EMERGING PATTERNS OF COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT IN AN EXPANDING RESOURCE
SHARING, ELECTRONIC INFORMATION, AND NETWORK ENVIRONMENT: REPORT OF A CONFERENCE
RACHEL MILLER
Head, Retrieval Services
University of Kansas Libraries
Lawrence, KS 66045-2800
Internet: rmiller@ ukans.edu
The 1996 Oklahoma Conference, sponsored by the University of Oklahoma Libraries and the University of Oklahoma Foundation, took place in Norman on March 7 and 8, with approximately 115 participants. After words of welcome from Nancy L. Mergler, Interim Senior Vice President and Provost at the University of Oklahoma, the conference theme was introduced by Sul Lee, Dean, University Libraries. Following the pattern of previous Oklahoma Conferences, eight speakers presented papers and answered questions from the audience, sparking lively discussions which continued over coffee breaks and a reception held at the end of the first day. The full papers will be published in the Journal of Library Administration. Brief summaries follow.
Library Collections and Distance Information: New Models of Collection Development for the 21st Century--Harold Billings, Director, University Libraries, University of Texas at Austin
Billings opened his presentation with a review of the changes that are occurring in the information environment. Print publishing continues to increase, but a growing proportion of information is in digital form, and "distance information" is increasing exponentially. This trend is forcing libraries to develop policies for building and managing melded "mega-collections" of paper and digital information. Information technology is transforming the university and moving libraries in unanticipated directions. Libraries will be relegated to the role of museums unless they can become facilitators of information retrieval: negotiating contracts for electronic information, introducing new cost-recovery mechanisms, developing policies for collection development and resource sharing which take electronic information into account, and seeking always to provide information as cost efficiently as possible.
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Historically, universities have been conceived of as places where scholars gather and students follow, but in cyberspace "all roads lead to digital Rome." Nevertheless, Billings argued, because libraries are still primarily paper based, delivery remains one of their most critical problems. Distance learning depends on the new distance information. New technologies which make it possible to distribute scholarship and learning require distributed fiscal responsibility. Just as the scarcity of resources has resulted in managed health care and HMOs, it will also lead to managed information programs and IMOs. Such management practices as centrally coordinated consortial purchases (illustrated by Tex-Share) can help libraries keep up with continually increasing costs and service demands. Collection development policies today, Billings observed in conclusion, cannot focus only on the building and management of local collections but also must reflect consortial decisions about the use of fiscal resources, deal with the evolving relationships between new information technologies, and address increasingly important issues such as copyright.
Responding to a question about differences in the availability of digital information across disciplines, Billings commented that the electronic environment may be temporarily accentuating inequities that already existed in the print environment. However, he sees the beginnings of a "democratizing" trend that may level such differences. Asked whether universities will begin to see technology infrastructure costs as the new "black hole," Billings acknowledged this as a real possibility and reiterated the importance of persuading administrators of the need for new information technology.
Library Collections at Centurys End: Lessons .from American Express--Genevieve Owens, Program Manager for Information Resources Selection, Bucknell University
Owens began her talk by alluding to Billings' article, "The Tomorrow Librarian" [1] and agreeing with his statement that librarians will continue to be needed in the electronic information future. Even in a fully digital environment, researchers will need librarians' mediation skills. If libraries respond to change by providing the services users need, they will survive.
Libraries should approach the process of building services by first developing an outward orientation. Owens suggested that they can learn how to do this from the recent experience of American Express, whose market share dropped from 24.8% to 16.1% between 1990 and 1995. Arguing that parallels exist in the library world, she cited recent research on academic departments' purchases of materials that duplicate library holdings or that the library cannot afford to buy [2]. To avoid losing market share, libraries must cultivate change. The marketing strategies which American Express implemented for its own recovery in recent years hold lessons for libraries. Owens mentioned three, all of which place primary emphasis on customers' needs and wants:
1. Co-branding: American Express offered the Delta Skymiles Optima Card in partnership with Delta Airlines. Similarly, libraries can enter into partnerships with vendors to provide new library services.
2. Brand extension: American Express introduced the Optima and Optima True Grace Cards, both credit rather than charge cards. Within the library world, building multimedia collec- tions and laboratories could be viewed as a type of brand extension. Libraries should be aware of the risk that new formats could be rapidly superseded and prove difficult to preserve.
3. Market segmentation: American Express targeted specialized services and rewards to likely consumers whom it identified through its database of information on customer purchasing habits. The flexible, customized reports provided by today's integrated library systems can enable libraries to extract transaction data for use in managing collections and planning services. Privacy issues, of course, must also be weighed.
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Designing Serial Collections for the 21st Century--Chuck Hamaker, Assistant Dean for Collection Development, Louisiana State University Libraries
Building on his previous Oklahoma Conference presentations, Hamaker provided an update on the LSU Libraries' efforts to "redesign" its serial collections. In 1994, after a $446,000 cancel- lation project, the library began offering free document delivery of articles from cancelled journals. The use of UnCover for unmediated ordering and the Reveal table of contents service were introduced and actively promoted to faculty and graduate students. Hamaker characterized as reasonable so far the costs of these document delivery initiatives; only in the case of a single journal have the costs of individual articles ordered exceeded the annual price of a subscription. In FY95 users ordered 2,092 articles from 936 journals at a cost of about $25,000. Articles ordered from Elsevier journals cost $2,100 while subscriptions to these journals would have totaled $84,000. These data support the key underlying fact, Hamaker argued, that in many journals only a small percentage of the articles are of interest to scholars. Therefore, he added, it is more cost effective to purchase those individual articles than to subscribe to the entire journal. LSU bibliographers, together with faculty, are using the data gained from this project to evaluate the serials collection, not under the threat of a cancellation project but rather for the purpose of using limited library resources more effectively.
Commenting on the Association of Research Libraries' FY95 statistics on trends in serial subscriptions, Hamaker pointed out that the library community has been unable so far to end the serials crisis. To keep the titles they currently own until 2006, 10 years from now, most libraries will have to double their serials budgets. With this in mind, LSU bibliographers worked with faculty in the sciences, agriculture, and engineering to identify the journals they needed for research and teaching, whether owned or not by the library. They asked faculty to specify whether the journals they identified had to be available in-house or whether access through document delivery would suffice. The results of this process enabled the library to cancel almost 300 subscriptions to journals that no faculty identified as needed. The average faculty member needed 28 journals; of these, they wanted 21 in-house and would accept document delivery for the remaining seven. Of science journals owned, 44% were of interest to only one faculty member. Now that bibliographers know which faculty members need which journals in the collection, when a faculty member leaves, the library can review and possibly cancel the subscriptions that were listed only by that one individual; when new faculty arrive, the library can offer to start new subscriptions.
Hamaker cautioned that this approach requires a change in collection development attitudes and a recognition that, in many areas, the library is not building an archival collection. With traditional subscription-based approaches, the library could not meet faculty journal needs. Subscriptions to the nearly 1,000 journals that were identified as needed and not currently owned would have cost over $400,000. Instead, by identifying the most cost-effective method to provide access to these titles, this year the library has been able to generate $50,000 for new subscriptions. With these resources, the library decided to support interdisciplinary subject areas (such as weather and climate) and to buy the cheapest journals among those that were used the most.
In reply to a comment from the audience that the LSU strategy is not appropriate in disciplines, such as history, that are poorly covered by commercial document delivery suppliers, Hamaker said that the model can be applied in some social science fields, such as psychology and education, and in the sciences. He added that if a library can gain control of the science portion of its budget, the rest will be far easier to manage. Responding to a question about faculty expectations of document delivery services, Hamaker stated that most articles were received within 24 hours and that problems had been experienced only with the quality of illustrations. A certain proportion of the faculty (25% in chemistry, for example) hate document delivery, however, and continue to want
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subscriptions in-house. At LSU a by-product of the serials redesign process is increased ongoing interaction between selectors and faculty.
Emerging Patterns of Partnership in Collection Development: A Subscription Vendor's Perspec- t ive-Kit Kennedy, Director, Academic Sales, Readmore Academic Services
Kennedy began her exploration of partnerships by inviting the audience to what she termed a "conundrum--the place where partnerships can happen." She commented on the enigmatic qualities of partnerships (rooted in community, selectively inclusive, mutable, experimental, and ubiquitous) and then listed six types of vendor and library partnerships: unmediated (e.g., vendors' Internet home pages); resource sharing; partnerships for hire; outsourcing; self- or intra-partner- ships; and advisory partnerships. Resource sharing should be recognized as the "patriarch" of partnerships. No library stands alone; all are linked in the great "chain of access." Document delivery has an inherent anti-resource sharing bias, she said, urging libraries to protect their local collections and the fringe materials that make those collections unique. The challenge of libraries and vendors is to manage well their portfolio of partnerships. If they do this, they will survive.
Kennedy's talk was followed by a brief exchange of comments on the question: Are libraries really partners with their vendors, or do they have client or employer relationships with them instead? Kennedy acknowledged that many library-vendor relationships are now formal and contractual. A comment from the audience pointed out that partners need not have the same objectives, and that partnership between for-profit and not-for-profit partners can succeed but must maintain a delicate balance.
Friends or Predators': Using Academic Periodical Price Histories to Make Subscription Deci- sions-Anthony Ferguson, Associate University Librarian, Columbia University
Ferguson's paper made the argument that a journal's price history is an important variable that libraries should consider, in addition to quality and user need, when selecting titles for their collections. He described periodical pricing practices as either "friendly" or "predatory." "Friendly" are those journals whose prices rose over the past decade at the same or a lower rate than the library's budget (in Columbia's case, 8% per year), and "predatory" are those whose prices increased more than that, requiring that other titles be cut or not purchased at all. Columbia conducted an analysis of the 5-year pricing histories of a 4,000-title sample (excluding reference works and titles without long-term research value). Based on the results, Ferguson offered the following generalizations:
1. There are friendly periodicals: 66% of the sample inflated at a lower rate than Columbia's budget.
2. There are predatory periodicals: 34% of sample inflated at a higher rate than Columbia's budget.
3. Social science titles were more predatory than science titles (based on the rate of increase, not the base cost).
4. Both foreign and domestic publishers are predators. 5. Both friends and predators practice discriminatory pricing. 6. Most predatory journals are issued by commercial publishers (71%).
The 75 friendliest titles averaged a $580 subscription cost; the 75 most predatory averaged $715. The subscription costs of the 75 friendliest titles actually decreased by 6% over the 5-year period; the 75 most predatory increased by 196%. Some of the findings were surprising. For example, among science and engineering titles, the percentage of friendly titles was higher than the
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percentage of predatory titles; also, there were twice as many foreign publishers in the friendly than in the predatory category.
As suggestions for how these findings might be applied by selectors, Ferguson presented his "Rule of 5":
1. Before placing a new subscription, check the title's pricing history and subscribe only if the library can afford similar price increases in future.
2. Target predatory titles for usage studies and faculty evaluations. 3. Send price history data for the titles whose prices have increased the most to the faculty,
together with document delivery cost information, and ask if purchase of individual articles would be an acceptable alternative to in-house subscriptions. Tell faculty the results of usage studies.
4. Notify editors and publishers of your price history findings. ("Whine specifically.") When you decide not to subscribe to a title, explain your reasons to the publisher.
5. When cancelling a journal, send a letter of explanation to the publisher and a copy to the chair of the academic department in the affected discipline.
Ferguson then asked: Are there alternatives to this strategy which will meet the needs of libraries as well as publishers? He contrasted the results of two different price models: in the first, a journal's price rises at a high rate, which leads to a decrease in readership each year; in the second, its price rises at a low rate, which produces an increase in readership. Ferguson suggested that publishers and libraries might negotiate fixed prices for an agreed-upon period of time. In conclusion, he remarked, many journal titles are friendly, but those that account for 60% to 80% of serials budgets are causing libraries serious problems. Libraries need new funds to support document delivery and electronic information, but they will have to generate those funds themselves through strategies such as the use of price history as a criterion in selection and cancellation decisions.
Collecting, Sharing, and Networking: The Role and Responsibilities of a National Library-- William Sittig, Chief, Science and Technology Division, Library of Congress
Sittig provided a description of changes and trends among national libraries today. National libraries, which are among the largest, most important, and most influential in the international scholarly community, are affected by the same economic and technological forces as other libraries. Typically, national libraries collect national imprints (books and serials, as well as multimedia materials, maps, and other resources), often using the instrument of legal deposit. They may also acquire foreign sources about the country, or needed to support government operations and research. Today, most national libraries are scaling back their acquisition programs. For example, the National Library of Canada now collects only Canada-related subjects. Japan has moved to a more networked national library emphasis, with the National Diet Library serving as a library of last resort. The National Library of Australia has constricted its mission to Australian imprints and foreign materials of extreme economic and political interest to Australia, with emphasis on Southeast Asia rather than Europe and the Americas. A number of national libraries are involved in digitization projects. Sittig listed several examples, including the British Library's Initiative for Access and the joint activities of the Vatican Library and IBM. He also mentioned the G7 Countries' Information Society Summit, which outlined the goal of a global infrastructure that will make information available to all, including people and countries without the resources to pay for it.
Sittig explained that the United States has two official national libraries, the National Library of
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Agriculture and the National Library of Medicine, and one de facto, the Library of Congress. Although the U.S. government's mood is one of retrenchment and budgets are not expected to grow, LC remains committed to comprehensive, international collecting. To deal with static appropriations, LC is:
1. Cooperating with the National Library of Agriculture and the National Library of Medicine to reduce duplication.
2. Participating in the Association of Research Libraries' foreign acquisition projects. 3. Cancelling duplicate serial subscriptions, print copies of electronic sources, and many
foreign newspapers, and initiating only the highest priority new subscriptions. 4. Obtaining private funding for the acquisition and processing of special collections and rare
books. Sittig also explained that LC is taking advantage of new electronic technologies to disseminate
its collections. It has assumed a leadership role in building the national and international digital library, with the goal of digitizing 5 million items by the year 2000, and half of the collection by 2030. LC is also involved in copyright management issues, the preservation of electronic infor- mation, and strengthening electronic services to Congress and other users. With continued support from Congress, he stated in conclusion, LC may be able to fulfill its basic responsibility to build and sustain our national collections.
Will Electronic Information Finally Result in Real Resource Sharing ?--Frederick Lynden, Asso- ciate University Librarian for Technical Services, Brown University
Lynden began his presentation with comments on the extraordinary growth and increasing importance of electronic information. Adopting electronic technologies and services involves major costs, however, particularly for equipment and staff expertise. He argued that document delivery services present significant disadvantages, such as the fact that publishers do not allow delivery of many journal titles or set very high copyright fees (e.g., Journal of Academic Librarianship). The lack of a single centralized document delivery service requires staff or users to query several to locate the source for a particular title. He said it is a misconception that access is cheaper than ownership, that publishers will take responsibility for preserving their titles, and that document delivery costs can be manageable. The access model taken to an extreme is a model for self-destruction and results in the "pooling of poverty" since less is available to access or share. He challenged libraries to strengthen their resource sharing efforts instead.
Summarizing his observations of resource sharing today, Lynden listed "the 10 C's":
1. 2.
3. 4.
5.
Coordinated collection development (for example, the Research Triangle libraries). Collaborative collection development (acquisition of materials from a central pool as practiced by the University of California system plus Stanford). Consortial cost sharing (such as Tex-Share, VIVA, and Georgia's Galileo). Cooperative holdings agreements (such as Boston Library Consortium). Consortial sharing of electronic resources projects).
those developed for chemistry titles by the
(for example, the CIC's electronic journals
6. Common interlibrary loan (as developed by OhioLINK). 7. Cooperative or shared storage (for example, the Center for Research Libraries). 8. Cooperative education and expertise (such as implemented by VIVA's regional resource
centers). 9. Common or linked online systems (such as Louisiana's LUIS).
10. Cooperative delivery systems (for example, GMRLC's interstate courier system).
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Lynden then identified "10 R ' s " that characterize "real" resource sharing:
1. The requirements of users are most often satisfied. 2. Materials are ready when users need them. 3. Materials are readily available when users look for them. 4. It realizes savings. 5. It reduces costs. 6. Resources are shared nationally. 7. Resources are increased locally. 8. Resources of a monetary nature can be obtained for participants. 9. Retention records are kept.
10. It remains in place, supported by a high degree of mutual trust among partners.
Lynden urged libraries to strengthen their resource sharing efforts in 10 ways:
1. Reemphasizing collection coordination, learning from the models and plans in place in the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, and the U.S., from the example of medical libraries.
2. Coordinating collection information at the state and regional level, for example, by maintaining a preservation clearinghouse of data on book and serial last copies.
3. Sharing remote storage facilities. 4. Negotiating common site licenses for electronic services. 5. Cooperating on cataloging and indexing efforts (for example, cataloging Internet resources,
developing an umbrella index to journals available from document delivery suppliers). 6. Converting print data to full text and creating a central database to record this activity and
avoid duplication of efforts. 7. Reporting detailed serials holdings to utilities, as medical libraries do to Docline, resulting
in interlibrary loan fill rates of 92% to 95%. 8. Experimenting with user-initiated interlibrary loan within consortia. 9. Negotiating consortial purchases.
10. Analyzing and learning from successes and failures in the resource sharing arena.
Lynden added, in conclusion, that although technology offers great potential, the ultimate success of resource sharing will be determined by how libraries approach political issues.
New Partners for Collection Development--Rebecca Lenzini, President, CARL Corporation (In Lenzini's absence, her paper was read by Ward Shaw, CEO and Chairman of CARL)
Lenzini's paper reviewed recent developments in electronic products and services, offered examples of the different types now available, and summarized the issues facing collection development. Traditionally, database selection has been done by reference departments or com- mittees, not by collection developers, but recent trends in electronic information are merging the roles of collection developers and database selectors. These librarians must now work not only with book and serial vendors but also with database producers, abstracting and indexing services, local system vendors, and publishers, as well as with the creators and distributors of new services aimed squarely at end users rather than at libraries. A key development of the past few years was the emergence of combined current awareness and document delivery services. At the same time, abstracting and indexing services moved from CD-ROM to online access and began providing full text in addition to citations. The first gateways were created by library system vendors and utilities working with abstracting and indexing services (OCLC's FirstSearch and RLG's Citadel, for
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example, provide full text as well as citations with links to interlibrary loan and document suppliers).
Lenzini listed six additional models of products and services that combine database access with links to full text and document delivery:
1. Databases offered through the producer's own host or gateway service (for example: EBSCOHost, IAC's Infotrac, UMI's ProQuest Direct, and CARL's UnCover).
2. Databases offered by a database consolidator through a local Wide Area Network or the Internet (for example: OVID Technologies and Silverplatter's Electronic Reference Li- brary).
3. "Aggregated" databases that are targeted at end users and provide general interest information in full text (for example: Infonautics' "Electric Library" and IAC's "Cog- nito' ').
4. "Targeted" databases containing specialized information (for example: Knight Ridder's ProBase, BusinessBase, and ScienceBase, and SilverPlatter's Physicians' Home Page).
5. Journals provided directly on the World Wide Web, either by their publishers (for example: Wiley and Elsevier) or by printers and others offering electronic journal production services (such as Catchword, Cadmus' Journals-At-Home, and the JSTOR project for conversion of core history and economics journals, funded by the Mellon Foundation).
6. Works loaded on the web directly by their own authors, generally for pre-publication discussion.
All these models offer either full text or links to services that provide the full text. The technology supports very high quality color and graphics. Compliance with Z39.50 protocols is becoming widespread. Another trend is the provision of links from a database to a particular library's holdings, which enables the library to maximize use of its owned collections. Database producers are increasingly either partnering with or acquiring document delivery services (for example: EBSCO purchased Dynamic Information and Knight Ridder purchased CARL UnCover). It is important to realize that most commercial suppliers still depend on library collections for the bulk of their fulfillment, a situation that is unlikely to change soon.
Collection developers have the opportunity to influence the electronic information industry as they grapple with the following challenges:
1. How to evaluate the options and choices, which continue to multiply. 2. How to address equitably the needs of undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers. 3. How to choose among the three pricing models that are emerging for electronic information:
transaction, license/subscription, and concurrent users. 4. How to deal with copyright--perhaps the most important issue of all.
In answer to a question about how electronic information providers decide what services to provide, Shaw replied that they usually gather data informally: through participation in confer- ences, by observing their competition, and by watching closely trends in the overall scholarly research environment. Other questions addressed the "reductionist tendency" evident in the limited number of journals available in full text or from article suppliers, and the continued disparity between the sciences and other fields in the electronic information arena. Shaw acknowl- edged the continuing role of libraries in influencing all the players in the market and predicted that inequities would indeed become worse as information providers--whether commercial or no t - - "follow the dollar."
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Lee then brought the 1996 Oklahoma Conference to a close. He thanked the speakers for their thought-provoking presentations and invited the audience to return next year, when another set of speakers will address once again the challenges facing academic libraries as they work to meet the needs of faculty and students.
REFERENCES
1. Billings, Harold. "The Tomorrow Librarian," Wilson Library Bulletin, 69 (January 1995), 34-37. 2. Reinke, Christa Easton. "Beyond the Fringe: Administratively Decentralized Collections at the University of Michigan,"
Library Acquisitions: Practice & Theory, 18 (1994), 157-164.
