Report of the Faculty Senate

Library Committee (1)

April 5, 2000

This report surveys the implementation of past proposals, discusses challenges posed by the evolution of information technology, and concludes with recommendations.

1. Implementation of past recommendations

This section reviews the recommendations of the 1998 and 1999 Library Committee reports, endorsed by the Faculty Senate, and assesses the extent to which these recommendations have been implemented. We examine first budgetary issues and then other matters.

1.1 Budgetary issues

1.1.1 Total budget

The 1998 and 1999 reports recommended an effort to approximately double the Libraries' budget, in order to attain parity with libraries in the tenth percentile of Public Research Universities I, in the Carnegie classification then in use. Doubling the fiscal 1998 budget in real terms, allowing for 5% annual inflation, would mean budgeting $11.9 million for fiscal 2000. The actual allocation increased only 9% in nominal terms, with the result that the Libraries' budget for fiscal 2000 is $5.9 million. This is less than half the recommended level. (2)

1.1.2 Acquisitions

The 1998 report noted that the share of acquisitions (capital expenditure) in total library expenditures was near the top of the range typical of comparable institutions. The report concluded that there was "little room to raise the share and no compelling need to radically lower it." The share of acquisitions in total expenditure fell from 38% in fiscal 1998 to 34% in fiscal 2000. It declined because from 1998 to 2000 acquisition expenditures fell almost 1% while personnel, operating, and travel expenditures rose more than 16%.

URI's acquisitions are substantially below those of other New England state universities. The extent of the gap for fiscal 1998&emdash;the most recent year for which data are available&emdash;is indicated in the accompanying table. From this table we can see that acquisition expenditures, expressed as a percent of URI's level, were 193% at the University of Connecticut, 148% at the University of Maine, 230% at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), 148% at the University of New Hampshire, and 190% at the University of Vermont.

Acquisition expenditures for fiscal 1998

1.1.3 Serials and monographs

The 1998 report noted that the share of serials expenditures in acquisitions had risen steeply in recent years and recommended that this rise "be halted before it cuts deeper into the acquisition of monographs." Unfortunately, the share of serials in acquisitions rose from 72% in fiscal 1998 to 82% in fiscal 2000. As a consequence, expenditure on monographs is at its lowest level since fiscal 1996. Were expenditures on monographs to continue at this low level, the quality of the collection would be seriously undercut.

The 1998 report recommended three steps to curb the rise of the share of serials in acquisitions. First, the report urged the Libraries to "substitute electronic for printed journals when the former are available in Postscript, PDF, or other high-resolution format and cheaper or more useful than the latter." The Libraries have now replaced several print subscriptions with collections of electronic publications but have found that such substitutions are less likely to save money than expand coverage. That is because electronic publications are often bundled into large collections.

Second, the report urged the Libraries to "select individual serials with attention to their benefits as well as their costs. Their benefits should be assessed on the basis of frequency of citation and surveys of faculty opinion." The 1999 report repeated this point, adding that the "recently completed faculty survey and cost-benefit analysis should be an important consideration in the next round of journal selection." The Libraries have not systematically revised their journal selection since these recommendations were made. However, the Libraries are attempting to coordinate their ongoing evaluation of collections and services with the schedule of the Program Quality Review committee. The FSLC endorses this coordination in the expectation that it will help to provide the Libraries with the guidance and information they need to better allocate existing resources.

Third, the report urged the Libraries to "investigate opportunities to join with other universities in efforts to curb ... costs by wresting control of copyrights from commercial publishers." The 1999 report reaffirmed this recommendation and added that "URI Libraries should investigate the possibility of joining the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition and faculty should seek publication opportunities that keep copyrights within the academic community." The Libraries have found that the Coalition is too costly to join but have supported its efforts by subscribing to its new low-cost journals.

1.2 Other issues

1.2.1 Research time

Research time for faculty was reviewed again this year and seems to be an ongoing concern, as elsewhere on campus.

1.2.2 Copyright compliance and library impact statements

The 1999 report recommended that the Director of University Libraries be "commended and supported in her efforts to develop a copyright compliance statement and a library impact statement for new programs." A library impact statement has now been drafted by the Director and endorsed by the FSLC. It should help librarians and teaching faculty to work together to ensure that new programs have access to adequate materials. The copyright compliance statement is still under development.

2. Information technology

2.1 Background

Information technology has been transforming libraries for decades. Developments from the 1960s through the 1990s are surveyed in Appendix 1. With the turn into the 21st century ever more publishing is occurring over the web through traditional and non-traditional scholarly publishers. Costs continue to escalate and libraries subscribe to both paper and electronic sources in some cases. This is because publishers sometimes change the format in the electronic version, or fail to include certain elements like charts, citations, reviews, and tables. The rise of electronic journal aggregators which act as middlemen between publishers and libraries has also created both rewards and shortfalls. On the one hand, it is convenient to have a single-source provider such as ABI/Inform provide hundreds of journals and indexes through one collection and one search interface. On the other hand, publishers may (and often do) renege on their publication agreements with the aggregator. Libraries which ceased subscribing to the print version suddenly found themselves without the electronic subscription either.

Aggregators and publishers together continue to raise their prices to libraries, based on the number of simultaneous users desired, the campus population, consortial relationship, or some other pricing model. Licensing arrangements are stringent, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with its many caveats but still inarticulate definitions of what is legal, complicates library acquisitions and other services. For example, most integrated library systems accommodate electronic reserves; but the copyright implications for libraries to digitize the print documents they own are complicated and intimidating.

Technology has also affected preservation efforts. Libraries are the keepers of the written and, now, digitized word. In print formats there are several recognized methods to sustain the record but electronic records depend on technology to be read. With each iteration of a technology, digital records need to be refreshed and upgraded to fit into new software requirements. Information storage and retrieval systems become obsolete very quickly. How best to archive or preserve the digital record remains an unresolved question.

2.2 Current use of information technology in URI libraries

Information technology systems and services now provided by URI Libraries include the following:

• An integrated library system (HELIN), shared with six other academic libraries in Rhode Island
• An electronic reserves system that complements traditional reserves resources
• Ownership, individually and through HELIN, of over 2,000 electronic titles
• Several electronic indexing and abstracting services, some of which provide the full texts of certain articles
• A model program of instruction for information literacy which includes three credit-bearing courses, one of which may fulfill a General Education requirement.

2.3 Information technologies worth considering for adoption

An electronic archive should ideally allow patrons to cheaply and easily search, display, and print in high resolution full text and graphics. Few if any archives have yet attained this ideal. However, evolving services such as Carl Uncover, JSTOR, and PEAK should be monitored for suitability for use at URI. Carl Uncover is already familiar to many patrons of URI Libraries. JSTOR and PEAK are described in Appendix 2.

3. Recommendations

The University administration is urged to raise the Libraries' budget in accord with the recommendations of the 1998 and 1999 reports. To insulate collection development from fluctuations in state funding, efforts should be made to increase the Libraries' endowment and to allocate a share of overhead money to the Libraries.

The Dean, Director, and staff of University Libraries are:

• commended for developing a library impact statement for new programs and for working with the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition in efforts to curb inflation in serials prices;
• to be supported in their ongoing efforts to develop a copyright compliance statement and to coordinate evaluation of collections and services with the work of the Program Quality Review committee;
• urged to implement the recommendations of the 1998 and 1999 reports with regard to allocation of funds and selection of journals;
• encouraged to remain alert to new opportunities to attain electronic access to an expanded collection of journal articles.

The faculty should continue to seek publication opportunities that keep copyrights within the academic community and to participate in the evaluation of library collections through the Program Quality Review and the library impact statement preparation process.

Appendix 1: The impact of information technology on libraries, from the 1960s through the 1990s.

Faced with accelerating change in information technology, libraries have repeatedly restructured their operations. In the late 1960s, the advent of the machine-readable cataloging (MARC) record meant that individual libraries no longer needed to duplicate the efforts of their neighbors; instead, they could share records nationally, thanks to the growth of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC).

In the 1970s, a few libraries applied data processing principles to their circulation services, even if only to use batch-process keypunched bookcards. A greater number took advantage of database vendors' educational discounts by offering online database searching to users. Expert reference librarians conducted searches personally in order to minimize costs which were calculated at hourly rates like taxi meters. The databases were generally indexes and abstracts, with some numeric data available. Librarians conducted reference interviews with searchers, and mediated the results when they were returned. In order to save on costs of printing the retrieved results, users generally had to wait for at least a few days to receive printouts from the vendor.

By the 1980s, many libraries had purchased and utilized microcomputers, and had either opened study and teaching labs for their students, or had linked single workstations into networks in order to share CD-ROM products and printing. The popularity of the CD-ROMS began to reduce the costs of acquiring databases, because the online taxi meter model was obviated. Indexes and abstracts were more current online because databases could be updated daily, while CD-ROMS cumulated monthly, quarterly, or only annually. Another advantage to CDs was that users themselves, rather than reference librarians, could perform searches.

In the 1980s some libraries began to purchase minicomputer systems to integrate their catalog and circulation functions. More newly affordable and versatile networking bibliographic databases were now available. This technology, however, brought the introduction of licensing agreements and meant higher prices for simultaneous access. Even though librarians continued to advise users on the most efficient means of searching and to mediate results, one no longer had to wait or pay for the printouts from vendors. Some CD-ROM products eventually incorporated whole texts, not just abstracts and indexes. The transformation of the microcomputer from personal productivity device to information retrieval medium in libraries was clear.

The early 1990s presented many libraries with more integrated systems options because vendors offered turnkey products which did not depend on large systems departments. Also those same vendors began to incorporate large database collections, such as ABI/Inform, into the library's public catalog module. The systems required coordination among vendors but users could, for the first time, sit at one library terminal and perform catalog-based searches or external database searches. Most libraries believed that it was necessary to mount integrated library systems because they knew that more and more information would become available only in online format.

As email systems developed into listservs, telecommunications became increasingly important to libraries. Once the Internet became a viable opportunity for most educational institutions, publishers began to migrate toward computer-generated online publishing and indexing. The costs to produce an online text were very low and indexing became automated. The publishers, however, passed the costs of adopting their new technology infrastructures onto the consumers. Therefore libraries paid more for their scholarly resources, even as they maintained their paper materials. Licensing and copyright issues began to surface even more rapidly.

Thus far almost all of the information that most libraries provided over their integrated systems was character-based. But the invention of the Web brought graphical-user interfaces to library catalogs and online resources. Publishers have made their documents accessible directly. The profusion of sources, search engines and websites has created confusion or complacency on the part of users. Confusion obviously results when multiple approaches can be used to identify a single relevant source; and complacency occurs when users believe that, simply by searching the Web, they have access to all materials available and that those materials are equally definitive and trustworthy.

In fact only 40% at most of the materials that exist on the web are found by all the search engines combined. Few users employ more than one search engine for research, so even less is retrieved. Finally the quality, reliability, and authenticity of documents on the web require evaluation. Librarians have included the assessment of web and other resources to their information literacy curricula.

Appendix 2: Electronic archives

New forms of electronic access to articles, not yet tried at URI, are worth monitoring. A particularly interesting experiment&emdash;Pricing Electronic Access to Knowledge (PEAK)&emdash;was initiated at the University of Michigan in collaboration with Elsevier in 1997. In this experiment, participating libraries could choose conventional journal subscriptions, a pay-per-download system, or a new alternative, called "generalized subscription," which involves prepurchasing tokens that can be exchanged for any articles selected by patrons. Once an article is selected by any patron it becomes freely available to all other patrons of the same library. (3) Finding that the generalized subscription provided a more predictable revenue than the pay-per-download system, the publisher offered a substantial discount to libraries that chose the former (Bonn et al. 1999, MacKie-Mason et al. 1999).

The Michigan experiment was promising enough that Vanderbilt University signed up for a generalized subscription for 1998. Vanderbilt's collection development officer summarizes its experience in 1998 as follows:

PEAK has taught us more about how serial information is used than any collection assessment project we have ever undertaken. We learned not only which journals our patrons used, but also how many articles in each journal they used and how often they used each article .... We should probably not assume that buying articles will cost us less than buying journals. But even if our costs do not decrease ... we can at least have the consolation of knowing that we are spending our money more efficiently because we are purchasing only what patrons use .... It is hard to object to a system that frees us from trying to guess what patrons will read and liberates us from paying for a dozen articles in order to provide users with the one they may want (Haar 1999).

PEAK has two serious limitations at present. First, it covers only one publisher's journals. Second, while selected articles remain available on a server, they apparently cannot be printed. A modified version of PEAK that overcame these limitations could be an attractive option for URI Libraries.

While PEAK is aimed mainly at improving access to recent articles, another initiative&emdash;JSTOR&emdash;holds promise of doing the same for older ones. JSTOR, a creation of the Mellon Foundation, aims to not only reduce the cost of storing journals, but also facilitate access to their contents. JSTOR enables users to search not just titles and authors but also phrases in the full text. It seems likely to substantially improve understanding of intellectual history (Bronner 1999).

References

Bonn, Maria S., Wendy P. Lougee, Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason, and Juan F. Riveros, 1999, A Report on the PEAK Experiment: Context and Design, D-Lib Magazine, 5, 6 (June).

Bronner, Ethan, 1999, You Can Look It Up, Hopefully, New York Times, Jan. 10.

Haar, John, 1999, Project PEAK: Vanderbilt's Experience with Articles on Demand. NASIG conference paper.

MacKie-Mason, Jeffrey K., Juan F. Riveros, Maria S. Bonn, and Wendy P. Lougee, 1999, A Report on the PEAK Experiment: Usage and Economic Behavior, D-Lib Magazine, 5, 7/8 (July/August).

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FOOTNOTES

1. For advice, comments, and information, the Faculty Senate Library Committee (FSLC) is indebted to Linda Barrett, Charles Hickox, Martha Kellogg, Artemis Kirk, Sylvia Krausse, John Long, Deborah Mongeau, and Thomas Rockett. Special thanks go to Artemis Kirk for drafting section 2.2 and appendix 1.

2. The budgetary data for fiscal 2000 used in this report were kindly supplied by Linda Barrett, Budget Director, and Artemis Kirk, Director of University Libraries. Data for previous years are taken from tables presented by Dennis Stark, Vice President for Business and Finance, to the Faculty Senate in October 1999 and are available at http://www.uri.edu/busfin/00slide12.jpg.

3. This feature sets generalized subscription apart from pay-per-down load systems, such as Carl Uncover, which produce no archive of articles freely accessible to all patrons.