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

Library Trends, Spring, 1995 by Gay N. Dannelly

Increasing costs of information, rapid increases in publishing of interest to academia, and stagnating budgets of institutions of higher education have made it glaringly obvious that no library can provide all the resources required by its users (Graves & Wulff, 1990, p. 53). In 1979, Scholarly Communication: The Report of the National Inquiry reported,

it is clear that research libraries can no longer function as autonomous entities, each striving for self-sufficiency. That goal, never realistic even in the years of rapidly expanding budgets, will slip further out of reach as each year passes. New forms of resource sharing, the development of national collections accessible to all research libraries, and the linking of libraries through computerized bibliographic networks into a national system are essential steps that must be taken if libraries are to meet their responsibilities to provide all users with reliable access to the research literature. (p. 151)

Performance expectations have increased at all levels of higher education: faculty are expected to publish, students are regularly expected to write papers or complete projects that rely on the scholarly record, and the purchasing power of library budgets has been drastically curtailed. The research library is not the only victim in this development. Libraries serving liberal arts and community colleges and technical institutions are caught in the same spirals of rising expectations and decreasing resources. These conditions have an increased reliance on resource sharing through interlibrary loan, direct borrowing arrangements for faculty and students, and other delivery mechanisms. Interlibrary loan and resource sharing are no longer adjunct sources of information but have become integral components of primary library services.

The economic consequences of continuing to do business as usual are dire at best. Greatly increased costs of journals and monographs in all disciplines, proliferation of electronic formats that faculty and students demand, and disintegrating historical collections all contribute to the need to develop new methods and models of providing information. VonWalde and Schiller (1993) have suggested that: "In the networked environment, access will become the primary function of the library. We will need to spend more money to support access and delivery of information" (p. 32). White (1994) has noted that, as opportunities for access to previously unknown resources become available, demands for those resources will increase, and that costs will, solely on this basis, undoubtedly increase (p. 8). Combining such demands for new resources with the price escalation of traditional formats, and the linking of pricing between paper and electronic formats of the same tide, libraries are clearly caught in an untenable situation both budgetarily and functionally. Libraries do not control costs, they simply respond to pricing and availability of resources produced by scholarly researchers and academic and commercial publishers (White, 1994, p. 7). The interactions of these external bodies govern the library's ability to respond to local needs as well as consortial agreements. Although recent years have seen an increase in the dialogue among scholars, librarians, and publishers, the economic reward system of academia and the profit motive of publishers still control the information pipeline.