by
Trevor Wallis
Manager: Information Services
Learning Resource Centre
Central TAFE Western Australia
Email wallit@perth.training.wa.gov.au
www.central.wa.edu.au/library/
Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan, - Five Laws of Library Science
The library has traditionally been the gateway or starting point for those who are searching for information in print format.
Libraries have been the custodians of these information resources, and typically they were held in one place – the physical library. Librarians have traditionally fulfilled the role of selector, interpreter, and guardians of how these resources have been made available to users.
Today, this traditional concept of collection management has been turned upside down by the Internet and the proliferation of full text electronic resources from a bewildering array of suppliers.
Fig 1. The Current State of the Industry (from "The Voice of the User: Where Students and Faculty Go for Information" by Leigh Watson Healy, EDUCAUSE 2002, p.2)
The traditional practice of the user physically visiting the library to start a search no longer occurs. Evidence for this is provided in a paper Leigh Watson Healy (2002) delivered at the 2002 EDUCAUSE Conference. Her company, Outsell Inc, (www.outsellinc.com/) conducted in-depth interviews with 3,200 faculty members, undergraduates, and graduate students from small liberal arts colleges and public and private research institutions in America.
(For more detailed findings see Dimensions and Use of the Scholarly Information Environment www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub110/contents.html)
The key findings of the survey were:
• Patterns of use vary significantly both by discipline and by users’ application of information.
• Use of print books and journals predominates, for now.
Fig 2. Information Types Used for Research, Teaching, and Learning (from "The Voice of the User: Where Students and Faculty Go for Information" by Leigh Watson Healy, EDUCAUSE 2002, p.9)
• To find information, everyone goes online first.
Fig 3. Where Researchers and Students go for Information (from "The Voice of the User: Where Students and Faculty Go for Information" by Leigh Watson Healy, EDUCAUSE 2002, p.10)
• Students’ and faculty research and coursework needs are met by online information more than half the time.
• Nearly all users have a high degree of trust in library - deployed information resources.
• The Internet receives high marks as a resource for daily information use, but most users don’t trust it without additional verification.
• Top information problems: having enough time, knowing what’s available, and having access to all information from one place.
The research results outlined below (Fig 4) show that clients are using the physical library 35% less than two years ago, while using significant amounts of electronic resources (ejournals 78% and e-books 18%). Collection managers, therefore, have the job ahead of them to ensure that the library remains a highly valued gateway for users.
Fig 4. Perception of Current Information Environment (from "The Voice of the User: Where Students and Faculty Go for Information" by Leigh Watson Healy, EDUCAUSE 2002, p.17)
In fact, libraries will only remain relevant if they take on board the needs and wants of users and how they are finding information. The research by Healy (2002) indicates that the current paradigm of libraries owning information is no longer relevant; the users are telling us that it’s all about access and the location of the information is unimportant.
Branin, Groen and Thorin (1999) (www.arl.org/collect/changing.html) detail how the field of collection management in America has changed over time and argue that librarians have to take on a leadership role in the new era of electronic information. They must now deliver services not only to the client who enters the physical library, but also deliver resources online and provide gateways to resources that are available on the Web. Of course, these Internet documents are different from print resources and with the use of hyperlinks allow a different type of document to evolve. An electronic document can have links to other electronic resources such as audio, video, or databases and even other electronic documents elsewhere in the world of the Internet. See Sports Dimensions for Playing Areas (1998) (www.ausport.gov.au/ausfc/afcdim.html) for an example in the sports area of how an online publication has been enhanced with the addition of links to the rules of the game.
Peters (2000) differs slightly from the above proposition in that he argues that computers and computer networks are changing what people can and want to do with scholarly texts and the very nature of the texts themselves. He argues that the computer has changed everything except the working assumptions and beliefs of collection development librarians.
Peters puts forward the thesis that for several hundreds of years the monograph and the journal article have served as the fundamental construct of a synchronous scholarly communication.
While the monograph and journal article are the basic unit for the user, from the collection developer’s standpoint, the individual monograph and the journal title are the basic unit for selection and management. Peters argues that there is an expanding gap between what collection developers collect and what users use; that is, the basic units of selection seem to be getting larger, while the basic units of retrieval are getting smaller. For Peters, this is symptomatic of collection managers not paying attention to, and analysing the actual habits of, users of academic libraries. Online systems do allow for detailed analysis of behaviour of the users, and some like Netlibrary even allow the patron to select the text for the collection. For Peters this just pushes the collection development to a higher level of who selects the texts and what are the criteria for selecting the books that get added to the pool of selectable books.
Peters puts the proposition that rather than continue to build collections based on a large number of small just-in-case decisions, collection managers need to explore and use systems that enable the purchase of information units as close to the moment of use as possible.
An example of this approach is the Australian Standards (www.standards.com.au) and the AusStats (www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/ausstatshome?openview) databases that charge when files are downloaded, and in the case of AusStats, charging a lesser fee for subsequent download of the same data.
Peters puts it aptly when he states that collection managers are threatened by their own mind-forged manacles in that the distribution system that worked very well in the 60’s will, if kept intact with only minor changes, work very poorly in 2005. They will therefore need to be aware of the latest research on the habits and preferences of users of electronic resources. Healey (2002) (Fig 5) shows that researchers in the area of Law and Business are more likely to use electronic resources than those in Art and the Humanities. This may indicate that either there is more online information available in the area of law and business or what information is available on the Internet in this area meets the needs of this class of users.
Fig 5. Information Use Habits and Preferences (from "The Voice of the User: Where Students and Faculty Go for Information" by Leigh Watson Healy, EDUCAUSE 2002, p.13)
As builders of collections, librarians now have a larger and more complex set of resources from which to select. These resources range from analogue versions of books, journals, encyclopaedias and sound, to digital versions of these in a variety of formats such as CDRom, DVD, digital video tape, to online digital ejournals, e-books and online databases.
Kovacs (2000) in a review of the literature on collection development argues that even in a digital world, librarians still collect, evaluate, and organise information resources.
Selection is simply a process of comparing individual resources with criteria of collection development policy, evaluating the quality, then determining the relevancy of the resource to the information needs of clients.
In addition to the traditional criteria, the digital world has thrown up a plethora of issues with which the collection manager has to deal. These issues are purchasing/budget, licensing, usage/statistics, copyright, archiving, presentation, staff workload, training of users, and technical issues such as how the information is delivered to users – via computers, e-book readers, does it require special software, and how do we authenticate legitimate users.
As the move to ejournals is more advanced than the move to e-books, this paper will examine the move to ejournals and the implications for collection managers.
There is a common assumption that moving to electronic journals will reduce cost by saving money on such items as storage, re-shelving, or binding, while improving access, as theoretically the online access is 24 hours by 7 days.
Odlyzko (1995) (www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/eworld.html) examined the cost of publishing print journals and identified the following costs associated with a typical article in a scholarly journal:
The indirect costs (shelving, binding, reference services) for libraries are typically double the costs that are paid to the publisher and he argues that libraries need to examine ways of reducing these costs
Odlyzko (1998) (www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/eworld.html) argues that it is inevitable that scholarly journals will go digital and that there will be a mix of free and subscription journals, with the subscriptions being cheaper than the print version.
Montgomery and Sparks (2000) (www.si.umich.edu/PEAK-2000/montgomery.pdf) of Drexel University have developed a framework for assessing the impact of electronic journal collection on library costs and staffing patterns.
They have shown that for Drexel University, although there has been an increase in journal cost overall, the unit cost has decreased since they provide a collection four times larger, which is more heavily used. They found that although fewer staff members were required, the staff needed new skills to provide access to the electronic journals via the web or the catalogue and to assess the usage (statistics) of the journals. For those who are interested in a more detailed examination of how to collect and use statistics in an electronic environment see the following:
EQUINOX Library Performance System (equinox.dcu.ie/index.html)
Guidelines for Statistical Usage (www.library.yale.edu/consortia/webstats.html)
White Paper on Electronic Journal Usage Statistics (http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub94abst.html )
The aggregation of journals by vendors has seen the development of consortia purchasing and the move to alternative forms of scholarly publishing. Consortia purchasing is seen as a response to the perception that to deal with large corporate entities there is strength in a collaborative approach.
An example of consortia is the TAFE (Technical and Further Education) sector (www.tafe.sa.edu.au/institutes/torrens-valley/survey/index.htm). The aim of this particular consortium is to provide access to all students of TAFE institutions Australia wide to Australian Public Affairs Full Text (APAFT www.informit.com.au) at a lower cost than if the access was purchased individually). This access will be via the Internet and students will be authenticated either by IP (Internet Protocol) or by login and password.
Alternative forms of publishing are also springing up and range from the physics preprint server arXiv (au.arxiv.org/), to free journals such as Journal of Combative Sport (ejmas.com/jcs/jcsframe.htm) or Athletic Insight (www.athleticinsight.com/), an online sport psychology journal, as well as attempts by large academic institutions to reduce the cost and time of publishing ejournals (see Berkeley Electronic Press (Bepress) at www.bepress.com/).
E print repositories are an example of academic institutions making available to the world their scholarly research (see the Australian National University for an Australian perspective eprints.anu.edu.au/).
See also www.soros.org/openaccess/ for the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which aims to make scholarly information freely available.
Licensing requires the librarian to ascertain what the terms and conditions of the contract are, is it available to just your clients, or is it available to the world. Will the library own the product at the end of the licence period, or does it revert to the provider, does it allow copies to be made for interlibrary loans, and is it in a form that will allow the handicapped to read or listen to it being read to them via the computer.
In the journal field, JSTOR (www.jstor.org) is a solution to the problem of storing and retrieving older journals and of ensuring they are available to future researchers.
In Australia the National Library of Australia is archiving Australian sport information from the Pandora web site (pandora.nla.gov.au/subject/25), see also (www.ausport.gov.au/nsic/wdbfull.html) at the National Sports Information Centre at the Australian Sports Commission for a list of other world sites
For full text sport documents archived by the Australian National Sports Information Centre, see www.ausport.gov.au/fulltext/.
To deliver the product to users, will the user need special software to read the electronic information, for example e-books may require the use of adobe e book reader (www.adobe.com/products/ebookreader/main.html). (For a listing of adobe e-book suppliers see www.adobe.com/epaper/ebooks/ebookmall/main.html). For an example of the use of e-books in the trails area see www.trails.com/explore/
Microsoft’s reader is at (www.microsoft.com/reader).
How do users access the information over the Internet, will access to ejournals be by a login and password, by IP address or will the electronic information be available only on an internal computer network. (LAN – Local Area Network).
Franck and Chambers (1998) (www2.potsdam.edu/LIBR/franckcr/ALA.html) found that many of the so called "Full Text" journals were not exact copies of the print version; for example, items such as letters to the editor or book reviews were missing.
Access to the online journals can be via a web site or by incorporating the URL in the library catalogue.
For a listing of new electronic journals and newsletters on the Internet see gort.ucsd.edu/newjour/ (As of 1 November 2002 it lists 12,076 titles).
To find out which vendors supply a particular journal and if it is provided in full text see JAKE (jake-db.org).
Another finding tool is the Colorado Alliance E Miner at (ejournal.coalliance.org/)
Australian Sports Journals via the National Library
For a comprehensive collection of resources for the selection of electronic resources see Appendix A, Selection and Presentation of Commercially available electronic resources: Issues and Practices by Timothy Jewell (www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub99abst.html).
Conclusion
Electronic resources are affecting collection management policies and they are drawing attention to two areas that have been neglected for too long in libraries, namely how do libraries change to meet the new searching habits of users of the Internet and how do collection managers react to the changing information needs of users.
In terms of Ranganathans’ laws of Library Science
AusStats, 2002, [Online], Available: http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/ausstatshome?openview [2002, November 4]
Australian Standards, 2002, [Online], Available: www.standards.com.au [2002, November 4]
Branin, J., Groen, F. & Thorin, S. 1999, The changing nature of collection management in research Libraries [Online], Available: www.arl.org/collect/changing.html [2002, November 4].
Franck, C. & Chambers, H. 1998, How Full is the Full in
Full-Text? A comparative study of paper periodicals with their web-based equivalents in the Ebsco, Information Access Company (IAC), UMI, and Wilson databases [Online], Available: http://www2.potsdam.edu/LIBR/franckcr/ALA.html [2002, November 4]
Friedlander, A. 2002, Dimensions and Use of the Scholarly Information Environment, Introduction to a data set assembled by the Digital Library Foundation and Outsell, Inc
[Online], Available: http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub110/contents.html [2002 November 4]
Healey, W. L. 2002, The voice of the user: where students and faculty go for information, [Online], Available: http://www.outsellinc.com [2002, November 4]
Jewell, T. D. 2001, Selection and Presentation of Commercially Available Electronic Resources: Issues and Practices [Online], Available: http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub99abst.html [2002, November 4]
Kovacs, D. Building electronic library collections: the essential guide to selection criteria and core subject collections, Neal-Schuman Publishers, Inc, New York.
Montgomery, C. H., & Sparks, J. 2000, Framework for assessing the impact of an electronic journal collection on library costs and staffing patterns [Online], Available: http://www.si.umich.edu/PEAK-2000/montgomery.pdf [2002, November 4]
Odlyzko, A. 1995, Tragic loss or good riddance? The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals [Online], Available: http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/eworld.html [2002, November 4]
Odlyzko, A. 1998, The economics of electronic journals, [Online], Available: http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/eworld.html [2002, November 4]
Peters, T. 2000, ‘Some issues for collection developers and content managers’, in Electronic collection management, ed. S. D. McGinnis, Haworth Information Press, Binghampton, NY, 2000, pp.137-153.
Sports Dimensions for Playing Areas (1998), [Online], Available: (http://www.ausport.gov.au/ausfc/afcdim.html) [2002 November 4]
This is an archive copy of a paper presented at 'Sharing information and building relationships - the Sport Information Workshop, 13–15 November, 2002, Perth WA' all copyright remains with the author.
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