Resource sharing in the electronic era: potentials and paradoxes - Networked Scholarly Publishing

Library Trends, Spring, 1995 by Gay N. Dannelly

Today's libraries face myriad challenges: social, economic, technical, organizational, and functional. One of the biggest challenges, however, is the rapid rate at which all of these factors are changing, their interdependence, and the effects that we see in our attempt to maintain, much less increase, information services. In 1986, the ALA Commission on Freedom and Equality of Access to Information wrote that: "Libraries of all types today find themselves caught between the anvil of growing citizen demand for increased access to a broader range of information resources in a wider variety of formats and the hammer of declining financial support" (ALA, 1984, p. 99). They were reflecting the then rapid rate of change, but not even that august body could have imagined the rapidity and variety of developments in today's information society.

Technology and its applications to information are evolving so rapidly that cutting edge installations of today are old hat tomorrow. The digitizing of information is providing a cleaner and more restorable form of data collection, retention, and manipulation. The competition to provide supporting services for handling this digitized information influences not only the research community, but also the commercial and public sectors of the economy. The lack of standards has hampered this to some extent, but with the development of the Z39.50 standard, gopher space, World Wide Web servers, and Mosaic, the rate of change in system access and availability has increased dramatically.

Gorman (1991) has written that: "Resources sharing has two bases: the effectiveness of technology and the need to cooperate." He continues: "I think that we are, like it or not, entering a Golden Age of Cooperation because (1) the technology to link libraries and to make the users of one library aware of the collections of others is available and getting better all the time, and (2) economics are forcing us to cooperate" (p. 7). These factors - technology and economics - impact library programs and practices more directly today than they have at any time in the past. These in turn produce a variety of paradoxes in the current art of library and information provision. (The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines paradox as a "statement contrary to received opinion; [a] seemingly absurd though perhaps really well-founded statement; self-contradictory; person, [or] thing, conflicting with preconceived notions of what is reasonable or possible.") They have indeed begun to force the issues of cooperation, collaboration, and a heightened need for resource sharing. The following discussion is general in nature, and there are always exceptions, but it is time to challenge certain assumptions about the way in which we provide information and the nature of the library environment.

Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines ownership as "to have or hold as property; to have power over." In this context, it is useful to consider several levels of ownership. The most convenient is, of course, the ownership that allows the patron to walk to a nearby shelf and take down the book or journal or videotape desired. The location of desired material that is owned at another branch of a library provides additional sources, but these are not immediately available. Another level is that of materials housed in remote storage. Most large universities are faced with this situation. Is it less convenient to wait for delivery from a branch library or from a storage facility that may be several miles or counties away? And the fourth level is the cooperative model, where access serves as surrogate ownership. The deciding factor in making a selection decision, aside from the cost and the availability of an item, is the opportunity costs to the patron. What does it cost the patron to wait for information for an hour, a week, or a month?

Webster's defines access as the freedom or ability to obtain or make use of." Just as there are multiple levels of ownership, there are many levels of access, and these may influence the decision to own an item. First is the ability to identify desired materials. Do such resources - whether print, media, or electronic - actually exist? Next is the access level that provides knowledge of the item, that it is indeed available in a library or document depository in the required format. The third level is that of the ability to retrieve it. Can it be borrowed, purchased through document delivery systems, sent directly to the patron; And if the third is impossible, can the patron go to the item. For many scholars, the need to use original documents allows no other choice. The strategic issue in this situation is to know that something exists and where it is located.

As a profession, we began the deconstruction of ownership as the only option when interlibrary loan became an accepted and regular library activity. Upon the establishment of OCLC and other utilities, the issue of ownership versus access was no longer of major importance, except as a rather arcane construct around which we could structure library and information science class sessions. In fact, by the time the question became broadly recognized, the information environment in which we function had long superseded the question. And thus we have the primary paradox facing the profession: access is ownership. Access is analogous to paying rent on a short-term lease rather than paying a mortgage, while ownership is the mortgage and includes a condominium fee for the upkeep and continued housing of an item.