Last week I was talking to a reference Librarian at Steenbock, and she explained to me that the different campus libraries all have their own budget and use their individual budgets to purchase resources that are then used by the whole campus. I am curious to know how this fits in with bundling though...it seems like there would be a lot of overlap between departments and database needs, and the big bundles include such a variety. Maybe there is a umbrella budget that covers the big ticket items that contain a variety of journal types.
I took a few main messages from the readings this week.
The articles that we read about the Big Deal were really interesting because it touched on the concept of how bundles both help and hurt libraries. In particular, I liked Ken Frazier's 2001 piece "The Librarian's Dilemma: Contemplating the costs of the Big Deal" about the psychology of how individual parties lose sight of the big picture when it comes to short-term gain.
In psychology 101, years ago, I read about a similar experiment to the one Ken Frazier describes, where participants could play a game. In the game they could co-operate with each other, and be gauranteed small success, or work against each other with the possibility of bigger success, at the cost of the greater good. And, just as in Frazier's article, the kicker is that they don't know what choices the other participants are making. It always stuck with me as a truism about the way people operate. Its not that we are not willing to work together, but no one wants to be the shmuck who gives up things when no one else is giving them up.
Frazier's point (that I took) is that libraries need to be willing to develop a trust relationship with each other that will permit them to take united stands against publishers when the time calls for it, and support alternative publishing.
The article about journal pricing in the 1930s and 1980s (Astle & Hamaker, 1988) was also very interesting, and seemed to mirror some of the ideas in Frazier's piece (even though it was not written with electronic resources in mind). It echoed the message that libraries hurt themselves when they become complacent about pricing. A quote within the article kind of previewed what Frazier discussed happening in later times: "American libraries, by their ability and willingness to pay, have enabled publishers to persist in charging exorbitant prices" (p.12).
A longer quote from the Astle & Hamaker article tied into Frazier's concept of "disintermediation"--where libraries are become passive vessels for publishers:
The academic and research library community must become actively involved in the development and implementation of alternative technologies for information distribution as an adjunct to print sources if they are to maintain their central place in the information chain (p.31).
The other readings were also very good, and talked in more detail about pricing considerations, consortia, and publisher-library conflict.
In addition, there were two speakers from WILS (Wisconsin Library Services) who came to discuss how WILS negotiates with vendors on behalf of libraries and how ILL works.
References:
- Journal publishing: Pricing and structural issues in the 1930s and the 1980s, Astle, D. & Hamaker, C. (1988). Advances in Serials Management 2, 1-36.
- The librarian's dilemma: Contemplating the costs of the "big deal". Frazier, K. (2001).. D-Lib Magazine 7 (3).
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