new technology in the human services
Vol 9:4 pp28-32
The Internet as a Virtual Social Work Library

Mark Watson

Mark Watson is Information Services Manager at the National Institute for Social Work Contact him at:
NISW Information Service
5 Tavistock Place
London WC1H 9SN
UK

Tel: 0171 387 9681
Fax: 0171 387 7968
Email: mwatson@nisw.org.uk

Introduction

Over the past decade Information Technology has impacted to varying extents in different professions. Unlike social work, the profession of librarianship has for the most part welcomed Information Technology as an enabling technology, freeing many from time-consuming manual procedures:

software now handles tasks such as book acquisition and processing, loans and reservations in libraries of all sizes - tasks previously carried out manually

bibliographic and cataloguing details to international standards can be easily obtained in electronic format - reducing the need for in-house cataloguing

databases offer the opportunity for librarians and for library users to carry out literature searches in a fraction of the time than was possible previously - time that was previously employed in trawling through printed abstracts and indexes to identify literature can now be spent on reading that literature

on-line and CD-ROM databases offer access to a wealth of information not available locally - libraries can offer access to a collection far greater than that which is contained within its four walls, material which can be obtained either through Inter-Library loan or material which is increasingly accessible on CD-ROM or via the Internet.

This is far removed from librarianship at the turn of the century, when many public libraries were 'closed access' - librarians acting as custodians of the collection, requiring library users to fill in written requests for books and the librarians retrieving the book from the shelves on behalf of the user (a system still in use in archive collections such as the British Library Reading Rooms).

Information and Communication Technologies, in particular CD-ROM and the Internet, increasingly offer exciting possibilities for accessing 'networked' information on a global scale. Many people refer to the Internet itself as a virtual library, or a global database, putting forward a picture of a wealth of information at the touch of the proverbial button.

Many academic and public libraries are enabling their users to make the most of such opportunities - academic libraries are now expected to provide access to a wide range of databases, as opposed to simply offering an On-Line Public Access Catalogue to their own stock, and public libraries are looking to provide Internet terminals for users, as an alternative to cyber-cafes and pubs.

And yet, Information Technology can be seen as a threat to libraries and the library profession as a whole - certainly much more of a threat than to social work. An increasing range of 'search engines', subject guides, 'intelligent' software offering personalised news-feeds, and databases mounted on the World Wide Web (WWW) with user-friendly search interfaces, all aimed at the end-user, could potentially remove the need for information intermediaries such as librarians. With electronic journals and books available digitally either via the Internet or on CD-ROM, the need for library buildings which physically contain material may well be receding.

The term 'Virtual Library' was in fact first used as long ago as 1980 (Harley, 1981), pre-dating the current media fascination with the Internet by over ten years. It is a term that is increasingly used (and mis-used), and one for which there is no agreed definition. In addition to a range of virtual libraries, the Internet also hosts digital libraries, electronic libraries, an Electric Library, and even a Virtual Reality Library.

Searching the Internet via search engines such as Lycos and Yahoo identifies a range of types of virtual library which fall into a range of categories:

libraries (primarily academic) who have either telnet access or a WWW interface allowing access to their computerised library catalogue. Whilst they are certainly virtual in the sense that they can be accessed from a remote site, they still predominantly offer a search facility to their stock of traditional printed books and journals.

co-operative ventures between a number of libraries and a regional or subject basis, presenting a single entry-point and seamless connectivity between different sites to give the impression of a single entity. In the United Kingdom a large number of the 'new' universities are in fact themselves 'virtual' - being a collection of previously separate colleges and polytechnics who remain on their own sites although they now share a single identity.

subject guides to WWW resources. The World Wide Web Consortium, (w3), who play a leading role in the development of the Internet, have established a high-profile Virtual Library on the World Wide Web. However, the w3 Virtual Library is in fact a collection of subject guides to resources on the Internet - a collection of links to WWW sites. w3 do in fact recognise that the term Virtual Library is open to confusion by also using the more appropriate, but rather less attractive term 'distributed subject catalogue'.

co-operative ventures between libraries and publishers. There have been a range of projects in recent years, primarily between university library consortia and publishers of scientific journals who have been keen to identify barriers and boundaries in the development of a market for electronic publications.

Whilst the Internet offers the means to publish cheaply and to reach a global audience, the extent to which it currently offers a range of resources and services that can truly be claimed to equate to a Virtual Library is open to debate. An overview of a range of resources and services with respect to social work are outlined below.

Electronic Journals

It is now fifteen years since the first attempts at establishing Electronic Journals. Experience to date has been that many publishers have approached the Internet and electronic publishing with caution. Commercial publishers see the Internet not as a liberating technology, but as a threatening one - through loss of sales due to copyright abuse, or to an increase in competition from electronic journals, or the threat that the Internet poses to their dominance of the printed medium.

Development in electronic journals have to date concentrated primarily on scientific and scholarly journals, many funded by large national projects - such as:

Sociological Review which is part of a £15m eLib (Electronic Libraries) Project.

Psychiatry On-line, offers an alternative model - a low-cost electronic journal, which claims .5m accesses per month and several thousand registered users - a readership far in excess of most scientific journals.

However, the need for academics to publish in peer-reviewed scholarly journals to secure tenure and for professional recognition mitigates against the development of electronic journals, which are seen as an academically inferior product to their printed counterparts.

In addition to journals published solely in electronic format, there are an increasing range of titles which are being dually published - in print and electronically. Many of these are available through password-controlled access to subscribers to the printed version, such as Catchword which includes titles such as Carfax's Disability and Society.

IDEAL has recently been launched by the Academic Press, making available the full text of a range of their printed journals on a subscription basis to Universities through academic networks. This type of password-controlled access for the UK Higher Education community was pioneered by BIDS - the Bath Information and Database Services which makes a range of bibliographic databases available to Universities on a site licence basis.

More 'mainstream' journals, such as the British Medical Journal and the Health Service Journal, have developed WWW sites which typically make available some editorial material and a limited selection of full text of recent articles - a 'shop-window' approach, aimed at attracting subscriptions to the printed version.

Abstracting/tables of contents

For many years abstracting and indexing services, and Tables of Contents services have offered current awareness services to library users. A number of Internet services of this type have been developed, although perhaps not as many as might be anticipated. Table of Contents services, such as for Child Abuse and Neglect, can be made available quite easily be e-mail. An International Social Work Contents Page Service is available by both e-mail and on the WWW, making available the contents pages of a range of social work journals published throughout the world.

The ISI Electronic Library Project is designed to provide users with immediate desktop access to the tables of contents, bibliographic data, abstracts, and full images of the approximately 1,350 scholarly journals indexed in Current Contents - Life Sciences. The full text of articles will only be available to subscribers to the service.

The Australian Institute of Family Studies has mounted a range of bibliographies as part of its National Child Protection Clearing House, and Age Concern England have a range of bibliographies on a number of topics relating to older people. It is worth noting that both of these organisations have well established Information Services - AIFS have also published Australian Family Resources on CD-ROM, a collection of over 600 documents published by eleven key Australian organisations concerned with the well being of children and families.

Electronic Books

Whilst journals are of a size and structure which are suited to presentation on the WWW, monographs of any length are not suited to the Internet. Whilst the Gutenberg Project attracted a lot of publicity for making classic (and out of copyright) novels such as Jane Austen's 'Persuasion' available on the Internet it is difficult to see users either reading such lengthy novels on screen, or else printing it out, when copies are available cheaply in bookshops.

A hypertext guide to the Mental Health Act 1983 offers a rare example of a resource which exploits the WWW interface, with access to the Act by section and subject and with hypertext links within the text.

The UK Department of Health has recently made available the Hansard transcripts of proceedings in the House of Commons and House of Lords - a particularly useful Internet resource which in its printed version is expensive in both terms of cost and of shelf-space.

Newspapers

Whilst the Internet has WWW sites for a range of daily newspapers, such sites typically contain only part of the content of the daily printed versions rather than the entire content ('full text'). The most comprehensive range of full text of newspapers is available through the recently launched NewsEyeQ service, with charges of £20 per month and £2 per item retrieved - somewhat more expensive than an Internet account.

Electronic Document Delivery

For many years the Inter-Library Loan networks which academic and public libraries have developed have in effect formed a virtual library - making any book or journal article published accessible to any library user for a relatively low cost.

The UnCover service makes available articles from a wide range of journal titles by fax or e-mail (following credit card payment) - a form of Virtual Inter-Library Loan service. Whilst more expensive than traditional Inter-Library Loan, UnCover does offer a 24 hour or faster document supply. The coverage of social work material is limited, although it does make possible a single transaction for a particularly difficult to obtain article, as opposed to having to take out a monthly or annual subscription.

Databases

For many librarians the attention being given to the Internet is quite bemusing as there is a sense of deja vu, and of 're-inventing the wheel'. Since the mid-1980s a range of databases have been available 'on-line' at relatively low cost (a pay per record retrieved basis). including:

NASW Social Work Abstracts (no longer available on-line)

DHSS-DATA - the UK Department of Health library

Sociological Abstracts

PsycInfo

Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts

Nursing and Allied Health

Medline

Whilst their search interfaces have not until recently been particularly user-friendly, it is the case that the user can connect to them with an expectation of either finding information on a particular topic quite quickly as the content and method of indexing each database is made clear to the user - a rather different matter to the Internet, where finding useful information is not a simple matter for the novice user.

Many of the databases listed above are now available in CD-ROM format, and an increasing number of available solely on CD-ROM. SilverPlatter's Electronic Reference Library is attempting to utilise both the WWW and CD-ROM to offer a seamless mixture of accessibility of their databases in both formats (including NASW's Social Work Abstracts +, and the American Association of Retired Persons' AgeLine).

The National Institute for Social Work's caredata CD, and the National Children's Bureau's ChildData are only available on CD-ROM, whilst VolNet and the Centre for Policy on Ageing's AgeInfo are both available on CD-ROM and accessible with some restrictions on the WWW. caredata CD has

begun to add full-text of articles from a range of titles (Social Work in Europe, Care Plan, Research Policy and Planning, Elders), and ChildData contains the full text of articles from Children and Society.

It is crucial to be aware of the range of information resources available through a variety of channels - printed, CD-ROM, and the Internet - and to understand how these relate to each other, to make effective use of them. None provide a fully comprehensive resource, but complement each other.

Catalogues/search engines

The Internet has replaced a range of quite cumbersome text-based tools such as Archie, Veronica, WAIS, gopher with the ubiquitous WWW. Until recently the WWW threatened to standardise access to the Internet in a manner which would have made life a lot easy for most users. However, the waters are being muddied again with developments, often in competition, over Java/Active X, Netscape/Internet Explorer, intranet and extranets.

There are a multiplicity of 'search engines' on the Internet each claiming their own unique service in indexing Internet resources. Hotbot offers a searchable index to every word on over 54 million WWW pages. However, it frequently requires the use of 'phrase searching' and boolean (AND OR NOT) searching to narrow down the number of retrieved records. Hotbot also offers, quite usefully, the facility to search only material from certain countries - which can reduce the otherwise overwhelming amount of US material.

One of the first search engines, Yahoo has now established country specific search engines, in competition to the likes of the Yellow Pages. However, Yahoo's social work listings are far from comprehensive.

Virtual Librarians - Cybrarians?

There is a key role for librarians to utilise their skills in organising the Internet, and an making use of their experience in searching databases and in evaluating the validity of information retrieved to make cyberspace an easier place for other users. Many subject guides on the Internet have been established by librarians, such as the comprehensive Internet and e-mail Resources on Ageing maintained by Joyce A. Post at the Philadelphia Geriatric Center.

In fact, the Policy Studies Institute some ten years ago exploring the use of Information Technology in Social Services Departments quoted a report : 'A new breed of 'knowledge workers' is being created on the back of the rapid use by companies of on-line databases for crucial business or research information. The professional information brokers act as intermediaries and specialise in economic searches on specialised databases.' (Forrest & Williams, 1987)

In order for libraries to be used effectively by their uses, material has to be identified, collected, organised and signposted. The Virtual Library is no different.

Virtual Library Users

Whilst a minority of IT-literate individuals in the social work field currently make use of the Internet, the majority will rely on an information intermediary to locate and retrieve information for them. The vast majority of social work agencies are unlikely to enable electronic networking amongst their staff as an integral part of their job, one of a range of barriers to take-up by practitioners (Schoech & Smith, 1995)

Usage of the Internet reflects the fact that the academic sector still has an advantage in terms of low cost access, desk-top connections to the Internet, and high-speed connections. For browsing, or grazing for information, for simply surfing to come across items by serendipity, the Internet, both the WWW and e-mail discussion lists suit the academic mind-set and not the practitioner (Berman, 1996).

The Internet is less suited for the practitioner, whose information needs are often of a different type - a sudden need to find out a particular item of information, or to find out who has faced a similar problem. The practitioner wants to get in, search for the information, find it, and get out quickly. And for the irregular user, this is not possible on the Internet.

The Future

The resources mentioned in this article are by no means a comprehensive listing, but merely a representative sample aimed at mapping out the type of material currently available electronically. The Internet and CD-ROM databases are still at an early stage of development, and as more individuals and organisations take up these technologies, and as more publishers and information providers take advantage of the opportunities that are offered in exploiting a radically new medium, the picture will change rapidly.

Whether the picture becomes clearer in time, and develops into a truly seamless, one-stop Virtual Library with a wealth of readily accessible resources, remains to be seen.

References

  • Harley A J. (1981),Towards the virtual library. in The Nationwide provision and use of information - report
  • of the proceedings of the Joint Conference of the Library Association, Aslib and the IIS, 15-19 Sept 1980. London: Library Association,
  • Forrest J & Williams S, (1987) New Technology and Information Exchange in Social Services.London: Policy Studies Institute,.
  • Schoech D & Smith K K, (1995), Use of electronic networking for the enhancement of mental health
  • services. Behavioral Healthcare Tomorrow, January/February, pp.23-29.
  • Berman Y, (1996), Discussion groups on the Internet as sources of information: the case of social work.
  • Aslib Proceedings, 48(2), February, pp.31-36.

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Last updated:
3 November 2000
The journal has now ceased publication (2003)