RE: Wellcome Trust report

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

I too have been told this, with respect to many countries. But even for
the developed countries, especially for back-up archival copies, we should
carefully consider the practice of "transmit electronically but give to
the end user in print."

At some very low print run, it would be more economical to prepare only an
electronic version, and print the necessary number from that on a high
speed laser printer. (I first became aware of this 20 years ago, when
Pergamon supplied a long back run of a serial as print-out from microfilm.
If they had said so I would have just gotten microfilm, as the print
quality was much lower than it would be today).  This would eliminate the
fixed costs of the print version.

The print version would lose high quality in the halftones, and color in
color ilustrations; for many journals this would not matter; for those
that did, the print quality from laser printers is better each year, and
the quality and price of color printers is showing a similar improvement.

There are a few areas where we can rely on technical improvements for cost
savings (storage comes to mind). In these few but fortunate cases we
should take advantage of it.

Dr. David Goodman
dgoodman@liu.edu

-----Original Message-----
From:	owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Liblicense-L
Sent:	Sat 6/12/2004 10:56 PM
To:	liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject:  Re: Wellcome Trust report

Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2004 10:29:34 -0600
From: Margaret Landesman <margaret.landesman@library.utah.edu>
Subject: Re: Wellcome Trust report

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My colleague has been working in Ethiopian academic libraries and her
Ethiopian colleague spent six months here.  They came to the opposite
conclusion - electronic works better for them.

The Ethiopian libraries have very few computers and intermittent online
access.  But they know that they can queue requests and print them when
the system is up, even if that's once a week.  (Their most urgent need =
is for a generator so as to avoid several hours a day without electricity
altogether.)

But the postal system is so insecure and unreliable that they hand carry
books for ILL library to library.  And felt that even if they had any
acquisitions money - which they don't, they rely on gift materials - it
wouldn't work to subscribe because the paper copy just never arrives.

I think we need to distinguish between:
1) electronic as a medium for the end user and
2) electronic as a way of transmitting texts

In many cases, a mixed model may be best - in this one, transmit
electronically but give to the end user in print.

Margaret Landesman
University of Utah