Re: ALPSP statement on e-publishing.

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btinternet.com>]

Costs are a big subject. I do not personally have time to lay them all
out, but it does seem to me that David is nibbling at them.

E-journals do not require physical handling, but e-manuscripts require a
lot of massaging depending of course on the nature of the subject area and
e-files require quality control when they arrive from suppliers (yes they
do) on an individual basis, and monitoring (have they arrived?) and
sending out to intermediaries, people like MedLine etc. Can one call this
digital handling?

The new staff need new managers.They are a new breed. Even Elsevier
Science, who have lots of managers, make mistakes and they have done more
work than anyone else automating the process. Almost all these jobs are
new. Because the situation is hybrid (print has not gone away) almost all
the old people are still there and necessary.

What David does not say is that many of the people who have gone from
libraries have gone because the functions are in the hands of OCLC or in
some areas with agents and other intermediaries. As he pointed before
publishers have tried to outsource and have not found it a happy
experience (he draws attention to these purchasing failures in another
posting). Often they have moved functions back in house with the loss of
economies of scale. This is of course a generalisation.

Anthony Watkinson
14, Park Street,
Bladon
Woodstock
Oxfordshire
England OX20 1RW
phone +44 1993 811561 and fax +44 1993  810067


----- Original Message -----
From: "David Goodman" <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, May 03, 2002 2:29 PM
Subject: Re: ALPSP statement on e-publishing.


> Yes, it does increase the need for senior as compared to jr staff--but not
> at a 1:1 ratio.
>
> Consider library automation--we have maybe half the people in tech
> services that we did when I came here 20 yrs ago. We have about as many
> professionals, the decline being support staff, such as an entire group of
> workers who typed headings on catalog cards. Of course, we now have a
> substantial systems staff. When you count in the money to buy computers
> and so on, I suspect that it comes out about even in terms of dollars.
> When (almost) all of our paper journals have been replaced by electronic,
> we'll not need another two groups of routine workers--though we will
> certainly need some additional high level specialists.  (I am not being
> totally heartless--at least here, several of the current processing people
> in this area are well qualified to move up, and undoubtedly will.) But
> this is a individual-item processing operation, each item being unique,
> operations inherently physically dispersed, and (so far) the continuing
> need for manual handling of the items. That's the most difficult possible
> situation.
>
> Publishing is of course different. It is not an individual unique item
> operation, it is much more centralized, and with ejournals involves no
> physical handling at all. That should be much more favorable.