Re: Harnad vs. Henderson: A view from the bleachers David Goodman 23 May 2000 05:16 UTC
The extent to which a university is being prudent rather than miserly in not spending all its endowment returns is much-debated. I and almost all other librarians and faculty obvious think that in general the university should spend more than 1/3 or 1/2. This is a matter of major concern, but its effects are not limited to libraries. If my university were to spend half again as much of its income from the endowment there would be many useful things to do with the money in addition to library resources. In fact, if my admittedly extremely wealthy university were to spend twice as much on the library (which would not be that much of its income), and I think it certainly can and certainly should, I would suggest that most of the money be used for increasing the number of professional staff devoted to direct user services and user outreach, and not primarily to the acquisitions budget. I do not think our administrators mistaken when they say that scientific journals as currently published are in large part not worth the money. I think they are very much mistaken when they say we can reduce our expenditures on them when we do not yet have an alternative system implemented. I think they are indeed looking at quality and, Al, that you are not. You have been maintaining on this list and elsewhere that everything currently published, and more, is worth publishing, even at the current costs. I know that in my subject this statement shows an ignorance of the relatively low worth of most of it, and I suspect this is true of many if not all other fields. (It might help you realize this if -- off the list-- you and I were to examine some of the actual material published in any field we both understood.) The provision of the optimal information does not mean provision of the maximal information. No researchers could do original research if it was also necessary for them to keep track of literally all conceivably relevant work. What the librarian's role is, in both reader services and collections building, is to help them find the information they need, and avoid the information they do not need. The second part of that is the harder. But for all the information they need, they are no longer dependent upon the scientific journals for distributing it or even for validating it. I will not recap all the proposals, and I do not claim to be able to predict what the successful system will prove to be. But I do know that we could adequately distribute all current research at very much less cost without loss of essential function, and I think we will. Libraries do need additional resources. We will not get them if it is not thought we will use them wisely. Spending yet more over the indefinite future on the present system of scientific journals is about the most unproductive use of the money I can imagine. I, like you, want everything possible to be available for research. But I know that this can only be done if it is made available at a practical cost. If you insist upon making it available in a way appropriate only to the most prestigious material , the result will be that it will not be made available at all. The more esoteric the material, the smaller the audience, the truer this is. The more a university library is a research institution, the truer it is. Even if some research libaries were funded as you hope, most of the educational world would not be able to afford them. The more important you general availability is, the more important low cost is. I think it more important to disseminate the results of research and scholarship than to price them as luxuries. Al, a personal plea: if you would direct your efforts to finding out what researchers and teachers really need now, and helping us get it, you would do much more good than if you continue to maintain, contrary to all experience over the last decade at least, that what they need is a bigger and more expensive version of a cumbersome and outmoded system. David Goodman, Princeton University Biology Library dgoodman@princeton.edu 609-258-3235 On Mon, 22 May 2000, Albert Henderson wrote: ...........>