Electronic Resources and Academic Libraries, 1980-2000: A Historical Perspective

Library Trends, Spring, 2000 by Ruth H. Miller

ABSTRACT

OVER THE PAST TWENTY YEARS, ACADEMIC COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT specialists have dealt with dramatic changes, brought about by decreasing purchasing power and the growing importance of electronic resources. Throughout this period, collection managers have rethought their efforts and revised criteria for the selection of materials in new formats while also maintaining traditional collections. Looking back over this period may help provide perspective for dealing with the next stages of change.

INTRODUCTION

Forecasting is notoriously hard, but identifying meaningful trends of the recent past may also be difficult. The World Wide Web is perhaps the most notable example of a far-reaching element that librarians neither predicted nor planned for. Not available before the early 1990s, but impossible to ignore by the late 1990s, the Web offers a kind of watershed in the way libraries and their users "connect." From 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee and others at CERN (European High Energy Physics Laboratory in Geneva) developed a hypertext system, the Web grew from "about one percent of backbone traffic in September 1993 to about 20 percent" by 1995 and has continued to expand dramatically since (Weibel, 1995, p. 7). The Web became the focus of the Internet in 1993 when the graphical browser Mosaic was introduced and followed by Netscape Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer (Cohen, 1998, p. 8). By January 1996, there were "an estimated 90,000 Web sites on the Internet, and ... the Web is doubling in size every fifty days with a home page added every four seconds" (Branin, 1998, p. 10). An OCLC announcement in September 1999 states that there are 3.6 million Web sites of which 2.2 million are accessible to the public.

Twenty years ago, common use of the Internet and such formats as CD-ROM was still in the future; many academic libraries still did not have integrated library systems, though most were using every means they had to acquire them. In the writings of collection developers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, one sees little awareness of the revolutionary changes ahead except for recognition of financial difficulties. This discussion examines how the present mixture of print and electronic collections evolved over the past twenty years and how criteria were revised and expanded to incorporate the latter into established collection development policies. The focus is primarily on academic libraries because that is where most of the writing on these issues originated, though clearly public and other libraries have shared many of the same issues and choices.

Academic libraries have responded to major changes in the nature of their collections and user demands while materials budgets have provided less purchasing power than in the previous decades. Partly due to general economic factors (inflation, weak dollar abroad, increased publishing costs) and partly due to other demands on university budgets (technology, student demographics, staff benefits), library materials budgets have tended to diminish, if not in actual dollars, certainly in what could be purchased and in the percentage of needed materials acquired. This situation was complicated as publishing, fed by university promotion and tenure demands as well as economic pressures toward mergers and increased profits, expanded in disciplines old and new as well as in a variety of formats. Additionally, pricing for scholarly journals, the backbone of any academic collection, increased annually by percentages in double digits, with devastating effects on print collections.

LOOKING BACKWARD

During the 1980s and 1990s, much was written about the serials crisis, or serials pricing crisis; access versus ownership or access and ownership; "just in time" versus "just in case" purchasing; the library as storehouse versus the library as gateway; and operating libraries within a new paradigm that includes a changing scholarly communication system. These key phrases of the period indicate the nature of the struggle to adapt to very different circumstances from those of the 1960s and 1970s.

In the early 1980s, there were few hints in the professional discussions of resource sharing, use studies, and budgeting about what was to come. The Library Resources & Technical Services (LRTS) "year's work" in collection development for 1980 concluded that it had been a quiet year (it must have been the last such) with variations on old themes, though "declining financial resources" was noted as disheartening (Magrill, 1981). By the next year, "austerity" was seen as marking the times, the impact of online bibliographic databases on collection decisions was being considered, and electronic journals were seen as having potential to radically change serials librarianship (Magrill, 1982). By another year, there was discussion of improving access through resource sharing, and the ADONIS project was seen as the beginning of electronic publishing (Welch, 1983). By the mid-1980s, CD-ROMs were considered to offer great possibilities (Wortman, 1987). McCarthy (1996) found "hardly any comparison to the issues and challenges we face today" when compared to 1985 (p. 16). Her list of current issues includes "the access vs. ownership debate, restricted resource budgets, changing management strategies to maximize those budgets, and the impact of information technology," all of which remain several years later (p. 16).