National Round Table on Access to Overseas Monographs Through Australian Libraries
28 August 1998, National Library of Australia
GLOBAL PUBLISHING, INTER LIBRARY LOAN AND AUSTRALIAN COLLECTIONS
Ross Coleman
University of Sydney
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Introduction
In this paper I would like to provide a broad context, or several contexts, to raise and address some of the issues relating to access to overseas monographs in Australia.
In overview, I would like to make some observations on trends in global and scholarly publishing and responses and implications; comment on the monograph in transformation; profile Library users; comment on the Background Papers and Statistics distributed prior to the Round table; and briefly describe overseas interlibrary borrowing and comment on Australian collections. I will conclude with general comments on collections, resource sharing and access.
But first, overshadowing this Round table is the financial crisis facing libraries in Australia. The combination of cuts to University operating funds, the ever-weakening Australian currency and the increasing costs of print and electronic resources is strangling collection budgets and eroding purchasing power. The reality is that we will be facing this situation for some time.
The immediate impact of this crisis is apparent. For example this year Australian University libraries have cancelled over $5.5 million dollars worth of journals. At the University of Sydney we have cancelled 20% of our serials and have cut our research monographs budget by about 23%. The impact is apparent, but the consequences have yet to be experienced.
This crisis will dictate decision-making and planning at the institutional level. How this transforms itself at the national level is an open question - one that this Round table should address.
Trends in global publishing
The growth rate for global book publishing is about 5-8%, varying region by region.
The general breakdown of title output by major geographical regions is : Europe, 43%; Asia 27%, and North America, 13%. The feature of this breakdown is the relative growth of publishing in Asia, which ten years earlier made up about 18% of global book publishing. [1]. This growth of Asian publishing is of particular relevance given the continuing importance of Asia to Australia. Fortunately, the new CJK system, established through the National Library of Australia, provides a strong platform to Australian libraries for bibliographic access and interlibrary loans to Asian material. This distribution is also noteworthy because Australian libraries purchase about 75-80% of books from overseas publishers, and exchange rates are a critical cost variable.
Based on the most recent (1994) statistics [2], China by far the most prolific publisher in the world. The top four publishers are China (100,951 titles), the United Kingdom (95,015 titles), Germany (70,643 titles) and the United States of America (51,863 titles).
These relative shifts in global publishing has generated some concern among research libraries in the US, particularly in regard to their declining coverage of foreign material. Monograph acquisition by American research libraries in 1996 was still 21% below 1986 levels.
One response to these concerns has been the Global Resources Program initiated by the Association of Research Libraries [3]. The purpose of this initiative is to build a network-based, distributed program for the collection of foreign language materials. Three demonstration projects targeting material from Latin America, Japan and Germany have been established.
In many ways this program is revisiting a number of American national and regional coordinated collecting programs [4] dating from the post-war Farmington Plan.
However, what distinguishes this program is the broad objective of redesigning information access and delivery, summed up in this statement :
"If research libraries are to rely on access to remote collections of material, they must redesign information access and delivery services and devise organisational structures to support coordinated collection management in the electronic environment. This requires a fundamental restructuring of collecting activities and the forging of a new kind of partnership among research libraries and the higher education community" [5]
This program provides both a model, and an example of the kinds of specialist collections that the international resource sharing networks plug into to provide material through ILL throughout the world. The program is explicitly part of the 'international information system'
Three of the major international resource sharing networks used by Australian libraries are the OCLC system in the US, the Research Libraries Group SHARE system, and the British Lending Library. While broadly cooperative, these systems also compete for library transaction business. Generally these types of systems have improved bibliographic access considerably with direct internet access to their databases, and are generally providing an efficient turnaround of requested material.
Trends in Scholarly Publishing
Scholarly publishing has been variously described as in a terminal crisis.
This problem was recently the subject of a conference, The Specialised Scholarly Monograph in Crisis, or How Can I Get Tenure If You Won't Publish My Book? [6], sponsored by the American Association of University Presses, the Association of Research Libraries, and the American Council of Learned Societies.
The conference addressed the current state of scholarly communication and the potential of new technologies to provide new means of dissemination and new formats for communication.
There was broad agreement by all participants on the nature of the crisis, which is perhaps best illustrated by the decline in average library sales for University Press titles from about 800 copies per title to about 200 copies.
The situation was described as a vicious spiral of declining sales and increasing prices. The quality of publishing was questioned as too specialised - "too many books with too little to say" - and there was consensus on the observation that the specialised monograph is facing extinction unless it transforms itself.
There appears to be many parallels between the crisis described for the scholarly monograph and the serial publishing crisis.
The Monograph in Transformation
When considering the transformations of the monograph there is a need to keep some perspective on the issue - print is still the primary means of publishing and distributing books. However the monograph is not a generic category, and changes currently taking place are effecting different spheres or niches of monograph publishing. Many of these spheres relate to scholarly and research publishing. The scholarly and research monograph is in trouble, and, seemingly, cannot fully survive in its present form.
The development and emergence of the electronic monograph cannot be discounted. We have seen that the publishers of the specialised monograph are addressing the process of change to new technologies. The growth of electronic text creation projects at many institutions and libraries (including an active program at the University of Sydney Library's Scholarly Electronic Text and Image Service (SETIS) [7]) is, in effect, providing a template for scholarly publishing. At the University of Michigan, for example, the University Press and the Library's Etext Service are collaborating in text publishing. There has been a strong shift towards electronic publishing of government and non-government reports, research and statistics, sometimes in parallel with short-run print publishing. We are also witnessing the emergence of the networked electronic student text.
The pressures for transformation include economic factors relating to viability, and technology and networks factors which provides the opportunities for other publishing options. One impetus for publication continues to be the author's need for publication, either for the sake of tenure or reputation, or just the scholar's intrinsic need to communicate his or her research.
In some ways the crisis and transformation of the monograph can be likened to a house of cards. This is a fairly crude analogy, perhaps better suited to the serial crisis than the monograph. Resting upon the monograph is a structure comprised of economic cards (publishers, booksellers, library suppliers), consumer cards (readers, scholars, students and libraries) content and intellectual property cards (authors, copyright, tenure etc), distributor cards (booksellers and libraries) and archive cards (libraries). As publication formats and distribution change and the economics of publishing begin to shift, then individual cards may begin to buckle - the trick will be how to rearrange the cards to keep the house up or knowing what cards are necessary to rebuild it. The point here is that there are many players in the game, all of whom will be effected in some way as transformation occurs, and each will look to their own interests throughout.
Library user profiles
Some consideration needs to be given at this meeting to the proflie and composition of library users.
At the University of Sydney Library in 1997 the composition of borrowers from the research collections (ie, excluding the Undergraduate Collection) was :
- Academic 5.9%
- Postgraduate (course work and research) 21.3%
- Undergraduate 58.6%
Interlibrary loan borrower of monographs, by type, was estimated (depending on the particular library) as :
- Academic 25-30%
- Postgraduate 70-75%
These distributions are probably proportional to user populations.
What these profiles do indicate is that the design of any access end user system tailored to only academic staff will exclude the majority of users. Postgraduates may be a transitory population, but they have legitimate needs that must be met. Equity of access is an issue that must be kept in mind as we proceed with redesign of information services and delivery.
Background Papers and Statistics
The user perception surveys distributed as background to the Round table seem to generally indicate no major problem with acquisition or access to overseas monographs, for example of the respondents
- 82% no problems in access to foreign language
- 61% satisfied from own library
- 79% happy with library acquisition system
- 73% happy with ILL
The question to be addressed is, however, which users ? The surveys focussed on academic users, while clearly the majority of users are not academics. The satisfaction levels may have varied if postgraduates were also surveyed.
The statistics distributed for the meeting were too generalised for specific conclusions to be made. This was not the fault of the NLA or CAUL, it is because the kind of figures required were not available.
This problem raises the question as to whether there needs to be some kind of Library Research Unit somewhere to facilitate the kinds of analytical surveys and research to provide the thorough and reliable data that is necessary for planning in this situation, and the many other situations facing libraries
Interlibrary borrowing of monographs and Australian collections
Given the lack of specific statistics in relation to ILL some brief consideration of institutional figures may provide some additional background
ILL of monographs only make up a small proportion of all ILL traffic. At the University of Sydney monograph borrowing only comprises 18% of all traffic. This proportion would be similar for most University libraries.
The percentage of monograph borrowing requests placed overseas is similarly small as the figures below indicate:
- USyd 11%
- UWA 13%
- UNSW 10-15%
It would seem, then, that about 85-90% of all monograph requests are satisfied from Australian collections. Whether this is, overall, adequate is a moot point, but it does seem satisfactory.
Any consideration of sourcing raises the question of does it matter whether books are obtained from within or outside Australia. This is the kernel of the just-in-time / just-in-case debate which has centred mainly on document delivery of serial articles. The question of whether books are intrinsically different from serial articles in nature, effective delivery and costs requires further discussion.
It would seem, generally, that access to books from Australian libraries is more cost-effective in time and costs than sourcing from overseas. However many of the actual ILL costs are accommodated by lending libraries, and fully disclosed costs may provide a basis to reconsider such an assumption.
Consideration of the maintenance of collections as a resource base for sharing relates to a recommendations from the Focus Group of ILL Librarians that certain libraries take on the role of national lenders. Issues to be resolved in regard to any library taking on such a role are generally economic (methods of calculation and compensation of actual costs, and maintenance of collection strengths in the face of a deteriorating library budgets) and matters of role conflict (essentially between institutional obligations and national role)
Behind any debate on national roles hovers the ghost of the Distributed National Collection (DNC). The DNC seems to have mysteriously disappeared from any collection discussions in the last year or two. The concern is not so much the DNC being dead, but whether it has been buried without an autopsy. If the DNC has in fact failed, then there are lessons to be learnt that may assist in the conception of other coordinated collection and access programs
Collections, resource sharing and access
Critical to any process of resource sharing and access is the need for improved management / information systems that will integrate both collection, ILL and document delivery activities. Particularly important are ILL management systems, and the integration of collection and access management into local library systems.
As we consider the form of the systems we will need to facilitate effective resource sharing we should consider the relevance of other models such as the ARL Global Resources Program and the RLG SHARE system.
Partnership with faculty is absolutely essential to the success of any coordinated collection and resource sharing arrangements. Faculty needs to agree to and understand the importance and implications of any such programs. It is no use librarians espousing grand theories of collecting and access without having academics (and administrators) at the institutional, regional and national level being committed to any such programs.
At the moment consortia opportunities, in which groups of libraries band together to negotiate purchase or access to resources, appears the most fruitful and practical path for effective networking and sharing. The CAUL consortia deals established through the datasets program is an outstanding example of the success of such arrangements.
The current situation in Australia in regard to monograph collecting and sharing is probably best described as laissez-faire. Libraries pursue their own institutional priorities within their imposed budgets, and ILL functions seem a secondary activity. This current situation, based on academic user perceptions and ILL provision from collections from within Australia, appears to work adequately. The critical question is whether this kind of informal arrangement can continue in the face of the kind of financial crises that libraries are now facing, and whether we (libraries and academics) can agree to resolve it at a regional, national or global level. This is the key issue facing the Round table
[1] Reed-Scott, Jutta. Scholarship, Research Libraries and Global Publishing, the result of a study funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Association of Research Libraries. 1996. p 31
[2] International Book Title Output : 1990-94, in The Bowker Annual, 42nd edition, 1997. pp 520-21
[3] Tactical Plan for the AAU/ARL Global Resources Program url : http://www.arl.org/collect/grp/tactplan.html
[4] The Association of Research Libraries SPEC Kit 195, Cooperative Strategies in Foreign Acquisitions, (1993) describes several national, regional and area-based cooperative programs in the US.
[5] Reed-Scott, op cit. p137
[6] The Specialised Scholarly Monograph in Crisis, or How Can I Get Tenure If You Won't Publish My Book? September 11-12, 1997 url : http://www.arl.org/scomm/epub/program.html
[7] Scholarly Electronic Text and Image Service (SETIS) at the University of Sydney Library url : http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/