LibraryLink

Research libraries serve academic institutions offering advanced study programs, or organizations committed to intense investigation of some area of the natural or humane sciences. The national libraries and some large public libraries also support research.

Areas of concern for Research Libraries (RLs).

• The kinds and amounts of research materials have greatly increased.

• Consolidation in the academic publishing industry has caused market dominance by a few very large concerns. This is especially true in Scientific, Technical and Medical publishing (STM).

• STM publishers charge high prices and increase these prices steadily, at a rate of about 10% annually.

• Academic library budgets have either grown slightly, been flat, or been reduced.

• To support the STM journals, many libraries cut journals in other fields and reduced book purchases, especially in the Social Sciences and Humanities.

• University presses couldn’t sell as many of the specialized monographs which academic libraries had previously purchased without question. The Presses also raised their prices and began to refuse more of the manuscripts submitted by scholars as too esoteric and unlikely to “move”.

• This reluctance grew from the increased corporate attitude among university administrators who viewed the Presses as business units which had to succeed financially or be eliminated.

• Younger scholars failed to attain tenure, because they failed to publish the mandatory monograph in the prescribed time, since they could find no publisher. This caused great resentment toward the RL policy of supporting STM journals, at almost any cost.

• Libraries have had to introduce and maintain costly technology, keep it current and hire or reassign personnel for this purpose.

• The purchase of a book or journal confers ownership in American law, under the so-called ‘First Sale’ doctrine. But many distributed electronic resources are leased, and so stand outside First Sale provisions. Access licenses can be restrictive and easily could see the same “cost creep” that afflicted STM materials.

• RL clients insist on the convenience of electronic materials, so libraries are canceling print versions of journals and moving to an “all e” posture. As a result they are buying and owning less, and leasing more.

• Content is increasingly being stored on the computers of a few corporations, which may not view it in the way librarians and scholars have. There are also many unsolved questions about preservation of inherently fragile digital materials.

• Research libraries have to rethink the entire apparatus of Bibliographic Control, the process of identifying and describing resources and enabling their use. Many of the concepts, tools and methods now in use for this purpose were created in the 19th century, and are reaching the limits of their usefulness. Some very interesting and even exciting advances are in prospect but implementation is difficult and costly.

• Academic librarianship is “graying” and members are leaving just at the time when the challenges are greatest. Replacement cadres are hard to recruit. Intelligent, well educated and highly cultured women,the traditional mainstay of research librarianship, now have wider opportunities and look elsewhere in choosing a career. Young people may view librarians as badly underpaid and without real status or influence in their organizations. And, uninformed comments about the “death of libraries” due to pervasive networked technology may raise doubts about whether academic librarianship will even exist in the future.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) represents the interests of RL members in North America:
ARL Home

The Association publishes ARL Bimonthly Reports on matters concerning research libraries:
Reports