Re: One library or many?

[Steve Hitchcock <sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

This debate was originally presented by Andrew Odlyzko in 1999
Competition and Cooperation: Libraries and Publishers in the Transition to 
Electronic Scholarly Journals
Journal of Electronic Publishing Vol. 4, No. 4, June, 1999
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-04/odlyzko0404.html

There are real issues here, and real pressures that are being driven by
real change, more so now, even though libraries, especially digital
libraries, have changed significantly since 1999.

Steve Hitchcock

At 22:36 14/09/04 -0400, Samuel Trosow wrote:
> Gee Joe, you're right. It would be a HUGE savings! Libraries at each
> institution? How silly.
>
> And while cost conscious administrators are at it, there are probably
> plenty of personnel savings to be found using such logic. If you only need
> one library, maybe you only need one librarian. What a fabulous idea,
> think of all of the money that would be saved. It would take the strain
> off the serials budget and there'd be less squawking about the high costs
> of periodicals then.
>
> And why stop with librarians, why not eliminate the nasty costs of the
> professoriate as well?  After all, with all of the marvelous information
> technologies at our fingertips, all we need do is caputure each prof's
> best lecture, and get their course outlines on something like WebCT. Why
> face the nasty prospect of recurring salaries when there could be a
> reasonable technological fix?
>
> Certainly we'll need adminstrators to keep thinks running smoothly. And of
> course, we'll need to have private information vendors...the
> administrators will need to have lunch without someone.
>
> Great ideas Joe, keep'm coming. Only problem is, someday you may be the
> only one left on this list!
>
> Sam Trosow
> University of Western Ontario