Ever since I learned about it during my first semester at University of Wisconsin Madison's library school, the possible lack of perpetual access to already paid for electronic content troubled me, especially in the face of many libraries switching from ownership of material model to that of solely leasing content. At my current workplace, this issue has moved from the theoretical to the practical for me, as we recently rearranged the library and went e-only for most publications to save space. Our print journals all suffered from low usage, with patrons clearly preferring online access. As Watson's chapter in Managing the Transition from Print to Electronic Journals and Resources makes clear, patrons "are reluctant to interrupt their workflow by stopping what they are doing just to visit the library in the hope that the needed article is on the shelf" (pg. 47). This was certainly the case at my workplace, and as such, it made sense, financially, to spend the money on resources being used.
I understand this decision. We were running out of space, we were strapped for cash, and our patrons were not being served currently by the existence of print. But we need some way of preserving this access, electronically. There is no library literature that I have read that advocates giving up access rights to previously subscribed content if one cancels a subscription. Instead, most point out that doing this would create the bizarre issue that, though a huge amount of information is being produced, our time could appear to future scholars as a dark ages, a black hole of literature. The literature, having not been preserved, would be lost.
Because of this, I examined my workplaces current solutions, and judged them according to the two articles I recently read that I found the most helpful for considering this issue: Watson's chapter and Stemper and Barribeau's article "Perpetual Access to Electronic Journals: A Survey of One Academic Research Library's Licenses" (which appeared in Library Resources and Technical Services). Sadly, I found both of their current solutions lacking.
Their first solution is to rely on ILL for access to articles for which they have unsubscribed. For the time being, this seems to be working, as most of our ILL requests for canceled journals can be filled. Of course, this costs the library money, but compared to the price of many electronic resource purchases, it is a very small amount. The main issue for this is that it forces us to rely on the kindness of others, and the fact that other libraries will still maintain print collections, or have licensed products that allow Inter Library Loan. As Stemper and Barribeau point out, many license agreements, especially standard publisher ones before negotiation, do not allow any ILL's to be sent that are copies of their electronic material. So, while it works for now, we could run into problems later.
The other method is relying on non negotiated licenses to grant perpetual access. While Stemper and Barribeau do mention that some licenses contain such a right naturally, they point out that the high number of licenses they found permitting perpetual access in some form (be it locally hosted, through the publishers site for a fee or via a third party)included that clause due to negotiation by the library. Indeed, they point out that librarians "should consider making the lack of perpetual access rights a deal breaker" and must negotiate for it, with no mercy. By not negotiating licenses, my workplace has left itself open to losing access.
So, what should my library do? Maintaining their own print archive is not an option, as, during their process of switching to e only, they threw away a great deal of their print copies (again, to save space). Negotiating licenses might not be feasible either, as there is not many library staff, and no one who is comfortable with license negotiation. While I believe that being sure to negotiate for some form of perpetual access, be it either through the publisher (and maintained via an access fee) or whether it is through a third party that works for the publisher (examples are the open source shared archiving software LOCKSS and Portico, a single server that contains publishers material and then shares this with the library), is the ideal solution, I do not know how practical this would be. As such, I believe the best thing for my library to do would be to join a consortium, as Watson discusses, where each library is responsible for keeping some journals in print and agree to share copies of these print articles via ILL. I do not really like this solution; it seems inelegant to me to maintain the integrity and access to lost electronic content via print. It also would introduce lag time for these journals as they would have to be sent from another consortium library to ours. However, for the small academic library, with little staff resources or time or space, it is a better plan that rely strictly on the kindness of publishers to save you.
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