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Libraries are and will remain central to the management of scholarly communication for the foreseeable future. Out of concern for the well being of institutions vital to scholarship and science, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation set out to address two main issues in this study.
This study is distinctive in taking the long view. Moreover, its purpose is not to project the near future, but to propose and consider the issues raised by a better understanding of the past and present. It relates current concerns to the fundamental principles of scholarly communication and to the role of the research library in facilitating that communication.
We have lived for many generations with a world in which the technology of publication meant that access required ownership, in other words, that scholarly information was usable only if it were gathered in a large, site-specific, self-sufficient collection. The pressures libraries now feel have already driven them to various forms of resource-sharing, notably interlibrary loan, that begin to provide alternative models. New electronic technologies allow the possibility of uncoupling ownership from access, the material object from its intellectual content. This possibility is revolutionary, perhaps dramatically so.
As one reads this report, some related concerns remain open: Is access to scholarly information narrowing as libraries respond less comprehensively to general trends in book production (that is, as they purchase less printed output)? Does contraction in acquisitions expectations mean that libraries sacrifice some of their individual aims in favor of pursuing goals that they share with other libraries? Is distinctiveness lost, and worse, overall richness of collections nationally, as libraries are chastened to more modest collecting ambitions? Can we say with confidence what rate of acquisition is optimal? In any event, might the greater restraint of the larger institutions in the 1970s have reflected a sense that they could afford the contraction without damage to their mission, while the smaller institutions may have felt they simply had no alternative but to keep up their buying levels? What is the viability of the traditional model of the library as a single-site comprehensive collection of printed materials?
The study concentrates on research libraries. It uses as its database the experience of twenty-four major United States research libraries, chosen for their range of size and mission and for the availability of high-quality information over a substantial period of years. The Association of Research Libraries' (ARL) database of library statistics is the main source, from which this study selects 24 libraries for closer examination. In some cases, data are reported for all 24 or for the twelve grouped below as Private 1 and Public 1 (especially for the period before 1963, when data tend to be thinner), but in most they are described under four sub-groupings based on institutional character (public/private) on the one hand and size and age on the other. The groupings are: Private 1---larger private institutions (Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Stanford, Yale); Public 1---larger public institutions (Berkeley, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Virginia, Wisconsin); Private 2---smaller private institutions (Boston U., Georgetown, NYU, Northwestern, USC, and Washington U. in St. Louis); and Public 2---smaller public institutions (Florida, Iowa State, Maryland, Michigan State, Rutgers, and Washington State). In general, it should be noted that the same trends tend to be found within all four composites.
Data on overall university expenditures were obtained from the Higher Education General Information Survey (HEGIS), which was administered annually by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and is available up to 1985-86. Data for expenditures after that year come from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS).
Data on domestic book production come from the R.R. Bowker Company (compiler of, for example, such reports as Books in Print and the Bowker Annual of Library and Book Trade Information) and the Association of American University Presses; international production is tracked through data from UNESCO. Data on periodical production in selected fields come from the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), while data on prices of books and periodicals come from R.R. Bowker and various issues of the Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. Note, finally, that for more recent years, chronological data sets were constructed for the periods 1963-70, 1970-82, and 1982-91. (See the "Glossary" for some definitions of special terminology.)
The broad patterns of development this study reveals are unsurprisingly congruent with the recent history of higher education in this country. The 1960s saw an unprecedented boom in library acquisitions; then the 1970s and early to mid-1980s saw a sharp slowdown in the rates of increase of acquisitions expenditures in the face of rapidly inflated costs, thus a drop in the purchasing power of the acquisitions dollar. As a result, the rate of increase in number of volumes added to collections slowed considerably and at many institutions was actually negative---i.e., in a given year fewer books would be purchased than in the year before.
From 1912 to 1991, the major libraries grew steadily and rapidly. Annual growth rates peaked in the mid- to late 1960s and then fell slowly throughout the 1970s. One of the closest correlations with other academic trends is with the number of doctorates conferred, for research libraries and doctoral programs tend to grow hand in hand. But when the 1970s saw contraction in the number of doctoral degrees conferred, library acquisitions were reined in less sharply. Acquisitions decisions are, after all, investment decisions affecting the long term, while degrees conferred reflect year-to-year production decisions taken with an eye on many variables. Furthermore, during the 1970s caution seems to have set in, so that when a modest recovery in the number of doctorates granted came, it was matched by an even more modest recovery in the annual number of "volumes added gross."
The boom of the 1960s affected the private universities on the whole more than the public; and the recovery since the mid-1980s has also been more pronounced in the private institutions, while there is little if any evidence of persistent recovery in acquisitions at the Public 1 institutions. But the most vigorous performers in the 1960s boom were the Public 2 institutions: at that period, for the most part, these were the smaller institutions with more rapid expansion plans, especially in their graduate programs, than those of corresponding more senior public institutions.
The patterns of growth, contraction, and modest recovery are nationwide and do not reflect specific stages in growth or maturity of institutions. Indeed, though smaller libraries might attempt to "catch up" in boom times, larger libraries showed in the 1960s that they could still stay well ahead of smaller ones as all parties showed enthusiastic growth figures. It was in the contraction of the 1970s, in fact, that the gap between larger and smaller libraries narrowed most, as the largest libraries showed the sharpest contraction.
It is difficult to select the most accurate measure of library expenditures over time, but however expressed, the increases are substantial and do not show signs of being closely tied to the GNP deflator (a form of general price index). The study's analyses further confirm that the boom years of the 1960s were anomalous and that a longer-term view shows a more consistent pattern. In fact, analysis of the years after the 1960s shows that library expenditure increases have been much more modest than might have been expected.
With that background, principal findings or observations of the Mellon study are numbered and highlighted:
Contrary to the conventional wisdom, library budgets have tended to increase less rapidly than other university expenditures. The library's percentage of total expenditures has tended to decline. It may well be that as old ambitions became impossible of realization, newer, rather more modest aims gave ground for a more restrained growth in expenditures. The developments affecting library budgets in the last twenty years have, in fact, led to institutional adjustments in fundamental assumptions as to what was both desirable and sustainable.
When measured against U.S. Department of Education figures for educational and general expenditures (E&G) by universities, budgets (of the libraries studied) took an increasingly large share of the pie through the 1960s, leveled out through the 1970s, and have actually declined through the 1980s to the point where they have lost almost all the ground gained in the last thirty years. These institutions' library budgets may now have stopped dropping, as some evidence suggests a plateau over the past very few years. When measured against instructional and departmental research expenditures (I&DR), the decline in library share of university expenditures over the last twenty years is slightly less pronounced than by some other measures, but the pattern is still clear.
Analogously, limited assessment of the comparative situation in college libraries shows that in these smaller institutions, the library characteristically looms significantly larger as a percentage of overall expenditures. The same broad trends described above appear in small college library budgets over the last decades, though it must be observed that the growth in library budgets of the last ten years has been much less pronounced in the colleges than in the universities.
Having considered overall expenditures (termed "total library expenditures" or TLE by the ARL), the study then analyzes the TLE's chief components. In the ARL statistical reports, these are: "materials and binding" (combined until 1963; two separate categories thereafter); "salaries and wages;" and "other operating expenditures." Materials and binding is subdivided into "non-serials" (largely though not entirely books and monographs, and hereinafter so called) and "serials" (heavily but not entirely journals).
In the 24 libraries studied, the total materials and binding component of TLE ranges between 33 and 35 percent of the whole---in other words, a similar percentage of the budget has bought books and serials over the years. Nonetheless, though that share has increased in dollar value, fewer book and serial titles can be bought for that money.
An essential comparison matches "volumes added gross" (a rough surrogate for acquisitions) with expenditures. The curves first began to diverge in the late 1950s and then diverged sharply beginning about 1970. From about that time, measured in real terms, expenditures on materials and binding continued to rise at the same time that the rate of volumes purchased actually declined.
Furthermore, the overall stability in the share of the TLE that has been devoted to expenditures on materials and binding conceals a pronounced internal shift in allocations: a far higher proportion of the materials and binding budget is now being spent on serials. Serials hold an important place in the budget: Research 2 institutions, smaller and working harder to maintain their standing, spent through the 1970s and 1980s approximately 10 percent more of their materials budgets on serials than did Research 1 institutions.
The growth of collections is measured against the trends in the numbers of books and periodicals published. In its broadest terms, book publication can be said to reflect general economic conditions. The boom in publication that began moderately in the 1950s and took off in the 1960s has slowed only slightly. Library acquisitions in the 1960s showed a growth that ran ahead of the increase in book publishing, but in the years since 1970 volumes added gross have remained roughly flat, while the figures for all domestic titles published have continued to rise at a steady rate. Comparison of publishing output to library collecting is difficult, and the questions must be asked several different ways in order to reach comparable approximations of the truth. Subjective issues arise easily, such as whether abundant production of scholarly information reflects a decline in its quality or is merely a function of the growth in the community producing such material, with the per capita output remaining close to what it was in the past. One probable influence is that the decline in the academic job market in the 1970s and 1980s increased competitiveness, one measure of which has become quantity of publication. All other things being equal, per capita scholarly production might be more likely to increase in bad times than in good.
Changes in the relative popularity of specific subjects of publishing have an important influence as well. Literature/Poetry/Drama as a category, for example, has fallen from a 17.2 percent share of the total national output in 1970 to 9.1 percent in 1988. On the other hand, the fields with some of the greatest increases in their share of the total output have been precisely those with the highest average per-volume hardcover prices: business, law, medicine, and technology. (Science has the highest average prices and remained at a more or less constant and significant market share of about 9.5 percent.) Library acquisitions reflect shifts in curriculum and research interests, and so may be presumed to reflect heavy purchasing in precisely the fields with the greatest price increases and the greatest increases in share of total titles published.
Among book prices, scientific/technical titles have diverged significantly from the other categories since the mid-1980s and are now being joined at the leading edge by medical books, while titles in arts and humanities, social sciences, and business have stayed with rates of increase close to the GNP deflator. As the most expensive fields have been the ones with the highest percentage increases in recent years, book prices are now showing some of the price-increasing tendencies characteristic of serials---not an encouraging sign for those who must be concerned about library budgets.
Examination of U.S. university press output also provides a measure of the adequacy of library acquisitions. Since 1974, it is clear that university press output has far outstripped library acquisitions increase rates.
International publishing production has also increased, ahead of the rates of increase of libraries' acquisitions for the period 1950-88. From 1950 to 1970, U.S. libraries actually increased their buying faster than the European publishers increased their production, but the two curves began to converge after 1970 and actually crossed around 1980, with the publishers' output now advancing at a rate steadily ahead of that of U.S. libraries' acquisitions. European book publishing indeed has grown at a rate substantially ahead of United States publishing, so that the six most productive European countries (Switzerland, Italy, France, Germany, U.K., Netherlands), which in 1971 produced about 1.5 times as many titles as American publishers did, now produce almost twice as many titles as the American industry.
To add to the difficulties, the sovereign position of the dollar through the boom years for libraries was lost when the dollar was allowed to float in 1971, and at various times during the period of study the dollar's low value has exacerbated the consequences for library buying of all materials. In one hapless interval from 1985 to 1988, the dollar fell against western European currencies by about 60 percent. (West) Germany has been the most productive publishing country in Europe and the least favorable exchange-rate partner since the early 1970s.
In sum, then, the number of volumes added yearly (books and serials) within the group of 24 libraries decreased between 1970 and 1982 at an annual rate of -1.4 percent, while the number of titles published, domestically and internationally, was increasing at a rate of greater than 2 percent per year. Over this period, libraries have been able to purchase less comprehensively in response to output in the publishing industry than at any time in this century.
Because of the high rates of serials price increases, the forces creating the gap between volumes added and publishing title output have been principally external rather than internal to universities, and individual institutions have been unable to respond proportionately. It would not be an exaggeration to say that of the various factors in the constellation affecting university libraries in recent years, the rapidly rising prices of periodicals have in many respects been the most important. Subscriptions encumber the materials budget, and serials prices help explain the widening gap between volumes added gross and book titles published. Library budgets have been steadily redeployed towards serials as the primary way of dealing with the pressure of rising serials prices.
In particular, the study makes the following findings regarding serials prices:
Serials expenditures have increased rapidly for the entire period since 1976, but 1981-86 saw moderating increases, while 1986 to 1991 showed the most rapid increase (an overall annual rate from 1986 to 1990 of over 11 percent). Some institutional data suggest science journals account for approximately 29 percent of the total number of serials but 65 percent of the serials budget.
Comparing book and serial prices, the study shows that average prices increased at comparable rates between 1963 and 1970, but about 1970 the pattern changed profoundly. Book prices remained close to the GNP deflator in their rate of increase until about 1978, when the periodicals index began to rise sharply. The proliferation of journal titles presumably created more specialized journals with shorter subscription lists and higher unit prices. For the whole period from 1963 to 1990, serial prices have increased at 11.3 percent per year, against 7.2 percent per year for book prices, and the GNP deflator lagged at an increase of about 6.1 percent per year (average).
Serial prices for scientific and technical journals from 1970 to 1990 have increased at an average rate of 13.5 percent per year. In so doing they lead a serials price surge in which virtually all science/technology fields run well ahead of the GNP deflator. In 1970, the typical U.S. journal in chemistry/physics cost $33; in 1982 it cost $178; in history, the average journal cost $7 in 1970 and $20 in 1982. To reduce such increases too quickly to measurement by constant dollars would be a mistake; it is useful to remember that many of the factors driving the national inflationary spiral (e.g., energy prices) have little effect on serials pricing and thus the nominal numbers are important in their own right.
Several factors correlate with high serials prices:
Measuring production of serial titles is fraught with its own difficulties. What constitutes a serial, and what within that group constitutes a "scholarly journal," is not easily measured. How many journals are published? Estimates range from less than 5,000 per year to upwards of 100,000. One standard guide is Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory, and on that measure, libraries have lagged. From 1972 to 1988, total serials listed in Ulrich's have grown by over 50 percent, while serials acquired by the twenty-four libraries under study have increased by only about 25 percent. Measures that look at date of founding of journals show a corresponding proliferation in the 1960s and especially through the 1970s, with some tapering off in the 1980s, but those numbers are hard to assess because there is no count of numbers of journals ceasing to do business during the same period. Some say that in recent years cessations may in fact be running ahead of current inceptions. One study of language and literature journals finds that over half the titles currently available were first published sometime since 1970.
In sum, then, in view of the increasing size of the periodicals universe (and increasing specialization of journals), the relatively fixed materials and binding budgets at libraries have resulted in decreasing numbers of subscriptions per title. Prices per title increase further, and a vicious cycle begins and continues. A similar dynamic, as suggested above, is even beginning to affect monograph publishing: one representative academic press confesses to a decline in average print runs between 1976 and 1986, from 1200-1500 to fewer than 1000. Of course, university libraries constitute a significant part of the market for university press titles, and the pressures on library budgets, for example, as they shift resources from monographs to serials, are an important contributing factor to this cycle as well.
In the face of this pricing crisis, libraries have responded essentially by redistributing their resources, a mode of response that cannot go on indefinitely. Instead there is a growing realization that no research institution can hope to sustain a self-sufficient collection into the indefinite future. Even before the "crisis," libraries were actively collaborating and sharing resources. Under the circumstances described in the study, and even absent new technologies, libraries would have been led to pursue "without walls" philosophies energetically. With technological hopes rising, possible contributions to mitigation of the "crisis" can come from a combination of:
Salaries in the composite libraries consistently constitute more than 50 percent of the average library budget. Staffing has increased since 1912, but at a rate somewhat less than that of collection size, so the number of books held per employee has risen to the highest level ever. The number of volumes added gross per staff member has declined, however, reflecting not staffing so much as the even greater effect of recent negative forces on acquisitions.
Between 1960 and 1970, average staff size in the Research 1 libraries nearly doubled. In the next fifteen years, the total increase in staff size was a little less than 7 percent; and from 1985 to 1991, a total increase of almost 6 percent showed a modest recovery. There can be no doubt, however, that drastic constraints were placed on staffing size around 1970 and that the easing in recent years has been modest in comparison.
Other operating expenditures have taken a larger share of the library budget over the last twenty years, apparently largely to reflect computerization of internal operations: circulation, cataloging, and acquisitions. The share of library budgets taken by salaries, meanwhile, has declined from around 62 percent in 1963 to 52 percent in 1991. That decline has been offset by increases in other operating expenditures, up from 6 percent in 1963 to 14 percent in 1991. That the decline in the staff share began in the 1960s probably reflects the shift in the age distribution toward younger employees as the staff size increased---rapid increases in staffing are often accompanied by less rapid increases in payroll costs because of the growing fraction of staff earning entry-level salaries. Post-1970, the decline in share taken by salaries reflects the sharp curtailment in recruitment, while other operating expenditures grew across the four sample groups of libraries chosen.
The technology of print turned information into a material commodity. Recorded usually in linear form on sheets of paper and distributed in multiple identical (or almost identical) copies, printed works have a relatively high cost for production of the first copy and relatively low cost for subsequent copies. The physical objects---the books---contain a fixed, immutable text with which the reader is permitted to interact only in limited ways. Aids to non-linear access (e.g., tables of contents and indexes) are relatively limited and supplied largely at the author's discretion. The study keeps its eye on a few trends closely affecting traditional arrangements. Large changes in conceptions of property and association may very well accompany adoption of new electronic information technologies on a wide scale. (As a historical analogy, consider that few are likely to have guessed in 1470 what the printing press, or in 1910 what the automobile, would bring.)
Currently, both publishers and libraries inhabit a world in which their standard practices require them to anticipate demand: the publisher must predict the market and the library must know its users in order for all the economic transactions to be carried out with the greatest efficiency. There are backups in place to adjust to unexpected demand (e.g., interlibrary loan, currently a rapidly growing activity in libraries), but so far those makeshifts have been considerably less satisfactory than successful anticipation of demand and providential provision of suitable materials. This "just-in-case," local-ownership model is one with familiar costs and benefits---including such bonuses as the creation of large, intricate collections of information that lend themselves to serendipitous, potentially interesting discoveries made by searchers on another trail or merely by browsers.
In particular, technological advances support suggestions that management of scholarly communication can now begin to separate access from ownership and concentrate on assuring access to scholarship and research, with questions of physical location of materials becoming secondary.
Now electronic technologies have been conceptualized to provide secondary bibliographical resources (catalogs, information about information, access to other institutions' holdings, periodical indexes, etc.). And increasingly, the technologies are beginning to be applied to problems of assembling and ordering the primary information itself. The "virtual library" with all the world's published riches at one's fingertips is largely a vision at this point, but a potent one.
Large-scale projects that provide computerized bibliographical information are under way. The two most notable national organizations in this area are the OCLC (the Online Computer Library Center) and the RLG (the Research Libraries Group). Both of these organizations are experimenting with ways to make their very large databases, reporting the holdings of member libraries, more accessible and useful to scholars. Of particular interest are RLG's efforts in improving the quality and availability of bibliographic information on what might be called "non-traditional" materials: everything from musical compositions to unpublished archival sources. In addition to the national services, many individual libraries make their catalogs available on the Internet. The utility of such online catalogs is limited when retrospective conversion of the card catalog is not yet substantially complete, but more than half of ARL member libraries report that they have already converted 90 percent or more of their card catalogs to machine-readable form.
Unlike books, serial literature is regularly indexed not by the libraries but by independent, often commercial, services. One caution is that because many of these services are provided outside the not-for-profit institutional environment, costs of access have been and can be substantial to individual users. When institutions purchase or utilize such indexing and abstracting services online, they try to contain costs by having their own trained personnel conducting the search. Yet the ideal of allowing individual access remains strong.
The next step beyond obtaining information about information is to share the texts themselves, as has been done traditionally by interlibrary loan (ILL). As emphasis shifts from ownership to access, models of information provision and electronic text availability permits, in principle, a degree of resource sharing among institutions far greater than that allowed by traditional ILL. As transmission improves, availability of resources outside the home institution will increasingly affect local collection development. Already the RLG Conspectus project attempts to help libraries make better informed choices about their acquisitions.
A newer model of resource sharing is document delivery. Document delivery services recently developed include the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries' (CARL) UnCover service, which supplies abundant bibliographical data on articles, and UnCover2, which provides rapid delivery service for full texts, via mail or fax with Internet delivery planned. A copyright royalty fee is collected and paid through the Copyright Clearance Center for each transaction. RLG's Ariel system allows any printed material to be scanned directly as a page image, then stored, transmitted over the Internet, and received for printing at the target site. Among commercial for-profit services, Faxon Research Services, Inc., in a program called Faxon Finder (for bibliographic information) and Faxon Xpress (for document delivery), looks promising. Only fuller experience with such experiments will enable institutions to make the necessary careful analyses of contrasting cost implications, balancing collection development with resource sharing.
The study's discussion to this point assumes that the primary text is printed and that the electronic technologies are used to facilitate access and delivery. But, when the primary artifact is itself electronic, the real revolution will begin. The changes such electronic publishing will bring, for example in the relationship between interpretive works and the underlying data or primary texts on which they are based, are the subject of much thoughtful speculation. Over time, for example, printing costs have worked against the thorough presentation of data: in electronic media, the possibility re-emerges of substantially complete publication of all the data on which research is based, and better still, publication in a form that others can continue to manipulate and enhance. It may soon be possible to think of producing shorter, less-expensive print products that contain little or no documentation.
What remains to be seen is how far new forms of publication will emerge, ones that that can only be displayed in an electronic environment, using sophisticated "hypertext" functions or offering three-dimensional, graphic, moving simulations, for example. Electronic texts can remove the limitations of print on paper. They can be dynamic, mutable, and are potentially eminently interactive. They may allow the producer and the user to uncouple the material object from the intellectual content.
Electronic texts have one signal advantage over print: they are far easier to transmit for purposes of resource sharing. There are experiments under way in this area, for instance, where textbooks are created on demand out of available online materials and distributed for a fee.
The transition to alternative forms of scholarly communication will not be easy. A particular technology, of whatever type, is joined to a set of economic and legal arrangements appropriate to it. So, one must not underestimate the difficulties involved in anticipating a reconfiguration, nor the important role traditional print media are likely to retain far into the future. For many applications, print products retain considerable advantages over electronic ones. There will be no near-term, wholesale replacement of print with electronic media (the way the vinyl platter was overwhelmed by the CD-ROM for music reproduction). The electronic media add a dimension to what we already have, but for the foreseeable future, the old media will be with us as well.
And it is impossible to be sure how far the technological possibilities will go. A wide range of predicted futures has been arrayed by thoughtful observers, and at some future point the changes may be considerably more far-reaching, affecting every aspect of our institutions and the communications on which they thrive. The library, the publisher, the printed book, the monograph, the learned journal, the process of peer review, copyright practices: all these and other familiar elements of the current system are at least somewhat at risk in the face of the new technologies. The following list suggests some areas in which difficult issues will have to be faced.
The reward system for scholars and scientists depends for now on traditional publication as a defining criterion for rank and status, with the real compensation for publication coming not from sales of the material itself but from the advancement in rank, salary, and prestige that publication makes possible. Any new system will have to satisfy scholarly and institutional leaders that it is adequately peer reviewed and reliable before new types of publications can be rewarded. Until assurances of such rewards are in place, faculty will be reluctant to put their best work in new forms.
Options for electronic text distribution are many, and no one can predict which will prevail, where, or how. Individual institutions might choose to maintain local electronic repositories of frequently-used titles; on the other hand, some publishers might choose to retain their texts themselves at central sites and distribute them on a fee-for-use basis; collaborative arrangements between repositories of various kinds in various places may emerge in which a consortium of libraries, say, may together hold a full set of resources, without each institution having to pay the full cost of housing such a set.
Cost factors may well force the determining choices on institutions irrespective of technological possibilities. Some say that electronic scholarly communication will be more affordable than print-on-paper. To determine with any precision what cost savings, if any, might emerge from any new methods of distribution is difficult, and there will undoubtedly be reallocation of costs within the university system. Who will pay and how much are vital, but still unanswerable, questions. Consider the development of the serial/journal in a new environment. The very concept of an "issue" of a journal is challenged: individual items can be distributed separately, as they very often are in the experimental e-journals now operating. This calls for different subscription and pricing policies, both for individuals and institutions.
Some of these upgrades are necessary in any event, but they carry real costs. Proponents of the new National Research and Education Network system (NREN) estimate that for every dollar appropriated for this system by the federal government, five to ten dollars will have to come from state and local governments and private institutions.
The full realization of the potential model of electronic scholarly communication described here depends, finally, upon the development of an adequate national telecommunications infrastructure, capable of moving vast quantities of text and data at very high speeds. The final chapter of the study provides a brief history of the emergence of the national scientific and academic networks now in existence and describes the upgraded, harmonized network that is, or will be, the NREN. The three-tier structure (a national backbone, then regional networks, then campus or local networks) puts heavy responsibility on individual institutions to maintain a significant share of the national network. But the improvements to service will be astonishing: a roughly 600-fold increase in speed of transmission as rapid as a billion bits a second will move texts with blinding speed and almost make possible acceptable speeds for the more data-intensive forms of information such as high-resolution graphics, moving pictures, and multi-media formats.
Libraries and publishers already play multiple roles. Libraries and publishers as we now know them are institutions created in and for the technology of the printed, or at least the written, word, depending on information to be produced, distributed, and possessed as a collection of material objects. But it is also critical to realize that both libraries and publishers play other parts as well. Publishers, for example, function as gate-keepers to the world of scholarly communication in managing scholars' and researchers' peer review, which in turn determines what is printed and what is not. Libraries, in turn, have collection development and management functions, but they also serve as indexers and pathfinders for information they do not own. Already such a model departs from the "just-in-case" approach to acquisition and approaches a "just-in-time" model, where material is acquired as it is needed. There may be some blurring in the distinctions among the historical roles of publishers as producers, vendors as intermediaries, and librarians as archivists. The electronic revolution may provide the potential for developing university publishing enterprises through scholarly networks supported either by individual institutions or consortia.
Peer review, editing, and composition will all remain important parts of the preparation of scholarly material for distribution. How much of this remains as the role of current publishers and how much is taken on by other participants in the process remains to be seen.
Existing heterogeneity of access and retrieval protocols poses a real problem in the short to medium term; here the solution is in the first instance technical, but various interest groups will have to negotiate their way to the suitable solution. What are called "expert systems" should further ease translation among computer formats.
The ease with which electronic material can be duplicated and retransmitted means that whatever controls the publisher places and seeks to enforce on users, whether by copyright or licensing agreements, can be circumvented with ease. If revenue depends on "sales" of the retail product, the retransmission represents a potentially threatening black market that could undermine publishers' ability to recoup their costs. The need to control will compete with the demand for wide and easy access to material. There are implications also for information accuracy and integrity.
The most critical issues are those that arise from the challenges to the law of copyright implicitly posed by the new technologies. Copyright in the United States is based in the Constitution and confirmed by statute. The original intent of the constitutional protection was to encourage intellectual productivity by securing rights to the authors. In scholarly practice today, rights are commonly assigned to publishers, in return for the substantial contribution they make to scholarly communication, while the rewards expected by the scholars themselves are those of prestige, rank, and institutional compensation mentioned above.
The U.S. copyright law's doctrine of "fair use" defines the way reproduction of copyrighted materials may be carried out. Some copyright scholars maintain that a key factor affecting determination of fair use appears increasingly to be the effect of that use on the potential market for the work, and it is on economic grounds that publishers scrutinize practices carefully for possible violation. Current litigation continues to define more precisely the scope of this doctrine.
The point at which resource sharing runs the risk of violating copyright can be a delicate matter. Eventual development of fee structures and payment mechanisms is one way to respect current copyright privileges. Licensing agreements freely entered into by purchasers of information are already used somewhat and offer another resolution for some of the issues raised.
Alternatives to current copyright management can be imagined. For example, universities could claim joint ownership of scholarly writings with the faculty they pay to produce them, then prohibit unconditional assignment to third parties, thus becoming important players in the publishing business themselves. Or universities could request that faculty members first submit manuscripts to publishers whose pricing policies are more consonant with larger educational objectives. Another possibility is that university-negotiated licenses could grant unlimited copying to libraries and individual scholars and specify such permission in the copyright statement. All these proposals are extensions of the broader idea under current discussion, that universities should reclaim some responsibility for disseminating the results of faculty scholarship.
Many concerns about management of the networks that distribute this material are already being articulated. Who has access, who pays, who worries about integrity of texts and privacy, who monitors ownership and legitimate use? Academic institutions, individual scholars, and their commercial partners in the transactions to come will all have their own agendas, and they must learn to work in an atmosphere of mutual respect and cooperation.
The heart of the scholarly enterprise is the exchange of ideas. University campuses offer myriad informal loci for dialogue, but the formal locus par excellence is in the dialogue between scholarly writer and scholarly reader that has been mediated for half a millennium now by the printed page. One scholar is quoted in the study and summarizes well the sense of responsibility that accompanies that dialogue:
In Notes on Virginia, Jefferson described the process: `A patient pursuit of facts, and cautious combination and comparison of them, is the drudgery to which man is subjected. . . if he wishes to attain sure knowledge.' Jefferson is still right about the patient pursuit of facts . . . . We have, however, taken much of the drudgery out of the process and made it easier to find sources, but we still have to read carefully---probably more carefully than ever---and we still have to think. The difference is that searching no longer takes much time and energy from the scholarship of thought.
The optimism of that passage is specific to the dawn of the computer age, but similar optimism has been expressed at each historical moment when the advance of technology has brought new riches closer to readers.
The indispensable mediator in the dialogue between writer and reader has been, for more centuries than even the printed book has been around, the institutional library. The study addresses the present and future of scholarly communication with particular reference to the research libraries that bear so much of the responsibility for making that communication possible, with particular focus on the research university library, whose special purpose is to support advanced scholarship and scholarly communication.
Ann Okerson, November 1992