get
things to put in it. Accordingly, he is involved in the actual coding of the LA WPA
cards as well as a project related to Census materials. It is considered, in both of
these cases, that this knowledge will be useful for regional geographers and
historians: the value of regional knowledge, as a whole, will go up because of the
space/time/keyword/format search mechanism.
x x lx The person responsible for this (pers.comm., anon., November 21st, 2001k) is also in charge of the
development of the Collection Information System. ArcIMS (ArcView Internet Map Services) will be
employed for this: regardless of how this turns out, it is certain that it makes it easier to manipulate
the data in different ways as individuals will be able to submit queries based on either or any of these
factors. ArcIMS allows individuals to point to a certain point on a map (space), specify a particular
time period, like 1940 (time), identify a format (digital form) or simply enter a keyword. This has
implications for virtual and for cognitive access that are built in to the nature of the technology itself.
This project is ongoing and a prototype will become available in the summer of 2002.
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These changes occur in the context of an institution with a finite amount of
resources: globalization as it relates to Internet access does not liberate the
constraints that have traditionally been placed on the free dissemination of
information. In the creation of archives, there is a strong element of making use of
what there is, rather than creation information systems out of perceived need for
particular kinds of scholarly development. Hence the first project was motivated by
the facts that USC owned these cards, and that they were a perfect illustration of why
a space format was needed (i.e. you could just pick on a certain rectangle on a map
of LA and get a corresponding set of entries). The Census materials were useful
because people in the university had already been working on them, the faculty were
interested in the census and there was an ability to fully exploit the potential of
ArcIMS. All of these decisions demonstrate a concern both with the content (to what
are we providing access) and the nature of technology. They are, in addition, both
emphatically and essentially place-based along with being both technologically and
intellectually determined: access creation occurs motivated by the potentials of
technology as well as the existence of materials that happen to exist in particular
places. It also depends on motivations that emerge from explicitly place-specific
games such as those of the local work of faculty members. The last section of this
chapter will discuss the various constraints that prevent the creation of freer and
broader access, much of which has to do with the control of information related to
neo-liberal policies.
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4.2.4. Multiscalar Roles, Diverse Motivations and Hybrid Physical and Virtual
Access
To understand the components of any particular website or information collection, it
is necessary to take into account that the goals of contributors, themselves diverse,
are not necessarily the same as those of its creators. The concept of the existence of a
place-specific ethos conceals the ways in which players construe their relationship to
places and/or institutions in particular ways based on a wider ecology of games that
often expand beyond the scale of the place under consideration. The nature of this
ecology and its implications for the spatiality of information as it occurs across
scales and implicates the simultaneous creation of virtual and physical access will be
investigated in this section. That it constitutes an investigation of the work of one
individual should serve to signal that the array of processes under play are indeed
dynamic.
Individuals’ games often begin to coincide with institutional missions as a result of
the former’s reconfiguration of the latter’s systems as driven by extra-institutional
goals. In this way, projects can be seen to link off each other. One individual
(pers.comm., anon., 2001f) speaks of a different kind of extra-institutional
motivation: he/she was driven not necessarily by a drive for the integration of
materials, but by a knowledge of how certain bodies of information in his/her field
were inaccessible to a particular group of regional specialists. This person chose the
niche to which his/her database would contribute by examining the structure and
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content of databases and archives in his/her field that were already web-accessible.
Subsequently, this person helped create a set of archives which can now be found on
the USC website. Just like the presence of the database on the USC web cannot be
explained without looking at this person’s role in many games, the content and
structure of the database has to be understood as a result of many intersecting games
and not an institutional decision per se. The database that resulted is more global,
less detailed, and more esoteric precisely because this person knows of the existence
of other similar databases. To understand how this database - as one incremental
step in the drive towards large-scale digitalization - became accessible on the USC
web, acquired the form it did, and opened another pathway to the global flow of
information, it is necessary to keep in mind the diversity of this person’s games. It is
also necessary to understand the importance of his/her knowledge of information
spaces and processes outside of the scale of the institution with which he/she was
and is directly affiliated.
This person’s goal in taking part in this endeavor, as part of a collaborative effort
with colleagues at other universities, was to serve his/her field and this network as
much as it was to provide a link for USC, which was required to pay a proportional
fee to become a member of this collaboration. While he/she was already networked
before, technology has strengthened these preexistent networks and created new
ones. By forging this collaboration, he/she has directly affected the particular profile
of access provided by the institution. Individuals’ games for creating access on
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global scales, this shows, can inadvertently create local access within the scale of the
institution: the link on the USC website increases the kind of cognitive access that
exists to the particular body of information under question among the university
community. This person is not alone in this endeavor: others have contributed to the
plethora of projects that will comprise the “Next Generation Library.” A subject
librarian (pers.comm., anon., 2001c) speaks of how he/she consistently links, as
much as he/she can, what is available at USC to new developments in his/her
profession, subsequently changing the nature of web-accessible resources in the field
and accelerating the dialectical process of scholarly supply and demand. To
understand how the Internet becomes interlinked - how institutional and professional
information and archives are related - we must view the endeavors of individuals
directly involved with the spatialization of information. The progression of
interlinkages that create the Internet also serve to influence social and cultural
aspects of the place through which these individuals operate inasmuch as information
archives can be seen to affect these matters: in other words, they create the
‘information place’.
The picture is further complicated with the realization that this database is only one
of this person’s many projects. Other projects in which he/she has been involved and
subsequently involved USC have been initially funded from external institutes like
Mellon. Individuals affiliated in different ways, this shows, often serve as portals for
the inter-institutional coordination or transfer of games. In some cases, he/she serves
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to link or work on projects that have no direct relationship to his/her role at the
institution: his/her place-based knowledge about collection development and access
issues, in this case, affects how external processes and projects might operate. As
he/she exists at the nexus of games that exist at a number of different scales (local:
the university; regional: his/her region of specialty; national: Mellon), he/she
coordinates his/her role in each in relation to all of the rest, subsequently affecting
their overall course and effect, both independent of and within the institution. It is
apparent here that access-creation is not necessarily or even primarily the drive of an
organization to coordinate games that exist within it: individuals can also involve
themselves in this endeavor, juggling processes and games that exist at scales larger
than themselves. This person does not necessarily think about the scale or the place
of influence and impact: his/her primary concern, throughout the complicated the
spatial processes he/she negotiates, is the various games with which she has become
involved out of his/her interest and concern for access.
By involving himself/herself in a wide-ranging set of games, this person complicates
and extends the set of games and profile of access-creation we might ascribe to the
institution or ‘place’. As this expands our notion of the institution’s functional reach
in access-provision, it might be useful to think of it less as a single-scale entity that
coordinates multiple games and more as a placeholder for wide-ranging and dynamic
games that transcend its local/urban boundaries. According to Couclelis and Getis,
“as activities become more and more person-based rather than place-based...where
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you are is less and less a reliable indication of what you may be doing” (1999, pp. 3).
This person’s example complicates this in one way: ‘what you may be doing’, in
turn, changes the place ‘where you are’. What happens at USC, very simply, often
happens outside of USC and changes what happens at USC. Access-creation is
shown to be both a multi-scalar and trans-scalar process in an era where technology
allows for multiple and independent roles to intersect. Upon consideration that this
set of linkages emerges from examining the work of one person, it is possible to start
to fathom the complexity and intensity of change this signifies and portends for
USC, the ‘information place’ out of which hundreds of other similar (although not
necessarily as assiduous) individuals operate.
4.2.5. Global Access and Local Games
Beyond the creation of archives, individuals’ work at the scale of the institution
(local) also influences and affects their professional roles in the larger (global) sense:
locally driven initiatives might be seen to affect access on trans-local scales because
of the existence of an ecology of games. An administrator from USC is on the e-
metrics committee at the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) (Houseton 2000).
Although this person (pers.comm., anon., 2001a) disagrees with the emphasis that is
still placed on the quantity of collections over capability for access, he/she can use
his/her knowledge from his/her intra-university game to affect his/her extra
university games. A professor of History at USC, similarly, contributes to the
Journal o f Multimedia History, changing the way in which this scholarship might be
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conducted on a global level, influenced and, perhaps, motivated by her/his local
experiences at USC. The head of the ISD, Jerry Campbell is involved in the creation
of a “scholar’s portal,” something that:
would facilitate the addition of high-quality material by fostering
standards, searching across databases, and offering a variety of supporting
tools The scholars portal would facilitate the addition of high-quality material
by fostering standards, searching across databases, and offering a variety of
supporting tools. As a result, libraries, corporations, and many other
organizations would be empowered to contribute to an accessible, distributed
digital library. The existence and efforts of scholars portal, therefore, would
accelerate the growth of high-quality material and facilitate what has been
referred to as the global relational research library. Such a library could
contribute to a reformation in the format of scholarly publishing and usher in
access to a vast and heretofore largely unusable body of original material,
specialized resources for communities of scholars, and accumulated scientific
data. (2000)
Campbell acknowledges that this is a largely utopic and unrealistic idea, particularly
in the current social and economic climate. But what emerges from his discussion is
that this idea emerged as a result, partly, of his own regional collaboration with
colleagues at his level of administration, inspired by the work he has done at USC
and the challenges by which he has been faced. This game might be seen to reflect
solely his goals at USC if we fail to see that, as games across different scales cross-
generate to create a complex ecology, levels of impact cannot always be discernible
as proportional to the effort and influence that goes into them. The interdependence
of games at different scales might result in global effects, for example, of locally
motivated acts. These cross-scalar effects, we can start to see from these examples,
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are made more dynamic through technology, and are particularly true for people in
power that occupy multiple positions.
4.2.6. Epistemology o f the World Wide Web
Apart from providing default access, the common web space of USC now allows
these multiple products to coexist and create a semblance of institutionally enabled
access, since all of these projects do occur within its rubric. This common web space
is deceptive, as it suggests that these initiatives resulted from an institutional
imperative which did not emerge until the decision to create the Collection
Information System (pers.comm., anon., 2001a; 2001j), which required each
individual to describe their collections and define archives that were not catalogued
in order for Shepard to develop the necessary categories of type (pers.comm., anon.,
2001c). In other words, the institution did not decide to recruit individuals to develop
each and all of these archives: it simply responded to a trend it had noticed that
happened to be occurring within its confines. The notion that the scales within the
university are directly related to those outside of it is in accordance with the
potentials of globalization interacting with established forms of scholarly
communication, including those based on ‘invisible colleges’ (Ekman and Quandt
1999, Crane 1972). The Integrated Digital Archives project (IDA website) is a
product of ISLA’s expansion and subsumption of other projects, many of which had
their initial funding from other sources, under the aegis of the university
administration. All of these projects, however, had their own particular birthplaces:
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they are products of myriad place-based and place-related processes that are
connected and integrated into the same vision partly because of the nature of the
Internet as a shared interface.
4.2.7. Integration o f the Physical and Virtual
In their chapter in the Janelle and Hodge collection, Batty and Miller say:
If we are to explore the continued relevance of ideas based on the
measurement of accessibility or propinquity defined traditionally in relation to
physical locations and interactions, then we need to examine the ways in
which information and energy are combining to create new spaces and new
patterns of human behavior. In short, new definitions and conceptualizations
of accessibility can only be defined by mapping physical or material space
onto virtual or ethereal space, thus defining a nexus of hybrid space
which...represents the appropriate focus for a new geography of the
information age. (1997, pp. 133-134)
The ways in which technology has allowed people to play their place-based and
professional games has not necessarily required them to focus exclusively on
technological projects. Virtual and physical access is shown to be deeply interlinked
at all scales upon a close consideration of these various projects. This person
(pers.comm., anon., 2001c) does not restrict his/her efforts to virtual access as he/she
uses her web of contacts with book-dealers in Latin America to negotiate the kinds
of books that USC is able to acquire. His/her motivations, in this case, include the
desire to help disseminate these books. Another person (pers.comm., anon., 2001c)
makes use of professional networks and list-serves to remain in touch with what is
going on and what exists out in the world of relevant information for his/her field. In
this way, the use of technology affects the way in which physical access is created on
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the local scale: the question of what librarians are meant to be doing with paper, for
instance, has come up on a number of different lists. He/she also discusses how
technology allows him/her to be more closely linked with colleagues than before;
some of his/her colleagues, he/she adds, are more technologically savvy, a factor that
creates different sets of affiliations that affect the nature of the discipline.
Technology, in this sense, does have an effect, albeit one implicated in a larger
dialectic.
4.3. The Urban Initiative and the Institutional Context
The proliferation of a remarkable range of new social and professional relations
inherent to the drive to create information access has emerged in the context of
significant technological changes. But it is in this same context that the institution
has imposed limitations on how much this can be allowed to happen: this is
manifested, for instance, in the limited number of seats for the CIS, or in the creation
of project criteria through the Urban Inititiative. The creation of access at greater
scales has been thwarted by place-based and local concerns in the context of
globalizing forces and ambitions. Specifically, among the constraints various access-
related projects have in reaching fruition is the political economic reality of an
institution that has reacted to the increased potentials allowed by the Internet by
seeking to maximize its competitive advantage. In cases where the institution has to
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choose amongst projects, a decision driven by the larger goal of access would ideally
incorporate an understanding of an ecology of games in the formulation of its
criteria. This is distinct, however, from the institution’s current policy of favoring
projects that satisfy what the university has identified in its “Strategic Plan” and
subsequent “Urban Initiative” as those that focus on “Los Angeles and its key role
within the Americas and the Pacific Rim” (Shepard 2001b). Seeing that (many of
them externally funded) digital archives existed, the university chose to respond by
incorporating them into its mission. In the realm of the kinds of collections to be
collected, the “Urban Initiative,” the university’s plan to focus on Los Angeles-
related materials™, subsequently, can be seen as an institutional attempt to respond
to its inherent comparative advantage by capitalizing on the resources it already
happens to have (pers.comm., anon., 2001h; 2001i), address financial imperatives by
eliminating a large proportion of projects that do not pertain to this ‘urban initiative’
(that is, archives that are not Los Angeles-related), and adhere to its notions about
the role of technology.
This attempt to create a specific advantage for which the university might be known
(pers.comm., anon., 2001a; 2001b; 2001d; 2001g; 2001h; 2001k) is reflective of a
desire to place a false sense of definition over the diverse and rich array of projects
x x x One of the individuals (pers.comm., anon., April 23r d , 2001i), for instance, speaks of a plethora of
work that currently exists within the university, including, for example, a set of archives about a
German Jewish historical novelist called the Seuchtwanger Memorial Library, whose relationship to
the region is tangential at best. Apart from a very few selected instances, this body of work is not
being digitalized: many projects such as this are eliminated for not being part of the “Urban Initiative”
or the university’s commitment to projects that are LA-specific.
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that have partially been emerging under the institutional rubric which have deep and
broad implications for the parochialization of information as it is presented,
preserved and disseminated. That the game here is not access but an institution’s
desire for a better standing or reputation and is deeply enmeshed in a series of place-
based and spatially dynamic financial and political games makes it possible to
connect this urban-centric parochialism to what an institution might have to under a
neo-liberal regime that calls for efficiency in the control of information at the cost of
access. If other institutions act upon the same principles, the creation of digital
archives could become imbued with local specificity on a global scale. Hence global
problems on a political economic level can be seen to creation global problems in
information access by playing out in specific ways the modalities of control in
locally situated institutions.
4.4. Global Contexts and Political Economies: Publishers and Copyright
This chapter has striven to illustrate the incredible range of drives and motivations
for the creation of access among individuals at USC. But this is not a utopian
account. Despite the fact that all of these projects concern the expansion of the
availability of information, the extent of their scope is continually determined by
other factors. Some of these are financial: it took publishers a long time, in the wake
of the electronic revolution, to standardize costs, many of which are, subsequently,
passed on to users (Litman 1996, Morrison 2001, Bowman 2001, Ginsburg 1993).
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These financial issues are directly related to the legal ones discussed in this section.
Much as librarians would like to provide free access and serve the world at large, as
some say, (pers.comm., anon., 2002a), the reality of legal and contractual rights with
publishers would not allow for this to happen in the context of neo-liberal
economies, where there are fewer and fewer paths to the creation of public
information, partly as publishers engages in battles about copyright lawsx x x l (Kahin
and Nesson 1997, Litman 1996, Morrison 2001, Schepp 2001, Weeks 2001). On
another level, this happens as the World Trade Organization (WTO) allows for the
commoditization of information in ways that might threaten institutions like the
public library (Hunt 2001). These legal complications all occur in the context of the
financial pressures faced by publishers and retailers of books and journals that are
central to the age of the Internet: the financial and the legal are deeply interlinked.
Many of the librarians interviewed commented on the ways in which these financial
and legal battles have led to the precipitous increase in costs of both books and
journals (pers.comm., anon., 2002a; 2001c, 2001g).
These changes are necessarily related to contemporary times. As an National
Research Council report (NRC 2000) discusses, in the past 200 years, copyright laws
have promoted broad access to information; in current times, new information
challenges rules of access, in some cases, making it harder for libraries to lend digital
X X X 1 The following is a quote from the article by Bowman "They've got their radical factions, like the
Ruby Ridge or Waco types," who want to share all content for free, said Judith Platt, a spokeswoman
for the Association of American Publishers.
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materials to patrons. Practices like interlibrary loans and document delivery services
are now being challenged by publishers, who assert that these rules were acceptable
for a pre-digital age (that is, placing a paper copy on reserve is not the same thing as
making the same thing accessible to numerous people). It is for the same reasons that
technology increases the possibilities for access that it reduces it, as the publishers
can be seen here to be reacting precisely to the ability to make information accessible
in ways that the public library - as a spatially located entity - did not.
How is this happening? Many specific processes are underway that would enhance
copyright owner control over the way their work appears over digital networks,
something that has significantly reduced libraries’ abilities to employ the Internet.
Among these was the Clinton Administration’s White Paper on Intellectual Property
and the National Information Infrastructure, (USPTO 1995) which recommended
the significant alteration of these copyright laws in favor of publishers as well as the
producers of video, audio and digital materials. These deliberations occur at the
national scale (Kahin and Wilson 1997, Masser 1999); however, they have great
implications for the way that copyright law is developed at a global scale.
Universities across the world face contradictory pressures - the need to disseminate
and to control the proliferation of information - that are well encapsulated in
intellectual property laws that are driven by the purpose of creating an environment
in which dissemination like this might occur. User policies are linked to contracts
which libraries are and are not able to write with buyers (Anonymous Administrator
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2001c); the strong move to create a visual culture is thwarted by changes in laws
from fair use to copyright protection (pers.comm., anon., 2001c; 2001h).
The high complexity of the set of problems this indicates is illustrated by the article
by Weeks, about Pat Schroeder’s battle for the publishers:
Of all the dangerous and dot-complex problems that American publishers
face in the near future - economic downturns, competition for leisure time,
piracy - perhaps the most explosive one could be libraries. Publishers and
librarians are squaring off for a battle royal over the way electronic books and
journals are lent out from libraries and over what constitutes fair use of
written material. (Weeks 2001)
In this article, librarians are accused of spending too much money on technology in
this article. Kranich, a librarian from New York University responds:
The reason we're in a bind... is that the price of some of the materials has
skyrocketed without any explanation." She cites one chemistry journal,
Tetrahedron Letters, that costs $14,000 a year. Public and academic libraries
do not want to pass on their costs to the public. In principle, librarians believe
that patrons should have free and easy access to all information. In Kranich's
mind, library-goers should be able to duplicate limited amounts of
information for educational purposes. Suppose you want to copy a journal
article, quote a section of a book or use a line from a poem, she says. "That is
all permitted under the fair-use provision of the copyright law. In the digital
arena, fair use has been narrowed to the point of disappearing." "The
publishing community does not believe that the public should have the same
rights in the electronic world," Kranich says, (ibid)
Others are less euphemistic about Schroeder’s tactics: Schulman (2001), linking
Schroeder’s vision to a “a pay-per-use model for information content that will
largely shut libraries out” calls her tactics loud and shameful. Librarians at USC
were similarly perturbed by the prospects of these changes, some of them more
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reconciled to them (pers.comm., anon., 2002a, 2001f, 2001g) than others
(pers.comm., anon., 2001b, 2001c). The ecology of games and varied attempts
towards access described on the local level occur within a much larger and more
global set of games whose financial and legal aspects are mutually reinforcing. Both
institutions - libraries and publishers - have responded to technology with the
ostensible hope of reducing costs and have in a highly reciprocal way accelerated the
spiral that leads to their increase.
These observations about copyright wars are related to the changes described in this
chapter in a number of ways. To begin with, they reveal that what technology
enables is or is threatened to be disabled by forces that seek to assert control
precisely because of its enabling potential. Secondly, they reveal that the ways in
which technology will be able to create access will depend on how these battles are
resolved: there is a great amount of uncertainty about the relationship between
technology and access. Finally, they partially explain a trend among the kinds of
archives discussed in this chapter. In function, these changes have meant that only a
certain kind of information has become available: in general, the kind to which the
university might claim some sort of ownership. At the same time as cognitive and
virtual access is provided to primary materials like LAWPA Cards - something that
is useful for sociologists, historians or political scientists interested in Los Angeles in
the 1930s - this format will not allow users to search secondary material that is
narrative in nature. Books, for instance, are not accessible through this means as they
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tend not to focus on a precise date and are not place-specific: partly because it is hard
to splice up the granularity with space and time for books (that is, there is no one
space or time for each record on each page), but more importantly because of legal
and copyright issues. As it happens, however, the only ‘books’ that exist as primary
materials, at this stage, are USC theses, which will ultimately be placed online: Los
Angeles has been proposed for the ‘place’. The individuals described are not
working in a larger global environment that is necessarily conducive to the fruition
of their visions.
How might institutions respond? The Clinton Administration white paper and
subsequent moves to implement it has met with opposition from various groups,
including the Digital Future Coalition (DFC 2002), that is committed to striking an
appropriate balance in law and public policy between protecting intellectual property
and affording public access to it. Strategic alliances have been formed for longer
periods with individuals interested in the dissemination of information on an
international scale (Tocatlain 1994). An anonymous administrator (pers.comm.,
anon., 2002a) speaks of the possibility of smart partnerships between libraries and
publishers. This suggests another series of games across another set of scalar
boundaries. What a conceptualization of scale relations might demonstrate here is
that libraries are not entirely vulnerable. One individual (pers.comm., anon., 2001g)
speaks of how many are starting to fight back with databases like JSTOR and how
systems that are now established like interlibrary loan were initially heavily
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contested by publishers. Another (pers.comm., anon., 2002a) discusses how specific
disciplines respond to the increased price schemes of publishers in different ways,
speaking of efforts like BioOne and the Public Library of Science: all of these were
attempts on the part of faculty members to publish themselves as universities
realized they had to buy back much of what they sold. If the impostition of these
laws by publishers can be interpreted as an instance of globalization under the
neoliberal regime, these local scale initiatives, which have the potential to change
what happens at greater scales, can be seen to be part of a resistant “globalization
from below” (Howitt 1993, pp. 38). One thing remains evident amidst this seemingly
impenetrable chaos: technology allows the development of systems of access when
individuals, operating under a set of parameters allowed by their institution, assume
the initiative. The ways in which access, in a broader sense, is conceptualized will
depend, in turn, on the spirit and vision of these individuals, as they understand their
placement within a larger ecology of games and ability to change their course.
4.5. Conclusion
These individuals’ actions collectively provide a reasonable blueprint of the matrix
of options for how we might contribute to access. By focusing on larger goals and
placing into context the unique contributions they can make in the face of what is
accessible to others and what is available elsewhere, they all create different
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trajectories of access. While they are responsible to their immediate communities of
faculty and students, they are cognizant, also, of global information inequalities, and
realize that the Internet changes the nature of information provision on a global level.
Since they are intuitively knowledgeable of these ecologies, they realize that they
might be involved in a series of games the details and rules of which they are not
necessarily cognizant. Like many individuals in contemporary times, they continue
to expand on their local scale place-based affiliations to engage with diverse projects,
committees or interests that exist as related to global scale networks. As everyone in
these networks is said to be invested or interested in certain aspects of the activities
under progress, they can be conceptualized well as ‘games’. Technology has allowed
these individuals to function within these networks at the same time as they engage
with their local scale affiliations and obligations: what this study has shown is that
these local scale place-based obligations are, in numerous ways, linked and mutually
reciprocal to their work and interests within these professional networks. In this
way, the institutional ‘place’ can be seen to be linked to larger scale spatial economic
and cultural processes by virtue of the individuals that it employs.
While Internet technology is used by individuals in the university to create access,
they face constraints at a number of different scales. Moreover, this technology, as it
is allied with and emerges in a particular financial and legal context, both reduces
and increases the ability to create access to information. As much as individuals use
the Internet to create more archives or to network with a wider group of
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constituencies at local, urban and global scales, the existence of the Internet is at the
root of new laws being pushed and which are already instated to reduce the freedom
of dissemination of information. Individuals within the institution responding to the
drive for competition among universities, furthermore, respond by striving to
constrict the kind of information that is made accessible by virtue of its relevance to
local and urban subjects.
In the same way as individuals’ desires or goals are not created or enacted in a void,
technological change is involved and interconnected with a far wider set of political
and economic processes occurring in and acting upon the institution or ‘place’. The
transition from the work of agents to the creation of an institutional place - in this
instance, a place explicitly concerned with the provision of information - is
necessarily fraught with tensions inherent to the making of all places. As the place-
sensitive perspective allows us to reconcile the idea of specificity with that of
causation (Agnew 1987, p. 42), we are able to see how a series of causative
individual processes can culminate in the creation of a unique environment in ways
that concepts like ‘culture’ or ‘environment’ might obfuscate. The place under
consideration, furthermore, is not physically bounded within the library: while a
place-specific ethos might be represented in the particularities of this physical
construction, as the introduction described, the individual processes and larger
environment of concern to which the ‘place’ perspective here applies extends across
the entire university.
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Chapter 5: Conclusion: Further Thoughts: Reality and Theory
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5.1. Brief Summary
The first chapter of this thesis established a series of contexts in which change
occurred at USC. The next chapter demonstrated that the institutional restructuring
that occurs in response to global trends and patterns has resulted in the privileging of
virtual over physical access in a place that is characterized by division and
miscommunication about the nature of information. The subsequent chapter strove to
demonstrate how, within this context and that of immense technological and
conceptual uncertainties, a technological system is being created that would greatly
impact the way in which access can and will be created by the university. In the
fourth chapter, individuals were shown to be working to create access in the context
of these uncertainties and constraints as well as new ones, such as legal and financial
ones imposed on a global level. Combined, these sections create a depiction of an
institution ostensibly devoted to the creation of information access whose existence,
within a series of contexts, determines the ways in which technological change
affects this endeavor. The constraints and contexts relate to the ways in which global,
urban and local scale factors intersect and co-generate to forward the trajectory of
institutional change under globalization.
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The following are the questions with which this thesis began: How does one
institution battle with the complications of information access in an era where neo
liberal policies and exultations about technology are aligned and co-generative in
different ways? How is an institution’s contribution to access a complex function of
the visions, motivations and capabilities of individuals within it that are involved in a
highly dynamic ecology of games (Dutton 1999) that is made increasingly intense
and intellectually challenging with the advent of information and communication
technologies (ICTs)? The following is the condensed conclusion, as also mentioned
in the beginning of this thesis: technological changes are among the factors and
processes operative at multiple scales that affect the ways in which emplaced social,
cultural and economic relations at the scale of the university determine how, why
and how much information is made accessible, or is not.
What other conclusions does a synthetic approach bring to the findings of all of these
chapters? The first and the clearest point about digital libraries and access is that
digital libraries will not be like libraries on the Internet: the Internet, by proxy, will
not eliminate the need for libraries. Legal and financial restraints prevent the
institution of any kind of a global public library on the web. Knowledge will still be
very much emplaced.
The second point about the relationship between space and information in the wake
of institution-specific technological change is that it is becoming progressively
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dynamic. This does not necessarily mean that more access is created, but that it is
increasingly difficult to pin down any one relationship that defines what happens at
the scale of the entire institution. At different scales within the institution, different
processes occur that lead to particular configurations of information. As individuals
are involved in games that extend beyond the scale of the institution, and multiple
games within the various scales within the institution, they have unique and diverse
effects on the creation or reduction of access at all scales. In this case, technology
cannot be seen to be at all determinist: it is patently clear that it simply changes the
possible spatialities of information and introduces the potential of new scale
relations. All of this might aggregate to altering the characteristic of the ‘place’
under question.
Having said this, however, it is also clear that, in some cases, individuals respond to
technological change based on the way they have been socialized to work and
interact. In these cases, technological change, as it creates the possibilities for new
networks and new spatialities, also brings these individuals into greater, deeper and
more intense contact with each other. This is partly because of the new connections it
forges and partly because it is evocative of deeper concerns that might be held about
the role of the human being in society and the nature of the human condition. The
latter point cannot be proven or elaborated in this thesis, but it is nevertheless
necessary to acknowledge, by placing the results of the first two chapters in relation
to each other, that the same set of changes has led to effects that appear to be
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diametrically opposing but are, in fact, deeply interlinked. The conceptual
sophistication afforded by ‘place’ makes it easier to clearly conceptualize the
combined effects of contradictory forces central to individual and institutional
responses to technological change. Technological change, when viewed in this light,
is both place-induced, as it occurs based on the set of social and cultural relations
inherent to a place, and catalytic of place-specific change, as these social relations
reproduce themselves in diverse, complicated and contradictory ways because of the
new set of spatialities they introduce. While the notion that such change has a
specific drive of its own with particular kinds of socio-cultural or economic effects is
insupportable in the wake of this analysis, it is nevertheless necessary to
acknowledge that, when people use technology, they might change their
environments in particular ways.
5.2. Why Does the Geographical Matter?
Hopefully, this thesis and this conclusion has demonstrated why the geographical
should matter in understanding how institutions create access. I have striven to
channel the force of feelings around technological change that arise from experience
and perspectives as evidence for this point; and to trace these perspectives to larger
discursive environments in which people reside, themselves scaled: for instance,
individuals were shown, in chapter 2, to respond to what was being said at the scale
of the library, at the scale of the university as well as to their specific networks and
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general rhetoric about the relationship between technological change and
contemporary society.
Apart from spatializing the account of institutional change, I have also sought to use
geographical theory to spatialize theories of social relations associated with
information technology. The concept of scale, and the project to theorize it, as it
exists within the geographical literature has been crucial because the ecology of
games, it helps show, exists across a number of scalar boundaries: something which
is crucial to know because it has often been conceptualized as uni-scalar (within an
organization, within a community) and generally local, creating the impression (not
necessarily that of the authors, but a residual one) that access-provision can be
controlled by the institution. The ‘ecology of games’, similarly, rescales ‘scale’,
showing that there are multiple scales within the local. Within this context, in the
third chapter, I tried to demonstrate that there are multiple ecologies at play in each
technological project, no matter how small: this is meant to have accentuated the
ways in which technology - not in and of itself a focus of the other chapters - is a
product of numerous social relations occurring across scale. The existence of
different visions within the institution was apparent here as it was in the second
chapter, with particular attention paid to the issue of user configuration. In all of
these ways, I have tried to integrate discussions of scale and place, energized by the
spirit of Dodge, who, in his guest editorial for the ‘Cybergeography’ issue of
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Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, describes work in this field as
becoming:
Somewhat counter to much of the popular, casual reporting that suggests that
the Internet inevitably makes geography redundant, that distance, location,
and place no longer matter in peoples’ daily lives, and that cyberspace
enables action and interaction between anything, anytime,
any where.... Cyberspace is hardly immaterial in that it is very much an
embodied space...and should be treated as an extension of the geographic
realm, not as some disembodied, parallel universe. (Dodge 2001, pp. 1)
As Dodge (pp. 2) also says, however “cyberspace is changing geography, it is
warping space, shrinking distance, and modifying our sense of place.” The time-
space compression that this invokes was brought into this conceptual landscape by
Harvey (1989). What this means is that space might very well matter more in the age
of cyberspace, precisely because we need to recollect and make sense of all the terms
and categories the discipline has enabled in engaging with the modalities of access.
Since the increased importance of cyberspace is concurrent with the continued
importance of embodied lives, this means that the geographic realm definitionally
becomes more important, as it controls both, as well as the relationship and process
of transfer between. Considering space, furthermore, makes it possible to perceive
inequalities and differences that might otherwise remain concealed: a matter that is
particularly important when evaluating the unevenness of access.
As discussed in Chapter 3, the case study of the institution illustrates the flexibility
and richness of inquiry allowed by the concepts of ‘scale’ and ‘place’, both of which
make it possible to engage the dynamic nature of institutional change and access
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creation in contemporary times. These concepts work particularly well in consort
with each other: discussions of scale make it possible to situate the relative
importance of different processes that emerge as a result of and affect place-related
and place-specific changes; the concept of place makes it possible to integrate the
abstraction of scale into a particular kind of realized conceptual terrain. They both
combine to illustrate the dynamic nature of institutional changes where non-
spatialized accounts simplify matters and, hence, conceal a set of issues that are
essential for our understanding of the institutions that control access. For instance,
the discussion about how different scales of information access are created within the
university because of the activities of the Revenue Management Center, in the
context of a particular kind of institutional structure, makes it possible to understand
why there might be an ecology of games - individuals involved in their own spheres
of activity - at the same time as there are common themes of concern across the
university. As it makes it possible to understand how different scales of activity are
at play within any given place, it provides insight into how we might reframe another
study of the library or seek to disseminate a strategy for the organizational
dissemination of information. The description of individuals involved in multiple
projects both within and outside of the institution provided in Chapter 3 illustrates
how an explication of geographic categories can highlight the scales of significance
inherent in the work that individuals perform on a day-to-day basis. The discussion
about the Oracle infrastructure makes it clear how the institution is partly but not
entirely responsible for the profile of access it is able to create: agents are only able
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to do their work in the context of constraints that exist at local, urban and global
scales. Without these geographic categories, the static conception of institutional
change makes it easier to lay blame and harder to suggest alternatives or imagine
new configurations of technology, people and information. These concepts make it
easier to approximate an understanding of a reality that is complex and dynamic.
While inspired and driven by “the technographic approach (Woolgar 1996, pp. 88),”
this work has not simply striven to demonstrate that technology is “society made
durable” (ibid) as it represents a “social order” (ibid). This case study might well
suggest otherwise, demonstrating that the library exists in a context in which there
are numerous cultures and sub-cultures within places that, operating through the
medium of agents involved in these projects, interact and form specific kinds of
derivative cultures and subcultures, as represented by any given digital archive, that:
1) do not necessarily represent the process of their creation; and 2) perpetuate a
series of subsequent cultures in an interactive and reflexive manner that might well
mean something if we view them through a collective lens, looking at how they
reflect and collectively constitute a more pervasive cultural practice. Technological
change might not have one effect on this context but it certainly has a series of them:
analytical and interpretive categories from geography can make this clearer, more
sophisticated, and truer to the complexity of reality. In the longer term, this will
involve linking these cases with larger socio-cultural trends.
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205
5.3. Recommendations
The explicit set of relationships I have sought to forge between ‘place’ and
‘information’ should, ideally result in recommendations and solutions. Many of my
interviews with librarians concluded with requests for my ‘findings’ once they were
ready. It is unclear whether I have ‘found’ anything that would be concretely useful
to any of them other than, perhaps, a larger understanding of the context in which
they operate, by virtue of having spoken to a deliberately wide range of them.
Precisely because the ecology of games occurs across scale, many of the individuals
to whom I spoke - themselves fairly high up in the institutional hierarchy - had
never met each other, even though they were pursuing very similar goals or were
involved, as it were, in parallel games. As Agre, Professor at the School of
Information Science at UCLA, says, libraries are the center of a number of different
trajectories of communication and, by proxy “communities” with diverse collective
imaginations: the library is “one window on this dynamic interplay but it is not a
window that lets us see that interplay very clearly” (1997, pp. 4). I have striven, in
this case, to abandon the view from the window and try to look around and outside
from the inside. Although I have not come up with definitive ‘solution, I have tried to
engage with those of other scholars - information scientists and others - who have
striven to understand the ways in which libraries and universities might reinvent
themselves, and relate their work to my own empirical assessment.
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206
Agre’s central concern is that:
instead of throwing out existing scholarly and library practices, we
should recover the underlying logic of these practices, abstract the aspects of
them that have lasting value, and then generalize, extend, and democratize
them - that is, make them available to, and adapt them to the purposes of, the
citizenry in general and not just to elites. This requires a sustained analysis of
intellectual life. (2001, pp. 289)
This notion resonates with the findings of Chapter 2 and the section of Chapter 3 that
discussed controversies over who the user is and the corresponding need to articulate
this on a cross-institutional level: all of these relate to the visions that all individuals
that affect libraries - librarians as well as university presidents, faculty members and
information technologists - hold for libraries. There is a particular set of reasons that
libraries might have become important to the creation of societies and, indeed,
places: accordingly, it is necessary to think deeply about what this vision might be.
This thinking needs to expand beyond the realm of intellectual histories to somehow
integrate with the kind of discourse that exists at the positions of power within
universities. The various problems of contention, confusion, fear, competition and
disparate antithetical organizational cultures, it appears, are directly rooted in a
terrain in which there has yet to have been a public articulation of what this role
might be. If information technology should determine anything at all, it should be
our impetus to study the reasons why we value particular institutions in a particular
way. I could not phrase the imperative more precisely than Agre: “Intellectual life is
both deeply individual and deeply collective at the same time, and analysis will be
required particularly to understand the relation between these two levels” (2001, p.
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207
1). This will directly and deeply effect the nature of the place under question,
particularly as we trace the direct relationship between the kind of access a library
creates and the kind of social and cultural forms that it both reflects and generates.
This is not, of course, a concrete recommendation. In a letter responding to a letter
written in response to a review he wrote of Nicholson Baker’s new book (2001) in
The New York Review o f Books, Darnton, cultural historian, writes about the matter
of failures of preservation in ‘public libraries’. Speaking of the widespread failure to
preserve materials for which “we have a responsibility to our descendants that we are
failing to meet” (Darnton 2002, pp. 48), he proposes the need for national support for
a new kind of multipurpose national library dedicated to the preservation of cultural
artifacts. While the specificities of the topic are distinct from that of this case study,
what Darnton proposes is relevant in terms of what it demonstrates about scale
relations and the control of information: it is not always useful or interesting to
blame individual places for problems that are, ultimately, rooted in the far greater set
of issues that are directly related to the realities and specifics of globalization. As this
thesis has attested, it is these local ‘places’ that will create the global world of
information to which any person might have virtual, physical and cognitive access.
As players in a wide variety of games, we have some thinking to do about how we
might galvanize this process.
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208
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Appendix: List of Interviews
Adminstrator/Coordinator (pers.comm., anon., March 13th, 2002a)
IT Specialist (pers.comm., anon., March 8, 2002b)
Shepard (pers.comm., anon., April 3rd, 2001a)
Collection Development (pers.comm., anon., April 1st, 2001b)
Subject Library (pers.comm., anon., April 18th, 2001c)
Faculty (pers.comm., anon., February 2nd, 2001d)
Library Technology (pers.comm., anon., April 16th, 2001e)
Subject Library (pers.comm., anon., April 18th, 2001f)
Administrator/Coordinator (pers.comm., anon., April 16th, 2001g)
Subject Library (pers.comm., anon., April 17th, 2001h)
Archives (pers.comm., anon., April 23rd, 2001i)
Factuly/Technology Specialist (pers.comm., anon., April 13th, 2001j )
Faculty/Technology Specialist (pers.comm., anon., November 21st, 2001k)
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

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Creator Azfar, Farid Mohammed (author)

Core Title Technology, libraries and the geographies of information: A case study of the University of Southern California

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Geography

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag education, technology of,Geography,information science,Library Science,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-300516

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Legacy Identifier 1414867.pdf

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Rights Azfar, Farid Mohammed

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Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA