Re: Data on circulation of books

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Responses to my query on circulation continue to come in, but I 
wanted to address just one aspect of Tony's comment below.

Can we "take the digitisation of journal backfiles as an 
indicator"?  I don't think we can.  Backlist and out-of-print 
books have always been actively monitored by publishers, but not 
so journal backfiles until the advent of online publishing.  The 
monitoring of books in "the old days" (pre-1994) took various 
forms, not the least of which being the editorial advisory boards 
that all publishers work with.  Many, many times when I was the 
editor of a college paperback line I would get a letter 
(hardcopy, with an actual stamp on the envelope) suggesting that 
I bring this or that book back into print.  Entire companies were 
built around this (e.g., Dover Publications).  And authors 
monitored this:  all publishers from the prehistoric period 
remember receiving letters from authors or their agents invoking 
the "out of print" clause, which stipulated that the rights be 
reverted to the author after a particular title was no longer 
available to the public; such letters often resulted in a book 
going into a reprint. Journals always had a different 
dynamic--the rights issue for one, where there was no motivated 
author since there was no basis for a reversion of rights.

In the end we will have the empirical data, and that should put 
an end to this argument.  My principal regret is that money and 
time (and time is the bigger factor) are being expended by some 
against the expectation that there will be an enormous boon for 
scholars when, say, all the books published in 1919 are suddenly 
available at the click of a mouse.  I would have preferred, 
cheapskate that I am, for the proposition to be tested first.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mcsean, Tony (ELS)" <T.Mcsean@elsevier.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2007 3:59 PM

> I think this is one of those unanswerable questions.  When I 
> ran the BMA library our annual book loan figures were almost 
> 50% of the total stock, but this was a working clinician's 
> library as well as research and that would distort the numbers. 
> I would think that was pretty well up the hectic end of the 
> continuum and that for most large, old research libraries the 
> long tail would be of midgard serpent dimensions.
>
> To answer speculatively your question on the efects of 
> large-scale digitisation.  If we take the digitisation of 
> journal backfiles as an indicator, we can probably expect to 
> see the usage increase pretty significantly, and ILL traffic to 
> diminish also.
>
> Tony McSean
> Director of Library Relations
> Elsevier
> London NW1 7BY