Are We There Yet? Online E-Resources Ten Years After

Library Trends, Spring, 2000 by Ann Okerson

ABSTRACT

THIS ARTICLE REVIEWS PAST TRENDS REGARDING electronic resources and publishing on the Internet, analyzes critical issues involving electronic resources, and makes predictions for the years 2000 through 2005. Important developments are reviewed on a year-to-year basis from 1991 through 1998/99. Archiving, usage, utility, and copyright are identified as key issues, while licensing is also covered.

INTRODUCTION

Everything people say about the Internet seems to be future-oriented: This or that wonderful thing will come to pass very soon now. But if Internet time is as different from ordinary time as people say, and if change happens with blinding rapidity, then surely history itself will accumulate more rapidly than used to be the case. This discussion is an exercise in Internet history as it relates to online electronic information resources. It is designed to help keep librarians, scientists, and scholars from losing their bearings.(1)

A few years ago, it seemed to many in the library, educational, and research communities that the coming of the Internet offered great promise for a revolution in scholarly and scientific communication. Clearly, the Internet has arrived, but it is far from sure that the promise we imagined has been fulfilled, at least in the ways we had imagined or wished that it would happen. The purpose of this article is to review the history of the very recent past in order better to understand our present and our future. The reader of these pages shares with me both a belief in the importance of scholarly and scientific communication and a concern for its economic and social viability.

What was it that we thought we glimpsed in the future of the Internet, those of us who watched this scene thoughtfully a decade ago? In those days, we knew that we had a "serials pricing crisis"--i.e., skyrocketing prices, skyrocketing numbers of new journals, limited library budgets, and customers who demanded all the best and the latest information libraries could provide.(2) What had been in the 1950s a benign revolution--the great increase in scientific research and consequently the introduction of the commercial scientific, technical, and medical (STM)journals--had turned into something far more ambiguous. More high-quality information than ever was being distributed, but institutions of higher learning feared greatly for their ability to pay the price.

Ten years ago, we noted other weaknesses in the print system of publication. Print journals are oftentimes slow to appear (the time from submission to publication can be many months), and they come to libraries through a distribution system replete with pitfalls, not the least of which are contributed by the world's postal systems. Access to the individual copy of a printed journal is limited to one person at a time, and further reproduction is legally limited--and may be expensive where the publisher's permission is required--and at all events labor-intensive. Reliably searching print text is difficult, even where great quantities of labor have gone into building indexes, though, to be sure, browsing print text is relatively easy and immensely comfortable. In short, research requires access to collections limited by location and access, and that access can be slow and inconvenient.

The economics of the print system also proved anything but favorable. By the 1970s and 1980s, for various reasons, prices had already escalated beyond ordinary inflation. Increase in the quantity of material published per journal is one fairly obvious cause, but currency swings and publishers' attempts to hedge themselves against those swings are also a factor. During the 1980s (and since), often bitter debates grew up between publishers and libraries--was the one charging too much or the other allocating too little to purchasing budgets? It was and is certainly the case that academic communities contribute to a publishing system in which they lose ownership--and thus control--of their works as authors sign over copyright to the publishing sector, a system with its downsides as well as upsides.(3)

The intuition that librarians had ten years ago about the future of network-delivered electronic publishing contained much truth. Already we could grasp that electronic texts would be made available more rapidly than printed versions, simultaneously to many more users; these publications would have powerful new features--e.g., searchability across multiple texts and titles. A few visionaries even imagined something called "hypertext" as a way of linking text and parts of text together. Simultaneously, the economic prognostications about electronic texts at the time were scarcely less optimistic. Many believed that e-texts could be produced far more cheaply than paper ones and that numerous middlemen might be eliminated. Electronic journals would thus become very inexpensive and effective ways of competing with the behemoth print journals that were sapping universities' economic resources.