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The Impact of Electronic Journals on Library Staff at ARL Member Institutions
THE IMPACT OF ELECTRONIC JOURNALS ON LIBRARY STAFF AT ARL MEMBER INSTITUTIONS: A SURVEY AND A CRITIQUE OF THE
SURVEY METHODOLOGY Susan Gardner BACKGROUND
Gardner is Instruction/Reference Librarian, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858; e-mail: gardnersu@ mail.ecu.edu.
A recent article addressed the difficulty of acquiring and maintaining Web-based, full-text electronic journals.1 For the purposes of this article, an “e-journal” includes not only individual, Web-based, full-text journals that duplicate their print counterparts, but also e-journal packages such as ScienceDirect and indexing and abstracting services such as EBSCOHost that include complete runs of the fulltext articles of selected journals. Many libraries have expanded their definition of the electronic journal to include all the above; like Drexel University, they “are now purchasing more of [their] electronic journals in packages from aggregators, publishers and consortia than as single titles” (p. 296).2 In a recent article about how one university is managing its e-journals, the authors stated that electronic resources were “more problematic, more time consuming, and involve more paperwork than paper subscriptions” (p. 44).3 Indeed, libraries everywhere are finding that e-journals involve more staff and increased staff time at both the acquisitions and maintenance stages of the work flow process than their printed counterparts. The selection, ordering, licensing, cataloging, and ongoing maintenance of e-journals affects staff workloads and challenges the organizational structure of libraries.
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As a project prepared in pursuit of a master’s degree in library science, in May 2000 the author conducted a survey that attempted to measure the impact of electronic journals on library staff at ARL member institutions. The results of the survey are reported in this article. In retrospect, I believe that the survey instrument could have been better conceived; several design flaws mar the results. Therefore, this article also addresses both the strengths and shortcomings of the survey in an effort to describe how the instrument could have been improved. This is done with the aim of helping others learn from and avoid the pitfalls to which I succumbed while designing the survey.
METHODOLOGY The focus of the survey was to determine how research libraries cope with the stresses of managing electronic journals. To gather information on the topic, I prepared a Web-based survey that consisted of seventeen questions designed to gauge the workload issues affecting research institutions as they struggled to provide electronic access to journals, as well as catalog their responses to the challenge. (See the Appendix for a copy of the survey.) My objective was to identify developing standards or common practices used by libraries to handle e-journals. I sent a letter via e-mail message to the head serials librarian of every ARL member institution (a list of the 120 ARL member institutions can be found at http:// www.arl.org). Since the survey was conducted, three new members were added, bringing the total up to 123. This message explained the survey and provided a link to it. Both one week and two weeks after the initial contact I followed up with another e-mail message, again explaining and providing a link to the Web-based survey. I identified the head serials librarians by checking organizational charts on ARL library homepages. For libraries that did not identify a distinct “serials librarian,” I chose someone in the Acquisitions Department with serial duties to serve as a surrogate contact. Ten member libraries were excluded from the sample because I could not identify one librarian whose job dealt specifically with serials management. Thus, the final sample numbered 110, rather than 120, ARL libraries. I chose to survey ARL members in the first place because they are research library leaders—the strict membership criteria en-
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forced by the association ensure that this is the case. ARL libraries also constitute a readily identifiable group, one highly likely to be immersed in e-journal workload and staffing issues. The seventeen survey questions are a mixture of multiple-choice nominal and ordinal queries supplemented by one open-ended question that allows the respondent the opportunity for a free response. Although all questions are supposed to be exhaustive in their answer choices, nominal questions “offer names or labels for characteristics,” whereas ordinal questions have “variables with attributes we can logically rank-order.”4 I used articles available in the library literature through April 2000 to develop the questions, although numerous articles subsequently published are relevant to the survey. Although some of these are discussed in the pages that follow, the reader should keep in mind that the information provided in them was not incorporated into the survey. My master’s thesis adviser supervised the literature review and survey construction; however, the professor never claimed to be an expert on the subject of e-journals and had never worked with them, other than as a user. Babbie’s The Practice of Social Research indicates that it is not essential that pretest subjects be experts on the topic, but that it is essential that subjects fill out the questionnaire rather than simply peruse it for errors.5 In this respect, I made an error; pretesting would have helped to eliminate bias in the survey. When subjects are involved in a pretest, they can indicate whether they were forced to make up answers—if that is the case, then the survey either did not provide appropriate choices, or questions needed to be clarified. In addition, pretesting can provide feedback on the visual layout of a survey and whether the questions are effectively ordered. Both of these are important factors in maximizing results. I attempted to guard against bias in the survey by providing space after most questions for freeresponse comments, and in some cases I provided the option of “other” as a choice of answer. Unfortunately, however, these types of errors still appeared in the survey. In retrospect, relying solely on the advice of my professor, rather than actually pretesting the survey with individuals actively involved in managing e-journals, was a shortcoming. Thirty-four librarians, or 30 percent of the sample, participated in the survey. Once they submitted the Web-based survey form, their identities remained anonymous. The answers were processed by the CGI
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(Common Gateway Interface) program, GForm. The server designated a file in my personal directory for the results. I chose to use a Web-based survey method because I believed it would be faster and less expensive than sending surveys by the US Postal Service. I also believed that librarians would be more likely to respond to an electronic rather than a paper survey, which they would have to mail back. Finally, I chose to use an electronic survey because the survey responses would be directed into a file in my directory, making it convenient for me to print off and analyze as time allowed. Although the file did not automatically tally the data, the coding that I had created was obvious enough so that I did not believe that interpreting the results of each survey would prove difficult. DISCUSSION AND RESULTS CHANGES IN WORKFLOW Duranceau, in a 1998 article,6 compared the work flow involved in acquiring printed serials to that for electronic serials at the MIT Libraries. The work flow for printed serials at MIT was a very linear process involving six simple steps, each performed by a different individual working independently. On the other hand, the work flow for the acquisition of networked serials at MIT was nonlinear and involved a total of fifteen people, often working in teams. Duranceau characterized the work flow for the acquisition of networked serials as different from the printbased workflow; the former was team based, cyclical, and varied rather than predictable, and required higher-level library staff and increased communication and coordination. Similarly, Drexel University found that e-journals required more staff time not only to select and acquire but also to maintain, as well as to instruct patrons on their use.7 Additionally, Drexel’s “increased needs [were] predominantly in areas staffed by the best-compensated employees.”8 Three questions that I asked on the survey were intended to confirm that at ARL institutions, more departments were involved with e-journals than with printed ones, and that both the number of staff and the amount of staff time have increased. Question 1 asked which departments were involved in one or more aspects of electronic journals. Traditionally, printed journals are handled by librarians in collection development, cataloging, circulation, and within the Acquisitions/Serials Departments. I wanted to see
Figure 1 Departments Involved with E-journals (Question 1) what additional departments had become involved in handling e-journals. Unfortunately, I did not ask respondents to describe the departments that were involved in handling print materials. As a result, the results are not very meaningful. A better question would have been to delineate what additional departments are involved in e-journals. Nonetheless, the results displayed in Figure 1 suggest that whereas in many cases the departments remain the same regardless of format, in some libraries e-journals require involvement from information technology/ systems (65 percent), administration (56 percent), reference (50 percent), electronic resources (47 percent), and bibliographic services (26 percent). Questions 3 and 4 assess whether the number of staff and the amount of staff time spent working with e-journals have increased a great deal or not much, not increased, or decreased when compared with printed journals. As expected, 73 percent of respondents said the number of staff who are involved has increased (either a lot or not by much); only 6 percent said the number has decreased (see Figure 2). Similarly, 97 percent said that the amount of staff time spent on e-journals has increased; only 3 percent reported a decrease (Figure 3). I failed to ask whether the staff being discussed were professional or clerical, although I was specifically trying to chart the change for professional librarians. Thus, again, the results are not as meaningful as they might have
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Figure 2 Number of Staff Who Worked with E-journals, Compared with Print Journals (Question 3) been. Several librarians themselves commented on the increased amount of work required to handle e-journals. One noted that “the amount of time spent on the acquisition of e-journals is growing exponentially,” whereas another wrote that “personally, I feel it has doubled [the] department work load.” Still another stated that “the largest portion of staff time spent on e-journals has not been taken from the time spent on print journals, but from elsewhere.” Conversely, one librarian speculated that as print journal subscriptions begin to decrease in the library, “our staffing will stay stable with a possible decrease.”
ACQUISITION PROCESS SELECTION The selection process for electronic journals is more complicated than that for printed ones. Staff from
Figure 3 Amount of Staff Time Spent on E-journals, Compared with Print Journals (Question 4)
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the collection development department, or possibly a specific subject specialist, choose printed journals. However, more departments are usually involved in the selection of e-journals. At the MIT Libraries, a team made up of librarians from various departments selects electronic resources.9 All the selection factors for printed journals—such as content, cost, where the journal is indexed, the citation index ranking, and importance to the collection—also apply to e-journals. In addition, new factors—such as interface options, search features, display formats, access restrictions, the availability of a persistent URL, linking capability, format, use statistics, and cost per title—must be contended with.10 Many libraries, like MIT, now include a variety of staff in the selection process. The University of Nevada, Reno, has assembled a “collection development working group” that consists of staff members from public services, serials/acquisitions, document delivery, a branch library, and access services.11 This group developed two e-products work forms to aid in the e-journal workload process. Question 8 in my survey asks who selects e-journals for the respondent’s library. Since my intention was to gauge what additional departments had become involved with e-journal selection, a better question would have been, “Who is involved in selecting e-journals who was not also involved in selecting printed journals?” Although I cannot be certain which departments were already involved with the selection of printed titles, the results displayed in Figure 4 indicate that at the time of my survey, collection development was most often involved (91 percent). Subject specialists choose e-journals in 29 percent of the libraries. Reference (35 percent), electronic resources (21 percent), serials (12 percent), a committee (9 percent), and systems (3 percent) are also involved in e-journal selection at the institutions surveyed. Questions 10 and 10b ask who, if anyone, reviews the e-journal selections and—if it is a committee that oversees selection—which departments are represented. I asked this to determine whether, if an individual initially selects e-journals, the recommendations are then reviewed by someone else. Selection review tends to occur most often when libraries are dealing with packages of e-journals, rather than individual titles. Only 12 percent of respondents said that selections were not reviewed. Fifty-three percent reported that a special committee reviews e-journal selections, 35 percent stated a department head or a director performs this task, 26 percent re-
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Figure 6 Selection Review Committee Membership (Question 10b)
Figure 4 Selectors of E-journals (Question 8) ported an electronic resources librarian as a reviewer, and 6 percent said a systems librarian had this responsibility (see Figure 5). The contingency question (10b) asked of those who reported that a committee reviewed selections to disclose the
Figure 5 Who Reviews E-journal Selections? (Question 10)
makeup of the group. The results revealed that a variety of departments were involved: 83 percent mentioned reference; 72 percent, acquisitions; 61 percent, systems; and 50 percent, electronic resources (see Figure 6). In retrospect, although including the “other (please specify)” option, I should have offered more choices. It is quite possible that administration or collection development, for example, are represented on a review committee. My answer choices were not exhaustive, which is the objective of most survey attributes. ORDERING AND THE LICENSE AGREEMENT Ordering a journal no longer means that a library pays for physical issues or volumes. Dygert has asserted that “because of several unique properties of digital information, agreements that govern the acquisition and maintenance of traditional paper collections are inadequate in the digital information context” (p. 10).12 E-journals are different because a library accesses rather than owns them. To guard against the abuse of intellectual property in the digital medium, publishers require libraries to sign license agreements that delineate who comprises the user population, what constitutes “authorized use” of the information, and how long access to the information will last.13 Question 9 of the survey asked whether electronic or printed journals require that more professionals become involved in the ordering process. Predictably, as Figure 7 indicates, 88 percent of the respondents believed that e-journals require a greater number of professionals to be involved; only 3 percent stated that printed journals required the
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Figure 7 Increased Number of Professional Staff Involved with Ordering Process (Question 9) involvement of more professional staff. Nine percent indicated there was no difference. This question is noteworthy because it is one of the few instances in which I asked about the level of staff required to perform an aspect of e-journal management, something that I intended to investigate all along. Another question from the survey asks who is presently negotiating license agreements in ARL libraries. A report from the 1999 Annual North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) conference stated that only slightly more librarians than administrators negotiated licenses (17 libraries versus 14), whereas “some consortia were involved in negotiations (p. 137).”14 An informal survey of AcqNet-L
Figure 8 Who Negotiates License Agreements? (Question 12)
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and Colldev-L list serve members conducted in 200015 revealed that a wide variety of departmental staff members were involved in license negotiations, including acquisitions (36 percent), the library director (29 percent), collection development (21 percent), the assistant director (17 percent), and systems (15 percent). Question 12 of my survey asked who negotiates license agreements for e-journals. The results, displayed in Figure 8, confirm that a variety of departments handle these negotiations. Acquisitions (35 percent), administrators and collection development (32 percent each), electronic resources (24 percent), consortia (21 percent), serials (18 percent), reference (6 percent), and systems (3 percent) were all cited. Question 13 asked if legal consultants reviewed license agreements. The majority of respondents claimed to have legal assistance; Figure 9 indicates that 65 percent said yes to this question, whereas 35 percent said no. Question 11 asked whether the library had a standardized procedure for negotiating license agreements or whether each electronic journal was treated as a separate case. When I embarked on this survey, I found nothing in the literature to indicate that libraries had yet developed a typical procedure. The results, shown in Figure 10, implied some standardization among ARL libraries. Twenty-four percent of respondents reported having a standardized procedure, whereas another 55 percent reported some standardization among e-journals with similar access criteria; 21 percent reported that each license was negotiated separately. Since the survey results were tabulated, several researchers have published articles that discuss the workload burdens of license tracking and how libraries might systematize the process. Duranceau16
Figure 9 Do You Have Any Legal Consultants Who Help with Licenses? (Question 13)
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two e-products work forms for licenses: Form I enables subject specialists to gather product, content, licensing, and systems requirement information; Form II aids serials librarians in working with other departments to set up license files, process orders, contact departments, publicize the e-journals, and include them on the subject Web pages. These forms are on the internal Web site to facilitate easy access.20
MAINTENANCE
Figure 10 Is There a Standardized Procedure for Negotiating License Agreements? (Question 11) discussed the problem of e-journal license tracking before, during, and after purchase at the MIT Libraries. In the early stages of e-journals, MIT library staff maintained nine separate tools to deal with different aspects of licenses, aspects such as ILL, remote access, technical support, license expiration, links, and usage statistics. They eventually realized that they had to integrate all the information into a single tool in order to reduce the workload. The result was VERA (Virtual Electronic Resource Access), which automatically generates Web-based reports and serves as both a user interface and an internal “licensing information” manager. VERA imports information from the OPAC and features automated link-checking and provision of journal holdings data, automated creation of proxy server URLs, automatic highlighting of new resources, an access-exclusions field, and an explanation of how to obtain usage statistics if they are available.17 Duranceau reported that it “has completely transformed the work flow and workload.”18 Similarly, Drexel University recently migrated to an electronic journal collection and created a “local journal subscriptions management database”19 to serve as a decision tool in e-journal selection. This obviated the necessity of maintaining individual, static HTML pages for every journal because the database generated dynamic HTML pages each night. Not every library has created new databases such as those developed at MIT and Drexel, but most have at least developed a worksheet or checklist they can apply to every license agreement. The University of Nevada’s Collection Development Working Group designed
CATALOGING Some libraries with Web-enabled catalogs will catalog e-journals for their OPACs and provide hotlinks to e-journal URLs. Others may create separate Web pages for their electronic journals. According to an informal survey conducted in 2000 by Whithers,21 62 percent of responding libraries cataloged their electronic resources in the OPAC, whereas 93 percent made their resources available via a Web page.21 This suggests a substantial overlap: many libraries provide access both ways. Likewise, Question 15 of my survey asked how the responding library maintained bibliographic control over its e-journals. The results, displayed in Figure 11, are similar to Whithers’: 94 percent of the responding ARL libraries provide access through the OPAC, whereas 74 percent mount links on separate Web pages. Once again, many libraries provide both means of access.
Figure 11 Bibliographic Control Over E-journals (Question 15)
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Figure 12 Department Responsible for Bibliographic Control (Question 15b) Question 15b asked which department was responsible for maintaining bibliographic control. The results, shown in Figure 12, reveal that the majority of libraries said the cataloging department has this responsibility (53 percent), followed by serials (24 percent) and systems (21 percent). One reason that the amount of work required to update bibliographic records and holdings of e-journals is much greater than for printed journals is because of the volatile nature of e-journals. Journal holdings, access points, and content are all subject to change at the whim of a publisher or aggregator. How do libraries handle the need for frequent updates? Some use link maintenance software to search for broken links and problems accessing URLs. This considerably cuts down on labor but still requires someone to analyze the results and make the necessary changes.22 Other libraries rely on user feedback to determine whether there are problems accessing electronic resources, believing this approach to be faster, more efficient, and more costeffective.23 I asked Question 16 to determine whether libraries were primarily using software for link maintenance or whether they were relying on user feedback. The results, exhibited in Figure 13, reveal that 29 percent of responding libraries used link maintenance software, whereas another 29 percent relied primarily on user feedback. Of the 42 percent for which staff handled URL maintenance, catalogers (18 percent), information technology staff (9 percent), electronic resources staff (9 percent), and collection development staff (6 percent) carried the burden.
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Figure 13 What Department or Method Is Used to Update E-journals? (Question 16)
PERPETUAL ACCESS/ARCHIVING Access to back issues of electronic journals is a hot issue for librarians. Because most e-journal services only go back a few years, to possess the entire run of a journal libraries must retain past volumes in print. Libraries access rather than own their e-journals, therefore when they have to cancel a subscription it is not clear that they will have continuous access to back issues already paid for. In fact, there are a number of questions that revolve around archiving. Do publishers guarantee access? If a journal ceases publication, will the publisher commit to maintaining perpetual access to the Web version? These questions bring up the closely related issue of archiving. If no one maintains and constantly refreshes an electronic journal, it will die. Preservation involves migrating data from old technologies and softwares, a potentially costly proposition. The electronic journal “needs continued attention if it is to remain accessible” (p. 54).24 According to Graham,25 “additional licensing efforts reflect a trend toward a license in perpetuity, with a provision included for the transfer of content ownership at the end of a specified access period” (p. 60). One publisher that has carried out such a license agreement is Elsevier Science. It maintains digital archives of its e-journals and has agreed to transfer them to another depository in the event that the company can no longer maintain them.26 In addition, Elsevier recently announced plans to collaborate with the Yale University Libraries to create a
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digital archive of the 1,100 journals they publish electronically. The project is funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and its objective is to develop a model archive that Yale can then use as a basis to offer archival services to other publishers.27 Similarly, Harvard University Library recently announced that it is collaborating with Blackwell Publishing, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., and the University of Chicago Press to develop an experimental archive for e-journals. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is once again the sponsor. During this yearlong endeavor, the parties will work through the issues surrounding e-journal archiving to develop a proposal for an archive.28 Unfortunately, these publishers might be in the minority. Archiving is expensive, and there is some doubt as to whether it is really in a publisher’s or aggregator’s best interests. Traditionally libraries have served as depositories for scholarly serials. Should they be the ones to take on this role for electronic journals? Several recent articles indicate they should not. Morris29 believes that archiving is too expensive for individual libraries and should be “undertaken by national libraries, not individually, but with full international cooperation” (p. 67). Although national libraries in the United States, such as the Library of Congress (LC), the National Library of Medicine, and the National Agricultural Library, have not been involved with archiving in the past, LC recently took a first step toward becoming involved with archiving electronic publications by acquiring the electronic holdings of journals published by the American Physical Society. LC will provide a backup archive for the society’s physics journals and, in the event of the society’s demise, will assume ownership. The cost to LC will be the price of purchasing and maintaining a server, estimated at $125,000. LC is expected to discuss similar arrangements with other publishers in the near future.30 Graham pointed out that standards for archiving are increasing, including those for the PDF and SGML markup languages, and that these standards will eventually lead to “the development of centralized digital repositories.”31 Boyce concurred, adding that archiving is beyond the reach of “any single organization”32 and must be accomplished by working together. Anderson33 felt that neither libraries nor publishers should archive; instead, “a new sector of the information world will soon take shape,” making archiving a rich “new area of economic endeavor” (p. 52).
It is unfortunate that when I prepared the survey I confused the issue of continual perpetual access to back issues of e-journals with the larger problem of archiving. Therefore, while well intentioned, Question 14, which asked about the groups currently archiving back issues of the respondent library’s e-journals,” was not well conceived. A better way to ask about perpetual access might have been, “What percentage of e-journals that the library currently subscribes to is guaranteed to remain accessible in the event that you cancel a subscription, the journal ceases publication, or the aggregator/publisher/vendor no longer handles the journal?” This may have been a better question, but it is doubtful the serials librarian would have known the answer. Likewise, the question that I posed was inappropriate for the serials librarian because she or he usually has no idea what publishers intend to do about to archiving their titles. Including “the library” as an archiver option may also have been naïve because many licenses expressly prohibit archiving or extensive printing of articles. Nevertheless, the results to Question 14, displayed in Figure 14, indicate that for ARL institutions archiving is performed 62 percent of the time
Figure 14 Who Archives Back Issues of E-journals? (Question 14)
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by publishers, 44 percent of the time by vendors, 15 percent by the library, 12 percent by consortia, 9 percent by aggregators, and that 21 percent of the time no one performs this task. Although these results are not especially meaningful, it is clear that archiving is a concern for ARL institutions since part of the mission of a research library is to ensure long-term access to research materials in all formats. A better approach to the archiving question would have been to separately survey a sample of publishers, vendors, consortia, and aggregators to determine how many of them would be able to perpetually archive their e-journals.
IMPACT ON STAFF AND DEPARTMENTAL LIBRARY STRUCTURE EXISTING POSITIONS One of the trends in staffing as a result of the increased workload imposed by e-journals is to incorporate new responsibilities into existing library positions.34 Serials librarians, for example, often have had responsibility for electronic resources added to their job description. In the case of American University, the serials position was redefined as “Serials/ Electronic Resources Librarian.”35 At the University of Nevada, Reno, “a partial reallocation of some of the functions in the serials librarian’s job description”36 resulted from the e-journal selection and management process. Clearly, the role of the traditional serials librarian has expanded with the influx of electronic journals. A survey of job postings that appeared on the SERIALST list serve from December 2000 through May 2001 reveals ten advertised jobs with the words “electronic resources” somewhere in the title. Six of these were combined with the term “serials,” implying an expansion beyond the handling of traditional (print) serials to include responsibilities in acquiring and maintaining electronic journals. Libraries that choose to expand existing responsibilities rather than to add new positions because of budgetary constraints must still train their staff to handle the new tasks. Gomez37 noted that in many libraries, staff members benefit from relevant on-the-job training courses, workshops, seminars, or conferences. I used Question 5 to ask serials librarians/surrogates if there had been an upgrade in their position over the past year in response to increased duties related to electronic journals. The results, shown in
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Figure 15 Number of Upgraded Job Descriptions for Serials Librarians (Question 5)
Figure 15, reveal that 76 percent reported no upgrade, 18 percent did have an upgrade, and 6 percent had discussed an upgrade but that no action had been taken. It is quite possible that a change in a serials librarian’s job description may have occurred without there being an actual upgrade, so perhaps the question should have been rephrased. Because many ARL libraries have had no increases in funding or are faced with budget cuts, serials librarians in these institutions may have had a fixed, inflexible career ladder. Although positions may not have actually been upgraded, it is possible that expanded responsibilities and workloads resulted in salary adjustments. Thus, a better question might have been, “Have you had a salary increase or any other formal recognition in the past year as a result of taking on more duties that are related to e-journals?” Question 6 attempted to determine what extra training serials librarians had been offered to assist them in dealing with e-journals. The results in Figure 16 indicate that attendance at conferences (47 percent) and workshops (41 percent) were most often utilized to gain expertise on this topic. Seminars were mentioned by 24 percent of respondents, whereas actual training (15 percent) and classes (3 percent) were seldom used. Twenty-nine percent of respondents claimed that they received no supplemental training at all, but had “learned on [their] own.” The problem with this question is that the choices offered are not mutually exclusive. Extra training can come in the form of a workshop, seminar, class, or conference. Furthermore, what is the difference between a workshop, seminar, or class? These all involve an
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Figure 16 Supplemental Training to Handle E-journals (Question 6)
educational discussion with a special focus and the terms can be used interchangeably. It is likely that pretesting the survey would have shed light on the confusing nature of the answer choices, but because I did not pretest, the data for this question are not that useful. NEW POSITIONS Many libraries are creating new positions to deal with electronic resources. For example, MIT created the position of Acquisitions Librarian for Digital Resources from an existing vacancy in another department.38 Drexel University created the Electronic Resources Librarian position, which “crosses traditional departmental functions including management, systems, technical services and reference.”39 As of 1997, Brigham Young University had created an Electronic Access Librarian; Vanderbilt University, an Electronic Resources Librarian; Yale University, an Electronic Publications and Collections Specialist; North Carolina State University, a Scholarly Communications Librarian; and the University of California at San Diego had developed an entire Electronic Resources Unit.40 Some of these positions focused on collections, whereas others were created to deal with systems or legal issues. Question 2 of the survey asked what new positions, if any, the library had created in the previous two years to cope with e-journal acquisition and maintenance workloads. Figure 17 tabulates the results, broken down by the departments in which the new position(s) resided. Thirty-eight percent of respond-
Figure 17 New Positions as a Result of E-journals (Question 2)
ing libraries stated that no new positions had been created to handle e-journals over the previous two years. When new positions had been created, however, departments that benefited were acquisitions and/or serials (29 percent), cataloging (21 percent), specially created e-journal positions crossing more than one department (21 percent), systems (12 percent), and legal positions (3 percent). In some cases libraries created entirely new departments; one librarian commented that “during a re-organization, several units that handled print and e-journals were combined into a new department.” DEPARTMENTAL STRUCTURE In 1998, Bordeianu, Lewis, and Wilkinson41 reported that a recent trend in ARL libraries was to merge Acquisitions and Serials Departments. Moreover, technical services downsizing had sometimes forced the combination of acquisitions and serials with collection development and ILL. More recently, Drexel University was “facing the need to either retrain, redeploy, or reduce existing staff”42 in technical services due to their transition to e-journals, and the University of Nevada needed “a new configuration within Technical Services.”43 Question 7 attempted to gauge how the departmental structure of technical services had changed to accommodate e-journals. The question included a matrix, with Acquisitions, Serials, Collection Development, Interlibrary Loan, Cataloging, and Systems Departments as choices for six possible departmental-action scenarios. I asked
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Table 1 Departmental Activity (Question 7)
Change Merged with another department Downsized a section Expanded a section Abolished a section Created a new section Created new positions
Acquisitions (%)
Serials (%)
Collection Development (%)
ILL (%)
Cataloging (%)
Systems (%)
21 18 12 0 6 15
18 9 6 9 6 18
3 0 6 0 6 15
3 3 6 0 3 3
3 12 12 0 9 21
6 0 15 0 6 35
whether a merger, downsize, expansion, abolishment of an existing section, creation of a new section, or creation of new positions had occurred in any of the listed departments. The results, displayed in Table 1, were disappointing because they revealed only slight evidence that any of the kinds of mergers discussed in the literature had taken place in the responding libraries. The data revealed some evidence that Acquisitions (21 percent) and Serials (18 percent) Departments had merged with another department, although it is possible that in all of these instances they merged with each other, which would increase the percentage to 39. Only 18 percent of Acquisitions, 12 percent of Cataloging, and 9 percent of Serials Departments had been downsized. Systems expanded in 15 percent of the libraries, whereas cataloging and acquisitions both expanded in 12 percent of the libraries. The only department said to have been abolished was serials, in 9 percent of the institutions. Few departments had created new sections; the most was cataloging, with 9 percent. Finally, 35 percent of Systems, 21 percent of Cataloging, 18 percent of Serials, 15 percent of Collection Development, and 15 percent of Acquisitions Departments had created new positions. Although my survey did not lend much statistical support to the trend toward downsizing discussed in the literature, it is still true that in the digital world, “the lines between acquisitions, collections, and systems work seems particularly fluid and unclear.”44 Furthermore, “the interrelated nature of acquiring, describing, and supporting e-journals may illustrate the blurring of traditional roles” (p. 138)45 in the library. Even if few official structural changes in the surveyed ARL libraries occurred, staff from all departments became more involved with e-journals than they had been with print journals. In many cases, committees comprised of staff from various
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departments were formed to deal with one or more aspects of the e-journal selection and maintenance process. Reorganization did occur, albeit often informally; departments in general became less clearly defined and more dynamic. Because e-journals affect all library staff, increased communication between departments is essential. Some of the survey respondents commented on the necessity of collaboration; one librarian complained that “lack of communication among all of the people dealing with electronic resources is a major problem,” whereas another wrote that “e-journals are forcing a new level of cooperation to emerge between technical services and public services.” IN RETROSPECT: CRITIQUING THE SURVEY INSTRUMENT Although the survey I conducted provided some valuable information about how ARL libraries are managing e-journals, if I were to do the survey again, I would do several things differently. Most important, I would pretest the survey for bias and content. This might have illuminated a number of instances in which the questions were ambiguous, poor, or not answerable. It might also have revealed that answer choices such as “training,” “workshop,” “seminar,” “class,” and “conference” for Question 6 were not mutually exclusive. In other instances in which the correct answer did not appear as an option or the respondent could not answer the question, I might have added the options “none of the above” or “I don’t know” to ensure inclusivity. Although I often provided a free-response comment box after a question, the available choices were not sufficient for complete and accurate responses. As Babbie notes, questions need to be accurate because respondents will “often make up answers.”46
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In other instances, due to my naivete about the topic, I either didn’t ask the question correctly, didn’t ask the right question, or didn’t ask the right people. For example, Questions 1 and 8, which have respondents delineate which departments are involved with or select e-journals, failed to compare the departments handling e-journals with those involved with printed journals. Thus, the point of the question—to see how the number has changed—was lost. Similarly, Questions 3 and 4 failed to ask about the level of staff involvement with e-journals, although both questions were intended to measure the additional staff and amount of time required for professional librarians. Question 5 is an example of not asking the right question: salary may be a more realistic change than an upgrade, given the condition of career ladders in many ARL institutions. Question 14 is an example of not asking a question of the right people: vendors, publishers, aggregators, and consortia have a much better idea as to whether they are archiving e-journals than serials librarians do. Because I was still in library school and did not have first-hand experience with my topic, I should have consulted with serials librarians about the questions before sending out the survey. As Babbie stated, “if you only have a superficial understanding of the topic, you may fail to specify the intent of your question sufficiently.”7 Pretesting certainly would have led to improvement in the overall design of the survey. For example, for contingency questions, such as 10b, that are applicable only if respondents choose “special committee” as an answer to the previous question, I could have made its conditional relationship to Question 10 more obvious by format changes such as indenting it to the right or inserting a connecting symbol between the two questions. Testers may have asked about the order of the questions, leading me to reconsider the organizational strategy. I took the “random-order” approach when constructing the survey because I feared that deliberately placing them in the order I wanted might lead to bias. In retrospect, however, I think the haphazard order of the questions was a detriment. Although each question falls into one of three orderly categories of e-journals and staffing, there is no way for the respondent to realize this. As Babbie asserted, a survey with randomly ordered questions “will probably strike respondents as chaotic or worthless. It will be difficult to answer, moreover, since they must continually switch their attention from one topic to another.”48
A better approach might have been to arrange the questions into content subsections and introduce each section with a short statement concerning its purpose so that respondents could understand what I was trying to measure.49 Note, too, that a randomly ordered survey does not lend itself to easy discussion and analysis. It’s likely that readers were confused as I discussed questions out of ideological sequence and referred to figures incongruous with the survey question order. On the other hand, I think the survey method itself worked very well. Mounting the questions on the World Wide Web and sending out an e-mail cover letter with a linked URL was more efficient in terms of time and money than an actual mailing. I suspect, but do not know for sure, that my response rate was higher because of the increased convenience of this method. The only drawback was that because I wanted respondents to remain anonymous, I had no way of coding the Web surveys the way I could have coded a mail survey; I had no way of identifying which people had responded and so had to send out follow-up e-mails to everyone. The only piece of identification on the survey was Question 17, which asked how many professional staff were employed in the respondent’s library. My intention was to break down the results by library size, but I did not receive enough responses to the survey for this to be meaningful. I do not consider the question a waste, however, because it is better to obtain too much information— even if it is not used—than too little. As Babbie stated, “Whenever you’re not sure how much detail to get in a measurement, get too much rather than too little. During the analysis of the data, you can always combine precise attributes into more general categories.”50
CONCLUSION The survey provided a snapshot in time of the impact of electronic journals on library staff at ARL member institutions. More than a year has elapsed since I conducted the survey, however, and the data are no longer current. A better-prepared, updated survey of how ARL libraries are handling access to e-journals should be undertaken periodically. New issues— such as archiving developments, license provision for back issues, and license-tracking databases that are integrated into the OPAC—need to be explored. Surveys of other types of libraries would also be valuable. How are smaller or middle-sized academic
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libraries, for example, dealing with online access to journals? How are academic health sciences libraries and specialized science libraries dealing with the fact that many of the titles to which they subscribe are available on the Web? Analysis of different populations might yield very different results from the ARL institutions. Designing a survey is not an easy task, and future researchers should take pains to pretest the survey to ensure that the questions have mutually exclusive and exhaustive answer choices, and to arrange the questions in a way that both makes sense to the respondents and lends itself to easy analysis.
NOTES 1. Ellen Finnie Duranceau, “Beyond Print: Revisioning Serials Acquisitions for the Digital Age,” Serials Librarian 33, no. 1 (1998): 83–106.
est Group (NASIG),” Library Collections, Acquisitions, and Technical Services 24, no. 1 (2000): 127–147. 15. Rob Whithers, “Biz of Acq—Selecting and Processing Electronic Resources: How to Plug Librarians into the Workflow,” Against the Grain 11, no. 6 (2000): 80–83. 16. Ellen Finnie Duranceau, “License Tracking,” Serials Review 26, no. 3 (2000): 69–73. 17. Ibid., 71–73. 18. Ibid., 71. 19. Montgomery and Sparks, “The Transition to an Electronic Journal Collection,” 8. 20. Loghry and Shannon, “Managing Selection and Implementation,” 34–44. 21. Whithers, “Biz of Acq,” 82. 22. Duranceau, “Beyond Print,” 95. 23. Ibid., 96.
2. Carol Hansen Montgomery, “‘Fast Track’ Transition to an Electronic Journal Collection: A Case Study,” New Library World 101, no. 1159 (2000): 294–303.
24. Peter B. Boyce, “Who Will Keep the Archives? Wrong Question!” in Karen Cargille, “Digital Archiving: Whose Responsibility Is It?” Serials Review 26, no. 3 (2000): 50–68.
3. Patricia A. Loghry and Amy W. Shannon, “Managing Selection and Implementation of Electronic Products: One Tiny Step in Organization, One Giant Step for the University of Nevada, Reno,” Serials Review 26, no. 3 (2000): 32–44.
25. Rebecca A. Graham, “Evolution of Archiving in the Digital Age,” in Karen Cargille, “Digital Archiving: Whose Responsibility Is It?” Serials Review 26, no. 3 (2000): 50–68.
4. E. Babbie, (1998). The Practice of Social Research, 8th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1998), 142. 5. Ibid., 159.
26. Karen Hunter, “Digital Archiving,” in Karen Cargille, “Digital Archiving: Whose Responsibility Is It?” Serials Review 26, no. 3 (2000): 50–68.
6. Duranceau, “Beyond Print,” 87.
27. “Late Bulletins: Yale and Elsevier to Collaborate on Digital Archive,” Library Journal 126, no. 6 (2001): 13.
7. Carol Hansen Montgomery and JoAnne L. Sparks, “The Transition to an Electronic Journal Collection: Managing the Organizational Changes,” Serials Review 26, no. 3 (2000): 4–18.
28. “Library Joins Publishers to Archive Electronic Journals.” Harvard University Gazette (24 May 2001). http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2001/05.24/17-library. html (10/30/01).
8. Ibid., 11.
29. Sally Morris, “Archiving Electronic Publications: What Are the Problems and Who Should Solve Them?” in Karen Cargille, “Digital Archiving: Whose Responsibility Is It?” Serials Review 26, no. 3 (2000): 50–68.
9. Duranceau, “Beyond Print,” 87. 10. Ibid., 8. 11. Loghry and Shannon, “Managing Selection and Implementation,” 34. 12. Claire T. Dygert, “New Challenges behind the Scenes: The Changing Roles of the Serials Librarian in the Age of E-publishing,” Internet Reference Services Quarterly 3, no. 3 (1998): 7–14. 13. Duranceau, “Beyond Print,” 97–98. 14. Pat Loghry, Linda Hulbert, and Adolfo R. Tarango, “From Carnegie to Internet2: A Report from the 14th Annual Conference of the North American Serials Inter-
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30. Scott Carlson, “Library of Congress Buys Electronic Archive of Physics Society’s Journals,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 2 February 2001, A32. 31. Graham, “Evolution of Archiving,” 60. 32. Boyce, “Who Will Keep the Archives,” 55. 33. Rick Anderson, “Is Digital Archiving a New Beast Entirely?” in Karen Cargille, “Digital Archiving: Whose Responsibility Is It?” Serials Review 26, no. 3 (2000): 50–68. 34. Whithers, “Biz of Acq,” 83.
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35. Duranceau, “Beyond Print,” 94.
APPENDIX
36. Loghry and Shannon, “Managing Selection and Implementation,” 44. 37. Joni Gomez, “Human Factors in the Electronic Technical Services,” Acquisitions Librarian 21 (1999): 110–12. 38. Duranceau, “Beyond Print,” 92–93. 39. Montgomery, “‘Fast Track’,” 299. 40. Duranceau, “Beyond Print,” 94. 41. Sever Bordeianu, Linda K. Lewis, and Frances C. Wilkinson, “Merging the Acquisitions and Serials Department at the University of New Mexico: A Case Study,” Library Acquisitions: Practice and Theory 22, no. 3 (1998): 261–62. 42. Montgomery et al., “The Transition to an Electronic Journal Collection,” 12. 43. Loghry and Shannon, “Managing Selection and Implementation,” 44. 44. Duranceau, “Beyond Print,” 95. 45. Tom Moothart, “Adding to User Confusion by Adding More E-journals,” Serials Review 24, no. 3/4 (1998): 136–138. 46. Babbie, 151. 47. Ibid., The Practice of Social Research, 148. 48. Ibid., 158. 49. Ibid., 159. 50. Ibid., 140.
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SURVEY METHODOLOGY Susan Gardner BACKGROUND
Gardner is Instruction/Reference Librarian, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858; e-mail: gardnersu@ mail.ecu.edu.
A recent article addressed the difficulty of acquiring and maintaining Web-based, full-text electronic journals.1 For the purposes of this article, an “e-journal” includes not only individual, Web-based, full-text journals that duplicate their print counterparts, but also e-journal packages such as ScienceDirect and indexing and abstracting services such as EBSCOHost that include complete runs of the fulltext articles of selected journals. Many libraries have expanded their definition of the electronic journal to include all the above; like Drexel University, they “are now purchasing more of [their] electronic journals in packages from aggregators, publishers and consortia than as single titles” (p. 296).2 In a recent article about how one university is managing its e-journals, the authors stated that electronic resources were “more problematic, more time consuming, and involve more paperwork than paper subscriptions” (p. 44).3 Indeed, libraries everywhere are finding that e-journals involve more staff and increased staff time at both the acquisitions and maintenance stages of the work flow process than their printed counterparts. The selection, ordering, licensing, cataloging, and ongoing maintenance of e-journals affects staff workloads and challenges the organizational structure of libraries.
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As a project prepared in pursuit of a master’s degree in library science, in May 2000 the author conducted a survey that attempted to measure the impact of electronic journals on library staff at ARL member institutions. The results of the survey are reported in this article. In retrospect, I believe that the survey instrument could have been better conceived; several design flaws mar the results. Therefore, this article also addresses both the strengths and shortcomings of the survey in an effort to describe how the instrument could have been improved. This is done with the aim of helping others learn from and avoid the pitfalls to which I succumbed while designing the survey.
METHODOLOGY The focus of the survey was to determine how research libraries cope with the stresses of managing electronic journals. To gather information on the topic, I prepared a Web-based survey that consisted of seventeen questions designed to gauge the workload issues affecting research institutions as they struggled to provide electronic access to journals, as well as catalog their responses to the challenge. (See the Appendix for a copy of the survey.) My objective was to identify developing standards or common practices used by libraries to handle e-journals. I sent a letter via e-mail message to the head serials librarian of every ARL member institution (a list of the 120 ARL member institutions can be found at http:// www.arl.org). Since the survey was conducted, three new members were added, bringing the total up to 123. This message explained the survey and provided a link to it. Both one week and two weeks after the initial contact I followed up with another e-mail message, again explaining and providing a link to the Web-based survey. I identified the head serials librarians by checking organizational charts on ARL library homepages. For libraries that did not identify a distinct “serials librarian,” I chose someone in the Acquisitions Department with serial duties to serve as a surrogate contact. Ten member libraries were excluded from the sample because I could not identify one librarian whose job dealt specifically with serials management. Thus, the final sample numbered 110, rather than 120, ARL libraries. I chose to survey ARL members in the first place because they are research library leaders—the strict membership criteria en-
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forced by the association ensure that this is the case. ARL libraries also constitute a readily identifiable group, one highly likely to be immersed in e-journal workload and staffing issues. The seventeen survey questions are a mixture of multiple-choice nominal and ordinal queries supplemented by one open-ended question that allows the respondent the opportunity for a free response. Although all questions are supposed to be exhaustive in their answer choices, nominal questions “offer names or labels for characteristics,” whereas ordinal questions have “variables with attributes we can logically rank-order.”4 I used articles available in the library literature through April 2000 to develop the questions, although numerous articles subsequently published are relevant to the survey. Although some of these are discussed in the pages that follow, the reader should keep in mind that the information provided in them was not incorporated into the survey. My master’s thesis adviser supervised the literature review and survey construction; however, the professor never claimed to be an expert on the subject of e-journals and had never worked with them, other than as a user. Babbie’s The Practice of Social Research indicates that it is not essential that pretest subjects be experts on the topic, but that it is essential that subjects fill out the questionnaire rather than simply peruse it for errors.5 In this respect, I made an error; pretesting would have helped to eliminate bias in the survey. When subjects are involved in a pretest, they can indicate whether they were forced to make up answers—if that is the case, then the survey either did not provide appropriate choices, or questions needed to be clarified. In addition, pretesting can provide feedback on the visual layout of a survey and whether the questions are effectively ordered. Both of these are important factors in maximizing results. I attempted to guard against bias in the survey by providing space after most questions for freeresponse comments, and in some cases I provided the option of “other” as a choice of answer. Unfortunately, however, these types of errors still appeared in the survey. In retrospect, relying solely on the advice of my professor, rather than actually pretesting the survey with individuals actively involved in managing e-journals, was a shortcoming. Thirty-four librarians, or 30 percent of the sample, participated in the survey. Once they submitted the Web-based survey form, their identities remained anonymous. The answers were processed by the CGI
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(Common Gateway Interface) program, GForm. The server designated a file in my personal directory for the results. I chose to use a Web-based survey method because I believed it would be faster and less expensive than sending surveys by the US Postal Service. I also believed that librarians would be more likely to respond to an electronic rather than a paper survey, which they would have to mail back. Finally, I chose to use an electronic survey because the survey responses would be directed into a file in my directory, making it convenient for me to print off and analyze as time allowed. Although the file did not automatically tally the data, the coding that I had created was obvious enough so that I did not believe that interpreting the results of each survey would prove difficult. DISCUSSION AND RESULTS CHANGES IN WORKFLOW Duranceau, in a 1998 article,6 compared the work flow involved in acquiring printed serials to that for electronic serials at the MIT Libraries. The work flow for printed serials at MIT was a very linear process involving six simple steps, each performed by a different individual working independently. On the other hand, the work flow for the acquisition of networked serials at MIT was nonlinear and involved a total of fifteen people, often working in teams. Duranceau characterized the work flow for the acquisition of networked serials as different from the printbased workflow; the former was team based, cyclical, and varied rather than predictable, and required higher-level library staff and increased communication and coordination. Similarly, Drexel University found that e-journals required more staff time not only to select and acquire but also to maintain, as well as to instruct patrons on their use.7 Additionally, Drexel’s “increased needs [were] predominantly in areas staffed by the best-compensated employees.”8 Three questions that I asked on the survey were intended to confirm that at ARL institutions, more departments were involved with e-journals than with printed ones, and that both the number of staff and the amount of staff time have increased. Question 1 asked which departments were involved in one or more aspects of electronic journals. Traditionally, printed journals are handled by librarians in collection development, cataloging, circulation, and within the Acquisitions/Serials Departments. I wanted to see
Figure 1 Departments Involved with E-journals (Question 1) what additional departments had become involved in handling e-journals. Unfortunately, I did not ask respondents to describe the departments that were involved in handling print materials. As a result, the results are not very meaningful. A better question would have been to delineate what additional departments are involved in e-journals. Nonetheless, the results displayed in Figure 1 suggest that whereas in many cases the departments remain the same regardless of format, in some libraries e-journals require involvement from information technology/ systems (65 percent), administration (56 percent), reference (50 percent), electronic resources (47 percent), and bibliographic services (26 percent). Questions 3 and 4 assess whether the number of staff and the amount of staff time spent working with e-journals have increased a great deal or not much, not increased, or decreased when compared with printed journals. As expected, 73 percent of respondents said the number of staff who are involved has increased (either a lot or not by much); only 6 percent said the number has decreased (see Figure 2). Similarly, 97 percent said that the amount of staff time spent on e-journals has increased; only 3 percent reported a decrease (Figure 3). I failed to ask whether the staff being discussed were professional or clerical, although I was specifically trying to chart the change for professional librarians. Thus, again, the results are not as meaningful as they might have
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Figure 2 Number of Staff Who Worked with E-journals, Compared with Print Journals (Question 3) been. Several librarians themselves commented on the increased amount of work required to handle e-journals. One noted that “the amount of time spent on the acquisition of e-journals is growing exponentially,” whereas another wrote that “personally, I feel it has doubled [the] department work load.” Still another stated that “the largest portion of staff time spent on e-journals has not been taken from the time spent on print journals, but from elsewhere.” Conversely, one librarian speculated that as print journal subscriptions begin to decrease in the library, “our staffing will stay stable with a possible decrease.”
ACQUISITION PROCESS SELECTION The selection process for electronic journals is more complicated than that for printed ones. Staff from
Figure 3 Amount of Staff Time Spent on E-journals, Compared with Print Journals (Question 4)
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the collection development department, or possibly a specific subject specialist, choose printed journals. However, more departments are usually involved in the selection of e-journals. At the MIT Libraries, a team made up of librarians from various departments selects electronic resources.9 All the selection factors for printed journals—such as content, cost, where the journal is indexed, the citation index ranking, and importance to the collection—also apply to e-journals. In addition, new factors—such as interface options, search features, display formats, access restrictions, the availability of a persistent URL, linking capability, format, use statistics, and cost per title—must be contended with.10 Many libraries, like MIT, now include a variety of staff in the selection process. The University of Nevada, Reno, has assembled a “collection development working group” that consists of staff members from public services, serials/acquisitions, document delivery, a branch library, and access services.11 This group developed two e-products work forms to aid in the e-journal workload process. Question 8 in my survey asks who selects e-journals for the respondent’s library. Since my intention was to gauge what additional departments had become involved with e-journal selection, a better question would have been, “Who is involved in selecting e-journals who was not also involved in selecting printed journals?” Although I cannot be certain which departments were already involved with the selection of printed titles, the results displayed in Figure 4 indicate that at the time of my survey, collection development was most often involved (91 percent). Subject specialists choose e-journals in 29 percent of the libraries. Reference (35 percent), electronic resources (21 percent), serials (12 percent), a committee (9 percent), and systems (3 percent) are also involved in e-journal selection at the institutions surveyed. Questions 10 and 10b ask who, if anyone, reviews the e-journal selections and—if it is a committee that oversees selection—which departments are represented. I asked this to determine whether, if an individual initially selects e-journals, the recommendations are then reviewed by someone else. Selection review tends to occur most often when libraries are dealing with packages of e-journals, rather than individual titles. Only 12 percent of respondents said that selections were not reviewed. Fifty-three percent reported that a special committee reviews e-journal selections, 35 percent stated a department head or a director performs this task, 26 percent re-
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Figure 6 Selection Review Committee Membership (Question 10b)
Figure 4 Selectors of E-journals (Question 8) ported an electronic resources librarian as a reviewer, and 6 percent said a systems librarian had this responsibility (see Figure 5). The contingency question (10b) asked of those who reported that a committee reviewed selections to disclose the
Figure 5 Who Reviews E-journal Selections? (Question 10)
makeup of the group. The results revealed that a variety of departments were involved: 83 percent mentioned reference; 72 percent, acquisitions; 61 percent, systems; and 50 percent, electronic resources (see Figure 6). In retrospect, although including the “other (please specify)” option, I should have offered more choices. It is quite possible that administration or collection development, for example, are represented on a review committee. My answer choices were not exhaustive, which is the objective of most survey attributes. ORDERING AND THE LICENSE AGREEMENT Ordering a journal no longer means that a library pays for physical issues or volumes. Dygert has asserted that “because of several unique properties of digital information, agreements that govern the acquisition and maintenance of traditional paper collections are inadequate in the digital information context” (p. 10).12 E-journals are different because a library accesses rather than owns them. To guard against the abuse of intellectual property in the digital medium, publishers require libraries to sign license agreements that delineate who comprises the user population, what constitutes “authorized use” of the information, and how long access to the information will last.13 Question 9 of the survey asked whether electronic or printed journals require that more professionals become involved in the ordering process. Predictably, as Figure 7 indicates, 88 percent of the respondents believed that e-journals require a greater number of professionals to be involved; only 3 percent stated that printed journals required the
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Figure 7 Increased Number of Professional Staff Involved with Ordering Process (Question 9) involvement of more professional staff. Nine percent indicated there was no difference. This question is noteworthy because it is one of the few instances in which I asked about the level of staff required to perform an aspect of e-journal management, something that I intended to investigate all along. Another question from the survey asks who is presently negotiating license agreements in ARL libraries. A report from the 1999 Annual North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) conference stated that only slightly more librarians than administrators negotiated licenses (17 libraries versus 14), whereas “some consortia were involved in negotiations (p. 137).”14 An informal survey of AcqNet-L
Figure 8 Who Negotiates License Agreements? (Question 12)
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and Colldev-L list serve members conducted in 200015 revealed that a wide variety of departmental staff members were involved in license negotiations, including acquisitions (36 percent), the library director (29 percent), collection development (21 percent), the assistant director (17 percent), and systems (15 percent). Question 12 of my survey asked who negotiates license agreements for e-journals. The results, displayed in Figure 8, confirm that a variety of departments handle these negotiations. Acquisitions (35 percent), administrators and collection development (32 percent each), electronic resources (24 percent), consortia (21 percent), serials (18 percent), reference (6 percent), and systems (3 percent) were all cited. Question 13 asked if legal consultants reviewed license agreements. The majority of respondents claimed to have legal assistance; Figure 9 indicates that 65 percent said yes to this question, whereas 35 percent said no. Question 11 asked whether the library had a standardized procedure for negotiating license agreements or whether each electronic journal was treated as a separate case. When I embarked on this survey, I found nothing in the literature to indicate that libraries had yet developed a typical procedure. The results, shown in Figure 10, implied some standardization among ARL libraries. Twenty-four percent of respondents reported having a standardized procedure, whereas another 55 percent reported some standardization among e-journals with similar access criteria; 21 percent reported that each license was negotiated separately. Since the survey results were tabulated, several researchers have published articles that discuss the workload burdens of license tracking and how libraries might systematize the process. Duranceau16
Figure 9 Do You Have Any Legal Consultants Who Help with Licenses? (Question 13)
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two e-products work forms for licenses: Form I enables subject specialists to gather product, content, licensing, and systems requirement information; Form II aids serials librarians in working with other departments to set up license files, process orders, contact departments, publicize the e-journals, and include them on the subject Web pages. These forms are on the internal Web site to facilitate easy access.20
MAINTENANCE
Figure 10 Is There a Standardized Procedure for Negotiating License Agreements? (Question 11) discussed the problem of e-journal license tracking before, during, and after purchase at the MIT Libraries. In the early stages of e-journals, MIT library staff maintained nine separate tools to deal with different aspects of licenses, aspects such as ILL, remote access, technical support, license expiration, links, and usage statistics. They eventually realized that they had to integrate all the information into a single tool in order to reduce the workload. The result was VERA (Virtual Electronic Resource Access), which automatically generates Web-based reports and serves as both a user interface and an internal “licensing information” manager. VERA imports information from the OPAC and features automated link-checking and provision of journal holdings data, automated creation of proxy server URLs, automatic highlighting of new resources, an access-exclusions field, and an explanation of how to obtain usage statistics if they are available.17 Duranceau reported that it “has completely transformed the work flow and workload.”18 Similarly, Drexel University recently migrated to an electronic journal collection and created a “local journal subscriptions management database”19 to serve as a decision tool in e-journal selection. This obviated the necessity of maintaining individual, static HTML pages for every journal because the database generated dynamic HTML pages each night. Not every library has created new databases such as those developed at MIT and Drexel, but most have at least developed a worksheet or checklist they can apply to every license agreement. The University of Nevada’s Collection Development Working Group designed
CATALOGING Some libraries with Web-enabled catalogs will catalog e-journals for their OPACs and provide hotlinks to e-journal URLs. Others may create separate Web pages for their electronic journals. According to an informal survey conducted in 2000 by Whithers,21 62 percent of responding libraries cataloged their electronic resources in the OPAC, whereas 93 percent made their resources available via a Web page.21 This suggests a substantial overlap: many libraries provide access both ways. Likewise, Question 15 of my survey asked how the responding library maintained bibliographic control over its e-journals. The results, displayed in Figure 11, are similar to Whithers’: 94 percent of the responding ARL libraries provide access through the OPAC, whereas 74 percent mount links on separate Web pages. Once again, many libraries provide both means of access.
Figure 11 Bibliographic Control Over E-journals (Question 15)
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Figure 12 Department Responsible for Bibliographic Control (Question 15b) Question 15b asked which department was responsible for maintaining bibliographic control. The results, shown in Figure 12, reveal that the majority of libraries said the cataloging department has this responsibility (53 percent), followed by serials (24 percent) and systems (21 percent). One reason that the amount of work required to update bibliographic records and holdings of e-journals is much greater than for printed journals is because of the volatile nature of e-journals. Journal holdings, access points, and content are all subject to change at the whim of a publisher or aggregator. How do libraries handle the need for frequent updates? Some use link maintenance software to search for broken links and problems accessing URLs. This considerably cuts down on labor but still requires someone to analyze the results and make the necessary changes.22 Other libraries rely on user feedback to determine whether there are problems accessing electronic resources, believing this approach to be faster, more efficient, and more costeffective.23 I asked Question 16 to determine whether libraries were primarily using software for link maintenance or whether they were relying on user feedback. The results, exhibited in Figure 13, reveal that 29 percent of responding libraries used link maintenance software, whereas another 29 percent relied primarily on user feedback. Of the 42 percent for which staff handled URL maintenance, catalogers (18 percent), information technology staff (9 percent), electronic resources staff (9 percent), and collection development staff (6 percent) carried the burden.
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Figure 13 What Department or Method Is Used to Update E-journals? (Question 16)
PERPETUAL ACCESS/ARCHIVING Access to back issues of electronic journals is a hot issue for librarians. Because most e-journal services only go back a few years, to possess the entire run of a journal libraries must retain past volumes in print. Libraries access rather than own their e-journals, therefore when they have to cancel a subscription it is not clear that they will have continuous access to back issues already paid for. In fact, there are a number of questions that revolve around archiving. Do publishers guarantee access? If a journal ceases publication, will the publisher commit to maintaining perpetual access to the Web version? These questions bring up the closely related issue of archiving. If no one maintains and constantly refreshes an electronic journal, it will die. Preservation involves migrating data from old technologies and softwares, a potentially costly proposition. The electronic journal “needs continued attention if it is to remain accessible” (p. 54).24 According to Graham,25 “additional licensing efforts reflect a trend toward a license in perpetuity, with a provision included for the transfer of content ownership at the end of a specified access period” (p. 60). One publisher that has carried out such a license agreement is Elsevier Science. It maintains digital archives of its e-journals and has agreed to transfer them to another depository in the event that the company can no longer maintain them.26 In addition, Elsevier recently announced plans to collaborate with the Yale University Libraries to create a
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digital archive of the 1,100 journals they publish electronically. The project is funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and its objective is to develop a model archive that Yale can then use as a basis to offer archival services to other publishers.27 Similarly, Harvard University Library recently announced that it is collaborating with Blackwell Publishing, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., and the University of Chicago Press to develop an experimental archive for e-journals. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is once again the sponsor. During this yearlong endeavor, the parties will work through the issues surrounding e-journal archiving to develop a proposal for an archive.28 Unfortunately, these publishers might be in the minority. Archiving is expensive, and there is some doubt as to whether it is really in a publisher’s or aggregator’s best interests. Traditionally libraries have served as depositories for scholarly serials. Should they be the ones to take on this role for electronic journals? Several recent articles indicate they should not. Morris29 believes that archiving is too expensive for individual libraries and should be “undertaken by national libraries, not individually, but with full international cooperation” (p. 67). Although national libraries in the United States, such as the Library of Congress (LC), the National Library of Medicine, and the National Agricultural Library, have not been involved with archiving in the past, LC recently took a first step toward becoming involved with archiving electronic publications by acquiring the electronic holdings of journals published by the American Physical Society. LC will provide a backup archive for the society’s physics journals and, in the event of the society’s demise, will assume ownership. The cost to LC will be the price of purchasing and maintaining a server, estimated at $125,000. LC is expected to discuss similar arrangements with other publishers in the near future.30 Graham pointed out that standards for archiving are increasing, including those for the PDF and SGML markup languages, and that these standards will eventually lead to “the development of centralized digital repositories.”31 Boyce concurred, adding that archiving is beyond the reach of “any single organization”32 and must be accomplished by working together. Anderson33 felt that neither libraries nor publishers should archive; instead, “a new sector of the information world will soon take shape,” making archiving a rich “new area of economic endeavor” (p. 52).
It is unfortunate that when I prepared the survey I confused the issue of continual perpetual access to back issues of e-journals with the larger problem of archiving. Therefore, while well intentioned, Question 14, which asked about the groups currently archiving back issues of the respondent library’s e-journals,” was not well conceived. A better way to ask about perpetual access might have been, “What percentage of e-journals that the library currently subscribes to is guaranteed to remain accessible in the event that you cancel a subscription, the journal ceases publication, or the aggregator/publisher/vendor no longer handles the journal?” This may have been a better question, but it is doubtful the serials librarian would have known the answer. Likewise, the question that I posed was inappropriate for the serials librarian because she or he usually has no idea what publishers intend to do about to archiving their titles. Including “the library” as an archiver option may also have been naïve because many licenses expressly prohibit archiving or extensive printing of articles. Nevertheless, the results to Question 14, displayed in Figure 14, indicate that for ARL institutions archiving is performed 62 percent of the time
Figure 14 Who Archives Back Issues of E-journals? (Question 14)
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by publishers, 44 percent of the time by vendors, 15 percent by the library, 12 percent by consortia, 9 percent by aggregators, and that 21 percent of the time no one performs this task. Although these results are not especially meaningful, it is clear that archiving is a concern for ARL institutions since part of the mission of a research library is to ensure long-term access to research materials in all formats. A better approach to the archiving question would have been to separately survey a sample of publishers, vendors, consortia, and aggregators to determine how many of them would be able to perpetually archive their e-journals.
IMPACT ON STAFF AND DEPARTMENTAL LIBRARY STRUCTURE EXISTING POSITIONS One of the trends in staffing as a result of the increased workload imposed by e-journals is to incorporate new responsibilities into existing library positions.34 Serials librarians, for example, often have had responsibility for electronic resources added to their job description. In the case of American University, the serials position was redefined as “Serials/ Electronic Resources Librarian.”35 At the University of Nevada, Reno, “a partial reallocation of some of the functions in the serials librarian’s job description”36 resulted from the e-journal selection and management process. Clearly, the role of the traditional serials librarian has expanded with the influx of electronic journals. A survey of job postings that appeared on the SERIALST list serve from December 2000 through May 2001 reveals ten advertised jobs with the words “electronic resources” somewhere in the title. Six of these were combined with the term “serials,” implying an expansion beyond the handling of traditional (print) serials to include responsibilities in acquiring and maintaining electronic journals. Libraries that choose to expand existing responsibilities rather than to add new positions because of budgetary constraints must still train their staff to handle the new tasks. Gomez37 noted that in many libraries, staff members benefit from relevant on-the-job training courses, workshops, seminars, or conferences. I used Question 5 to ask serials librarians/surrogates if there had been an upgrade in their position over the past year in response to increased duties related to electronic journals. The results, shown in
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Figure 15 Number of Upgraded Job Descriptions for Serials Librarians (Question 5)
Figure 15, reveal that 76 percent reported no upgrade, 18 percent did have an upgrade, and 6 percent had discussed an upgrade but that no action had been taken. It is quite possible that a change in a serials librarian’s job description may have occurred without there being an actual upgrade, so perhaps the question should have been rephrased. Because many ARL libraries have had no increases in funding or are faced with budget cuts, serials librarians in these institutions may have had a fixed, inflexible career ladder. Although positions may not have actually been upgraded, it is possible that expanded responsibilities and workloads resulted in salary adjustments. Thus, a better question might have been, “Have you had a salary increase or any other formal recognition in the past year as a result of taking on more duties that are related to e-journals?” Question 6 attempted to determine what extra training serials librarians had been offered to assist them in dealing with e-journals. The results in Figure 16 indicate that attendance at conferences (47 percent) and workshops (41 percent) were most often utilized to gain expertise on this topic. Seminars were mentioned by 24 percent of respondents, whereas actual training (15 percent) and classes (3 percent) were seldom used. Twenty-nine percent of respondents claimed that they received no supplemental training at all, but had “learned on [their] own.” The problem with this question is that the choices offered are not mutually exclusive. Extra training can come in the form of a workshop, seminar, class, or conference. Furthermore, what is the difference between a workshop, seminar, or class? These all involve an
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Figure 16 Supplemental Training to Handle E-journals (Question 6)
educational discussion with a special focus and the terms can be used interchangeably. It is likely that pretesting the survey would have shed light on the confusing nature of the answer choices, but because I did not pretest, the data for this question are not that useful. NEW POSITIONS Many libraries are creating new positions to deal with electronic resources. For example, MIT created the position of Acquisitions Librarian for Digital Resources from an existing vacancy in another department.38 Drexel University created the Electronic Resources Librarian position, which “crosses traditional departmental functions including management, systems, technical services and reference.”39 As of 1997, Brigham Young University had created an Electronic Access Librarian; Vanderbilt University, an Electronic Resources Librarian; Yale University, an Electronic Publications and Collections Specialist; North Carolina State University, a Scholarly Communications Librarian; and the University of California at San Diego had developed an entire Electronic Resources Unit.40 Some of these positions focused on collections, whereas others were created to deal with systems or legal issues. Question 2 of the survey asked what new positions, if any, the library had created in the previous two years to cope with e-journal acquisition and maintenance workloads. Figure 17 tabulates the results, broken down by the departments in which the new position(s) resided. Thirty-eight percent of respond-
Figure 17 New Positions as a Result of E-journals (Question 2)
ing libraries stated that no new positions had been created to handle e-journals over the previous two years. When new positions had been created, however, departments that benefited were acquisitions and/or serials (29 percent), cataloging (21 percent), specially created e-journal positions crossing more than one department (21 percent), systems (12 percent), and legal positions (3 percent). In some cases libraries created entirely new departments; one librarian commented that “during a re-organization, several units that handled print and e-journals were combined into a new department.” DEPARTMENTAL STRUCTURE In 1998, Bordeianu, Lewis, and Wilkinson41 reported that a recent trend in ARL libraries was to merge Acquisitions and Serials Departments. Moreover, technical services downsizing had sometimes forced the combination of acquisitions and serials with collection development and ILL. More recently, Drexel University was “facing the need to either retrain, redeploy, or reduce existing staff”42 in technical services due to their transition to e-journals, and the University of Nevada needed “a new configuration within Technical Services.”43 Question 7 attempted to gauge how the departmental structure of technical services had changed to accommodate e-journals. The question included a matrix, with Acquisitions, Serials, Collection Development, Interlibrary Loan, Cataloging, and Systems Departments as choices for six possible departmental-action scenarios. I asked
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Table 1 Departmental Activity (Question 7)
Change Merged with another department Downsized a section Expanded a section Abolished a section Created a new section Created new positions
Acquisitions (%)
Serials (%)
Collection Development (%)
ILL (%)
Cataloging (%)
Systems (%)
21 18 12 0 6 15
18 9 6 9 6 18
3 0 6 0 6 15
3 3 6 0 3 3
3 12 12 0 9 21
6 0 15 0 6 35
whether a merger, downsize, expansion, abolishment of an existing section, creation of a new section, or creation of new positions had occurred in any of the listed departments. The results, displayed in Table 1, were disappointing because they revealed only slight evidence that any of the kinds of mergers discussed in the literature had taken place in the responding libraries. The data revealed some evidence that Acquisitions (21 percent) and Serials (18 percent) Departments had merged with another department, although it is possible that in all of these instances they merged with each other, which would increase the percentage to 39. Only 18 percent of Acquisitions, 12 percent of Cataloging, and 9 percent of Serials Departments had been downsized. Systems expanded in 15 percent of the libraries, whereas cataloging and acquisitions both expanded in 12 percent of the libraries. The only department said to have been abolished was serials, in 9 percent of the institutions. Few departments had created new sections; the most was cataloging, with 9 percent. Finally, 35 percent of Systems, 21 percent of Cataloging, 18 percent of Serials, 15 percent of Collection Development, and 15 percent of Acquisitions Departments had created new positions. Although my survey did not lend much statistical support to the trend toward downsizing discussed in the literature, it is still true that in the digital world, “the lines between acquisitions, collections, and systems work seems particularly fluid and unclear.”44 Furthermore, “the interrelated nature of acquiring, describing, and supporting e-journals may illustrate the blurring of traditional roles” (p. 138)45 in the library. Even if few official structural changes in the surveyed ARL libraries occurred, staff from all departments became more involved with e-journals than they had been with print journals. In many cases, committees comprised of staff from various
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departments were formed to deal with one or more aspects of the e-journal selection and maintenance process. Reorganization did occur, albeit often informally; departments in general became less clearly defined and more dynamic. Because e-journals affect all library staff, increased communication between departments is essential. Some of the survey respondents commented on the necessity of collaboration; one librarian complained that “lack of communication among all of the people dealing with electronic resources is a major problem,” whereas another wrote that “e-journals are forcing a new level of cooperation to emerge between technical services and public services.” IN RETROSPECT: CRITIQUING THE SURVEY INSTRUMENT Although the survey I conducted provided some valuable information about how ARL libraries are managing e-journals, if I were to do the survey again, I would do several things differently. Most important, I would pretest the survey for bias and content. This might have illuminated a number of instances in which the questions were ambiguous, poor, or not answerable. It might also have revealed that answer choices such as “training,” “workshop,” “seminar,” “class,” and “conference” for Question 6 were not mutually exclusive. In other instances in which the correct answer did not appear as an option or the respondent could not answer the question, I might have added the options “none of the above” or “I don’t know” to ensure inclusivity. Although I often provided a free-response comment box after a question, the available choices were not sufficient for complete and accurate responses. As Babbie notes, questions need to be accurate because respondents will “often make up answers.”46
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In other instances, due to my naivete about the topic, I either didn’t ask the question correctly, didn’t ask the right question, or didn’t ask the right people. For example, Questions 1 and 8, which have respondents delineate which departments are involved with or select e-journals, failed to compare the departments handling e-journals with those involved with printed journals. Thus, the point of the question—to see how the number has changed—was lost. Similarly, Questions 3 and 4 failed to ask about the level of staff involvement with e-journals, although both questions were intended to measure the additional staff and amount of time required for professional librarians. Question 5 is an example of not asking the right question: salary may be a more realistic change than an upgrade, given the condition of career ladders in many ARL institutions. Question 14 is an example of not asking a question of the right people: vendors, publishers, aggregators, and consortia have a much better idea as to whether they are archiving e-journals than serials librarians do. Because I was still in library school and did not have first-hand experience with my topic, I should have consulted with serials librarians about the questions before sending out the survey. As Babbie stated, “if you only have a superficial understanding of the topic, you may fail to specify the intent of your question sufficiently.”7 Pretesting certainly would have led to improvement in the overall design of the survey. For example, for contingency questions, such as 10b, that are applicable only if respondents choose “special committee” as an answer to the previous question, I could have made its conditional relationship to Question 10 more obvious by format changes such as indenting it to the right or inserting a connecting symbol between the two questions. Testers may have asked about the order of the questions, leading me to reconsider the organizational strategy. I took the “random-order” approach when constructing the survey because I feared that deliberately placing them in the order I wanted might lead to bias. In retrospect, however, I think the haphazard order of the questions was a detriment. Although each question falls into one of three orderly categories of e-journals and staffing, there is no way for the respondent to realize this. As Babbie asserted, a survey with randomly ordered questions “will probably strike respondents as chaotic or worthless. It will be difficult to answer, moreover, since they must continually switch their attention from one topic to another.”48
A better approach might have been to arrange the questions into content subsections and introduce each section with a short statement concerning its purpose so that respondents could understand what I was trying to measure.49 Note, too, that a randomly ordered survey does not lend itself to easy discussion and analysis. It’s likely that readers were confused as I discussed questions out of ideological sequence and referred to figures incongruous with the survey question order. On the other hand, I think the survey method itself worked very well. Mounting the questions on the World Wide Web and sending out an e-mail cover letter with a linked URL was more efficient in terms of time and money than an actual mailing. I suspect, but do not know for sure, that my response rate was higher because of the increased convenience of this method. The only drawback was that because I wanted respondents to remain anonymous, I had no way of coding the Web surveys the way I could have coded a mail survey; I had no way of identifying which people had responded and so had to send out follow-up e-mails to everyone. The only piece of identification on the survey was Question 17, which asked how many professional staff were employed in the respondent’s library. My intention was to break down the results by library size, but I did not receive enough responses to the survey for this to be meaningful. I do not consider the question a waste, however, because it is better to obtain too much information— even if it is not used—than too little. As Babbie stated, “Whenever you’re not sure how much detail to get in a measurement, get too much rather than too little. During the analysis of the data, you can always combine precise attributes into more general categories.”50
CONCLUSION The survey provided a snapshot in time of the impact of electronic journals on library staff at ARL member institutions. More than a year has elapsed since I conducted the survey, however, and the data are no longer current. A better-prepared, updated survey of how ARL libraries are handling access to e-journals should be undertaken periodically. New issues— such as archiving developments, license provision for back issues, and license-tracking databases that are integrated into the OPAC—need to be explored. Surveys of other types of libraries would also be valuable. How are smaller or middle-sized academic
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libraries, for example, dealing with online access to journals? How are academic health sciences libraries and specialized science libraries dealing with the fact that many of the titles to which they subscribe are available on the Web? Analysis of different populations might yield very different results from the ARL institutions. Designing a survey is not an easy task, and future researchers should take pains to pretest the survey to ensure that the questions have mutually exclusive and exhaustive answer choices, and to arrange the questions in a way that both makes sense to the respondents and lends itself to easy analysis.
NOTES 1. Ellen Finnie Duranceau, “Beyond Print: Revisioning Serials Acquisitions for the Digital Age,” Serials Librarian 33, no. 1 (1998): 83–106.
est Group (NASIG),” Library Collections, Acquisitions, and Technical Services 24, no. 1 (2000): 127–147. 15. Rob Whithers, “Biz of Acq—Selecting and Processing Electronic Resources: How to Plug Librarians into the Workflow,” Against the Grain 11, no. 6 (2000): 80–83. 16. Ellen Finnie Duranceau, “License Tracking,” Serials Review 26, no. 3 (2000): 69–73. 17. Ibid., 71–73. 18. Ibid., 71. 19. Montgomery and Sparks, “The Transition to an Electronic Journal Collection,” 8. 20. Loghry and Shannon, “Managing Selection and Implementation,” 34–44. 21. Whithers, “Biz of Acq,” 82. 22. Duranceau, “Beyond Print,” 95. 23. Ibid., 96.
2. Carol Hansen Montgomery, “‘Fast Track’ Transition to an Electronic Journal Collection: A Case Study,” New Library World 101, no. 1159 (2000): 294–303.
24. Peter B. Boyce, “Who Will Keep the Archives? Wrong Question!” in Karen Cargille, “Digital Archiving: Whose Responsibility Is It?” Serials Review 26, no. 3 (2000): 50–68.
3. Patricia A. Loghry and Amy W. Shannon, “Managing Selection and Implementation of Electronic Products: One Tiny Step in Organization, One Giant Step for the University of Nevada, Reno,” Serials Review 26, no. 3 (2000): 32–44.
25. Rebecca A. Graham, “Evolution of Archiving in the Digital Age,” in Karen Cargille, “Digital Archiving: Whose Responsibility Is It?” Serials Review 26, no. 3 (2000): 50–68.
4. E. Babbie, (1998). The Practice of Social Research, 8th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1998), 142. 5. Ibid., 159.
26. Karen Hunter, “Digital Archiving,” in Karen Cargille, “Digital Archiving: Whose Responsibility Is It?” Serials Review 26, no. 3 (2000): 50–68.
6. Duranceau, “Beyond Print,” 87.
27. “Late Bulletins: Yale and Elsevier to Collaborate on Digital Archive,” Library Journal 126, no. 6 (2001): 13.
7. Carol Hansen Montgomery and JoAnne L. Sparks, “The Transition to an Electronic Journal Collection: Managing the Organizational Changes,” Serials Review 26, no. 3 (2000): 4–18.
28. “Library Joins Publishers to Archive Electronic Journals.” Harvard University Gazette (24 May 2001). http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2001/05.24/17-library. html (10/30/01).
8. Ibid., 11.
29. Sally Morris, “Archiving Electronic Publications: What Are the Problems and Who Should Solve Them?” in Karen Cargille, “Digital Archiving: Whose Responsibility Is It?” Serials Review 26, no. 3 (2000): 50–68.
9. Duranceau, “Beyond Print,” 87. 10. Ibid., 8. 11. Loghry and Shannon, “Managing Selection and Implementation,” 34. 12. Claire T. Dygert, “New Challenges behind the Scenes: The Changing Roles of the Serials Librarian in the Age of E-publishing,” Internet Reference Services Quarterly 3, no. 3 (1998): 7–14. 13. Duranceau, “Beyond Print,” 97–98. 14. Pat Loghry, Linda Hulbert, and Adolfo R. Tarango, “From Carnegie to Internet2: A Report from the 14th Annual Conference of the North American Serials Inter-
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30. Scott Carlson, “Library of Congress Buys Electronic Archive of Physics Society’s Journals,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 2 February 2001, A32. 31. Graham, “Evolution of Archiving,” 60. 32. Boyce, “Who Will Keep the Archives,” 55. 33. Rick Anderson, “Is Digital Archiving a New Beast Entirely?” in Karen Cargille, “Digital Archiving: Whose Responsibility Is It?” Serials Review 26, no. 3 (2000): 50–68. 34. Whithers, “Biz of Acq,” 83.
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35. Duranceau, “Beyond Print,” 94.
APPENDIX
36. Loghry and Shannon, “Managing Selection and Implementation,” 44. 37. Joni Gomez, “Human Factors in the Electronic Technical Services,” Acquisitions Librarian 21 (1999): 110–12. 38. Duranceau, “Beyond Print,” 92–93. 39. Montgomery, “‘Fast Track’,” 299. 40. Duranceau, “Beyond Print,” 94. 41. Sever Bordeianu, Linda K. Lewis, and Frances C. Wilkinson, “Merging the Acquisitions and Serials Department at the University of New Mexico: A Case Study,” Library Acquisitions: Practice and Theory 22, no. 3 (1998): 261–62. 42. Montgomery et al., “The Transition to an Electronic Journal Collection,” 12. 43. Loghry and Shannon, “Managing Selection and Implementation,” 44. 44. Duranceau, “Beyond Print,” 95. 45. Tom Moothart, “Adding to User Confusion by Adding More E-journals,” Serials Review 24, no. 3/4 (1998): 136–138. 46. Babbie, 151. 47. Ibid., The Practice of Social Research, 148. 48. Ibid., 158. 49. Ibid., 159. 50. Ibid., 140.
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