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Learning to compete: Competition, outsourcing, and academic libraries
Learning to Compete: Competition, Outsourcing, and Academic Libraries by Robert Renaud
Academic libraries face unprecedented competition from on campus units, private companies, and outsourcing firms. Using the theme of outsourcing, this article applies key concepts from competition theory to understand how new competitive forces are shaping the campus library, and how that theory can assist the library in making tactical decisions.
Robert Renaud is Team Leader, Bibliographic Access, The University
of Arizona Library, PO
Box 2 7 00.55, Tucson, Arizona
85 720-0055
.
F
or the first time in their history, academic libraries face the prospect of real competition. On campus, units ranging from central computing to the bookstore are beginning to offer services that either overlap with, or replace, services provided by the library.’ At the same time, private companies, including publishers and distributors, are attempting to exploit profitable niches such as document delivery and full-text searching, once the exclusive preserve of the library.2 Within libraries, technical services departments find themselves competing against outsourcing services. In these cases, libraries come into sudden and unexpected competition with old business partners as well as new players. Academic libraries have, of course, always competed for scarce university resources. Depending on the skills of their directors and staff, and on the financial health of their institutions, their fortunes rose and fell relative to other units on campus. In fact, annual budget cycles became a familiar backdrop to the lives of librarians in administrative roles. Like the seasons, budget cycles encompassed crises, threats, periods of calm, and finally resolution. At the end of the year, how the library fared relative to other units became a tangible yardstick of success or failure. The sharp competition now experienced by campus libraries points to a fundamental shift, a permanent disruption of the familiar patterns of the past. The network of loyalties and rivalries that once defined competition on campus has been undermined at first gradually, and then suddenly. As is often the case in such shifts, the underlying cause relates to technology, and in the instance of libraries to the cluster of technologies associated with the Internet. Over a long period of time, campus communities came to depend on the ease, speed, and convenience of Internet-based electronic mail and file trans-
fers. If it had been left in its original form, the Internet would have continued to have been a useful, but specialized, tool for researchers. However, the convergence of the Internet with products such as Microsoft Windows and Netscape in the 1990s suddenly fueled the growth of the World Wide Web (WWW) as a forum for commerce, publishing, and education. The low cost of mounting WWW services opened the Internet up to an explosion of new uses, ones that drove deep into the traditional preserves of the campus library. Despite the signs that libraries are entering into a new era of competition, some librarians may deny or avoid the issue. The reasons for this vary. The literature contains suggestions that, as a group, librarians are not comfortable with the concept of competition and its connotations of conflict, abrasiveness, and commercialism.” Perhaps as a result, the issue of competition receives only occasional attention in the literature.4 Particularly in the world of the academic library, the values of cooperation and collegiality seem to argue against a need to understand the nature of competition. In addition, the fact that academic libraries are not oriented to profit and loss obscures the underlying reality of competing interests and positions, and the new challenges posed by information technology. We compete, whether we know it or not. The new competition posed by companies offering outsourced technical services is a recent example of the confusion that arises when a profession lacks the vocabulary to understand and respond to an unexpected challenge. Libraries have always outsourced, in the sense that they purchased services that they might otherwise have provided themselves. However, the depth and pace of outsourcing during the 1990s have provoked an unprecedented level of attention within librarianship. As so often seems the case, special libraries
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have acted as bellwethers of change. In the 198Os, law and special libraries began to experience the same kind of outsourcing that would later affect their larger counterparts.’ The responses to outsourcing within the profession since that time have remained remarkably consistent, and illuminate the limitations inherent in the literature. With a few exceptions,6 library literature’s response to outsourcing falls into two broad categories: the ethical and the technical. Some authors believe that outsourcing, particularly in the area of cataloging, betrays basic professional obligations.’ Others discuss the technicalities of specific outsourcing arrangements, cost analyses, and contract issues.’ Although useful, this body of literature fails to place outsourcing in a strategic, rather than short-term, context and leaves too many questions unanswered. How should candidates for outsourcing be identified? Under what circumstances should a library outsource? What activities should be immune from outsourcing? To answer these questions, it is necessary to reach beyond library literature and to understand competition theory, of which outsourcing is just one of many subtopics.
KEY CONCEPTS Modern competition theory encompasses a vast literature, ranging over politscience, economics, law, and ical management. This article applies several key theories relating to business strategy to the academic library and draws strongly on the work of Michael Porter. Every organization in the economy exists within an industry structure, a complex network of suppliers, producers, and customers. Students of industry structure map relationships between organizations in an attempt to understand changes in competitive position over time. Although this concept at first seems applicable only to private, profit-making enterprises, it, in fact, also applies to non-profit agencies.’ Within an industry, organizations face hurriers to entry when they attempt to offer new services, that is, when they attempt to enter new markets. Common barriers to entry include the high costs of creating the new services, legal and regulatory obstacles, and the reputation and size of others offering comparable services.‘O Organizations face an opposite problem when they encounter harriers to exit. In these cases, they find themselves locked into providing legacy services that
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drain the resources needed to enter new markets.” Industry structure and barriers to entry frequently lead to partnerships, and other attempts to leverage limited resources. For example, a company without the capital necessary to develop a new product may decide to join with a competitor to fund a research and development project.’ 2 A concept related to industry structure is that of the value chain. Developed by Michael Porter and Victor Miller, this concent describes all the activities that an organization performs to remain in business. This theory states that in order to maintain competitive advantage, a company must either perform these activities at a lower cost than rivals or in a way that differentiates the service in the eyes of customers. Porter’s work also strongly demonstrates how information technology links activities within the value chain.‘j THE NEW COMPETITIVE A MACRO VIEW
REALITY:
Industry Structure Every day, academic libraries buy books and journals, negotiate with computer suppliers, and agree with other libraries to share resources. Like most activities that occur in everyday working life, these transactions appear to be unrelated. In fact, however, they occur within a specific economic context, or industry structure. Librarians glimpse this structure when they realize that some companies seem uncooperative whereas others struggle to offer low prices, or when some units on campus get more resources than others. These disparities do not occur randomly. Rather, they can be traced back to the position of academic libraries within their industry structure. Michael Porter defines industry strutture according to five attributes: the power of buyers, the power of suppliers, the threat of new entrants, the threat of substitute products, and the rivalry between competitors.‘4 These attributes enable us to observe changes in competitive position over time. The case of professional journal publishing illustrates the forces described by Porter. The fact that a small number of large publishers has dominated the industry has concentrated power in suppliers. Conversely, buyers, who are primarily libraries and individuals, have exercised less power because they have been dispersed and relatively unorganized.” But, as Porter points out, information technology acts powerfully on this basic equa-
tion.16 By lowering costs, computing permits new entrants in the industry, as researchers move from paper, to Internet, based publishing. Similarly, this move creates whole new information roducts, such as the electronic journal. 1’: Acting together, these forces disrupt the industry structure and bring about fresh rivalries. It is beyond the scope of this article to depict in detail the industry model within which academic libraries operate. However, a foundation for this analysis has been laid by Richard Lucier in his work on the scholarly communication process. This work describes relationships between suppliers and producers of scientific knowledge and traces value-added activities within that network.” This work enables librarians to glimpse the emerging industry structure and their place within it. This structure holds great promise for academic libraries if they decide to participate fully in the creation of information, not just in its storage and indexing. But in keeping with the forces described by Porter, it also implies new sources of competitive conflict.
Barriers to Entry The industry structure within which academic libraries function presents barriers to potential competitors. It is unlikely, for example, that a private company will suddenly decide to replicate a large-scale research library and sell access to it. The cost of creating such a collection, and the fact that existing libraries offer access to their collections at a low price, bars new entrants. In fact, as long as libraries based their collections on paper documents, the resulting industry structure locked out potential rivals.
By the 199Os, the introduction of information technology in the form of the Internet changed industry structure and lowered barriers to entry. Suppliers such as Yahoo began to mount virtual libraries, complete with a form of catalog, that promised immediate, global access to an ocean of information. Librarians began to feel the pressure of rising customer expectations and to worry that their position on campus might be eroded. The campus library also faces barriers locally when it attempts to provide new products and services. Facing a changed competitive landscape, libraries may wish to compete against new entrants by mounting WWW pages. Here, the impediments described above come into play. A poorly-funded library may lack the resources in terms of funding and expertise to provide a usable product. It may
encounter restrictions imposed by copyright. It may also find that the quality of the services provided by private companies sets a standard that it cannot meet. In such cases, barriers to entry force weak competitors to take second place to stronger, nimbler rivals. Barriers to Exit Librarians working with diminished funding intuitively understand barriers to entry. Industry structure imposes an equally strong influence through barriers to exit. Like all organizations, the campus library not only creates new services, it also provides existing, or “legacy,” services. The effect of legacy services is particularly strong in the case of academic libraries because of their grip on the fixed or diminished funding available on campus. Unlike a private firm, the campus library cannot fund new services from increased prices or through access to equity markets. Therefore, within each library, legacy and emerging services compete for steadily diminishing dollars. The large collections of paper documents built up by academic libraries over many years constitute both a great strength and an enormous obstacle to progress. As noted above, these collections bar entry to direct competition for legacy services. also drain precious However, they resources from libraries struggling to reposition themselves within the new industry structure. Budgeting processes often reinforce the grip of legacy services by placing a priority on funding day-today needs and traditio;$ collection building over new services. Breaking this grip, and allowing a library to exit a declining business, takes courage and focus. Indeed, it involves breaking the model, built up over many years, that justified funding levels on the basis of large and growing paper collections. As a compromise, the recent trend towards outsourced technical services seeks to free up funding while maintaining legacy collections. It is questionable, though, whether outsourcing alone will in the long term release sufficient resources to permit entry into new markets. As academic libraries face the barrier to exit formed by their existing collections, they will choose whether to compete by reallocating resources or to accept a diminished future role on campus.*’ Partnerships and Leveraging The preceding discussion can leave the impression that rivals act alone within an industry structure. In fact, libraries, like other organizations, form partnerships to
leverage existing resources and to overcome barriers to entry and exit. James R. Moore describes industry structure from the perspective of such partnerships as an “ecology of competition” to convey the fluidity and complexity of the emerging environment.*’
work out the terms of those transactions in an explicit fashion suitable for computer programming and to trust in the other partner completely. The slow rate at which ED1 has been absorbed by academic libraries illustrates a reluctance to enter into deep and transformational partnerships, and a failure to reap the corresponding benefits.
“By working at the margins, the types of cooperative arrangements in place in campus libraries give the impression of valuable synergy, but often fail to deliver needed breakthroughs.”
The Value Chain The campus library performs a myriad of activities. As is the case with industry structure, it is easy to forget that these discrete activities have a context and that they are linked. Porter applies the concept of the “value chain” to divide a “company’s activities into [the] technologically and economically distinct activities it performs to do business.“23 As noted above, this concept states that in order to maintain competitive advantage, a company must either perform these activities at a lower cost than rivals or in a way that differentiates the service from the perspective of customers. In order to apply the value chain concept, however, the campus library needs first to understand the discrete activities driving its services and the linkages between them. In practice, this knowledge seldom exists. There are several reasons for this. First, there is the understanding that services consist of distinct and linked activities developed in the private sector as companies undertook business process reengineering. As a result of these efforts, companies began to understand that they performed many functions, not just one, and that these functions could be analyzed, costecii and benchmarked against competitors. Until recently, academic libraries have not seriously undertaken the reengineering efforts that yielded these insights. Second, university budget cycles and financial reporting systems have tended to focus on departments and units, rather than on work processes. This focus distracts attention away from processes and frustrates any systematic examination of workflow. If properly applied, the value chain concept aids decision making, and particularly decisions relating to outsourcing. By decomposing the campus library into discrete and linked activities, it becomes possible to benchmark parts of the library’s operations against other libraries and even private sector companies. Here the value chain concept asks the library whether it can provide a service at a lower cost, or with greater differentiation, than another organization. Further, the concept
For academic libraries, cooperation takes many forms, including resource sharing through interlibrary loan, information sharing through bibliographic utilicampus partnerships. ties, and on Although useful, these arrangements share a common limitation: they only marginally assist the campus library to attain competitive advantage. This is because they fail to free up enough resources to support major investments. By working at the margins, the types of cooperative arrangements in place in campus libraries give the impression of valuable synergy, but often fail to deliver needed breakthroughs. The type of partnership created by information technology enables the library to leverage, or greatly add value to, existing resources. To use an example of a technology found both in libraries and the private sector, electronic data interchange (EDI) allows trading partners to exchange purchase orders, invoices, claims, and so on, using an industry standard computer format. Because it uses a standard format, partners need not worry about differing computer systems, communications protocols, and encoding schemes. By increasing the ease of information gathering, and by eliminating organizational layers dedicated to handling paper, ED1 radically transformed the industries in which it was applied.22 ED1 differs from arms length partnerships such as interlibrary loan in that it intimately meshes the business processes of trading partners. The reason for this relates to the fact that ED1 does not require human intervention. If a business transaction is to be performed electronically, then it becomes necessary for each partner to
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stresses the importance of information linkages, that is, how a process interfaces with other activities. It is vital to remember that the value chain concept emphasizes the importance of both value activities and the linkages between them. One without the other results in failure. For example, a library may decide that a company can perform its ordering function at a lower cost than it can itself. But without smooth and transparent links between the computer systems of the company and the library, fund accounting may become inaccurate, thereby eroding the benefits of the outsourcing agreement. To succeed, an outsourcing arrangement must meet the test of performing an activity at a lower cost than the campus library and in a way that fits seamlessly into the library’s operations.
“The new competitive environment ignores the strengths that most libraries have built up over many years in terms of collections, task knowledge, and adherence to internal professional standards.”
GUIDELINES FOR LOCAL ACTION: A MICRO VIEW Competition theory permits us to generalize about the context within which academic libraries function, that is, their industry structure or “ecology,” the barriers to entry and exit that they face, how they overcome these barriers through partnerships, and how they can make better decisions based on an understanding of value activities. Applying competition theory to individual libraries takes this analysis a step further. At the local level it becomes necessary to integrate these concepts into planning and budgeting cycles by building a capacity to understand and respond to the new realities of competition. Build Capacity for Organizational Learning The discontinuous and sudden nature of competition grates against conventional library organizations. With their hierarchical cultures, isolated departments, and sluggish decision making, many campus libraries simply lack the agility to anticipate change and thrive in the new information industry. In order to succeed, campus
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libraries need to develop the capacity for shared learning and action, to become what Peter Senge calls “learning organizations.““ This implies profound changes. Librarians need to reach out beyond their own profession and literature to understand the broader trends affecting their campuses, and to let go of old and comfortable roles. Libraries need to be guided by customer needs rather than internal preferences. Library organizations themselves need to become flatter, more cross functional, and more democratic. Although traumatic, these changes promise real benefits. The new competitive environment ignores the strengths that most libraries have built up over many years in terms of collections, task knowledge, and adherence to internal professional standards. Instead, it values speed, the ability to identify and exploit new opportunities, and the capacity of staff to apply competencies in areas of new work.‘” The discipline developed within learning organizations enables the campus library to build on past accomplishments by leveraging its most valuable asset, the competence and creativity of its staff. As Senge writes, in “the long run, the only sustainable source of competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than its competition. No outside force can take the momentum of that advantage away from YOU.“~’ By giving up outmoded structures, and becoming learning organizations, campus libraries gain long-term viability. Understand the Context After the campus library begins to transition to the learning organization, it needs to develop and share a common understanding of its larger context, or industry structure. As Ross Atkinson writes, libraries and publishers now function within the same industry.** This implies enormous changes in how present collections and services are viewed as libraries move from paper collections to digital services. It also implies new sources of competitive conflict, as publishers and academic libraries vie for position in an emerging market.” At the level of the publishing or information industry, librarians need to understand and anticipate changes in the marketplace, and how these changes may affect their services. At the local level, each library needs to understand its own position within the campus, how it fits into the value chain of its campus, and how its value can be increased. Needless to say, the circumstances faced by each library will vary. For a large land grant institu-
tion, access to campus or grant funding may ease the transition to new services, and provide the heft needed to form partnerships. For a small, private college, more limited funding may constrain choice and dictate a more modest role. In either case, the position of the campus library within the industry structure and the value chain of the campus shapes responses to competitive challenges. Define the Portfolio of Collections and Services Whether it knows it or not, each library offers a portfolio of collections and services. Each portfolio balances investments in people, technology, and fixed assets to achieve shared goals3” When the campus library makes these investments primarily on the basis of past practice and historical budgeting, which is to say, without much conscious planning, the portfolio becomes unbalanced. In these cases, responses to competitive threats tend to be haphazard and reflexive. The discipline of the learning organization forces the campus library to define explicitly its portfolio of collections and services. This serves several important functions. First, it surfaces long-standing assumptions affecting resources allocation that may no longer be valid. Second, it encourages the library to relate the priorities represented by the portfolio to customer needs. Finally, it leads the library into making structured decisions about resource allocation understandable to both its staff and customers. Defining the portfolio can create conflict within the library, as the tension between legacy and emerging services becomes visible. Indeed, it may be predicted that the portfolio of individual libraries will be informed by the tension between paper collections and digital services. But by building the capacity for shared learning, and by facing the realities of the new environment, libraries can begin to develop focused, balanced portfolios of collections and services responsive to the new environment and linked to customer needs. Rank According to Value After the campus library understands and defines its portfolio of collections and services, it needs to rank them based on value, with the highest being those which are differentiated by quality or uniqueness from the perspective of customers, and the lowest being those which may be performed at a lower cost outside the library through outsourcing. This ranking enables the library to identify its best opportunities
for increasing the overall value of its operation on campus.
“The discipline of the learning organization forces the campus library to define explicitly its portfolio of collections and services.” As Porter writes, each activity in the value chain must either be performed at a lower cost, or at a higher level of differentiation, than rivals. Decisions relating to outsourcing may be made at this point. If an activity can be performed at a lower cost outside the campus library, and it can be linked seamlessly into existing library operations, it becomes a candidate for outsourcing. If an activity fails this test, one of two outcomes is possible. First, it may not be a candidate for outsourcing because of a technical factor, such as an inability to interface with existing systems. Second, the activity may be differentiated in such a way that it should remain within the library. Since they are immune to outsourcing, these differentiated activities become fresh and sustainable sources of competitive advantage. Shift Resources to Higher Value Activities After ranking its collections and services, the campus library needs to shift human and financial resources to high value, differentiated activities and away from work which may either be outsourced or eliminated. Although this step appears to be self-evident, it, in fact, poses the greatest challenge to libraries with large investments in legacy services. As noted above, academic libraries generally play a zero-sum game in budgeting and staff allocations, taking resources from legacy services to fund new projects. Given the political strength of those staff and customers who are wedded to legacy services, the campus library may be tempted to “have its cake and eat it too,” that is, to continue to support legacy services at past levels while funding emerging services with marginal funds. The level of investment needed for emerging services, and the new staff skills required to develop them, suggest that this approach will fail. Instead, the campus library needs to make tough choices based
on a clear understanding of its portfolio of that shift and services collections resources to high value, future-oriented
work. This underlines the need to communicate to internal and external customers the library’s vision of the .future and the importance of funding the future first. This process also implies major and continuous reorganizations, as the library forms new units to manage emerging partnerships and opportunities.31 Reassess and Reallocate Continuously Given the dynamic nature of the new ecology of competition, it becomes necessary for the library to build in the kind of reassessment described in this section into its regular planning and budgeting cycle, and to make its staff and customers aware that this review and consequent resource allocation will be never ending. This takes into account the fact that the structure of the information industry and the campus library’s portfolio changes over time. For example, as technology changes, libraries may identify new candidates for outsourcing, while in other cases they may decide to reverse the process and insource an activity. Indeed, the steps described in this section form a circle that should be repeated with increasing frequency. With each iteration, this process helps the campus library to understand its position within the new industry structure and identify opportunities to increase the capabilities of its staff and the value of its collections and services. CONCLUSION Competition theory enables the campus library to understand its economic context, or industry structure, the barriers to entering new markets and exiting old ones, the to leverage power of partnerships resources, and the value chain of activities that serves customers. On a local level, the library needs to build a capacity for shared learning, to understand the emerging industry structure, to define and rank services, and to reallocate resources to high value, differentiated activities In reallocating resources, the library may decide to outsource an activity when it can be performed at a reduced cost and can be linked seamlessly with existing processes. The concepts described in this article help to place such tactical, short-term, decisions, in the strategic, long-term, context of the emerging information industry. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Lauren Seiler & Thomas Surprenant, “When We Get the Libraries We Want, Will We Want the Libraries We Get?,” Wilson Library Bulletin 65 (June 1991): 3 1.
2. Richard T. Sweeney, “Leadership in the Post-Hierarchical Library,” Libra? Trends 43 (Summer 1994): 77. 3. John Agada, “Studies of the Personality of Drexel Library Quarterly 20 Librarians,” (Spring 1984): 37; Sandra M. Black, “Personality-Librarians as Communicators,” Canadian Librap Journal 38 (April 198 I ): 67; May M. Moore, ““New Blood” and Managerial Potential in Academic Libraries,” Journal of Academic Librarianship 9 (July 1983): 142-147. 4. Ross Atkinson, “The Coming Contest,” College & Research Libraries 54 (November 1993): 458-460; Ronald F, Dow,. “Sustaining Organization Advantage in Times of Financial Uncertainty: The Context for Research & Development lnvestments by Academic Libraries,” Libra? Trends 42 (Winter lYY4): 460-466; Norman Howden, “Catalogers and Catholic Libruty World 59 Competition,” (July-August 1987): 34-37. and “Outsourcing Lakey, 5. Kathleen lnsourcing of Information Services: A Case Study of Corporate and Government Libraries in Victoria,” Austrulian Special Libraries 27 Roxanne 1994): 103-122; (December “Outsourcing and LibrariesMissingham, Threat or Promise?,” Australian Special Librarie.s 27 (December 1994): 13 l- 139; Richard C. Reuben, “Baker & Mckenzie Shelves Librarians: Library Professionals Worry Bargain-Hunting Firms Will Look to Outsourcing,“ABA Journal 8 1 (July 1995): 26; Law Saint-Onge, “Outsourced Michael Library Serves As A Wake-Up Call; Librarians Who Fail to Show How They Contribute to the Bottom Line May Find Themselves Shelved,” The National Law Journal 17 (July 17. 1995): C3C4. 6. Clare B. Dunkle, “Outsourcing the Catalog Department: A Meditation Inspired by the Business and Library Literature,” Journal oj’itcademic Librarianship 33 (January 1996): 33-44. 7. Michael Gorman, “The Corruption of Cataloging,” Librar?, Journal 120 (September 15, 1995): 32-33; “Berger Testifies against Contracting-Out.” Wilson Library Bulletin 60 (January 1986): IO; Ross Wood, “Outsourcing: Bungling [Letter to the Editor],” Librar? Joumnl 121 (February 1, 1996): 10. of Alberta Outsources 8. “University College & Research Libraries Cataloging,” News 56 (March 1995): 140; Magda ElSherbini, “ContrAct Cataloging: A Pilot Project for Outsourcing Slavic Books,” Cataloging & Clasxification Quarterly 20 (3) (109.5): 57-73: “An Introduction to Joyce L. Ogburn, Outsourcing,” Library AcqL1i.sition.s: Practice & Theo? 18 (1994): 363-366; Outxourcing Cataloging, Authority Work. and Physical Processing: A Checklist of Con.siderution.s. edited by Marie A. Kascus and Dawn Hale (Chicago: American Library Association. 1995); Brian Distad, “The Client Still Ranks First in U. Alberta Library’s Restructuring,” Libray Acquisitions: Practice & Theop 19 (Winter 1995): 435-438; Rick J. Block,
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“Cataloging Outsourcing: Issues and Options,” Serials Review 20 (Fall 1994): 73-77; Cannel C. Bush, Margo Sasse, & Patricia Smith, “Toward a New World Order: A Survey of Outsourcing Capabilities of Vendors for Acquisitions, Cataloging and Collection Development Services,” Librn~a Acquisitions: Practice & Theory 18 ( 1994): 397-4 14. 9. Milind M. Lele, Creating Strategic Leverage: Matching Company Strengths with Market Opportunities (New York: Wiley, 1992). pp. 17-3 I. 10. Sharon M. Oster, Modern Competitive Analysis (New York : Oxford University Press, 19901, pp. 37-60. I I. T. Burke, A. Genn-Bash, & B. Haines, Competition in Theory and Practice (London: Croom Helm, 19X8), pp. IOO-1 I 1. 12. Steven L. Goldman, Roger N. Nagel, & Kenneth Preiss. Agile Competitors and Virtual 0rgani:arions: Strategies for Enriching the Cusfomer (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. 19951, pp. 29-33. 13. Michael E. Porter, Comperitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Perfi)rmance (New York: Free Press. 1985), pp. 33-61; Michael E. Porter & Victor E. Millar, “How Information Gives You Competitive Advantage: The Information Revolution Is Transforming the Nature of Competition,” Harvard Business Review 63 (July-August 1985): 149- 160. 14. Porter & Millar, “How Information,” p. 155. 1.5. Michael A. Staller, Robert Christopherson. & Michael Miranda, “The Economics
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of Professional Journal Pricing,” College & Research Libraries 57 (January 1996): 9-2 1. 16. Porter & Millar, “How Information,” p. 152. 17. Paul Metz, “Serials Pricing and the Role of the Electronic Journal, ” College & Research Libraries 52 (July 1991): 3 15-327. 18. Richard E. Lucier, Embedding the Library into Scientific and Scholarly Communication through Knowledge Management. Paper presented at the 1992 Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, April 5-7, 1992, Sponsored by Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. 19. Carla J. Stoffle, Robert Renaud, & Jerilyn R. Veldof, “Choosing Our Futures,” College & Research Libraries 57 (May 1996): 221. 20. Ibid, p. 224. 2 1. James R. Moore, “Predators and Prey: A New Ecology of Competition,” Harvard Business Review 71 (May-June 1993): 75-86. 22. Friedemann Weigel, “EDI In the Marketplace: How Close Are We?,” Librun, Administration & Management 10 (Summer 1996): 141-146; Joan C. Griffith, “Why Not EDI? One Librarian’s Perspective,” Library Administration & Management IO (Summer 1996): 147-150; Pamela Bluh. “Why EDI?: What Managers Need to Know about Electronic Data Interchange,” Library Administration & Management 10 (Summer 1996): 138-147.
23. Porter & Millar, “How Information,” p. 152. 24. Michael Hammer & Champy James, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution (New York : Harper Business, 1993), pp. 35-47. 25. Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (New York: Doubleday, 1990). For an application of Senge’s concepts to libraries see Shelley E. Phipps, “Transforming Libraries into Learning Organizations-The Challenge for Leadership,” Journal of Library Administration I 8 (3/4) (1993): 19-37. 26. George Stalk, Philip Evans, & Lawrence E. Shulman, “Competing on Capabilities: The New Rules of Corporate Strategy,” Harvard Business Review 70 (March-April 1992): 5769. 27. Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies for Builing a Learning Organizution (New York: CurrencJs 1994), p. 11. 28. Atkinson, “Contest,” p. 459. 29. Ross Atkinson, “Library Functions, Scholarly Communication, and the Foundation of the Digital Library: Laying Claim to the Control Zone,” The Library Quarterly 66 (July 1966): 248-253. 30. Oster, “Competitive Analysis,” p, I5 1. 31. Richard E. Lucier, “Building a Digital Library for the Health Sciences: Information Space Complimenting Information Place,” Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 83 (July 1995): 346-350.
Academic libraries face unprecedented competition from on campus units, private companies, and outsourcing firms. Using the theme of outsourcing, this article applies key concepts from competition theory to understand how new competitive forces are shaping the campus library, and how that theory can assist the library in making tactical decisions.
Robert Renaud is Team Leader, Bibliographic Access, The University
of Arizona Library, PO
Box 2 7 00.55, Tucson, Arizona
85 720-0055
F
or the first time in their history, academic libraries face the prospect of real competition. On campus, units ranging from central computing to the bookstore are beginning to offer services that either overlap with, or replace, services provided by the library.’ At the same time, private companies, including publishers and distributors, are attempting to exploit profitable niches such as document delivery and full-text searching, once the exclusive preserve of the library.2 Within libraries, technical services departments find themselves competing against outsourcing services. In these cases, libraries come into sudden and unexpected competition with old business partners as well as new players. Academic libraries have, of course, always competed for scarce university resources. Depending on the skills of their directors and staff, and on the financial health of their institutions, their fortunes rose and fell relative to other units on campus. In fact, annual budget cycles became a familiar backdrop to the lives of librarians in administrative roles. Like the seasons, budget cycles encompassed crises, threats, periods of calm, and finally resolution. At the end of the year, how the library fared relative to other units became a tangible yardstick of success or failure. The sharp competition now experienced by campus libraries points to a fundamental shift, a permanent disruption of the familiar patterns of the past. The network of loyalties and rivalries that once defined competition on campus has been undermined at first gradually, and then suddenly. As is often the case in such shifts, the underlying cause relates to technology, and in the instance of libraries to the cluster of technologies associated with the Internet. Over a long period of time, campus communities came to depend on the ease, speed, and convenience of Internet-based electronic mail and file trans-
fers. If it had been left in its original form, the Internet would have continued to have been a useful, but specialized, tool for researchers. However, the convergence of the Internet with products such as Microsoft Windows and Netscape in the 1990s suddenly fueled the growth of the World Wide Web (WWW) as a forum for commerce, publishing, and education. The low cost of mounting WWW services opened the Internet up to an explosion of new uses, ones that drove deep into the traditional preserves of the campus library. Despite the signs that libraries are entering into a new era of competition, some librarians may deny or avoid the issue. The reasons for this vary. The literature contains suggestions that, as a group, librarians are not comfortable with the concept of competition and its connotations of conflict, abrasiveness, and commercialism.” Perhaps as a result, the issue of competition receives only occasional attention in the literature.4 Particularly in the world of the academic library, the values of cooperation and collegiality seem to argue against a need to understand the nature of competition. In addition, the fact that academic libraries are not oriented to profit and loss obscures the underlying reality of competing interests and positions, and the new challenges posed by information technology. We compete, whether we know it or not. The new competition posed by companies offering outsourced technical services is a recent example of the confusion that arises when a profession lacks the vocabulary to understand and respond to an unexpected challenge. Libraries have always outsourced, in the sense that they purchased services that they might otherwise have provided themselves. However, the depth and pace of outsourcing during the 1990s have provoked an unprecedented level of attention within librarianship. As so often seems the case, special libraries
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have acted as bellwethers of change. In the 198Os, law and special libraries began to experience the same kind of outsourcing that would later affect their larger counterparts.’ The responses to outsourcing within the profession since that time have remained remarkably consistent, and illuminate the limitations inherent in the literature. With a few exceptions,6 library literature’s response to outsourcing falls into two broad categories: the ethical and the technical. Some authors believe that outsourcing, particularly in the area of cataloging, betrays basic professional obligations.’ Others discuss the technicalities of specific outsourcing arrangements, cost analyses, and contract issues.’ Although useful, this body of literature fails to place outsourcing in a strategic, rather than short-term, context and leaves too many questions unanswered. How should candidates for outsourcing be identified? Under what circumstances should a library outsource? What activities should be immune from outsourcing? To answer these questions, it is necessary to reach beyond library literature and to understand competition theory, of which outsourcing is just one of many subtopics.
KEY CONCEPTS Modern competition theory encompasses a vast literature, ranging over politscience, economics, law, and ical management. This article applies several key theories relating to business strategy to the academic library and draws strongly on the work of Michael Porter. Every organization in the economy exists within an industry structure, a complex network of suppliers, producers, and customers. Students of industry structure map relationships between organizations in an attempt to understand changes in competitive position over time. Although this concept at first seems applicable only to private, profit-making enterprises, it, in fact, also applies to non-profit agencies.’ Within an industry, organizations face hurriers to entry when they attempt to offer new services, that is, when they attempt to enter new markets. Common barriers to entry include the high costs of creating the new services, legal and regulatory obstacles, and the reputation and size of others offering comparable services.‘O Organizations face an opposite problem when they encounter harriers to exit. In these cases, they find themselves locked into providing legacy services that
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drain the resources needed to enter new markets.” Industry structure and barriers to entry frequently lead to partnerships, and other attempts to leverage limited resources. For example, a company without the capital necessary to develop a new product may decide to join with a competitor to fund a research and development project.’ 2 A concept related to industry structure is that of the value chain. Developed by Michael Porter and Victor Miller, this concent describes all the activities that an organization performs to remain in business. This theory states that in order to maintain competitive advantage, a company must either perform these activities at a lower cost than rivals or in a way that differentiates the service in the eyes of customers. Porter’s work also strongly demonstrates how information technology links activities within the value chain.‘j THE NEW COMPETITIVE A MACRO VIEW
REALITY:
Industry Structure Every day, academic libraries buy books and journals, negotiate with computer suppliers, and agree with other libraries to share resources. Like most activities that occur in everyday working life, these transactions appear to be unrelated. In fact, however, they occur within a specific economic context, or industry structure. Librarians glimpse this structure when they realize that some companies seem uncooperative whereas others struggle to offer low prices, or when some units on campus get more resources than others. These disparities do not occur randomly. Rather, they can be traced back to the position of academic libraries within their industry structure. Michael Porter defines industry strutture according to five attributes: the power of buyers, the power of suppliers, the threat of new entrants, the threat of substitute products, and the rivalry between competitors.‘4 These attributes enable us to observe changes in competitive position over time. The case of professional journal publishing illustrates the forces described by Porter. The fact that a small number of large publishers has dominated the industry has concentrated power in suppliers. Conversely, buyers, who are primarily libraries and individuals, have exercised less power because they have been dispersed and relatively unorganized.” But, as Porter points out, information technology acts powerfully on this basic equa-
tion.16 By lowering costs, computing permits new entrants in the industry, as researchers move from paper, to Internet, based publishing. Similarly, this move creates whole new information roducts, such as the electronic journal. 1’: Acting together, these forces disrupt the industry structure and bring about fresh rivalries. It is beyond the scope of this article to depict in detail the industry model within which academic libraries operate. However, a foundation for this analysis has been laid by Richard Lucier in his work on the scholarly communication process. This work describes relationships between suppliers and producers of scientific knowledge and traces value-added activities within that network.” This work enables librarians to glimpse the emerging industry structure and their place within it. This structure holds great promise for academic libraries if they decide to participate fully in the creation of information, not just in its storage and indexing. But in keeping with the forces described by Porter, it also implies new sources of competitive conflict.
Barriers to Entry The industry structure within which academic libraries function presents barriers to potential competitors. It is unlikely, for example, that a private company will suddenly decide to replicate a large-scale research library and sell access to it. The cost of creating such a collection, and the fact that existing libraries offer access to their collections at a low price, bars new entrants. In fact, as long as libraries based their collections on paper documents, the resulting industry structure locked out potential rivals.
By the 199Os, the introduction of information technology in the form of the Internet changed industry structure and lowered barriers to entry. Suppliers such as Yahoo began to mount virtual libraries, complete with a form of catalog, that promised immediate, global access to an ocean of information. Librarians began to feel the pressure of rising customer expectations and to worry that their position on campus might be eroded. The campus library also faces barriers locally when it attempts to provide new products and services. Facing a changed competitive landscape, libraries may wish to compete against new entrants by mounting WWW pages. Here, the impediments described above come into play. A poorly-funded library may lack the resources in terms of funding and expertise to provide a usable product. It may
encounter restrictions imposed by copyright. It may also find that the quality of the services provided by private companies sets a standard that it cannot meet. In such cases, barriers to entry force weak competitors to take second place to stronger, nimbler rivals. Barriers to Exit Librarians working with diminished funding intuitively understand barriers to entry. Industry structure imposes an equally strong influence through barriers to exit. Like all organizations, the campus library not only creates new services, it also provides existing, or “legacy,” services. The effect of legacy services is particularly strong in the case of academic libraries because of their grip on the fixed or diminished funding available on campus. Unlike a private firm, the campus library cannot fund new services from increased prices or through access to equity markets. Therefore, within each library, legacy and emerging services compete for steadily diminishing dollars. The large collections of paper documents built up by academic libraries over many years constitute both a great strength and an enormous obstacle to progress. As noted above, these collections bar entry to direct competition for legacy services. also drain precious However, they resources from libraries struggling to reposition themselves within the new industry structure. Budgeting processes often reinforce the grip of legacy services by placing a priority on funding day-today needs and traditio;$ collection building over new services. Breaking this grip, and allowing a library to exit a declining business, takes courage and focus. Indeed, it involves breaking the model, built up over many years, that justified funding levels on the basis of large and growing paper collections. As a compromise, the recent trend towards outsourced technical services seeks to free up funding while maintaining legacy collections. It is questionable, though, whether outsourcing alone will in the long term release sufficient resources to permit entry into new markets. As academic libraries face the barrier to exit formed by their existing collections, they will choose whether to compete by reallocating resources or to accept a diminished future role on campus.*’ Partnerships and Leveraging The preceding discussion can leave the impression that rivals act alone within an industry structure. In fact, libraries, like other organizations, form partnerships to
leverage existing resources and to overcome barriers to entry and exit. James R. Moore describes industry structure from the perspective of such partnerships as an “ecology of competition” to convey the fluidity and complexity of the emerging environment.*’
work out the terms of those transactions in an explicit fashion suitable for computer programming and to trust in the other partner completely. The slow rate at which ED1 has been absorbed by academic libraries illustrates a reluctance to enter into deep and transformational partnerships, and a failure to reap the corresponding benefits.
“By working at the margins, the types of cooperative arrangements in place in campus libraries give the impression of valuable synergy, but often fail to deliver needed breakthroughs.”
The Value Chain The campus library performs a myriad of activities. As is the case with industry structure, it is easy to forget that these discrete activities have a context and that they are linked. Porter applies the concept of the “value chain” to divide a “company’s activities into [the] technologically and economically distinct activities it performs to do business.“23 As noted above, this concept states that in order to maintain competitive advantage, a company must either perform these activities at a lower cost than rivals or in a way that differentiates the service from the perspective of customers. In order to apply the value chain concept, however, the campus library needs first to understand the discrete activities driving its services and the linkages between them. In practice, this knowledge seldom exists. There are several reasons for this. First, there is the understanding that services consist of distinct and linked activities developed in the private sector as companies undertook business process reengineering. As a result of these efforts, companies began to understand that they performed many functions, not just one, and that these functions could be analyzed, costecii and benchmarked against competitors. Until recently, academic libraries have not seriously undertaken the reengineering efforts that yielded these insights. Second, university budget cycles and financial reporting systems have tended to focus on departments and units, rather than on work processes. This focus distracts attention away from processes and frustrates any systematic examination of workflow. If properly applied, the value chain concept aids decision making, and particularly decisions relating to outsourcing. By decomposing the campus library into discrete and linked activities, it becomes possible to benchmark parts of the library’s operations against other libraries and even private sector companies. Here the value chain concept asks the library whether it can provide a service at a lower cost, or with greater differentiation, than another organization. Further, the concept
For academic libraries, cooperation takes many forms, including resource sharing through interlibrary loan, information sharing through bibliographic utilicampus partnerships. ties, and on Although useful, these arrangements share a common limitation: they only marginally assist the campus library to attain competitive advantage. This is because they fail to free up enough resources to support major investments. By working at the margins, the types of cooperative arrangements in place in campus libraries give the impression of valuable synergy, but often fail to deliver needed breakthroughs. The type of partnership created by information technology enables the library to leverage, or greatly add value to, existing resources. To use an example of a technology found both in libraries and the private sector, electronic data interchange (EDI) allows trading partners to exchange purchase orders, invoices, claims, and so on, using an industry standard computer format. Because it uses a standard format, partners need not worry about differing computer systems, communications protocols, and encoding schemes. By increasing the ease of information gathering, and by eliminating organizational layers dedicated to handling paper, ED1 radically transformed the industries in which it was applied.22 ED1 differs from arms length partnerships such as interlibrary loan in that it intimately meshes the business processes of trading partners. The reason for this relates to the fact that ED1 does not require human intervention. If a business transaction is to be performed electronically, then it becomes necessary for each partner to
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stresses the importance of information linkages, that is, how a process interfaces with other activities. It is vital to remember that the value chain concept emphasizes the importance of both value activities and the linkages between them. One without the other results in failure. For example, a library may decide that a company can perform its ordering function at a lower cost than it can itself. But without smooth and transparent links between the computer systems of the company and the library, fund accounting may become inaccurate, thereby eroding the benefits of the outsourcing agreement. To succeed, an outsourcing arrangement must meet the test of performing an activity at a lower cost than the campus library and in a way that fits seamlessly into the library’s operations.
“The new competitive environment ignores the strengths that most libraries have built up over many years in terms of collections, task knowledge, and adherence to internal professional standards.”
GUIDELINES FOR LOCAL ACTION: A MICRO VIEW Competition theory permits us to generalize about the context within which academic libraries function, that is, their industry structure or “ecology,” the barriers to entry and exit that they face, how they overcome these barriers through partnerships, and how they can make better decisions based on an understanding of value activities. Applying competition theory to individual libraries takes this analysis a step further. At the local level it becomes necessary to integrate these concepts into planning and budgeting cycles by building a capacity to understand and respond to the new realities of competition. Build Capacity for Organizational Learning The discontinuous and sudden nature of competition grates against conventional library organizations. With their hierarchical cultures, isolated departments, and sluggish decision making, many campus libraries simply lack the agility to anticipate change and thrive in the new information industry. In order to succeed, campus
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libraries need to develop the capacity for shared learning and action, to become what Peter Senge calls “learning organizations.““ This implies profound changes. Librarians need to reach out beyond their own profession and literature to understand the broader trends affecting their campuses, and to let go of old and comfortable roles. Libraries need to be guided by customer needs rather than internal preferences. Library organizations themselves need to become flatter, more cross functional, and more democratic. Although traumatic, these changes promise real benefits. The new competitive environment ignores the strengths that most libraries have built up over many years in terms of collections, task knowledge, and adherence to internal professional standards. Instead, it values speed, the ability to identify and exploit new opportunities, and the capacity of staff to apply competencies in areas of new work.‘” The discipline developed within learning organizations enables the campus library to build on past accomplishments by leveraging its most valuable asset, the competence and creativity of its staff. As Senge writes, in “the long run, the only sustainable source of competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than its competition. No outside force can take the momentum of that advantage away from YOU.“~’ By giving up outmoded structures, and becoming learning organizations, campus libraries gain long-term viability. Understand the Context After the campus library begins to transition to the learning organization, it needs to develop and share a common understanding of its larger context, or industry structure. As Ross Atkinson writes, libraries and publishers now function within the same industry.** This implies enormous changes in how present collections and services are viewed as libraries move from paper collections to digital services. It also implies new sources of competitive conflict, as publishers and academic libraries vie for position in an emerging market.” At the level of the publishing or information industry, librarians need to understand and anticipate changes in the marketplace, and how these changes may affect their services. At the local level, each library needs to understand its own position within the campus, how it fits into the value chain of its campus, and how its value can be increased. Needless to say, the circumstances faced by each library will vary. For a large land grant institu-
tion, access to campus or grant funding may ease the transition to new services, and provide the heft needed to form partnerships. For a small, private college, more limited funding may constrain choice and dictate a more modest role. In either case, the position of the campus library within the industry structure and the value chain of the campus shapes responses to competitive challenges. Define the Portfolio of Collections and Services Whether it knows it or not, each library offers a portfolio of collections and services. Each portfolio balances investments in people, technology, and fixed assets to achieve shared goals3” When the campus library makes these investments primarily on the basis of past practice and historical budgeting, which is to say, without much conscious planning, the portfolio becomes unbalanced. In these cases, responses to competitive threats tend to be haphazard and reflexive. The discipline of the learning organization forces the campus library to define explicitly its portfolio of collections and services. This serves several important functions. First, it surfaces long-standing assumptions affecting resources allocation that may no longer be valid. Second, it encourages the library to relate the priorities represented by the portfolio to customer needs. Finally, it leads the library into making structured decisions about resource allocation understandable to both its staff and customers. Defining the portfolio can create conflict within the library, as the tension between legacy and emerging services becomes visible. Indeed, it may be predicted that the portfolio of individual libraries will be informed by the tension between paper collections and digital services. But by building the capacity for shared learning, and by facing the realities of the new environment, libraries can begin to develop focused, balanced portfolios of collections and services responsive to the new environment and linked to customer needs. Rank According to Value After the campus library understands and defines its portfolio of collections and services, it needs to rank them based on value, with the highest being those which are differentiated by quality or uniqueness from the perspective of customers, and the lowest being those which may be performed at a lower cost outside the library through outsourcing. This ranking enables the library to identify its best opportunities
for increasing the overall value of its operation on campus.
“The discipline of the learning organization forces the campus library to define explicitly its portfolio of collections and services.” As Porter writes, each activity in the value chain must either be performed at a lower cost, or at a higher level of differentiation, than rivals. Decisions relating to outsourcing may be made at this point. If an activity can be performed at a lower cost outside the campus library, and it can be linked seamlessly into existing library operations, it becomes a candidate for outsourcing. If an activity fails this test, one of two outcomes is possible. First, it may not be a candidate for outsourcing because of a technical factor, such as an inability to interface with existing systems. Second, the activity may be differentiated in such a way that it should remain within the library. Since they are immune to outsourcing, these differentiated activities become fresh and sustainable sources of competitive advantage. Shift Resources to Higher Value Activities After ranking its collections and services, the campus library needs to shift human and financial resources to high value, differentiated activities and away from work which may either be outsourced or eliminated. Although this step appears to be self-evident, it, in fact, poses the greatest challenge to libraries with large investments in legacy services. As noted above, academic libraries generally play a zero-sum game in budgeting and staff allocations, taking resources from legacy services to fund new projects. Given the political strength of those staff and customers who are wedded to legacy services, the campus library may be tempted to “have its cake and eat it too,” that is, to continue to support legacy services at past levels while funding emerging services with marginal funds. The level of investment needed for emerging services, and the new staff skills required to develop them, suggest that this approach will fail. Instead, the campus library needs to make tough choices based
on a clear understanding of its portfolio of that shift and services collections resources to high value, future-oriented
work. This underlines the need to communicate to internal and external customers the library’s vision of the .future and the importance of funding the future first. This process also implies major and continuous reorganizations, as the library forms new units to manage emerging partnerships and opportunities.31 Reassess and Reallocate Continuously Given the dynamic nature of the new ecology of competition, it becomes necessary for the library to build in the kind of reassessment described in this section into its regular planning and budgeting cycle, and to make its staff and customers aware that this review and consequent resource allocation will be never ending. This takes into account the fact that the structure of the information industry and the campus library’s portfolio changes over time. For example, as technology changes, libraries may identify new candidates for outsourcing, while in other cases they may decide to reverse the process and insource an activity. Indeed, the steps described in this section form a circle that should be repeated with increasing frequency. With each iteration, this process helps the campus library to understand its position within the new industry structure and identify opportunities to increase the capabilities of its staff and the value of its collections and services. CONCLUSION Competition theory enables the campus library to understand its economic context, or industry structure, the barriers to entering new markets and exiting old ones, the to leverage power of partnerships resources, and the value chain of activities that serves customers. On a local level, the library needs to build a capacity for shared learning, to understand the emerging industry structure, to define and rank services, and to reallocate resources to high value, differentiated activities In reallocating resources, the library may decide to outsource an activity when it can be performed at a reduced cost and can be linked seamlessly with existing processes. The concepts described in this article help to place such tactical, short-term, decisions, in the strategic, long-term, context of the emerging information industry. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Lauren Seiler & Thomas Surprenant, “When We Get the Libraries We Want, Will We Want the Libraries We Get?,” Wilson Library Bulletin 65 (June 1991): 3 1.
2. Richard T. Sweeney, “Leadership in the Post-Hierarchical Library,” Libra? Trends 43 (Summer 1994): 77. 3. John Agada, “Studies of the Personality of Drexel Library Quarterly 20 Librarians,” (Spring 1984): 37; Sandra M. Black, “Personality-Librarians as Communicators,” Canadian Librap Journal 38 (April 198 I ): 67; May M. Moore, ““New Blood” and Managerial Potential in Academic Libraries,” Journal of Academic Librarianship 9 (July 1983): 142-147. 4. Ross Atkinson, “The Coming Contest,” College & Research Libraries 54 (November 1993): 458-460; Ronald F, Dow,. “Sustaining Organization Advantage in Times of Financial Uncertainty: The Context for Research & Development lnvestments by Academic Libraries,” Libra? Trends 42 (Winter lYY4): 460-466; Norman Howden, “Catalogers and Catholic Libruty World 59 Competition,” (July-August 1987): 34-37. and “Outsourcing Lakey, 5. Kathleen lnsourcing of Information Services: A Case Study of Corporate and Government Libraries in Victoria,” Austrulian Special Libraries 27 Roxanne 1994): 103-122; (December “Outsourcing and LibrariesMissingham, Threat or Promise?,” Australian Special Librarie.s 27 (December 1994): 13 l- 139; Richard C. Reuben, “Baker & Mckenzie Shelves Librarians: Library Professionals Worry Bargain-Hunting Firms Will Look to Outsourcing,“ABA Journal 8 1 (July 1995): 26; Law Saint-Onge, “Outsourced Michael Library Serves As A Wake-Up Call; Librarians Who Fail to Show How They Contribute to the Bottom Line May Find Themselves Shelved,” The National Law Journal 17 (July 17. 1995): C3C4. 6. Clare B. Dunkle, “Outsourcing the Catalog Department: A Meditation Inspired by the Business and Library Literature,” Journal oj’itcademic Librarianship 33 (January 1996): 33-44. 7. Michael Gorman, “The Corruption of Cataloging,” Librar?, Journal 120 (September 15, 1995): 32-33; “Berger Testifies against Contracting-Out.” Wilson Library Bulletin 60 (January 1986): IO; Ross Wood, “Outsourcing: Bungling [Letter to the Editor],” Librar? Joumnl 121 (February 1, 1996): 10. of Alberta Outsources 8. “University College & Research Libraries Cataloging,” News 56 (March 1995): 140; Magda ElSherbini, “ContrAct Cataloging: A Pilot Project for Outsourcing Slavic Books,” Cataloging & Clasxification Quarterly 20 (3) (109.5): 57-73: “An Introduction to Joyce L. Ogburn, Outsourcing,” Library AcqL1i.sition.s: Practice & Theo? 18 (1994): 363-366; Outxourcing Cataloging, Authority Work. and Physical Processing: A Checklist of Con.siderution.s. edited by Marie A. Kascus and Dawn Hale (Chicago: American Library Association. 1995); Brian Distad, “The Client Still Ranks First in U. Alberta Library’s Restructuring,” Libray Acquisitions: Practice & Theop 19 (Winter 1995): 435-438; Rick J. Block,
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“Cataloging Outsourcing: Issues and Options,” Serials Review 20 (Fall 1994): 73-77; Cannel C. Bush, Margo Sasse, & Patricia Smith, “Toward a New World Order: A Survey of Outsourcing Capabilities of Vendors for Acquisitions, Cataloging and Collection Development Services,” Librn~a Acquisitions: Practice & Theory 18 ( 1994): 397-4 14. 9. Milind M. Lele, Creating Strategic Leverage: Matching Company Strengths with Market Opportunities (New York: Wiley, 1992). pp. 17-3 I. 10. Sharon M. Oster, Modern Competitive Analysis (New York : Oxford University Press, 19901, pp. 37-60. I I. T. Burke, A. Genn-Bash, & B. Haines, Competition in Theory and Practice (London: Croom Helm, 19X8), pp. IOO-1 I 1. 12. Steven L. Goldman, Roger N. Nagel, & Kenneth Preiss. Agile Competitors and Virtual 0rgani:arions: Strategies for Enriching the Cusfomer (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. 19951, pp. 29-33. 13. Michael E. Porter, Comperitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Perfi)rmance (New York: Free Press. 1985), pp. 33-61; Michael E. Porter & Victor E. Millar, “How Information Gives You Competitive Advantage: The Information Revolution Is Transforming the Nature of Competition,” Harvard Business Review 63 (July-August 1985): 149- 160. 14. Porter & Millar, “How Information,” p. 155. 1.5. Michael A. Staller, Robert Christopherson. & Michael Miranda, “The Economics
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of Professional Journal Pricing,” College & Research Libraries 57 (January 1996): 9-2 1. 16. Porter & Millar, “How Information,” p. 152. 17. Paul Metz, “Serials Pricing and the Role of the Electronic Journal, ” College & Research Libraries 52 (July 1991): 3 15-327. 18. Richard E. Lucier, Embedding the Library into Scientific and Scholarly Communication through Knowledge Management. Paper presented at the 1992 Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, April 5-7, 1992, Sponsored by Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. 19. Carla J. Stoffle, Robert Renaud, & Jerilyn R. Veldof, “Choosing Our Futures,” College & Research Libraries 57 (May 1996): 221. 20. Ibid, p. 224. 2 1. James R. Moore, “Predators and Prey: A New Ecology of Competition,” Harvard Business Review 71 (May-June 1993): 75-86. 22. Friedemann Weigel, “EDI In the Marketplace: How Close Are We?,” Librun, Administration & Management 10 (Summer 1996): 141-146; Joan C. Griffith, “Why Not EDI? One Librarian’s Perspective,” Library Administration & Management IO (Summer 1996): 147-150; Pamela Bluh. “Why EDI?: What Managers Need to Know about Electronic Data Interchange,” Library Administration & Management 10 (Summer 1996): 138-147.
23. Porter & Millar, “How Information,” p. 152. 24. Michael Hammer & Champy James, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution (New York : Harper Business, 1993), pp. 35-47. 25. Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (New York: Doubleday, 1990). For an application of Senge’s concepts to libraries see Shelley E. Phipps, “Transforming Libraries into Learning Organizations-The Challenge for Leadership,” Journal of Library Administration I 8 (3/4) (1993): 19-37. 26. George Stalk, Philip Evans, & Lawrence E. Shulman, “Competing on Capabilities: The New Rules of Corporate Strategy,” Harvard Business Review 70 (March-April 1992): 5769. 27. Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies for Builing a Learning Organizution (New York: CurrencJs 1994), p. 11. 28. Atkinson, “Contest,” p. 459. 29. Ross Atkinson, “Library Functions, Scholarly Communication, and the Foundation of the Digital Library: Laying Claim to the Control Zone,” The Library Quarterly 66 (July 1966): 248-253. 30. Oster, “Competitive Analysis,” p, I5 1. 31. Richard E. Lucier, “Building a Digital Library for the Health Sciences: Information Space Complimenting Information Place,” Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 83 (July 1995): 346-350.