Re: Yes, it's time (RE: Is it time to stop printing journals?)

[David Goodman <dgoodman@princeton.edu>]

But there are such services--and Proquest and Ebsco and Wilson 
and others have been providing it very successfully for a number 
of years now. They have among other things greatly facilitated 
the ability of libraries to keep intact files of this material, 
and for university to provide access to a wide range of material 
to which they would not ordinarily subscribe.

At a more popular level, the problem has been solved by the 
(usually free) web editions of many magazines and newspapers, and 
their aggregation via RSS. And in many fields, the growth of 
web-only magazine-like services--for me, the most important of 
them is slashdot--there has ever been an equally good way of 
access to this sort of material.

It is not only librarians and conventional publishers who can 
figure out effective ways for distributing content.

David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
dgoodman@princeton.edu

----- Original Message -----
From: adam hodgkin <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com>
Date: Friday, April 27, 2007 10:18 pm
Subject: Re: Yes, it's time (RE: Is it time to stop printing journals?)
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu

> A rather delayed response to this thread, which I found very 
> interesting. It has been leading me to puzzle out why the 
> consumer magazine market has not gone in the same direction (at 
> least it has not gone there yet)
>
> http://exacteditions.blogspot.com/2007/04/journals-and-consumer-magazines.html
>
> I have also been wondering why a similar aggregation solution for
> consumer magazines, seems so unattractive. Can one imagine a
> Science Direct for all the major consumer magazines? It would be
> a rather monstrous compilation, but does that not tell us
> something about how much the big research libraries really
> wanted/needed solutions like Science Direct? Only with big and
> efficient aggregators such as Elsevier could the STM library
> world have moved so quickly towards an electronic solution for
> their patrons. Libraries are of course vastly more important to
> the STM market than they are to the consumer magazine publishers.
>
> However, it seems likely that there is some role for
> comprehensive aggregation services for digital books and digital
> magazines. Adam
>
> On 3/31/07, Rick Anderson <rickand@unr.edu> wrote:
>>> I am curious to hear whether this is a commonly held sentiment.
>>
>> I wouldn't call Scott's statement an expression of sentiment; it
>> was an observation of what's happening among his patrons.  And I
>> would largely second it from the perspective of my institution.
>> A few years ago we instituted a strict and explicit program of
>> online preference for our journals -- if a journal is available
>> online and someone wants us to acquire it in print, that person
>> must submit a written justification to the Dean of Libraries.  I
>> think I can count on one hand the number of requests that we've
>> received.  The fact is that printed paper is a lousy format for
>> distributing journal content.  It's a great format for extended
>> reading, but a terrible one for any other kind of
>> information-seeking.
>>
>>> If this equation has indeed flipped in a matter of a half-dozen
>>> or so years, this ranks as one of the most important periods in
>>> scholarly communication history.
>>
>> I don't think there's any question that this is exactly the case.
>> What's been remarkable to me is the range of responses to these
>> dramatic changes -- library patrons have largely taken them in
>> stride, few of them seemingly aware of the fundamental and
>> radical nature of the changes that have taken place in the
>> marketplace that serves them.  Many of us in the library
>> profession, meanwhile (though by no means all of us), are in
>> denial, defending our traditional territory and furiously
>> continuing to focus on the materials that our patrons are least
>> interested in.
>>
>> Is it time to stop printing journals?  Yes, and past time -- even
>> in the humanities, where affection for print has tended to
>> linger.  Regardless of content, ink-on-paper is a highly wasteful
>> and ineffective way to distribute discrete, article-sized chunks
>> of information.
>>
>> It's also, by the way, time to stop thinking in terms of journal
>> "issues" -- the issue is a meaningless construct that made sense
>> only in the print realm.
>>
>> Rick Anderson
>> Dir. of Resource Acquisition
>> University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
>> rickand@unr.edu