The future of serials librarianship

M a r y Elizabeth Clack and John Riddick, Column Editors

The Balance Point

TIIE FtrrURE OF SERIALS LIBRARIANSHIP

Forum edited by Mary Elizabeth Clack and John Riddick, with contributions from F. Dixon Brooke, Jr., Czeslaw Jan Grycz, Karen Hunter, and Herbert White Introduction

Clack is serial records librarian at Harvard College Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Riddick is head of Acquisitions Services at Park Library, Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, Michigan.

-- THE FUTUREOF SERIALSLIBRARIANSmP-

For this column, we asked contributors to write a brief statement on the future of serials librarianship. We were interested in obtaining views from library science educators, subscription agents, publishers, librarians, and academicians on the trends they foresee in the next ten years. How will serials librarians adapt to changes in the format and distribution of serials? What skills should be acquired and/or developed to meet future challenges? While our authors agree on the primacy of printed serials for the short term, they recognize that technological advances will have a marked effect on serials management. F. Dixon Brooke, Jr. of Ebsco sees the need for serials librarians to be flexible, to adjust to technology in flux, and to keep abreast of changing emphases in academic fields. Chet Grycz of the University of California sees a blurring of the distinctions between print and electronic publication so that three significant areas will be affected: legitimization, collection, and identification. His article redefines these functions and explores the implications of technological innovation as scholars increasingly communicate original work electronically. Karen Hunter of Elsevier addresses the requisite educational preparation for librarians to effect solutions to the economics of access. Ideally, emphasis would be on entrepreneurial and decision-making skills and training in marketing analysis and planning and financial models. SUMMER 1990

55

Herbert White of Indiana University presents a library educator's perspective. Viewing the serials librarian as manager rather than technician, he too emphasizes expertise in decision making to address ever-present economic pressures and users' demands for greater access to collections. F. Dixon Brooke, Jr.

EBSCO Subscription Services In the development of this article, I have given considerable thought and research to the subject of the future of serials librarianship. I have also discussed the topic with several of my EBSCO colleagues who are themselves librarians. They asserted, naturally, several different views along with some common thoughts. My formative opinion is that there is no foreseeable demise of the printed serial publication and therefore no accompanying decrease in the need for serials librarians. However, regarding the role of the serials librarian in the future, the only thing we can be sure of is that it will change just as it has in the past. Recent technological advances have predicated visions of future libraries with no books or serials and row after row of workstations where technologically advanced users access full-text documents online with little or no assistance...and even scenarios where individuals have full access to all their information needs from their homes or offices via online connections with no need for libraries as we know them. But are publishers, librarians, and, most importantly, library patrons really ready to exchange all their printed pages for computer screens? I think not. Despite the current fascination with and increased usage of a wide variety of automated library capabilities, the information explosion continues to "explode" primarily through serial publications produced in print form. As Patricia Glass Schuman pointed out in "Reclaiming Our Technological Future" (Library Journal, 1 March 1990), large research libraries have doubled the size of their collections in the past 14 years. We encountered further evidence of the continually greater demand for serial publications recently while developing our Index Medicus Price Study; in 1986 there were 2,149 prepriced titles indexed in Index Medicus and by 1990 that number had risen to 2,346. That's close to a 10 percent increase in five years just in this finite area of medical and health sciences information. This is notto say that technology will not continue to change the face of worldwide information access. Recent years have seen not only miraculous but critical 56

SERIALSREVIEW

advances in all areas of library automation and information access, and it is extremely likely that such advances will be expanded and refined in the future. The information creators will continue to experiment with new document delivery systems stemming from this technology, obviously even to the extent of online fulltext versions. But we must remember several factors when considering the future of information dissemination and how it will affect information professionals such as serials librarians. The first of these is economics. For the most part, the choice of an information delivery system for any particular journal is dictated by the publisher and is driven by economics. Whether it is produced by a commercial or a scholarly publisher, the cost of delivery plays a major role in a publication's presentation format. The technology may be present and may be perfectly applicable to the task, but the cost may be prohibitive in many instances. For example, when mainframe computers first came on the scene in the early 1950s, automated card catalogs for libraries would have been an ideal application. But the cost and the space they required at that time were enormous. It wasn't until thirty years later, when microchip technology came into its own, that such an ideal application could become an accomplished reality. A related concern involves the question of circulation (from the publisher's view) or access (from the librarian's and patron's view)--whether all subscribers or potential users of a publication would have access if published electronically rather than in print form. Currently, it is estimated that only 13 percent of the households in the United States have a personal computer and that only 10 percent of these have a modem. This also brings up the topic of use. Even if the technology exists and the creator of the information and the institution providing access to it want to disseminate it in a specific format, this doesn't automatically mean that the end-user will appreciate and support their decision. Remember microfilm in the 1970s? It was billed as the new library "panacea" that would unclutter the shelves, save space, and provide instant access to older documents. The problem was the patrons detested it and often refused to use it. My point is that information technology is in a state of flux. It remains to be seen exactly which advances and technologies will develop as true, practical realities for which publishers, for which types of libraries, and for which patrons. BRS currently has 70 titles available online in full-text form.., and such access makes sense for online searching by researchers looking for specific biomedical data. But does it make sense for a public library patron.to read an article in TIME on a computer screen rather than on a page of the - - M A R Y E L I Z A B E T H C L A C K AND

JOHN RIDDICK

--

printed magazine? Additionally, the medical researcher may have well-defined information needs and, given the opportunity, probably can locate some of the needed articles or citations by himself or herself. But, can a junior high student assigned to write a paper on political unrest in Lithuania be expected to accomplish this without the assistance of a trained librarian? I think not. In the future, astute serials librarians must keep up with trends in their subject areas, evaluate and embrace or reject automation technologies on an individual basis, and display a wider variety of interpersonal and communications skills than ever before due to the continual change in their professional environment. They will play an important role in determining not only which titles in which formats from which sources are to be a part of their library's collection, but which networks, consortia, automated library systems, and related associations should be established to support that collection. Although they may utilize different means to accomplish their goal due to a continually changing set of "realities," serials librarians in the future must continue to determine how best to serve the information needs of their library patrons--just as they've done in the past. Brooke is vice president/division general manager of EBSCO Subscription Services.

Czeslaw Jan Grycz Division of Library Automation The University of California All of us sense change within library and serials management. Change is natural for a professional dealing with an eclectic proliferation of specialized journals and collections of articles. But serials librarians have been increasingly baffled by the multiplicity of suggested forms of publications vying for legitimacy alongsidetraditionalprint. Thenew competitionevokes various radical scenarios that produce a sense of anxiety, or at least uncertainty, among serials librarians. Presently, to be sure, most available bibliographic technologies consist of retrospective collections of previouslypublished articles. These further inhibit true innovation by commonly storing images of pages, rather than their ASCII equivalents. Nevertheless, online databases (such as DIALOG); enormous databases of journal "Tables of Contents" (such as Current Contents); and various collections of publications (such -- Tm~ FUTUREOF SF~tIALSLmRAmANSmP-

as those issued in CD-ROM format) provide a new kind of retrieval efficiency for librarians. As such, they have been widely endorsed and enthusiastically embraced by the library community. While there is no minimizing the practical and social barriers that must be overcome before electronic publishing can be seen as the equal of print, it is likely that we will experience a gradual but continual disintegration of the distinctions between print and electronic publication, as we become more accustomed to dealing with the latter. Today's electronic products also signal the potential for a more profound transformation in serials publication, one in which the same electronic media technologies are being harnessed for the delivery and dissemination of original scholarly work. Such work within the electronic environment will tend towards primary (and even exclusive) electronic publication, raising a whole host of complicated issues for serials librarians. Technological innovation is likely to proliferate first in the area of scientificjournal publications. There are several contributing reasons for this. Scientific authors believe the present system of print publication to be flawed, and are pressing for innovative change. The perceived advantages of being able to access electronically stored databases of articles far outweigh the disadvantages of the medium itself. The robustness of the electronic environment is attractive to those scientists who would prefer to deliver source data or software programs along with analytic texts. Images, now frequently created on computers, can be more effectively delivered electronically than in print. The economics of professional journal publications are being scrutinized and criticized. Timeliness of publication is increasingly important to scholars, and (whether correctly or not) electronics are expected to reduce publication time. User control is cited as another advantage of electronic publishing. In sum, there now exists a critical mass of "computer-literate" potential subscribers in many fields and disciplines who would be ready to evaluate prototype electronic journals. When electronic journals are tried and found acceptable, the change will have a decided impact on serials librarians. The more important implications can be categorized under the following rubrics: Legitimization (recognizing items that are appropriately within the bibliographic system), Collection (issues involved in archiving and storing various non-print information resources), Identification (finding items of appropriate interest for particular purposes).

SUMMER 1990

57

Legitimization There exist numerous barriers hindering rapid implementation of electronic journals. This is not the place to examine these in any detail. Suffice it to say that the more significant barriers primarily affect the author and publisher, and have to do with the economics of publication and the related legal structures for protecting intellectual property rights. For the library community, one of the rarely appreciated publishing functions involves the procedurally standardized way by which publishers bring actual published materials to the attention of the library community. Over time, the process by which publishers exercise their important gatekeeping role has accommodated both intellectual and practical requirements. Intellectually, publishers legitimize an author's work by subjecting it to peer review. Practically, they dress itup for an appropriate public appearance by contributing editorial and stylistic improvements and marketing it to a potential audience. Functionally, they validate the quality level of submitted manuscripts by either withholding or granting the publisher's imprint. Integral to the whole process are apparently mundane bureaucratic steps, which are nonethelessvital to the librarian. These include applying for copyright, obtaining an ISBN, and publishing CIP information. While mundane, these pragmatic stages legitimize a library's interest by identifying serious published materials. Simultaneously, these items provide useful "handles" for eventual collection, classification, and retrieval. Similar procedures for electronic "documents" do not yet exist. For many network specialists, "publishing" is equated with "making available" or "sending." We need to define a new set of terms to distinguish between formal and informal publication in the digital milieu. While a recent workshop, convened by The Corporation for National Research Initiatives, addressed this topic, the terms that were suggested were decidedly infelicitous, and will require much refinement before they can be popularized. Nonetheless, that a new electronic environment will require modified handling procedures is undisputed. In the absence of a systematic process of identifying legitimate publication, we will be propelled into an anarchic chaos in which librarians will be unableto distinguishlegitimatepublicationfrom electronic dross. In reply to such concerns, various scholars suggest that many of the discerning functions presently embodied in the librarian's experienced knowledge and enhanced by the scholarly publisher's uneasily granted imprints, can be defined by algorithms. They also assert that extrapolating existing procedures is, in fact, impossible. To move from an environment characterized by print to one in which the volume of electronic 58

SERIALSRgVlgW

information will inevitably dominate, an entirely new model will have to be developed. Many "knowledge access" researchers having already concluded that the bibliographic systems developed for print (albeit elegant) will simply be inadequate for the robust environment of the future, are involved in studies involving AI and "expert systems." Such research is expected to provide quite different techniques for information retrieval than the ones with which we are presently familiar. Their experiments suggest a paradigmatic shift from present "retrieval" models. Instead of assuming that individual items exist to be retrieved, the advanced searching techniques assume the presence of polyglot forms of information, some subset of which might interest a researcher. The subset will be composed of some documents that have previously been published and appear in print, but also others that might have been scanned and exist in digitized form, others for which only digital images exist, still others that might only exist in video or audio form, and some of which might conceivably consist of dynamic multimedia databases. Accordingly, new approaches for identifying useful information don't look for individual documents, but rather facilitate the ability to express search parameters of considerable flexibility and "user friendliness." These programs report relevance statistics for matches and permit dynamic modification of the search parameters, depending on the number and quality of "hits" found. Clearly, much labor is required before really workable models of such programs will be widespread among research libraries and institutions. But the trend is obvious: New search programs assume the desirability and inevitability of greater personal control by database researchers. They anticipate access to remote (as well as local) resources, using uniform search command protocols. They diminish the role of the expert librarian intermediary. These are all aspects with which serials librarians will need to come to grips over the next decade. If one of the most useful characteristics of traditional publication-its quality control--will be challenged by the expected diversity of information sources, librarians will have to contend with a less reliable qualitative ranking of startup publishing entities that may be expected to emerge within the electronic environment. If the scope of the serials librarian will include documents that may not have gone through the systematic processes associated with print, librarians will want to define and enforce new procedures by which such "renegade" documents are legitimized as sufficiently serious to be brought within their purview.

-- MARYELIZABETHCLACKANDJOriNRmDICK--

Collection

One way to exert some influence over the predictable (if--one hopes--temporary) chaos suggested by the above is for librarians to embrace the challenges by extending their definition of "collectable scholarly documents" to include specifically electronic ones. This contrasts with the far more common approach by which electronic and digital documents are frequently ignored altogether. To the extent that many librarians deal with electronic publications at all, they do so by purchasing CD-ROMs, which--comfortingly--behave like their more corporeal counterparts: printed books and journals. Similarly, while librarians have also begun collecting audio tapes, recordings, and video cassettes, these, too, have physical forms that make them far easier to deal with--than specifically electronic materials that might live out their lives in digital form and involve less tangible characteristics of authorship or place. Frequently, librarians consider electronic documents as ephemera, beyond the scope of collections policies. Doing this avoids some of the thornier budgetary problems, but may be a counter-productive strategy. Instead, librarians need to define the requirements for collecting such less tangible electronic documents for at least two reasons; their skills in imposing systematic coherence on otherwise daunting diversity is nonpareil. By contributing to a solution for permitting heterogeneityof form while facilitating widespread universal access, librarians will make a valuable contribution to "taming" the more unruly electronic environment. Their enormous experience can help civilize the electronic media, domesticating it to the real useful service to the research community. This call for library involvement, I realize, contradicts the popular notion of electronic networks, which describes them as revivals of democratic exchange, in which contributions come from varieties of sources and must be judged on their own merits. In a scholarly environment, however, it has always been the case that one's peers call attention to work considered to be worthy. It has been suggested that an electronic environment could permit the creation of some form of "postpublication review process" whereby comments and critiques appended to electronic articles would provide the ultimate peer evaluation mechanism. This radical approach would suggest the existence of some form of search parameter that would analyze and evaluate the comments themselves in order to identify articles worth reading. Such a scenario also suggests an entirely new role for publishers. They might retrospectively cull the networks in order to consolidate significant -- THE FUTtrREOF SEmAt~LmRARIANSmP-

bodies of work, publishing these in more useful form (perhaps print). Such a function would not only identify items of particular noteworthiness, but would signal the appearance of emerging disciplines and unexpected confluences that might appear from among the interdisciplinary collections. While interesting to consider, it is not likely that these more extreme proposals will emerge until well after we've become familiar with more imitative prototypes, where electronic publishing mimics print conventions, at least initially. These are obviously considerations not only of some import but of considerable complexity. It is quite impossible to predict what forms will be found useful and be permitted to exist, and which will be seen as restrictive or archaic and be doomed to failure. What is certain is that we can expect a rich variety of experiments in the near future. Accordingly, the energies dedicated by serials librarians will be vital to the unfolding capabilities of an electronic environment, in which electronic academic journals (however they appear) might reasonably co-exist with their printed antecedents and counterparts. It is quite likely, after all, that any system for the future will differ enormously from the existing one. But, it is extremely important that the relationship between old and new permit a graceful co-existence. Only librarians will be able to facilitate the merging of such diverse systems, given their common ultimate requirements. Identification

Perhaps the only challenge for serials librarians that is largely within their control is in dealing with the paradigmatic shift, required by the proposed existence of a polyglot corpus of data than that to which they are accustomed. The contemporary paradigm is based on the familiar "needle in the haystack" model. The needle can be thought of as a pre-existing, known article or item of bibliographic information. At some time after its creation, it was judged sufficiently importantto havebeen published, identified, classified, and archived. The challenge for librarians is--on demand--to locate and retrieve any individual item that might be required. The only way for this model to function is for librarians to have been in control of all the stages between publication and retrieval. As the universe of published documents has grown, the difficulties in meeting the challenge have simultaneously become more complex, but control has continued to exist entirely within the library. Though this model has remained stable for centuries, there are unambiguous signs that it will not survive long into the next. There is little doubt that maneuvering through the extensive labyrinth of library holdings presently SUMMER 1990

59

requires the expert intervention of a librarian. One should not conclude that, in the short term, many of the program developments mentioned above will appear in the market to threaten, much less eliminate, the role of librarians. But if contemporary research seems to point to the fact that the "needle in the haystack" paradigm will not long survive, then in its place a new model must arise. The most common alternative posits that there exists a variety of different needles in the same haystack, each with slightly different characteristics and uses. What is equally true is that there will be a greater diversity of haystacks, which requires future serials librarians to serve in the increasingly important role of navigators. They will need to identify and discover the existence and presence of knowledge databases both local and remote: even international. Such navigational advice will be vital to the fullest exploitation of the electronic network resources that are, even today, being developed. Conclusion

Thus, serials librarians face challenges from external and internal sources. Externally, the predictability of quality controls will inevitably deteriorate as new publishing entities proliferate in the electronic environment. Internally, managing a polyglot corpus of information resources is exponentially more complex than the already challenging diversity in print. Psychologically, the central role of the librarian is threatened by software and paradigmatic attitude shifts that tend to undermine an appreciation for the contributions of serials librarians. None of these challenges will ultimately dislodge the role, or much change the real function of serials librarians. Indeed, it can well be claimed that the new electronic environment depends as much on the developed skills and experience of such individuals, as it does on any technological or computer enhancement. That the changes anticipated in this paper will come about (in one form or another) is of little doubt. How gracefully it comes about will depend on the degree to which librarians energetically contributetheir skills to required solutions for integration, coherence, and navigation. Grycz is head, Scholarship and Technology Study Project, Division of Library Automation, The University of California.

60

SEmA~ REVIEW

Karen Hunter Elsevier Science Publishers

Regrettably, serials librarians in 2000 and beyond will still have the basic challenge of needing creative solutions to a major imbalance between serials worthy of purchase and funds available. The distributionmedia will have evolved, but electronic delivery is not a panacea. The majority of serials (broadly defined) will still not be available electronically. For that which is available, the net cost for electronic access may not be less than for paper, and the literature as yet shows no signs of slowing its growth. Librarians will have to work harder than ever to create collections and services custom-tailored to the needs of their user communities. Given that perspective and as a graduate of both a library school (Syracuse) and a business school (Columbia) and as a former technical services librarian (Cornell), there is no question in my mind as to the most appropriate training for tomorrow's serials librarians. Whom would you hire first--Candidate A or Candidate B? Candidate A is a graduate of a leading library school, where course work included: History of the Book, Reference Services I and II, Advanced Cataloging: AACR IV, Automated Acquisitions Systems, Library Administration, Electronic Information Resources, and Regional Networking. Candidate B is a graduate of a leading business school, where course work included: Entrepreneurial Enterprises, Cost Accounting, Finance II: Dealing in Foreign Currency, Marketing II: Consumer Market Research, Statistics and Operations Research, Personnel Management, The Art of Negotiation and Dealmaking, and Strategic Planning. I'd take B any day and teach him or her about electronic information sources and regional networking via on-the-job training. While this is said somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it has been my view for more than twenty years that the most successful technical services librarians of any stripe or department are those who think and act first as businesspeople. This takes nothing away from the ideals of service and love of information and the formats in which it is distributed. It simply makes one more effective in delivering those services. It's a tough world, regrettably getting tougher, and the survivors will be those who are skilled in managing scarce resources (including people). -- MARYELLZ~d3ETnCLACKANDJOHNRmDICK -

-

Decision making--one of the skills that business schools are supposed to teach best--will be an increasingly valued skill. We have seen "collection development" evolve first into "collection management" and now into what might be termed "access management." Serials librarians have to deal with a variety of standard business notions, such as: evaluating (if not actually calculating) return on investment and cost/benefit ratios; negotiating optimal terms with vendors; developing new services or "product lines"; and accepting "sunk costs" (expenses that have been incurred, can't be recovered and, that should no longer be factored into a decision (i.e., the twelve years of bound volumes of a journal that now should be canceled). The question is not whether serials librarians can and do make decisions, but whether they have been given the proper tools to make and implement those decisions as effectively and efficiently as possible. What kinds of tools? Perhaps at the extreme: * • •

• • •

training in market research and analysis to better determine their constituencies' real needs; marketing skills to "sell" programs (as well as unpopular decisions) to faculty and administrators; management information systems to track the most relevant data of their purchasing and customer transactions--the data that will help most in decision making; statistical and financial models for evaluation of alternative strategies; risk-management techniques; strategic planning models; and systems for establishing measurable objectives, both for programs and for individual staff members.

Library schools and business schools are both professional trade schools. What is needed is for librarians--particularly acquisitions and serials libraria n s - t o understand what trade they are in. Hunter is vice president and assistant to the chair, Elsevier Science Publishers.

-- Tm~ F~rvr~ oF Sr_~ALSL m ~ s m r -

Herbert S. White School of Library and Information Science Indiana University Most library schools, including my own, teach serials work as part of a course called Technical Services. There are pressures on us to offer more courses, as there are from proponents of other specific areas, who argue that we should have a second and perhaps even a third course on government documents, or that academic library administration is not enough and that we need a course on urban community college library administration. For the most part, and given the reality of the present 12-course degree program that starting salaries barely validate, I would think that one course on technical services is enough. Of course, much more remains to be learned about serials work, but it can be learned quite comfortably and appropriately on the job, or in workshops. I would much prefer to concentrate on the issues of the library as an institution, and the options of how to get them resolved. I would argue that those who disagree, and who want students "better trained," have failed to accept the generally accepted professional premise that new hires are not very productive and are not supposed to be productive, because they have been educated in schools and now need to be trained by the employer or by mechanisms devised and paid for by the employer. The jobs of managers include the setting of goals and objectives, the evaluation of alternatives, and the establishment of strategies and priorities. Most of all management is the making of decisions, and the selection among options that may at first glance all appear unattractive. Technicians, by contrast, accept the premise of the environment, and look only for ways to get the job done. The job then becomes the purpose of the job, and, if it occurs to the reader that this is what some of our "managers" do, it would be my suggestion that this is because some of these people are really technicians with fancy management titles. They certainly do not do what good managers are supposed to do, and that is to lead into what may be a recasting of the entire environment, or at least a revalidation of the premises. The term "technicians" is not used pejoratively. There are technicians on Wall Street who understand what happens and know how to make money whether the stock market goes up or down, and who earn annually five or ten times what any librarian might hope to earn. Most computer professionals, in my observation, are technicians. They want to make SUMMER 1990

61

computer systems efficient within their own framework, and they have forgotten that Peter Drucker reminded us that automation is not about machines, but rather about how people work. In my days of directing the NASA Scientific and Technical Information Facility, I found quite a few technicians in programmers who wrote applications for the efficiency of the machine, and not necessarily of those using it. We are assured that all of this has now ended with "user-friendly" software, but don't you believe it. My screen still insults me with comments, such as "invalid instruction," which Miss Manners would not approve. Most librarians, and specifically most serials librarians, operate as technicians, doing whatever it is they do efficiently, at least by their own criteria, if not by others'. I enter this caveat because I realize that I can think of no reason why any journal issue should be removed from use for more than two months for something as routine and predictable as binding. Two weeks to get ready, one-month for the bindery, and two weeks to get it back. Any bindery that cannot function in a one-month environment when the work is pre-scheduled can certainly be replaced by a bindery that can. Any serials librarians who must have 499 packages neatly tied with twine waiting for an issue to complete the 500th can be equally replaced, because it has not occurred to this individual that the problem package can go in the next shipment. And just perhaps, if it never goes at all, so what? This is not the manager in me surfacing, it is the technician searching for efficiency, because I was also prepared as a technician. When groups of technical services librarians urge the ALA Council to express its dismay at the weakening of the U.S. dollar because of its presumed negative impact on our ability to purchase foreign journals, that is the voice of the technician. When the ALA Council endorses such a resolution, it simply represents the reality that the ALA Council is also heavily populated by technicians, in this case also abetted by a vote block always ready to criticize a national government as long as it is our own. Managers would have realized that the weakening of the U.S. dollar is basically an irrelevancy for the American customer, and only represents a problem for the foreign vendor. That is how it is supposed to work to reduce the American trade deficit, and that is how it does work when the Japanese and Germans realize that to sell their cars they either have to establish U.S. manufacturing facilities or accept a lower profit margin or both, because Americans don't care about the reasons, they just know they aren't going to pay more. The next time your friendly international scholarly publisher argues that the price increase was "unavoidable" (an obviously absurd term because the publisher has many options, including issue size) suggest that it might be time to 62

SERIALSREVIEW

consider opening a printing plant in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The point that technicians accept what they find (increased prices, low budgets, unreplaced staffs) and make it all work anyway while managers try to change the premise is one I have made before, and do not need to repeat here. My argument, in the context of this column, is that serials librarians are going to have to learn to be managers because at some point even the conspiracy of author/readers is going to tire of throwing more money at this problem. I have stated in other writings that we are already spending far too much on our serials budgets, because we give up too many other initiatives to get the money. A growth rate that matches the rate of inflation should be plenty, and the publishers might consider themselves grateful that the process grows at all. Some economic sectors are getting smaller. Up to now publishers have paid no attention to my arguments, because they have assumed quite correctly that they can always count on technician librarians to scurry around to get the money and protect the process. I could of course be wrong. Perhaps the process of 20 percent annual growth will never end, and I will leave to statisticians the calculation of when, under this scenario, library serials acquisitions budgets exceed the entire gross national product. When that happens there will be a real problem, because there will be no money left with which to buy video games. Sarcasm aside, I think that serials librarians will have to become managers instead of technicians because the pressures will become unbearable. We should also want to do it because it is not difficult to recognize that automation, centralization, and national networks will reduce much of what technicians in libraries now do to mechanical routines. Missing issue claims can already be more consistently recognized by a computer program. Outstanding quality in cataloging (a subjective decision in any case) can become counterproductive if it violates the national standards for sharing data. "Catalog it as we agreed, don't catalog it 'better'" is already being heard. Somewhere with the buggy whip manufacturers and the stage coach drivers are the librarians who had the gift for finding esoteric titles squirreled away in Irish monasteries. Except in rare book libraries, the problem is not finding titles. It is paying for what our clients have found. It is then necessary that we back away and re-establish why serials librarians do what they do. In my perhaps simplistic view, the primary reason is still to provide our clients with access to the information they need. Information comes in many forms, but quite a lot of it comes in serial publication, and in some disciplines most of the most important information comes in serial publication because it is one of the more rapid forms - - M A R Y E L I Z A B E T H C L A C K AND

JOHN R I D D I C K

--

of communication (certainly as compared to monographs). Purcttase directly for the collection has been, and will probably continue to be, the most obvious and safest form to assure access, although we rarely make the connection between ownership and access. The bindery delays I have already mentioned are one example; cataloging or check-in backlogs represent a second. The third comes from my own national Science Foundation studies in the 1970s that confirmed what serials librarians already knew, that under budgetary pressures duplicate copies become redundant to protect the one last copy, even when nobody uses it while the lack of multiple copies of heavily used material thwarts access. Our technician system has always valued ownership above access, and that point is easy to demonstrate in the recognition that we measure the first scrupulously and the second not at all. In a paraphrase of a popular phrase, it was a lousy system but it was ours. However, if I am correct in assuming (I am really hoping) that at some point even the academic world will rebel at the thought of a serials budget that doubles every four or five years, then we need to examine the options. Those options are many in number and, because they are heavily impacted by technology in both bibliographic access and delivery mechanisms, they will change and increase. They are options that have up to now not really affected serials librarians, because serials librarians have only been concerned with ownership. What we don't own now becomes a problem only for the interlibrary loan people. We can't begin to deal with the issue until we accept the premise that ownership is only one form of access, and access to serials should be the concern of serials librarians no matter where the particular title happens to be located. That issue becomes so emotionally charged that it is probably essential that we not even tell our users what we "own," because what we own is the information resources of the world, as long as we can build the bridges to them. The question of what we acquire in hard copy in presumed anticipation of need is a management strategy involving cost of purchase, ease of access and rapidity of access, anticipated likelihood of frequent need, shelf and storage space, and a whole range of other factors that become a part of the management model. The mechanisms are already plentiful, and I am reluctant to list them because they are already well known, because I would probably leave some out, and because even a complete list would be immediately dated. The concept of distributing tables of contents for journals we might or might not own is for some libraries thirty years old. We can do it ourselves or we can purchase the service. It fits quite nicely into the way our users work. They do not "read" journals any more than they read newspapers. They browse or skim -- Ttm FtrIXa~ oF SERIALSLmRAmANSmr--

them in the hope of finding something, or at least to protect themselves against missing something. Copies of current and earlier articles can be provided from our own libraries. Even the most stringent interpretation of the copyright law permits one copy of one article for one requestor for material we own, and the copyright law was written broadly precisely at our request to give us the options we now frequently give away in the fear of offending somebody whose price scales show no concern about offending us. We can blow back from microfilm, we can obtain a copy from another library under a mechanism we understand but implement badly, both because it is slow and because we have the effrontery to charge the requestor, thereby assuring that in the future he or she will insist that we purchase the whole journal. At the worst we can obtain copies from a commercial service, and then the copyright implications are their problem. We can bind or not bind, and keep or discard again evaluating a variety of factors including cost, space availability, likelihood of use (something we cannot know but we can certainly predict), and availability from other sources. There are two groups not involved in our management decision process. One is our users, and our responsibility here is simply to give them what they request (I would rather give them what they need). If they get it within 72 hours, that is better than they are doing now, and the question of where we got it from becomes irrelevant. To what extent we spend our access budget on initial purchase and to what extent we spend it on later acquisition are of course management decisions for us to make. Letting the users decide the titles in the purchase collection is a technician's trick toward decision avoidance, but it is a poor strategy for the university because the users don't know the options. The second group whose preferences are irrelevant are the publishers. Our relationship here is contractual and legal, and as already noted the copyright law is vaguely written and poorly defined by precedent. The likelihood of an academic library (unlike a corporation) being sued is minimal because actual damages are trivial and punitive damages would require a great deal of jury convincing. Juries may not fund libraries, but they still love them. It is important that in the process of protecting our options we sign away none of our rights. If any publisher insists on our signing some sort of restrictive agreement, let's all pass on buying the journal. It should occur to us that they wouldn't ask us to sign if they thought the law already protected them. If publishers are concerned about the possibility of coordinated resource sharing, and of course that is what this represents, then let them look to their pricing structure--but not as an act of morality, because for at least a small group of scholarly publishers the phrase publisher morality is an oxymoron. Rather, they might SUMMER 1990

63

look at their pricing structure because it could persuade our economic modeling. I am frequently asked at professional meetings to address the issues of cooperation and resource sharing, because the need to do what I have suggested in this article is quite clear to just about everybody. My response is always the same. Cooperation and resource sharing will work only to the extent to which the individual managers in each of the participating libraries see it as an advantage to them and to their libraries, and not just to the system as a whole. We have been running our library cooperative programs, without necessarily even being conscious of it, under the Marxist doctrine of "from each according to his ability,

to each according to his need." It doesn't work in the Soviet Union, and it doesn't work for interlibrary loan when large libraries realize that giving priority to request only drains their resources and encourages still more requests. It is only when we drop the technician mantle and accept management roles that require that we make cost-effective decisions about our own libraries, that we will see the potential of helping both the profession and all other libraries. Serials librarians may be at the cutting edge of this change. Wh/te is dean, School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University.

(Continued from page 53)

NOTES 1. Newsletter on Serials Pricing Issues. 1989-Irreg. $5/issue(paper). American Library Association. Association of Library Collections and Technical Services, Publisher/Vendor-Library Relations Committee. Subcommittee on Serials Pricing Issues.

2. Sharon C. Bonk, "Toward a Methodology of Evaluating Serials Vendors," Library Acquisitions: Practice & Theory 9, no. 1 (1980): 51. Jane Baldwinand Arlene Moore Sievers, "Subscription Agents and Libraries: An Inside View of what Every Serials Librarian Should Know," in Advances in Serials Management; a Research Annual, ed. by Marcia Tuttle and Jean Cook. (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1988), 41.

5. Stella Pilling, "The Use of Serials Subscription Agents by the British Library Document Supply Centre," Ihe Serials Librarian 14, nos. 3/4 (1988): 128. 6. Marcia Tuttle, Introduction to Serials Management. (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1983), 77. Sharon C. Bonk, "Toward a Methodology of Evaluating Serials Vendors," Library Acquisitions: Practice & Theory 9, no. 1 (1985): 52. 7. Thomas R. Sanders, "Subscription Agents in an Automated World," The Serials Librarian 14, nos. 3/4 (1988): 44. 8.

3. Huibert Paul, "Are Subscription Agents Worth Their Keep?" Serials Librarian 7 (Fall 1982): 31-41. 4. J.B. Merriman, "The Work of a Periodicals Agent," The Serials Librarian 14, nos. 3/4 (1988): 17-36. John B. Merriman, "Subscription Agents--Are They Worth Their Salt?" Library Acquisitions: Practice & Theory 13, no. 2 (1988): 149-52.

64

SERIALSREVIEW

Merriman, "The Work," 21-22. N. Bernard Basch, "Pricing," Library Acquisitions: Practice & Theory 12, no. 2 (1988): 205. Tuttle, 77-83. 9. Marcia Tuttle, "Magazine Fulfillment Centers: What They Are, How They Operate, and What We Can Do About Them," Library Acquisitions: Practice & Theory 9, no. 1 (1985): 47.

-- MARYELIZABETHCLACKANDJOHN RIDDICK--