Expanding E-Resources and Redefining Collections
The universe of scholarly publishing is in great flux. We will be successful providing information to meet the needs of our students to learn and our faculty to teach and advance knowledge through research only if we accept the fact that the delivery of information is diversifying. Yes, we believe that books will be around for a long time to come (a “good machine”), but we also believe that the scholarly journal will soon be principally electronic and that we have a responsibility for grappling with new information forms from remote sensing and GIS data to U.S. Government information that is migrating with blinding speed from print to the Web.
While the demands for print resources, particularly research monographs, and other collections are likely to remain unchanged for the foreseeable future, the electronic journal is increasingly becoming more commonplace and is challenging traditional notions of print serial collections. The “added value” represented by the more dynamic electronic journal compared with its less robust print counterpart is uncontested.
The UM Libraries currently spend approximately $4,000,000, half of the total acquisitions budget, on 6,500 paid journal subscriptions. Of this number approximately 4,000 are also available to the campus community in electronic form. Many of these e-journals are still not available as a subscription separate from a “package” that also includes the print version. In 2004, the UM Libraries will for the first time begin subscribing to some of these titles in electronic form only. Journals of the American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society are among the first examples of this transformation. While this represents a significant departure in the collecting of journal literature, it will still encompass less than 10% of our total serials. This switch will permit us to realize some immediate space and processing efficiencies, without jeopardizing the archival permanence of the content that is acquired in electronic format only. The latter issue is critical, since not all publishers have commitments to preserve their electronic publications in perpetuity.
Journals
Based on trends of the past few years, over the next five year period the UM Libraries may be able to convert between 10% and 50% of its print journals to electronic format only. Depending on the particular mix of publishers involved, this may consequently represent a range of $400,000 to $2,000,000. These figures do not represent a reduction in acquisitions expenditures, but rather a strategic redirection in how our acquisitions dollars are presently invested from print journals to electronic online access. How quickly this conversion develops will depend largely on the extent to which individual journal publishers permit electronic-only subscriptions and provide for effective archiving to ensure future access to current content. The effects of this move to electronic-only access will be diverse. Any positive budgetary impact from the reduction in the number of print subscriptions is likely to be minimal. At present, the most generous publishers typically offer a one-time reduction in subscription costs of 10%. Other publishers are using the opportunity to change their pricing models in ways that preclude the Libraries from realizing any cost reductions, merely an opportunity to limit the damage done by rapid inflation. Perhaps the most alarming trend in the past two years has been the adoption by some publishers of “tiered” pricing, where large institutions are assessed far higher charges than small institutions. Nonetheless, the University of Maryland Libraries have been a leader in the national trend of shifting acquisitions resources to online access of full text and this will continue particularly because it is highly desirable to the campus community and emerging pricing models will require the gradual abandonment of the print paradigm for a significant part of collection management budget.
Changes in the composition of journal collections and in the amount of material acquired in physical form will change the allocation of other resources. Conversion of half of our journal subscriptions to electronic-only form would reduce annual growth of journal collections by approximately 10,000 volumes. This is in comparison to the 50,000 monograph volumes that are typically acquired annually.
Conversion to increasing electronic access will have other resource implications. Annual binding expenditures would be reduced by as much as $80,500 and periodical check-in by $28,000. Continued decline in the circulation and use of print collections, requiring shelving and stacks maintenance will present additional opportunities to reallocate nonexempt staff and student assistant funds. Reductions would be possible within the existing allotment for the shelving contract ($50,000 in FY03, $30,000 in FY04). These adjustments, while increasingly real in the long term, could be more than offset in the next five years by increased demands created by transitional work.
The processes for the selection and management of electronic collections have been characterized as “chaotic.”1 This is in sharp contrast with the established and orderly systems that libraries have had in place for decades to deal with materials in print and other more traditional formats such as microforms. Subject librarians are increasingly working in a complex environment, where the vagaries of electronic formats and the marketplace pose constant challenges. The digitization of information resources and scholarly content is also redefining in significant ways the landscape of collection building and related user services. In this broad context of collection activities, the following cogent observations are appropriate:
The migration from print to electronic varies in speed and extent by discipline; electronic products are interdisciplinary and expensive, giving rise to selection by committee; projections for future funding are guesswork; and archiving and content control are problematic. Legal and negotiation skills are now mandatory. To complicate matters, decisions are often made through a consortium. The process for acquiring electronic resources turns the traditional acquisitions and user service model topsy-turvy.2
Non-Serial Publications
While the emphasis in the foregoing has been on the transition of the print journal to the electronic format, there are notable efforts underway that affect non-serial publications. UM graduate students will be submitting theses and dissertations in electronic form beginning in 2003-04. In cooperation with the Graduate School, the Libraries will facilitate access to these electronic resources. This will represent reductions in annual binding costs of approximately $9,660. The cataloging of these materials is being outsourced. There will be some processing required for the records. However, we can anticipate eliminating 2.5 months of work for one cataloger, or $8,000. This effort can be devoted to materials that would not have been cataloged, such as digital objects and backlogs of unique collections.
Above all, the internal shift of the work of Technical Service Library Faculty to cataloging foreign languages and special formats and metadata development means that we will diminish their time commitment to basic cataloging and rely on retrained staff, technological improvements in library systems and outsourcing to help maintain our level of effort in processing print materials. This is essential because we do not foresee a diminution in the addition to the collections of monographs over the next five years significant enough to diminish the need to process for use large numbers of print volumes. For example, in 2003 the Libraries added 20,000 journal/serial volumes and 50,000 monograph volumes. Even if we moved shifted half of our journals to e-only (our highest estimate), the Technical Services staff will still process 60,000 print volumes per year.
Federal Documents
Discussion is also underway among institutions, including the University of Maryland, that serve as one of the nations’ 51 regional depositories for U.S. government publications. The migration of these materials from print to electronic form stands to redefine in substantive ways the traditional roles that depository libraries have served. This may have profound implications for government document collections and associated services.
The Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) has announced that 95% of all U.S. government documents will be in electronic form in five years. FY02 FDLP statistics show that 68% of the government documents are distributed in electronic form already. The University of Arizona has reported to the Government Printing Office on a pilot project that retains electronic versions of government documents and eliminates print from the collection. UA is a selective 59% depository while UM is a regional 100% depository. In one year UA recouped 190 linear feet of shelving, one microform cabinet, one map cabinet, and freed up 1.0 FTE staff. UM Libraries could realize such savings to be reallocated if we began to weed paper and microform versions of documents. With fewer “tangible” documents to process, shelve, and re-shelve, staffing may be devoted to new projects. For example, in the Technical Services Division, one staff person, or $30,000, may be devoted to new tasks.
The FDLP has also announced a joint digitization project with the Association of Research Libraries and federal government agencies. UM Libraries could participate by taking on specific projects or by partnering with the Chesapeake Information and Research Library Alliance (CIRLA) libraries to digitize sets of government documents. For example, the National Agricultural Library could work on agricultural documents, the Smithsonian could digitize its own documents, and the same is true for the Library of Congress. The University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, George Washington University, and the University of Delaware could be assigned other subsets of these collections or assist the National Agriculture Library, the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress with their work. Records created for these collections could be requested from the Government Printing Office (GPO) and distributed electronically. A project such as this would compel the library to rethink a proposed project to catalog and inventory the existing print collection.
