RE: Thanks to three list members

["Nat Gustafson-Sundell" <n-gustafson-sundell@northwestern.edu>]

First, I should say that I'm not dipping into the conversations 
that preceded your response and I don't think I need to since you 
have set off in a new direction.

It seems to me that you have things backwards.  Scholarly 
resource consumption almost never involves reading the whole 
work.  When most people do research, they will generally scan 
hundreds of articles, tables of contents, bibliographies, and so 
on to get further research ideas, develop awareness of the scope 
of problems, determine who is doing the good work and who is 
retreading, etc.  In fact, one complaint I've heard quite a bit 
is that circulation figures don't capture the substantial and 
important usage of collections that don't circulate (and 
complementarily, one use by one scholar might be enough to 
justify the collection if the use is valuable to the community).

Frankly, as more and more work becomes more efficiently available 
online, more and more work can be efficiently assessed for 
further usage.  This is a huge boon to research and does involve 
real and substantial consumption although it doesn't fit your 
more idle definition.

Academic libraries exist in large part to enable the scholarly 
community to do their research as efficiently as possible. 
Despite what you might read in your own writing, circulation and 
usage are up everywhere.  I personally doubt direct marketing 
will ever compete with what libraries do because of the overhead. 
In surveys, the acquisitions role of libraries is consistently 
valued at the highest end of satisfaction by scholars, and access 
services are catching up.  On campuses using the new discovery 
interfaces, access satisfaction seems to be very high 
(anecdotally), while next gen ILSs are just around the corner -- 
one development priority is to allow more granular search and 
access (chapters, figures, etc.), as well as search and access 
services to more types of electronic resources (data sets, 
workflows, blogs, wikis).  In other words, grazing/ scanning/ 
assessment activities are becoming ever more viable, useful, and 
likely, especially as new discovery interfaces will allow more 
context browsing or wandering via linked data.  (Just one 
tangential point of interest:  with tagging and recommender 
services, some level of validation will be occurring without a 
commercial host to intermediate.)

The sponsors of the variety of open access initiatives actually 
seem to be paying attention to what we're learning from the 
market research and observation conducted by libraries and the 
automation vendors who service libraries.  On the other hand, it 
is true that some commercial publisher license and pricing models 
show they haven't even thought about how research is conducted 
this century ... it ain't anything like wandering around your 
bookstore for idle reading matter ... and it's just going to keep 
changing.

-Nat