This report describes a Study conducted during the period March to July 1997, as part of a JISC-funded programme of eLib Supporting Studies concerning the social, cultural and economic perspectives of the electronic library. The research was undertaken by a small team of researchers from the International Institute for Electronic Library Research at De Montfort University, Milton Keynes.
A first deliverable was submitted to the Tavistock Institute in March 1997, comprising a literature review and criteria for modelling eLib cultural change. A revised version of this deliverable has been incorporated into this final report.
The original aims and objectives of the Study, as stated in the call for proposals, included an examination of eLib for its assumptions and models regarding cultural change, and its success in "achieving cultural changes that are supportive of the development and uptake of electronic media and network services and their integration in the work contexts of librarians and teaching and research staff". The Study was also charged with making recommendations for the strategy to be adopted by successor programmes to eLib, to ensure that organisational and human issues were built in appropriately to ensure future cultural change.
Cultural change is an important objective of the eLib programme. If electronic libraries are to be implemented successfully, some shifts in culture have long been recognised to be essential: the 1995 Anderson Report noted that the obstacles to making research information delivery complete were "mainly legal and cultural, rather than technical."
In many ways it is useful to say what cultural change is not. Although the following factors may all influence cultural change, they do not in themselves represent a definition of cultural change. Cultural change is not:
There are inevitable difficulties in defining cultural change. An emphasis needs to be put on how people think, work and act as a community, their relationships, perceptions and attitudes. The way a system, routine or procedure is shaped depends to a large extent on both the attitudes and perceptions of the people and organisational structures involved, as well as other external forces. Language and communication is very important. How the use of language changes over time (the words, meanings and concepts which become an accepted part of the natural terminology of a community) provide evidence of changes in culture, although such detailed discourse analyses were precluded from this Study by its brevity.
Cultural change has been defined by the Tavistock Institute (1996b) as follows:
Cultural change involves new frames of reference, new ways of acting. Cultural change results from actors acquiring new symbolic resources (cognitive frames/paradigms: concepts, knowledge, skills) in changed structural contexts (organisational contexts, work processes) where these symbolic resources are meaningful, deployable and operational.
This theoretical definition, while precise and useful in the social science context, was found to be too unwieldy to be of use in the present Study, where the concept of cultural change had to be communicated to busy librarians, information scientists and others. Teasing it apart, and using more accessible language, the definition appears to have two main strands:
This definition assumes that both the formal (structural) and informal (socio-cognitive) aspects of stakeholders' work must change in some way for the 'culture' to have been fundamentally changed - but changes to just one aspect or the other are obviously still of interest (see also the discussion of this distinction in the literature review section). The word 'lasting' has been inserted above to emphasise that changes brought about by the initiation of an eLib project, but which do not last beyond the project's end, cannot be counted as useful cultural change. However, it is too early to tell at the time of writing whether such changes will be seen, since most eLib projects have only recently been completed or have yet to finish.
From our discussions with project staff we found a considerable degree of scepticism and cynicism regarding the whole concept of cultural change as applied to the eLib programme. There was a strong feeling that cultural change would happen anyway, and that projects were under so much pressure to deliver products and disseminate results rapidly that they could not be expected to concern themselves with these intangible, abstract issues. Many people feel that cultural change is a subsidiary issue that only gained in significance during the evaluation procedures instigated by the Tavistock Institute.
Although the Study took a detailed look at individual projects, the research aimed to assess the impact on cultural change of the eLib programme as a whole rather than the effects at the specific project level. The findings are therefore reported in general terms, and do not identify individual projects or persons by name.
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The Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) was funded
by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)
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