Redundant Journal Access: Why Pay More Than Once?

Electronic Resources & Libraries 2010

Jared Howland

Given February 2010 in Austin, TX

Download: PowerPoint | PDF | Keynote

I’d like to start this afternoon by sharing a story I heard a couple years ago on the NPR program “This American Life”
You will be hearing from Alex Blumberg, the producer of the program:

This story illustrates the problems that are inherent in making assumptions
Assumptions are the biggest challenge facing libraries today
Alex’s embarrassing experience was based on a set of faulty assumptions
How many of you attended the North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) meeting in 2008?
For those of you that attended, please indulge me as I summarize on of the keynote presentations for the next 4 or 5 minutes
That presentation, given by Mike Kuniavsky, was, for me, the genesis of the project I will be discussing today
This summary will be about three-fourths summary and one-fourth my interpretation of his presentation
So, Mike Kuniavsky spoke at the NASIG 2008 annual conference about ubiquitous computing
However, he started by analogizing the world of electric motors to the world of computing

In 1910, “electric motors were expensive, so you bought one for the house and then you bought attachments for it. The motor was a general purpose tool that was adapted as needed.”
As motors got cheaper, you started having multiple motors in the home
Instead of an attachment for a fan, you had a fan
Instead of an attachment to wash clothes, you had a washing machine
Eventually, we ended up with hyper-specialized electric motors (for example, there are now, on average, 20-30 motors per car)
This led to many unintended consequences (vacuums → wall-to-wall carpeting)
We see the same thing happening with computers today as what happened with electric motors at the turn of the century
We have entered the 3^rd stage of computing (mainframe → desktop → ubiquitous computing)
The phrase ubiquitous computing was phrased in 1988 by Mark Weiser
He describes it as follows:

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.
Just like hyper-specialization of the electric motor led to some interesting changes, so will ubiquitous computing
Mike Kuniavsky continued by saying the following:

Ubiquitous computing gives us tools to track, trade and share objects much more efficiently than any previous technology.
What does this mean in real terms?
Here are just a few real world examples:

You are all familiar with Netflix
Ubiquitous computing has led to a tracking system that allows for cheap and easy movie rentals and, now, even movie streaming
This model is challenging the way we think about ownership of movies
Why would you need to own a movie when you can just stream a movie straight to your TV anytime you want to watch it (you don’t even need to get out of our chair to put in the DVD)
Here’s another example:

Another example is ZipCar – rent a car anytime you need one
This is a very different idea of ownership than what we are used to
Mike described it as living in a world where everything has dotted lines around it
Instead of owning a car, you own the right to use a car
The idea of subscribing to something instead of owning it is, of course, nothing new to librarians
We have dealt with serials and aggregators for many years now
However, with the advent of ubiquitous computing, the possibilities for what we can have access to without having ownership are almost endless
It was not financially feasible to do this even just a few years ago, however, today we can get access to entire libraries

In the past, the words access and ownership were synonymous in the library world – those two terms were inextricably entwined
There was no way for librarians to provide access without owning the material
Interlibrary loan changed that to a certain extent
However, it has only been since the advent of ubiquitous computing and the network that access and ownership have been truly decoupled
Going back to Alex Blumberg and his assumptions about Nielsen families, the biggest assumption librarians are now questioning is that we must own content in order to provide research-quality resources
Just how far will this idea go?

How many resources are really so critical to a research library’s mission that we must own them?

And how many of our resources would it be okay for us to just have access to them?

access
There is no one-size-fits-all answer
However, access, rather than ownership, may be the best answer in many cases in the future
Finding the optimal mix (the right answer) all depends on where we are willing to see dotted lines in our world
But most of all, it depends on how willing we are to go back to the assumptions we made about Nielsen families as a kid and really start to question them
So, it was with these ideas in mind that I created a tool to help our library analyze the overlap we had in our journal collection
I should probably start with a brief background so you know what type of institution Brigham Young University is

BYU is an ARL library with an FTE of about 30,000
Our serials budget is around 5 million dollars
Our serials have traditionally been paid out of a common pot of money
Our collection development coordinator, with the help of subject librarians, is the one that determines the distribution of that pot of money
As might be predicted, this lead to a “Tragedy of the Commons” problem and has created some inefficiencies in the way the serials budget is handled
The other problem with our serials is that many librarians have not traditionally viewed library databases as an actual part of our collection
Sure, they are a nice addition, but they are not the collection
This has started to change over the last few years and has allowed us to move forward with a project like this

So I keep mentioning this project, I should probably give a brief description of the purpose of this project
Like all libraries, we have access to many of our journals in multiple formats
We subscribe to some titles in both print and electronic formats and then, we also have access available to us through library databases and aggregators
We wanted to eliminate this overlap by looking at where and how we had access to all our journals
For this project to be successful, we needed to have all of the following information:
1. Price/Budget information - how much were we paying for access to these various journals and what budget were they being paid from
2. Usage information - how much were the electronic and print versions of our journals being used
3. Overlap information - where each journal was accessible to our patrons and what were the dates of coverage

I will spend the next few minutes describing where I got this information from and then talk about how I used that information
First, I needed to have a list of journals that our library paid for individually (this included some that were purchased as packages such as Elsevier or Wiley, but the point is that we needed a list of titles for which we received itemized invoices for which Elsevier and Wiley both provided for us)
The easiest place to get this information was our ILS system
After talking to our database administrator, he was able to generate a report from our system that included all the titles we paid for, along with how much we paid, what budget it came out of and the ISSN of the titles