A couple of people passed on to me their responses to Bob Weber about the expression "library without walls." Joe Wible, Falconer Biology Library, Stanford University, says:
"I believe the phrase 'library without walls' can be attributed to John Sack based on his article 'Open Systems for Open Minds: Building the Library without Walls.' It was published in the November 1986 issue of College & Research Libraries."
>From Mike Renshawe, McGill University:
"The first instance I saw where 'libraries without walls' was used was in a presentation given to the Australian Law Librarians Association, published in Australian Law Librarians Group Newsletter, no. 88, 205 (Sept-Oct. 1988). Roy Mersky, Law Librarian at Texas, gave the address and his actual quote was a 'National law library without walls: A global law library without boundaries.' Marianne Scott, National Library of Canada, later used the quote (last summer) in a conference at the University of Texas on the Global Responsibility of Law Librarians, later to be published."
And Bob Weber says:
"Others have pointed out that the term may have its roots in discussions at the time printing was invented (movable type). Some have suggested that it dates back to the late '40s or early 50s as a variation on Andre Malroux's 'museums without walls.'"
What all this has to do with serials pricing, I don't know, unless we're preparing for the time when we can't afford libraries with walls because all the money has to go to pay for journals.
Several people noticed the numbering error at the top of the last issue of the Newsletter, but two subscribers mentioned that their computers alerted them to the duplicate number! As Deana Astle says, "It just shows that humans do not always pay as much attention to details as a machine!" But Miriam Palm wins the prize with this message: "I'm going to nominate you for two awards: the numbering mess award and the total honesty award!!" No prizes for those who mentioned "Snake-In-The-Grass Award!"
While we're on the topic of the Newsletter itself, I want to ask you another question. Arnold Hirshon wonders if we might go to a ragged right margin instead of justifying it. Excerpting items would be easier for him if he didn't have to deal with the extra spaces created by the justification. How about the rest of you? Ragged? Justified? Doesn't matter? All nonrespondents go into the last category.
23.2 GORDON & BREACH LAWSUIT DISMISSED IN WEST
GERMANY
Association of Research Libraries memo dated May 30, 1990,
FAXed to all ARL Directors.
For your information, Richard Meserve of Covington & Burling, attorneys for the AIP/APS, has just telephoned to relate that today, in Frankfurt, West Germany, the Trial Court has ENTIRELY dismissed the Gordon & Breach lawsuit. The dismissal represents a very favourable development for the physical societies and Dr. Barschall, with positive implications for the American Mathematical Society.
The written ruling is expected in several weeks and will explain the rationale for the dismissal, whether on technical or loftier grounds. Such rationale is not known at this time. The matter is subject to appeal and we will be informed of future developments. Cases are still pending in Switzerland and France.
Your support, along with that of your faculty, has been very useful. Thank you for your efforts. In spite of today's news, our efforts for widely distributed consumer pricing information as well as ready access to scholarly materials must continue -- it is not a time to stop or to be complacent.
23.3 ALA/ARL POSITION ON HR 3131: THE NATIONAL
HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING TECHNOLOGY ACT OF 1989
Statement of Paul M. Gherman, Director of Libraries, Virginia
Polytechnic Institute and State University, on behalf of the
American Library Association and the Association of Research
Libraries before the Subcommittee on Science, Research, and Technology,
The Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, March 15, 1990.
I am Paul Gherman, Director of Libraries at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. I am appearing today on behalf of the American Library Association and the Association of Research Libraries. ALA is a nonprofit educational organization of 50,000 librarians, library trustees, and other friends of libraries. ARL is an association of 119 major research libraries. I serve as a member of the ARL Committee on Government Relations, and the ARL Task Force on Telecommunications.
Both ALA and ARL support HR 3131, which calls for the creation of the National Research and Education Network (NREN). The membership of ALA passed a resolution at their January meeting in Chicago supporting the NREN.... ARL has joined with EDUCOM and CAUSE, organizations representing computer and information professionals in higher education, to form a coalition which will encourage development of information resources on the NREN and study issues such as standards, intellectual property rights, copyright, and the management and funding of the network. We feel strongly about the establishment of the NREN because it will have significant impact on the mission of the nation's libraries and on the opportunities and challenges we face today and in the future.
Since the beginning of the last decade, the process of scholarly communication has been in crisis. By scholarly communication I mean the process of review, publication, storage, and dissemination of the results of research and scholarship so that scientists, scholars, and researchers have access to the results of the work of others. The crisis has come about because the cost of scholarly publications, especially those in the sciences, technology, and medicine, have increased at a rate well beyond that of inflation. A recent study commissioned by ARL has shown that from 1975/76 (when journal expenditures were first reported) to 1987/88, the average cost per journal in the ARL university library has risen 250 percent, and this trend does not seem to be abating. At Virginia Tech this means that each year we must increase our budget by $250,000 just to retain the same subscriptions as the previous year. These funds are not available, so that each year we face the cancellation of over 1,000 titles of journals of importance to our faculty and graduate students. Ordering new journals in new areas of research is a luxury we have not had for years. Added to the purchase price of journals is the cost of binding and housing them.
It is time, therefore, that we establish a new paradigm for scholarly communication. Most libraries can subscribe to only about 20 percent of the journals published today, and many of these journals are high-cost, low-use publications used by only a select number of our specialists. Instead of libraries purchasing these high-cost, but low-use, journals, we must develop a process by which our faculty and students have access on demand to significant articles from a much broader array of journals. We must shift emphasis from ownership of information to access to information. The NREN can be an integral part of implementing such a system.
In the future we envision, electronic databases will list available articles via a standard article number. Faculty and students will then, with a single key stroke, be able to order an electronic article to be delivered to their desktop workstation to be printed, stored, and accessed at will. Publishers could be compensated for use of their databases, and they will at the same time eliminate the cost of printing, storage, and delivery. Libraries will no longer need to store unused journals, and readers will have access to the world of knowledge instead of just the materials held in their local library. Possibly the lengthy submission and review process of articles will also be accelerated as electronic copies of articles can be sent from authors to reviewers to editors via the network. The NREN will make this process possible by connecting our campus networks to a broad array of publishers, information providers, and databases.
The library world is putting in place several test models of parts of the system. Already over 25 library catalogs are available on the existing connected network, which is the Internet. Our librarians and faculty routinely check the library catalogs of the University of California. The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries, CARL, a consortium of multi-type libraries, not only lists what books are available in their libraries, but has online on the Internet a database of tables of contents from over 7,000 journals. The National Agricultural Library has been conducting a pilot project to scan thousands of pages of text and illustrations dealing with acid rain, agent orange, and aquaculture. Today over 12,000 pages have been stored on CD-ROM (Compact Disc-Read Only Memory). Virginia Tech is one of five NAL test sites, and we have very encouraging results. Recently a joint demonstration project between North Carolina State and NAL successfully transmitted a number of these page images from NAL to NC State using the Internet. NC State will now attempt to transmit these images across their campus network directly to the faculty members' workstations. The next stage of the project will involve at least ten other land-grant libraries, with the hope of someday connecting all land-grant libraries in an electronic document delivery system for agricultural information.
One example of an excellent resource that could be made available on the NREN is the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). OCLC, a membership organization of libraries, provides online access to a database of over 21 million bibliographic records and can identify over 350 million individual book locations. OCLC has recently made available a service that gives the individual scholar or library patron access to this enormous wealth of knowledge.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and OCLC have also just announced an all-electronic journal that is scheduled to begin publishing in July 1991. The articles for this journal will be reviewed using the same rigorous procedures of Science magazine and will be available online very shortly after their acceptance. The electronic journal will provide access to the data that back up the journal articles and perhaps give the reader and the author an opportunity to enter into a dialogue about the article or its findings.
Likewise, the Research Libraries Group, RLG, a membership organization of many large research libraries based at Stanford, is offering access to its database via the Internet. RLG is also planning to use its dedicated network at night to send large volumes of fax transmissions to speed the delivery of interlibrary loan material.
Daily, thousands of pages of interlibrary loan materials are telefaxed between libraries using high-cost commercial telephone lines. Experimentation at Ohio State and at the University of California is showing how telefax machines may be able to send page images over the Internet. If these tests are successful, it will then be possible to send interlibrary loans directly to the requestor's workstation. The use of the NREN will be critical to the success of such a system.
The NREN holds the potential to connect the researcher to a number of specialized databases that are not textual or bibliographic. The University of Arizona has a song index that was developed locally on their system. The University of California at Santa Barbara has assembled a unique collection of about 2 million satellite images. NSF has funded a project, along with the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis and RLG, to develop a spatial database which will allow scientists throughout the nation to identify these images. Eventually these images could be digitized and transmitted via the NREN. One LANDSAT image takes hours to send over the current Internet, but with a fiber optic network as envisioned in the bill, such images could be sent in almost real time.
There is discussion that could lead to a consortium of universities sharing the cost of mounting databases which would be too expensive for a single university to maintain. Government databases such as Agricola, in the field of agriculture, or ERIC, in education, could be placed on one university's computer and accessed by a number of other universities. This would save the duplicate cost of storing the data and software to access the database. We envision a partnership between various universities and government agencies to disseminate government information via the NREN, much as the current depository library system works.
Virginia Tech has over 400 distant learners, who take courses via satellite transmission. We have found that a major impediment to the broader development of this program is the lack of comprehensive library collections in remote rural areas. Full text delivery via the NREN could solve this problem and could truly bring affordable higher education to rural America.
Small high tech businesses cannot afford large collections of science and technology journals, and many such businesses are not located near our research libraries. Currently at Tech, we serve these businesses across Virginia via telephone and telefax machine. With the NREN the effectiveness of this service could be greatly enhanced and, in turn, the economic development of the state. For the non-affiliated researcher, the citizens' group, the occasional business user, and any information seeker lacking equipment or experience, the link to the NREN could be an academic, public, or other library, which could provide not only the local access node, but orientation and training.
The older collections of our nation's libraries are literally falling apart due to the acidic nature of the paper used in printing during the last 100 years. Indeed, our entire cultural history is at risk. Currently, preservation microforming is the only means we have available to us to deal with the problem. At Cornell there is a joint project underway with Xerox to scan a unique collection of mathematics journals which will soon be lost to decay. One has to believe that one day soon we will have the technology to store these valuable books in electronic form. When that day comes, the NREN could serve as the means of access to these important collections by scholars across the nation.
The potential volume of data transmission in the system I have just described is overwhelming. At the Virginia Tech library alone, we operate two fax machines fourteen hours a day, six days a week, transmitting interlibrary loans. Imagine the increase in volume when readers can initiate their own interlibrary loans, or when readers are able to request publications directly from publishers. Add to this the band width needed for color, audio, or video, and it is staggering.
The vision of the future I have just drawn for you is one filled with great promise, where information will be efficiently produced, accessed, and delivered almost instantaneously directly to the scholar, researcher, and scientist. It is a future of information riches which could transform the scholarly communication process, making our researchers more efficient and productive in their work. But beyond the technical issues there are many other difficult legal, standards, and management issues. Before we can realize this future, a significant rethinking of intellectual property rights and copyright law must be undertaken. We in the library community realize that publishers are very concerned about protecting their interests in this new environment, but we cannot cling to the paper world of scholarly communication. We must find a means to cross over to this electronically networked world. Our scholars and researchers are both the producers and major consumers of scientific, technical, and medical information. Copyright cannot be an impediment to our advance. Management and funding of the NREN is also of great concern to the library community. Questions such as what we mean by commercialization, how we charge for differing services, and how the transition will be made from our current form of management to a future management form, are a few examples of those concerns.
The original vision for the NREN was to make supercomputing more broadly available to scientists and researchers. It was a very worthwhile initiative. However, I believe the vision the library community has presented to you here today sees in the NREN the possibility of transforming the very basis of scholarly communication in our nation. This vision offers a new efficiency, quality, and speed by which information can be accessed, which will give this nation a competitive edge as we develop new advances in science, technology, and medicine.
Thank you for the opportunity to appear before the subcommittee. ALA and ARL give their strongest support to HR 3131 and urge its further development and passage.
23.4 ELECTRONIC JOURNALS
Peggy Johnson, St. Paul Campus Libraries, University of Minnesota, 1984
Buford Avenue, St. Paul MN 55108; BITNET: M-JOHN@UMINN1.BITNET.
We are beginning to ponder the practical and philosophical issues of electronic journals and libraries. I haven't been able to find much at all about library policy decisions, other than Bob Houbeck's comments about his thoughts on handling them in the last issue of NSPI (no. 22). The questions I'm pondering are related to "physical" and bibliographic access: How have librarians been cataloging electronic journals (and what was cataloged -- the computer file or a paper copy)? Does the library print and keep copies of each issue or send the electronic issues to a central mainframe? If so, who manages these files? How is the bib. record linked to the serial (electronic or print)? And so on.... I realize these questions are outside serials pricing issues, but I thought someone might have some personal experience or have an idea of someone else I could contact. I'm also putting a query out through the PACS forum. This group has its own electronic journal, cataloged on OCLC (The Public Access Computer Systems Review).
(Editor's note: NSPI is also cataloged on OCLC!)
23.5 TETRAHEDRON: ASYMMETRY PART II
Holly Melanson, Coordinator of Collections Development, Dalhousie
University Library; BITNET: BIRDSALL@AC.DAL.CA.
Re Susan C. George, "Tetrahedron Asymmetry" in issue 22 of May 13, 1990: I wrote as follows to Jane Macmillan, Marketing Manager of Pergamon Press, about this supposed "new journal" on February 9th. Our Chemistry Department agreed with the librarians that Tetrahedron: Assymetry
'is an unnecessary addition to the chemistry journal collection. The 27 percent increase in the 1990 subscription price for Tetrahedron is now comprehensible, since it was intended to cover an additional publication. However, we do not wish to subscribe to the new journal. I am writing to request a reimbursement to Dalhousie of the one-year subscription cost of Tetrahedron: Assymetry, advertised at US $265.00 As customers who value Pergamon journals, we find this latest attempt to dig deeper into library pockets both unethical and insulting. To your non-customers you have given the choice of subscribing to either Tetrahedron or Tetrahedron: Assymetry, but to your present subscribers you have not extended the same courtesy ..."
The letter was copied to the Editor-in-Chief of Tetrahedron: Assymetry and to Blackwell's. So far, no reply has been receved, but we'll be watching for the invoice on this one. Any ideas for further action?
23.6 TETRAHEDRON: ASYMMETRY, PART III
Susan C. George, Physical Sciences Librarian, Dartmouth College;
BITNET: SUSAN.C.GEORGE@MAC.DARTMOUTH.EDU.
Here's a copy of what I sent Pergamon:
Jane Macmillan
Marketing Manager
Pergamon Press
Headington Hill Hall
Oxford UL OX3 0BW
Dear Ms. Macmillan:
I am writing in regard to a new journal you are publishing, Tetrahedron: Assymetry. While new journal publications are welcomed by libraries, this title does not qualify in my opinion as a unique and new title. Rather, it is a set of articles which could easily appear in one of your other tetrahedron publications. I consulted our Chemistry Department faculty about this title and they agreed with me that this publication does not need to exist.
Further, in a careful reading of the Annual Subscription Rates section on the verso of the title page, the following statement is made: "Tetrahedron: Assymetry is included in subscriptions to Tetrahedron but can also be ordered separately." I believe this means that, as a current subscriber to Tetrahedron, I am to automatically receive a subscription to this new journal at no cost to me. Is this the case? If so, when does my subscription begin? If not, why is the statement made?
Dartmouth College Library purchases many Pergamon titles, both serial and monographic, in all subject areas, and while we value these titles, we cannot support or collect titles which have no legitimate reason for existence, except monetary gain for the publisher. This type of publisher philosophy not only hurts the library pocketbook, but also denies information access needed by the individual researcher.
As the collection officer for Chemistry at Dartmouth College, I do not intend to purchase this new journal for an additional cost of US $265.
23.7 AV AND JOURNALS
Midge King, The University of Calgary; BITNET: MHKING@UNCAMULT.
Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 17, no. 5, April 1990, includes an article which is supposed to be accompanied by a video tape (VHS). According to Geophysical Research Letters, the video tape was an official part of the paper for review purposes. The video tape has been archived at the American Geophysical Union. It was not distributed with the journal issue, but must be purchased from AGU at the additional cost of $25.00. The video tape is considered part of the permanent record of the paper, but access is not included in the subscription price of the journal.
Questions arise as to access to the video tape. Will we all have to purchase it? Will the AGU provide Interlibrary Loan of the tape? How do we become aware of a video tape which is a vital part of an article but which was not included in the subscription?
23.8 ACRL DISCUSSION GROUP ON JOURNAL COSTS IN ACADEMIC
LIBRARIES
Chuck Hamaker, Louisiana State University; BITNET:
NOTCAH@LSUVM.
The ACRL Discussion Group on Journal Costs in Academic Libraries will meet Sunday, June 24th at ALA, from 9:00 - 11:00 a.m. The location is McCormick Place North, M-6a. The topic: Librarians within the Law. Two lawyers will be addressing the group: Richard Meserve of Covington Burling, the law firm representing many AIP interests in the U.S., will speak on Legal Issues in Journal Publishing. Todd Parker of Shiff, Hardin and Waite, a Chicago-based firm will discuss Antitrust Issues in Publishing. Hal Schiff, Director of Libraries, University of West Virginia, will speak as a government information specialist on Privatization of Government Information and Scholarly Publishing. This promises to be an important meeting. The room will comfortably hold 150 persons and, although it's a long way from most hotels to McCormick Place on a Sunday morning, the trip may well be worth the effort.
23.9 HAMAKER'S HAYMAKERS
Charles Hamaker, Louisiana State University; BITNET:
NOTCAH@LSUVM.
The Wall Street Journal of May 17th, 1990, writes that Mr. Maxwell is about to acquire the following tabloids: Globe, National Examiner, and Sun. The price will top $100 million. These three newspapers are weak competitors of the National Enquirer, Star, and Weekly World News, but will give Mr. Maxwell "a spot on US magazine racks, a market he has fought to enter before." And, more importantly, through the acquisition of these tabloids Maxwell Communication will receive access to a national distribution system, which is, according to experts, what Mr. Maxwell is after. Globe Marketing Services, which owned these papers before, had a 500-person field force, which distributes magazines and newspapers in supermarkets and convenience stores nationwide. This acquisition will allow Mr. Maxwell to distribute any publications he plans to start up or acquire in the future.
The Wall Street Journal, May 22, 1990 (B6), notes that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is selling J.B. Lippincott Company, the medical publisher of journals, newsletters, and textbooks, to Wolters Kluwer for more than 250 million dollars. The price is 19 to 20 times annual earnings, although gross revenue at Lippincott approaches $100 million. Bidders for the company included Paramount Communications, Toronto-based Thomson Corporation, Reed International plc (owner of Bowker, Butterworth, and K.G. Saur), Pearson (Financial Times, Longmans, etc.), and Elsevier. With a price/earnings ratio that high, if earnings stay where they are, return on investment would be no more, by my estimates, than about 3.6 percent, which means Kluwer will have to increase earnings by about 4 times to make the purchase pay. Watch out for price increases in medical publishing?? Also of interest to the peanut gallery is the fact that Elsevier, Kluwer, and Pearson are interlocking companies (i.e., Pearson and Elsevier own significant portions of each other, and Elsevier holds 30 percent of Kluwer nonvoting stock, if memory serves correctly). In effect, three of the bidders with joint ownership in each other's companies were bidding against themselves, from my perspective.
News Corp. in divesting itself of Lippincott, continues to own Harper & Row, Zondervan, British publisher William Collins, and of course Scott Foresman. This looks like another in the series of niche purchases for market dominance and can only result in much higher prices in those niche areas, although Kluwer (as WSJ points out) owns nearly 100 other companies and has taken consistently a long term view of the market. Wolters Kluwer also owns Raven Press and Aspen Publishers in the U.S. On the other hand, could this purchase be a bit of a poison pill to dilute Elsevier's non-voting stock profits from Kluwer, which fought off an attempted Elsevier purchase not too long ago?? An invitation for a divorce?
The May 1990 ICPSR Bulletin (Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research) has three articles under the rubric of "The Academic Enterprise in the 21st Century: The Impact of Computing." Of interest are the three sub-units of this article, "The Automated Intellectual: Faculty Work in the 21st Century," by Judith A. Perrolle, Northeastern University; "The Information Crisis of the 21st Century," by Robert Philip Weber, Harvard University and Northeast Consulting Services, Inc.; "Expert Systems in Academia: Assistants or Mentors," by Edward Brent, University of Missouri - Columbia. All are from ICPSR's 1989 Meeting of Official Representatives.
Weber's piece has appeared in a different form, and with some different emphasis in Publishers Weekly. He pictures "a future in which information and its control and dissemination assume paramount importance as the cost of information increases." Most of the six "futures" he creates suggest very bleak outcomes for many universities and colleges. In the best "scenario" over a third of academic institutions are priced out of the market for access to information. His final sentence is important: "Many institutions, especially those in the second and third tiers, will be unable to fund such services (access to online information for faculty and students) and will fall further behind in quality. I believe we all have a stake in preventing this from happening." (p. 5) If ALA, ACRL, and ARL need an agenda, that is certainly a clear statement of the problem. We all must unite to prevent loss of access for an informed and productive society to the information tools necessary for sustained productivity. The article is good enough to forward to chief academic officers and others concerned about the future of higher education and information access in general. The stakes,as Weber envisions the future, are very high. His warning is further emphasized by the following: "Some of the decisions that affect the outcomes (of future information access) are being made now. Before Congress is a bill introduced by Senator Albert Gore that would create a national high-speed research network. Congress and others continue to evaluate the nature of copyright and how it should be extended or curtailed. And of course, technology continues to advance. The information industry cannot ignore these issues." Amen.
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Readers of the Newsletter on Serials Pricing Issues are encouraged to
share the information in the newsletter by electronic or paper methods. We
would appreciate credit if you quote from the newsletter.
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The Newsletter on Serials Pricing Issues (ISSN: 1046-3410) is published as
news is available by the American Library Association's Association for
Library Collections and Technical Services, Publisher/Vendor-Library Relations
Committee's Subcommittee on Serials Pricing Issues. Editor: Marcia Tuttle,
BITNET: TUTTLE@UNC.BITNET; Faxon's DataLinx: TUTTLE; ALANET: ALA0348;
Paper mail: Serials Department, C.B. #3938 Davis Library, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC 27599-3938; telephone: (919)
962-1067; FAX: (919) 962-0484. Committee members are: Deana Astle (Clemson
University), Mary Elizabeth Clack (Harvard University), Jerry Curtis
(Consultant), Charles Hamaker (Louisiana State University), Robert Houbeck
(University of Michigan), and Marcia Tuttle. EBSCONET customers may receive
the newsletter in paper format from EBSCO. Back issues of the newsletter are
available electronically free of charge through BITNET from the editor.
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