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Economics Drive New Strategies For Collection Development/Information Access
Peter Allison
Bibliographer for the Social Sciences
Inflation in the cost of serial publications continues to drive the Libraries' strategies for collecting materials and providing access to information. To review the basic facts...the combination of journals, annuals, electronic databases, and other recurrent titles that we call serials, consumes approximately two-thirds of the collection development/ information access budget. Inflation in this sector alone regularly exceeds by a factor of two or three, the annual increase the library receives from the University. For example, in FY 1997, we will receive a 5% increase in this budget, but vendors project a 13% increase in serials inflation. The result has been a downward cycle in which dramatic erosion of the monograph budgets has been halted only by painful serials review exercises--leading to the cancellation of more than $500,000 in serials subscriptions over the last five years. We do not expect these economic trends to stabilize or reverse themselves.
Nor do we expect rapid change in the context in which we operate. Worldwide scientific publishing continues to expand. The cost of scholarly information continues to rise because most works of scholarship are not functionally interchangeable. Publishers face no market competition; prices are limited only by considerations of potential market size and the likely elasticity of demand. The University does not have, and will not acquire, the fiscal resources to shield the Libraries from inflation at current levels. The "invisible college" may take up residence on the Web, but exchanges there will remain closed to the uninitiated and will not quickly displace the perceived value of publication in a journal whose status helps to confirm the value of the contribution to both colleagues and administrators.
In light of these conditions, we have changed our strategies for collecting materials and providing access to information. Building comprehensive local collections for both teaching and research is, we believe, an unattainable goal. Accordingly, we have reprioritized the use of our funds to emphasize distributed indexing, current awareness services, and ready access to articles through "Scholars' Express." In the Fall we will offer two different table-of-contents services and a much wider array of scientific indexes--all distributed electronically to users' workstations. We will also increase the document delivery budget to ensure that time-dependent requests can be met expeditiously. Ariel telefacsimile technology has been acquired to increase the quality of graphic reproduction on fax copies acquired both commercially and from other Ariel sites, such as the UConn Health Center.
Making these strategic investments means that even less money will be available to absorb inflation in the cost of our existing commitments. All subject budgets are now flat except for monies applied to designated University "program priorities." Last year all such money was used to maintain science journals. Even if this pattern recurs, most of the science disciplines, where 80-90% of budgets are typically invested in journals, will lack sufficient funds to cover existing commitments. We will have to cancel more local subscriptions in the coming year. Very expensive research titles to which we can provide timely indexing or table-of-contents coverage cannot be continued; unless access can be shown to be more costly than ownership.
Flat budgets across the subject areas will mean buying more selectively. As we make finer distinctions between what we buy and what we must forego, we've felt a growing need to codify our practice and make our working assumptions available for the scrutiny of the academic community. To accomplish this we've begun to outline a series of subject-based collection development policy statements. We expect to begin sharing the first of these with academic departments in the Fall. Our ultimate goal is a hypertext document that will allow users and prospective users to verify their perceptions against our intentions using the LC classification schedules as an indexing matrix.
And finally, a word about our organization. Over the summer the bibliographers of the Collection Development Department will merge with colleagues in Acquisitions, Bibliographic Control, Preservation, and Collections Maintenance into a new "functional area" called Collections Services. This consolidation is part of a wider library reorganization; we are not going out of business. Although some wits have suggested that our principal activity might more aptly be titled "deconstruction" or "demolition," we believe that we are still "developing" a combination of local holdings and external connections that make good sense for all our users. As always, your comments, recommendations, and suggestions are encouraged.
Peter Allison, Social Science Bibliographer; peter.allison@uconnvm.uconn.edu
Richard Fyffe, Humanities Bibliographer; richard.fyffe@uconnvm.uconn.edu
Fran Libbey, Science Bibliographer; fran.libbey@uconnvm.uconn.edu
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