A couple of weeks ago I posted about what went wrong with Intute, and towards the end I gave a few personal details about how I was prevented from presenting, to the rest of the Intute team, a new (and I thought exciting) alternative plan to that of cataloguing the best of the Internet. The personal details were included because without them, no-one would have understood why I didn’t present the new ideas, and also the lengths that were taken to stop me presenting them at a meeting to which I had been invited by the Intute Management. Amongst the feedback to the post was a rather insulting and inaccurate Comment which called my past contribution to Intute ‘increasingly negative’, ‘disruptive’ and ‘vindictive’. The Commenter, who I don’t remember from Intute days, and if he was involved, he has left no traceable contribution that I can find, went on to say that “…more than a few people breathed a sigh of relief that you weren’t involved further.”
That last bit is probably correct, especially if it refers to some of those who continued to be employed to catalogue Internet resources.
As a manager of one of Intute’s ‘Hubs’, one of several things that concerned me at the time was the cost of cataloguing Internet resources. I believe this was eventually calculated to be something like (including overheads, etc) £80 per record*.
Here’s an example of a catalogue record from Intute:
International Journal of Alternative Propulsion
This journal site includes sample issues with abstracts, bibliographic details and pdf format full text articles covering alternative propulsion and alternative energy generation systems.
The journal includes original research papers, literature review reports, case studies of current interest, and book reviews. It is published by Inderscience.
Here are 163 similar records.
Of course, there was more to Intute than records like that. Intute actually did quite a lot of good work, there were some good informative blog entries, there was the Virtual Training Suite, and Intute helped more than a few people find quality Internet resources. But the Internet resource catalogue was always unfortunately kept at the heart of Intute, and JISC money was poured into it.
Intute, and its predecessors, got through a large amount of funding during the lifetime of the various services and projects. It must have been more than £10 million and perhaps even £20 million*. There seems to be little to show for that investment today.
In 2005 the wrong decision, at a key time, was taken with respect to Intute’s future. I remember an Intute meeting in, I think, Birmingham, where I argued that the service should progress beyond an Internet resource catalogue and become a much more useful service involving cross-searching of various bibliographic databases and more (on which a lot of work had already been done). I suggested that the actual Internet resource catalogue should be drastically cut in size, and that the resulting savings in costs could be put to better use. There were several people at that meeting who agreed with me. Obviously, the cataloguers didn’t agree.
If I remember correctly, it was the Intute Board who took the decision to continue to concentrate mainly on an Internet resource catalogue, and from this point onwards, Intute was doomed to a slow death, even though further £ millions went into funding it.
Now – from the abusive Comment in my previous post I deduce that there may be some people who would like all of this, and more, buried. The message is clear – if you bring it up, your character may be questioned. There will be flak. It’s already the case that some people are reluctant to say much in public about these sorts of things (because you never know who might mark one of your future bids for funding, etc), and not just matters relating to Intute, and the best course is therefore usually assumed to be: tow the line/keep quiet. This doesn’t affect me anymore, because I’m retired, and I’m prepared to bring things up, and I’m not put off doing so by personal abuse.
How on earth, in 2005 when Google had already gone public and when the popular search engines had already taken over ‘Search’, could a Board including university librarians and others who should have known better think that cataloguing the Internet, in order to produce a searchable database of about 80,000 records of the type above, have a future worth investing more £ millions?
Who gained from this decision, and in what ways? Did anyone make money (from consultancies, etc) from giving advice that influenced the decision? Was there other pressure? Was there a stitch up? Or – was it simply a dumb and costly decision?
Is there a can of worms here? It should be possible to raise such questions without receiving abuse.
For some recent musings about national level resource discovery services, and a researcher’s platform, read this post by Ed Chamberlain, and this post by Aaron Tay.
With the funding that was available, Intute would have been in a wonderful position to develop similar ideas and services in a way taylored to the best interests of academics, had that decision not been made by the Board. The decision by the Board seems to me like a major screw-up of JISC funding; and libraries, students and researchers are still suffering from it. That’s why this stuff is still relevant today.
As a footnote, if my suggestions to Intute at the time were disruptive according to this definition, then I’m actually proud of that fact.
* If you have more accurate figures, please let me know.
“How on earth, in 2005 when Google had already gone public and when the popular search engines had already taken over ‘Search’, could a Board including university librarians and others who should have known better think that cataloguing the Internet, in order to produce a searchable database of about 80,000 records of the type above, have a future worth investing more £ millions?”
My recollection is of having similar thoughts at the time. I had been fully expecting the review to recommend ending the RDN rather than continuing it. I was pretty gobsmacked when a further 5 years was agreed. But by then I had not been involved for some years, and did not have any detail on the background. I doubt a conspiracy of any kind, and suspect it was felt to be worth “one last try” at the idea.
FWIW both RDN and Intute did good work in many areas other than the “cataloguing the web” bit.
I’ve been looking through my email folders, and surprisingly can’t find any with primary focus on the subject gateways, the RDN or Intute (but it was mostly a bit outside the eLib programme). There are mentions of the RDN in many places, especially discussions on the DNER (the proposed Distributed National Electronic Resource, which I guess became the Information Environment). At that time, I think we thought the RDN would play a key role in coordinating cross-access to the many resources that would underly the DNER. I even remember suggesting that the RDN hub (then at Kings in London) should be part of the JISC team rather than separate (this was at the time when Lorcan Dempsey was Director), but this didn’t fit the model the Powers That Be had in mind.
I did not find any direct reference to the £80 per catalogued record, but it doesn’t surprise me.
In the end, to my mind, the purported superiority of the SBG/RDN/Intute model over Internet Search was based on a flawed, patronising view of the capabilities of internet users at the HE level to discern quality in Internet resources. The masses have proved that view both wrong and right! But the masses also proved that they preferred making up their own minds in assessing the wealth of resources presented to them by increasingly smart search algorithms, rather than searching comparatively minute, patchy but “quality” resource hubs. So by and large they used search and did not use Intute.
Thanks for that comment, Chris.
The RDN Hub was in fact part of the JISC team when I was there.
Similarly, for many years I used to save useful web content on my hard drive. Eventually I grew to trust google instead.
I recall a much earlier attempt to catalogue the internet was born in Scotland in 1995. http://eprints.rclis.org/bitstream/10760/4787/1/cat1rep.htm
Hi Mick,
That doesn’t predate the SBIGs, which became the RDN, which became Intute, by very long.
In response to your request for more accurate figures: I worked at Intute: Health and Life Sciences from 2005 – 2010 as manager (after your time Roddy). We had a large number of external contributors – we paid £5 for a new record and £2.50 for a review of an existing one.
Thanks Jackie. At EEVL, in the early years, we had volunteers who added records, and a further figure I remember is for the cost per record, including overheads, at the EEVL Hub, which was something like £32 or £35
Mike, Roddy,
Both SOSIG and OMNI predated eLib / 1995; I think they are both from 1993 in a basic form. A bit disappointed that http://www.sosig.ac.uk now no longer exists – at least EEVL and OMNI point to other things.
As you mentioned Catriona, there was a fair amount of experimentation with z39.50 around 95-98 but it never looked healthy in terms of a widely distributed pseudo RDN or Intute network in the long term. BUBL itself didn’t look like a long-term option (there’s no way JISC were going to fund both it and the RDN into the 2000s) and it nearly got sold off to a well-known Dutch information services company in 2001, but that fell through. That and [redacted] pretty much sealed its fate.
I really must write the damned book one day, as pretty much 20 years of JISC has gone by now; have got enough material on the various computers and in my England storage unit. I still have a first edition print edition of Ariadne I think signed by the four of us; Sothebys here I come…
JK (ex of UKOLN, ILRT, ROADS, OMNI, CDLR and erm the Outer Hebrides, in that order)
Thanks for that, John.