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Bulgarian Libraries and the Internet An Optimistic Story of a Pessimist "So where is the agora for the global community? In January 1992 after being for nearly 15 years a researcher and professor at the Institute of Mathematics of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS) I have taken the position of Director of the Central library of BAS, the oldest and largest research library in Bulgaria. The Academy at that time was a full member of EARN and hosted the Bulgarian node of it. It had also few X.25 links to EARN. So it happened that the CL of BAS has an interesting tradition and experience in networking and linking to different types of local and foreign computer networks. From my own perspective both as a Director of CL of BAS and as a Mathematician I shall try in few sentences to describe it and to make some conclusions. In 1994 the RTD networking in Bulgarian was still based only on the good old X.25 protocol with e-mail, ftp and listserv as service options. The only three international connections were via Bitnet1, EARN and EUnet2 provided by four operators: Bulpac, Sprint, UNICOM-B and Digital Sytems. Apart from X.25 all other East European countries at that time had already TCP/IP services. From 1992 for three full years up to the beginning of 1995 CL of BAS had an access (4.8-9.6Kb/sec licensed lines) to one old IBM mainframe (43XX) and one VAX machine. Both were 5 kilometers away and our licensed phone lines had to pass through two old analog telephone stations. Via these "Bitnet mainframe machines" we were connected to the Net. It was extremely naļve and interesting time. Getting to know closer the syntax of two old operating systems, one (VMS) still considered among the best up to the beginning the 90-ies, was a great experience. None of the Bulgarian libraries had at that time any DBs or a single bit of information ready to be accessed. From the beginning of 80-ies CL of BAS had been generating and supporting a "punched card" DB of the periodicals (more than 4000 titles) in its collections. Towards the end of 80-ies beginning of the 90-ies this significant old-fashioned DB was lost without being able to be converted and recorded on some sort of new magnetic type of media. At that time getting connected to different foreign library Gopher servers or telneting other ones was more like an interesting adventure than being of real use for the library and its clients. Nevertheless from time to time some useful inquiries had been done mainly in some American library Gopher servers. A couple of times it was possible to provide even online services that were not "typically librarian". For example, a user of the library approached us one day later in the afternoon with urgent request to help him to get in touch if possible with a colleague in Poland. The problem was that our client had no e-mail address and phone number of that colleague. The only known information about that person was that he is professor maybe in the city of Ljublin. I do remember very well that moment about 7 p.m. when at last I had written the correct syntax line (not an easy task) for the corresponding VMS command and a list of all (just imagine - all) Polish Bitnet users connected to the Net at that very moment was printed on the monitor of my PC. And among them "Oh, God!" a username that seemed to be the family name of the guy we were looking for - that was really he! In fact for me the EARN era was over a little bit earlier somewhere in 1993 when I realized that the old "punched-card" DB of the library periodicals was lost for ever. Few years before I got to know a little bit in SGML so, when the first real browsers and Websites came into being it was not unexpected - the future DBs should had to be from now on with "tagged data" or directly accessible via any browser without telneting options and implications. The EARN period was a short period for CL of BAS but full with a lot of enthusiasm. When thinking about the near future at that time we were more likely to consider the bottle as half-full than half-empty. In 1995 the era of TCP/IP protocol had started for the BAS and its Central Library, the Internet had come. Although the first commercial browsers and Websites had appeared in 1992 almost nobody except few professionals knew well at that time the emerging NET. Only later we started asking ourselves the question J.C.R. Licklider (1915-1990), one of the founding Fathers of the modern Net, had asked in 1978: "If we could look in on the future at say, the year 2000, would we see a unity, a federation, or a fragmentation? That is: would we see a single multi-purpose network encompassing all applications and serving everyone? Or a more or less coherent system of intercommunicating networks? Or an incoherent assortment of isolated noncommunicating networks... The middle alternative - the more or less coherent network of networks - appears to have a fairly high probability and also to be desirable..."3 [Licklider and Vezza 1978] Now we see that what J.C.R. Licklider had predicted as middle alternative turned to be completely true. We have "...the more or less coherent network of networks"- the Internet, the NET. But let's turn back to the experience. From 1995 our library, the CL of BAS, is trying to adapt itself to the NET, to the changing Internet environment and realities. What does it mean with respect to the local Bulgarian realities and are these efforts successful? Up until now all Bulgarian libraries, ours including, are trying to generate some sort of computer-based catalogs mainly of their new collections with just a few attempts for conversion of a certain parts of the old ones. From the beginning of the 90-ies the leading Bulgarian libraries as a lot others around the world are trying to implement something that could be classified as computer-based processing technology. The introduction of the new technologies in the libraries needs money, a lot of money, in a certain cases (National, big University and research libraries) quite a lot of money, know-how and support from outside the library community. In our country mainly librarians were and still are involved in the process of introduction of the new technologies in the libraries. During the last 7-8 years no one of the Bulgarian libraries had been successful to introduce a real "turn-key" computer-based system. It means nowhere has been done a profound system analysis and design before the implementation of a new software system. As a result none of the implementation of the specialized software library systems could be characterized as truly successful one. Of course it's not only the fault of the library managers. In our country, during the last 10 years, apart from the support from the library program of the Open Society Fund, just few dollars had been invested in this sector. In general for most of the Bulgarian libraries this period was time of enormous efforts to computerize at least some parts of their catalogs with minimum funding. In most of the cases it meant just a duplication of the card catalog's formats and standards with the help of software solutions from the 70-ies and 80-ies. Now we have to look back and ask ourselves could all these efforts be justified and if not what was wrong. My deep belief is that our libraries missed a lot; they missed the NET, the Internet. They were fixed on the computerization of the catalogs by any means and efforts and in some sense they had no time, no possibility to look outside this problem. In some sense the time "stopped" for them. Again it is not only their fault. Most of the librarians had been doing this job, as they understood it, honestly, selflessly with great devotion. During the last five years the NET was developing with giant steps. What our libraries had done and still are doing was of great value for the first half of the 90-ies but now, in the new virtual reality these "values" had undergone a severe "inflation" and need to be "denominated". Is it so important to spent most of your insufficient financial resources for the computerization of the catalogs of periodicals when you have no possibility to provide a lot of other Internet related services as access to diverse metadata and full-text DBs? I am sure the answer is "NO!" I shall give an example. CL of BAS is the oldest and largest (apart from the National library) research library in this country with large and diverse collections with periodicals. Most of these journals are foreign scientific journals published in Latin. 94% of our budget for periodicals is for journals in Pure and Applied sciences. Ten years ago this budget was more then one million USD, now it's four times less. Our old card catalog for the periodicals is still in relatively good shape and it is not yet Web accessible. Most of our clients use to live in Sofia and could have a de visu access to it as a whole and to certain parts of it in some additional sites in the city. So, they could have if they need an everyday awareness for the new incoming volumes. On the other side almost all of the professors and researchers at the Academy have constant access at their desks to the Internet. Via our Website they could check always some metadata DBs as for example SwetsNet. There they could find the content of every single volume among more than 16,000 titles of scientific journals in a week time from the date of their publication. A recent inquiry of mine among a lot of our researchers showed that although the number of periodicals was heavily cut most of them are coping with the situation with the help of the services mentioned above. In most of the cases when browsing SwetsNet one finds an interesting article he could send immediately an e-mail request to the author. The science nowadays is extremely international and in 9 cases out of 10 in a couple of days you get the full text of the article. This is the situation in Pure and Applied Sciences, still not all of the researchers in Humanities and Social sciences have constant Internet access at their desk. Apart from the national bibliography and certain specific collections the computerization and Web accessibility of the most of the catalogs of our libraries is now more valuable for the libraries themselves in order to keep their "backyards" in good shape and conditions than for their users. Still libraries, not only Bulgarian ones, are missing and bypassing a lot of chances for their development and conversion into modern mediators and generators of information. [An example from the American realities: Yahoo!] Traditionally libraries, Bulgarian including, are very conservative units and there are many reasons for that. Historically, being the main information resource during centuries, libraries could be considered as one of the main prototypes, preimages of the modern Internet that is more like the Babylon library from the famous story of Jorge Luis Borges. The Internet on the other side is the last phase of the eternal aspiration of the man to cope with the Entropy. But one should always remember that from the point of view of the Law of the never declining Entropy the only possible evolution is towards chaos, disorder. So, the libraries had a lot of reasons to be conservative [From "order" to "disorder" it is quite frequently just one step, from chaos to some sort of order it could be eternity] but it does not mean inactive. They have to find the proper modus in order to act adequately. Because of different reasons, mainly economical, it is most likely that the Universities, the research and mainly the corporative communities will always need intermediators in order to get in corresponding shapes, standards and formats the proper information and metainformation. Still libraries have relatively good know-how to be among the most important players in this game but their "instincts" still are more like "not to lose than to win". This is a losing strategy in the nowadays NET. The virtual information world is highly international and if your local social and political environment is not ready to adapted you definitely will be among the losers. Old Russian anekdot in modern interpretation. "What will happen with old, mother Russia if suddenly vodka disappears? As nothing in the Nature could be lost vodka will come into being somewhere. So, there Russia will emerge again." The same with the information. Whenever, wherever the raw data will use to "come into being" there will immediately emerge a unit with the mission to process these data and to disseminate it. People used to call this unit The Library during centuries. So, it is quite an optimistic short story of the Bulgarian libraries living without and with Internet during the last five years. A story told by a pessimist who could be treated as well informed optimist. Thinking about the NET, the Libraries and their future one could recall a fragment of the Talmudic text of the Genesis: "Twenty six attempts preceded the creation of the world and all of them were unsuccessful. The world of man came into being from the remains of these attempts. It is too fragile and it easily could be transformed, ruined into the Void. "Let's hope this attempt will be successful" - God said after the creation and this hope has been the eternal companion to the history of the World and Mankind, underlying from the very beginning that history is marked by uncertainty and relativity4. Notes
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