i’m sitting here at my desk popping wasabi peas and trying to talk myself off the ledge. here’s the thing. as the serials & electronic resources librarian it’s up to me to tell my university which print journals they can get rid of, journals that cost a LOT of money and are vital to current scholarship. if we have stable access to the electronic version it is redundant to retain a print subscription, especially when we know our users prefer the electronic version. if we have access in perpetuity (i.e., FOREVER) to the electronic version, why retain the old print? we don’t need the print version because we have access to the electronic version, and all those print volumes are taking up space. this is a perfectly logical thought process. librarians all over the world have followed this thought process, discarding print volumes of journals in favor of perpetual electronic access. so why is it that lately i’ve been mistrusting this thought process? it’s because i’ve been asking our journal vendors to provide me with titles and specific volumes/years that we should have perpetual access to. many of them have been slow to produce the list of titles/holdings, and i’ve returned many of those lists with added titles they’ve missed. that makes me nervous. what happens when it comes time to cash in that access? will the lists of titles and holdings we’re making now be honored later?
talk me down, people. how are you handling all of this at your own universities?
The concerns you’re expressing are well founded. My own opinion is that we cannot rely too heavily on perpetual access provisions in contracts — many publishers don’t actually have good mechanisms in place for providing such access and they’ve never been terribly good at actually tracking what people subscribe to.
That being said, all of these decisions are a balancing of risks/benefits/available resources. Preservation strategies are improving (although still a long way from being where they need to be), as are the policies and procedures that publishers are developing, so I think the situation is improving over time. I think it is likely that a library that goes e-only is going to end up with a loss of some content they thought they had access to at some point — but I think the risk of that being widespread is pretty small. So I’ve made the decision to go e-only — we’ve purchased virtually no print in the last 3 years. I think it’s better for my community in the long run that I take the financial advantages of going e-only while accepting the small risk of some losses of content at some point.
I think you’re right that the decision has to be about what kind of risk one’s institution can bear. It’s reasonable to think there will be a loss of some content, I just hope it’s not MY favorite journal that disappears. 🙂 For us, too, it is a cost savings to move to e-only, and I suspect that alone is driving more institutions than the perpetual access aspect.
At the Charleston Conference last year I wandered through the vendor area, asking vendor reps if they knew what their companies’ digital preservation plans were; none did. We can at least press that issue so they know that their long term commitment to the data is important to us. Anyway, work in progress.
We’re transitioning subscriptions from print to online, like everybody else, but we’re still holding on to the print copies for the most part. The plan is to get together with other major research libraries in the area for a shared regional repository — one copy of everything we need, rather than all of us individually keeping our runs. I think this is reasonable, as I for one am still a bit paranoid about everything going digital, especially given the difficulty of electronic resources management.
I definitely agree with the need to hound vendors about their digital preservation plans.