RE: Is it time to stop printing journals?

["Eileen Fenton" <Eileen.Fenton@portico.org>]

Rick quite rightly notes that the economics of electronic 
resources have flipped some of the dynamics we knew so well in 
the print world. Embedded in this flip, however, may be new 
opportunities.  Not only can smaller libraries pursue a greater 
breadth of electronic collections, but through community-based 
archives, such as Portico or other initiatives, they can also 
support long-term preservation of critical e-resources by 
contributing only a fraction of the total preservation costs. 
This opportunity for cost sharing is especially important because 
as libraries' electronic collections grow in breadth, local 
preservation needs may actually become more rather than less 
pressing, regardless of institution size.

>From our early work on the Portico archive we have seen that 
libraries from across the spectrum (and around the world) are 
willing to contribute to support of a community-based permanent 
archive.  This response suggests that libraries - large and small 
- believe that action to ensure permanent access to the scholarly 
record is just as vital to the teaching and education mission of 
their parent institutions as is the provision of current access 
to a breadth of materials.  One important benefit of addressing 
long-term preservation and access needs in a collaborative manner 
is that we avoid placing the full burden and expense on the 
shoulders of just a few generous, large institutions.

Eileen Fenton
Executive Director, Portico

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Rick Anderson
Sent: Monday, April 02, 2007 6:26 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: Is it time to stop printing journals?

> I think print will continue to be necessary until we as a 
> profession can develop the confidence in e-archives that we now 
> have in print as an archival format. Will we ever develop that 
> confidence? What will it take?

As time goes on, I think permanent archival access is going to be 
a central function for fewer libraries.  During the print era, we 
all thought of ourselves as more-or-less permanent repositories 
of the information we selected.  But we paid for permanence with 
breadth -- we could afford to house our journals permanently, but 
we couldn't afford to buy everything our patrons needed.  Today 
we can flip that model: online access makes it possible for us to 
provide much more of the content our patrons want, but (in many 
cases) not to do so in a reliably permanent way.

This means we have to ask ourselves a serious question: to what 
degree is permanence of access more important than breadth of 
coverage?  I think the right answer will vary depending on the 
library.  A big ARL should probably worry much more about 
permanence than a community-college library should.  And it also 
probably depends on the kind of content.  I think the important 
thing, though, is that we stop assuming that permanence is always 
a trump-card issue.

---
Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
rickand@unr.edu