In this issue

Citation

McGrath, M. (2010), "In this issue", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 38 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ilds.2010.12238caa.001

In this issue

Article Type: Editorial From: Interlending & Document Supply, Volume 38, Issue 3

Cuts, cuts, cuts. University libraries, commercial and public libraries, research funding bodies, and open access will all suffer as managers are forced to make some of the biggest cuts known in our lifetimes. The economic situation may be baffling to many of us – where did all the money actually go? Well, a lot of it was spent by us on credit which now has to be repaid. Every country to varying degrees – see the report on global library cuts by Ian Rowlands and David Nicholas in the literature review – will be cutting public sector expenditure and raising taxes. The hope is that this will kick-start economic expansion. What nobody seems to want to face is that with everyone following the same “strategy”, where does export-led growth come from? Cuts mean higher unemployment, which leads to less tax revenues and more public expenditure on unemployment benefits, which in turn leads to more cuts in expenditure and so to a very un-virtuous downward spiral. For libraries and their users, two developments will be hit hard – First, author-pays open access will come under great strain as funding bodies see their revenues drop – partly because of government grant reductions and partly because of decline in investment income. Self-funded journals will find great difficulty in raising funds to continue. Even repositories will likely come under strong scrutiny. They use scarce resources to establish, maintain and populate with no immediate benefit to the library. However, existing and proposed mandates should ensure their continuance even if at a reduced level of promotion and development. A key problem for libraries will be these additional costs – often with author side fees as well but corresponding reduction in the serials budgets. Something will have to go. Secondly, serial prices continue to rise, causing more resistance from librarians to the Big Deals (see the result of a survey conducted by Jill Taylor-Roe in the literature review). Cuts will cause an even greater focus on these expensive but attractive deals. And what will it all mean for document supply? Libraries and users should wake up to the fact that properly organised, documents can be delivered speedily and cheaply to users’ desktops. I predict a significant shift to “just in time” rather than “just in case”, for both returnables and non-returnables. Only time will tell.

At the time of writing we are in the lull before the storm. I hope that my bleak prediction above is not true or at least exaggerated – we will know soon enough. During the lull, business as usual. We publish articles from around the world. An exciting project in the UK has now become a service (“The UK Research Reserve (UKRR): machinations, mayhem and magic”). University libraries are removing print runs of low use journals with the guarantee that long-term access to the titles will be assured from the British Library Document Supply Centre. Space savings are already dramatic and while the processes are quite complex, there is much interest from other countries, especially as capital funds for new buildings are likely to be very thin on the ground.

From Denmark we get the latest on Danish Libraries and their collaboration with OCLC (Danish libraries in WorldCat). From China we have an overview of the rapidly changing landscape for document supply (“The development of document supply services in China”). From Korea the service from KISTI, the world-renowned national document supply service is described (“Document delivery through domestic and international collaborations: the KISTI practice”). From Iran, a subject of more than parochial interest is the state of Islamic libraries in that country (“Establishing an information network among Islamic Sciences Centers in Iran: a feasibility study”). From Germany a paper originally given at the highly successful ILDS conference in Hannover describes case studies of commercial and public libraries and their future (“Success factors for the future of information centres, commercial and public libraries: a study from Germany“). And finally, the literature review from your editor gives extensive coverage to document supply and open access developments (“Interlending and document supply: a review of the recent literature: 71”)

Good reading!

Mike McGrath