Scholarship, Research Libraries and Global Publishing

Citation

Calvert, P. (2001), "Scholarship, Research Libraries and Global Publishing", Collection Building, Vol. 20 No. 4, pp. 214-216. https://doi.org/10.1108/cb.2001.20.4.214.3

This is the full report of a four‐year study of trends in global information resources conducted by the Association of Research Libraries. The original project title was Scholarship, Research Libraries and Foreign Publishing in the 1990s, and the report first appeared in 1995. Two points emerge from that simple introduction. The first is the subtle change in the title of this Haworth monograph, and readers should be aware of its real content. This is about the acquisition of “foreign” materials by North American research libraries and not primarily about global publishing trends. Second, the report is already dated, and there are some comments, such as references to the weak greenback, which make for odd reading at present.

The report makes it clear that foreign acquisitions are essential for modern higher education, research and business, all of which have become international to a marked degree. Librarians know that the problems of acquisition remain the same as ever and in some ways have intensified. Foreign materials always have had high acquisition, cataloguing and preservation costs. To that can be added the much greater volume of material emanating from some parts of the world (in 1991 China became the world’s most prolific publisher), plus higher prices charged by Russian and Eastern European publishers. At the same time, of course, they have to cope with reduced library funding. The report avoids the error of trying to make all publishing trends appear to be global. That is why its authors conducted 14 separate area studies in which a lot of the most valuable content is to be found.

The report offers some solutions to the problem. The most obvious one is greater cooperation among research libraries, but the previously mentioned funding difficulties plus burgeoning global publication make resource sharing ever more difficult. A number of current initiatives focus on cooperative acquisition supported by seamless access to bibliographic and delivery services. One of the first of these, the Latin Americanist Research Resources Project, is described in the report, but before anyone had undertaken the final analysis of its success.

Developments in publishing technology draw many mentions, but the date of the report tells against it on this point. It is no longer only the acquisition of a physical document that is all that matters, because sometimes the library needs to find appropriate Web sites and index them. Almost every Chinese university library now has a Web site, though you wouldn’t know that by reading this report. There are six pages of references at the end of the volume but no cumulative index.

This is an important acquisition for North American libraries, but it will have less value to others.