RE: Is it time to stop printing journals?

["Ivy Anderson" <Ivy.Anderson@ucop.edu>]

I think Rick and Greg's summaries cover the issue well.  To
Greg's list of incentives to retain print, I would add VAT in
Europe, which acts as a disincentive to go e-only for our
overseas colleagues.

After the University of California's Collection Management
Initiative concluded in 2002 that library users overwhelmingly
used electronic journals in preference to print (and rarely
called for print when it was removed from browsable access), the
University began acquiring a single shared print copy of the
journals in its major electronic journals licenses and storing
the copies at a shared regional storage facility, allowing each
of our ten campuses to cancel local print copies of those same
journals.

Our experience has continued to show that print is rarely
requested when access is available online.  Requests for print
most commonly are a result of missing content or poorly-rendered
images or figures in the online version (especially for older
materials). In another recent example, a campus has chosen to
retain local print copies to satisfy the needs of a disabled
user. (I hasten to add that we haven't updated the CMI findings
more formally to understand how usage patterns and user
perceptions have evolved from discipline to discipline, so these
comments should be considered general and anecdotal).

So while usage of print is very low, it isn't quite zero.  In
addition, despite an overwhelming user preference for online
access over print, the UC libraries are mindful in this
transitional period of our long-term role as stewards of the
intellectual record.  Whether the print is used or not, some
faculty continue to worry, as we do, about the archival
persistence of the electronic versions. For all these reasons, we
have been cautious about deciding to abandon shared print
archives entirely, even as we seek to articulate criteria that
might allow us to do so.

Among the criteria we're evaluating are two that Mark Leader
mentions:

* the availability of trusted digital archives (when can we truly
trust them?  My sense is hopefully soon, but perhaps not quite
yet.  Most of these initiatives are even younger than Google),
and

* whether print or online is the version of record.

It turns out that the latter question is far from straightforward
to determine.  How many publishers have formally established a
version of record?  (I know of only a few who have declared this
for their electronic versions.)  For those that have, by what
criteria is this determined, and how and where is the information
recorded? (Mark mentioned that ASCB considers its e-version the
version of record, but I couldn't find that statement anywhere on
the ASCB or MBC website.)  What obligations does a publisher
undertake when anointing an electronic version as the version of
record?  For example, when editors and editorial board members
change, the historical information that is captured in print
isn't typically retained online, leaving print as the only record
of this information.  Should this and similar information be
retained online if online is the version of record?  Are policies
and practices for dealing with errata and retractions clearly
delineated so that the integrity of the published record is
maintained?  Is all supplementary material made available in (or
with) print included in the online version? Are there policies
and practices in place for continued online availability when
publishers change?  Etc.

I'd be interested to know if other libraries have considered the
role of version of record in decisions about print retention and
what standards or practices, if any, this designation implies (or
ought to imply) when it is applied to the electronic version. I
suspect that declaring a version of record is a way of according
orphan status to the format that is not so designated.  Fair
enough.  But it's also my sense that electronic versions of
record may still have a bit of evolving to do, just as the
reliability of the electronic record itself is still a developing
story.  In any case, there's no straightforward way of which I'm
aware to discover whether a given publisher considers a
particular format to be its version of record, nor of knowing
what exactly that designation means when it does exist.

When electronic version of record becomes a more common
designation with a well understood and trusted set of behaviors,
whose persistence and availability can be taken for granted, then
I think the transition to e-only in libraries will become more
complete (European VAT notwithstanding). Meanwhile, libraries
with an archival research mission are likely to continue to seek
ways to efficiently store and maintain print where it continues
to exist, but increasingly on a shared basis (including shared
across institutions).  [Of course the minute I hit "send," we're
bound to 'evolve' our policies further and cancel all those
shared print copies...]

Ivy Anderson
Director of Collections
California Digital Library
University of California, Office of the President
(510) 987-0334=A0 (voice)
(510) 287-3825=A0 (fax)
ivy.anderson@ucop.edu
http://www.cdlib.org