Collection Development Issues in the Online Environment

Jonathan Eaton (Electronic Resources Manager, London Business School, London, UK)

Program: electronic library and information systems

ISSN: 0033-0337

Article publication date: 31 July 2007

220

Keywords

Citation

Eaton, J. (2007), "Collection Development Issues in the Online Environment", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 41 No. 3, pp. 313-315. https://doi.org/10.1108/00330330710774192

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2007, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


This collection of articles is another in the established series of “monograph separates” published by Haworth Press, with each article simultaneously co‐published in The Acquisitions Librarian, Vol. 19 Nos. 1/2, 2007, with contributors drawn from academic libraries in Australia, Canada, the UK and USA.

The book aims, through essays and case studies, to address the various issues surrounding electronic materials (e‐journals, e‐books and other kinds of electronic content) affecting library professionals at both collection development and senior managerial levels in an era of inexorable gravitation towards electronic sources as the primary focus for research. However, this is a world where, for library practitioners, the persisting legacy of print publication models still appears to dominate (and distort) the subscription and access landscape, often to the detriment of productivity, efficiency and user access continuities.

The editor has organised contributions under three general “issues” headings:

  1. 1.

    common;

  2. 2.

    special; and

  3. 3.

    future.

Under common issues are grouped pricing and budgeting for e‐journals (either individually‐ordered or “bundled”); the demands involved in assertion and maintenance of access rights for e‐journals; electronic reference works and library budgeting; the choice of migrating to an “e‐only” approach for journal subscriptions and consideration of whether the e‐journal model is proving a help or a hindrance for academic libraries. The first section of this collection will certainly alert (or remind) the reader to the many sources of frustration currently experienced by anyone tasked with procuring and maximising access to electronic materials, especially e‐journals where the information needed to authenticate and download may frequently get lost in the (often) convoluted series of interactions between the various participants in the overall supply chain (libraries, publishers, gateways, serials agents, etc.). A continuous refrain in more than one contribution here is the widespread sense of confusion created by the diversity of different publishers' pricing models. In short, there is ample evidence here of the “market dysfunctions” so clearly identified by such experienced observers as John Cox and which have spurred the rise of such initiatives as the Scholarly Publishing Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) alliance, the Open Access (OA) movement and the institutional repository model. The extensive quoting of e‐mail discussion transcripts by Crothers, Prabhu and Sullivan in their article “Electronic Journal Delivery in Academic Libraries” ably summarises the many common discontents expressed by librarians around the world. In cost and productivity terms, there are both opportunities and threats to consider involved in moving to an “e‐only” strategy for journals, as Wolf discusses in a case study from Cardiff University. In many cases there are proven difficulties or obstacles to achieving the expected costs savings (in the UK not least due to full VAT duty levied on e‐journal invoices).

The special issues section comprises three (unrelated) topics: recent trends in US copyright legislation and their implications for library acquisitions and collection development; an approach to evaluating full‐text database indexing; and the experience of creating an electronic archive of scanned historical company annual reports. The first, a summary of recent developments in US copyright legislation, covers such milestones as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Copyright Termination Extension Act, the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) and case law such as the Tasini ruling. Despite this localised North American focus, readers in other countries will find helpful the summary of more generally applicable and relevant points about copyright, confirming that many of the current problems stem from copyright failing to evolve with technological developments, or the difficult consequences arising from legislation drafted in deliberately ambiguous ways with the intention of accommodating future technologies (which may not develop as expected or predicted). The second chapter offers a different perspective on e‐collection development – the issues involved for a library wishing to digitise and host a collection of printed material – via a case study of the Wharton Lippincott Library's attempt to digitise its historical collection of US company annual reports and to offer them as a freely‐accessible collection via the web.

The volume is rounded off with more discursive papers that address and advocate views of the structural changes needed to transform current pricing and access models for electronic content, and the kinds of systematic incentives that could be introduced to implement open‐access‐based archiving of faculty authors' peer‐reviewed papers. In the former, David Stern of Yale University Library points to the growth of a new generation of federated search tools and document resolver technologies as a potential catalyst for development of new access mechanisms, policies and (consequently) pricing models. In contrast to some of the earlier articles in the “common issues” section, which typically only lament and list problems without proposing solutions, Stern at least presents some alternative approaches, such as package profile plans for journal subscriptions as a replacement for the many thousands of different customised deals held between publishers and organisations. Daniel Cleary offers a polemical “assault on a well‐entrenched and funded publishing industry” in his essay “Incentives for seconstruction of the e‐journal”, which identifies and recommends a key strategic step change: universities taking back their published knowledge in the form of localised self‐archiving by authors. The last article explores a leading‐edge topic: the issues involved in licensing the “mobile document” represented by emerging kinds of reference and serial publications targeted for the personal digital assistant (PDA) platform.

Described by its publisher as presenting “85 cutting‐edge practices from academic libraries around the world”, this collection is, on reflection, something of a “curate's egg”, with good and bad parts and slightly stale in places. That is certainly how many of the common issues contributions will appear to experienced librarians. The better parts comprise one or two contributions (like Stern's) that are not content with simply describing problems experienced in the e‐journals supply chain (for example), but actually propose solutions and envisage a less dysfunctional future. Some of the ground covered here has been (in this reviewer's opinion) more elegantly and effectively explored in other recent collections (for example the International Yearbook of Library and Information Management 2004‐5: Scholarly Publishing in an Electronic Era, edited by Gorman and Rowland, Facet Publishing, 2005). In addition, the claim to represent a truly up‐to‐date summary is contradicted by the dated nature of many of the contributions (evident in the bibliographies where few, if any, references later than 2003 are found). Potential readers should accordingly bear in mind that the co‐publication date of 2007 for the monograph and journal publication masks a significant gap of at least two to three years between original writing and appearance, and within that timeline has come the enormous academic library interest in OA, self‐archiving and institutional repositories, for which an additional contribution should surely have been included in this collection released for a late 2006/early 2007 publication date. On a positive note, however, the paperback monograph version comes at a relatively low US dollar cost, which at current exchange rates puts this collection well within the reach of academic libraries, students, and individual practitioners.

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