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1 This article was downloaded by: [Oregon State University] On: 1 April 2010 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number ] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: Registered office: Mortimer House, Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK The Serials Librarian Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: Future-Proofing the Library: Strategies for Acquisitions, Cataloging, and Collection Development Rick Anderson a a Scholarly Resources & Collections at the Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT To cite this Article Anderson, Rick(2008) 'Future-Proofing the Library: Strategies for Acquisitions, Cataloging, and Collection Development', The Serials Librarian, 55: 4, To link to this Article: DOI: / URL: PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

2 WSER X The Serials Librarian, Vol. 55, No. 4, September 2008: pp ACQUISITIONS ISSUES IN SERIALS Rick Anderson, Editor Acquisitions THE SERIALS Issues LIBRARIAN in Serials Future-Proofing the Library: Strategies for Acquisitions, Cataloging, and Collection Development Rick Anderson ABSTRACT. The future is not perfectly predictable. However, as serialists it is our job to predict the future in some very real ways, and current trends give us valuable tools for at least figuring out a range of possible future scenarios. Certain trends in particular point to highly likely developments in the near future, and wise libraries will position themselves to deal with those developments. They include a continued drift on the part of researchers away from printed resources, from the library catalog, and from non-unique collections, with a concomittant rise in the importance of unique collections and locally-produced scholarships. Libraries can futureproof themselves by, in part, turning decisively away from resources and Rick Anderson is the Associate Director for Scholarly Resources & Collections at the Marriott Library, University of Utah, 195 South 1500 East, Salt Lake City, UT ( rick.anderson@utah.edu). The Serials Librarian, Vol. 55(4) 2008 Available online at by The Haworth Press. All rights reserved. 560 doi: /

3 Acquisitions Issues in Serials 561 services that patrons are abandoning and towards those resources and services that are likely to grow in importance. KEYWORDS. Collection development, catalog, institutional repositories, print resources, online resources, MARC, metadata, future of libraries The future, as we are all painfully aware, is not perfectly predictable. But it can be easy to forget that the future is also nowhere near completely unpredictable, and that what is true today can offers powerful hints about what will surely be true next year and will very likely be true in ten years. For example, we do not know what s going to replace the traditional online library catalog. But our patrons have already adopted new searching tools en masse 1 and show no signs of looking back. Clearly this fact has implications for our future. While electronic books are still awaiting the killer app that will bring them from the margins of research activity into the mainstream, printed reference books are already moribund, and electronic research monographs are beginning to find their way into book vendors approval programs. 2 This is another tide that only flows one way; our patrons will never willingly go back to printed indexes and encyclopedias, and it would be unwise to bet against their adoption of the electronic format for most research monographs as soon as that option is widely available. The difference between books intended as research tools and books intended for cover-to-cover reading a difference that was always obscured in the print realm comes into sharper relief every time a library purchases an ebook (or a package of them). Predicting the future may be difficult, but as librarians working with serial and monographic collections, it is unfortunately a large part of our job. We have to be able to look at the evidence provided by the past and the present, and then do what hurricane forecasters do: figure out a range of likely future scenarios and prepare for them as best we can. That task may be difficult and often frustrating, but it s not completely impossible, and another factor makes it an increasingly urgent one: the information world is changing in ways that tend to make more and more high-quality information available to our patrons at no charge, and with greater and greater ease of access. This means that both the broker and intermediary roles of the library are shrinking, and that in turn means that libraries need to find new ways to make themselves mission-critical to their institutions.

4 562 THE SERIALS LIBRARIAN So what future scenarios seem most likely, and how can we prepare for them? If I were a betting man, I would put serious money on the following predictions: 1. Printed information will continue to fade in importance for research libraries. Granted, this is a pretty safe bet; although disputes continue to rage over the exact speed and future trajectory of this particular development, it would be difficult to find a librarian anywhere who would argue that the printed book and journal issue are not on their way to the margins of the research collection. In fact, the printed journal issue is already on the margins, and in the case of some libraries has essentially disappeared completely. Printed books have not yet disappeared from our shelves or our acquisition programs, but our patrons are disappearing from the book stacks, 3 at least in research libraries. 2. Patrons will use the OPAC less and less. This is not a particularly controversial assertion either. It s becoming increasingly clear to any disinterested observer that the traditional OPAC continues to be a fine inventory tool, but is being inexorably eclipsed as a discovery tool by other, more intuitive and user-friendly search options. 3. The importance of MARC records will decline slowly at first, and then with increasing speed. Even those who acknowledge the decline of the OPAC s importance are often much more reluctant to concede that the MARC record itself is on its last legs. But in an information environment that increasingly provides full-text searchability, the necessity of descriptive metadata of any kind is in question and although that particular question is far from settled, it seems unlikely that the new world of structured metadata will give pride of place to a scheme that was designed with the needs and research patterns of a previous century s researchers in mind. Karen Calhoun perhaps put it most succinctly and trenchantly in her recent report to the Library of Congress on the changing nature of the library catalog: The catalog is in decline, she observed, its processes and structures are unsustainable, and change needs to be swift. 4 Its processes and structures are, of course, centered on the MARC record. Alternative metadata schemes are already making serious inroads into the research environment. 4. Institutional repositories (IR) will grow in importance, initially as showcases and preservers of locally created scholarship and eventually expanding to include other information products.

5 Acquisitions Issues in Serials 563 The library has traditionally functioned like a net cast out into a sea of information, gathering in the best and most relevant information products and organizing them for use by its patrons. As that role becomes less and less necessary, one new opportunity that is emerging is that of acting like a sort of reverse filter, catching locally produced scholarship before it s sent out for public consumption and preserving copies of that scholarship as a record of the institution s scholarly and creative output. The local archive can serve a variety of functions a showcase for institutional achievements, a repository of authoritative versions, a virtual storage facility for faculty and is potentially highly flexible. An IR does not have to limit itself to storing academic papers, but can also be adapted to include large data sets and multimedia files, and can act as an incredibly rich source for data mining. Libraries will increasingly adopt these roles in the near future although perhaps not soon enough. 5. Local collections of non-unique, conventionally published material will decline in importance, suddenly and quickly, and within the next five years; local collections of rare and unique materials will increase in importance, according to the same timetable. Do not be fooled by the huffing and puffing of the publishing industry: the Google Books project, or something very much like it, is going to succeed, and the ramifications of its success will be staggering for libraries. The impact will be felt more strongly in research libraries (where books tend to be used as little databases rather than read from front to back) than in public ones, but it will be felt everywhere. A library that was once useful as a place from which to check out a copy of A History of the English Speaking Peoples or in which to leaf through a volume of statistical abstracts is going to have to find new ways of being useful. One way will be to shift focus from caring for material that is available everywhere to caring for material that is uniquely available in that library, and that has a particular relevance to the institution s identity and goals. Eventually, Special Collections may be our only real collections. Each of these predictions implies its own future-proofing strategy: 1. Redirect staff time away from the acquisition and management of printed materials to the acquisition and management of online resources. All of us who entered this profession because we love books will find this to be a painful step. But it is past time that

6 564 THE SERIALS LIBRARIAN we get over it. The library is not about books; it s about information. Printed resources are only one tool for distributing information, and they are a poor one. Even where printed resources are the only ones available, they still serve patrons badly they are difficult to use, they are not effectively searchable, they are available only in one place at a time, and they are available only when the library is open. Please note that I said redirect staff time away from the acquisition and management of these materials. Let s be perfectly clear about what this means: it means abandoning them. Turning away from them. Forsaking them. Yes, we will continue to buy some books and (heaven help us) subscribe to some printed journals for the foreseeable future but we should do so with quickly mounting reluctance, and only when absolutely necessary. It s not that printed materials are not valuable, but rather that online resources are, generally speaking, far more valuable and the staff time we have available is, in most libraries, dreadfully scarce. Every moment of staff time we invest in acquiring and caring for ineffective information tools like printed journal issues and reference books is a moment that is not being invested in the provision of other materials that will serve our patrons far better. With increasingly rare exceptions, buying printed materials for a research library collection is like drilling more holes in the hull of a sinking boat. 2. Provide new and better finding tools. Do not kill the OPAC (yet), but do not make heroic efforts to prolong its life either. Benign neglect is the key. Benign neglect is our patrons attitude toward the traditional catalog, of course, and we argue with them at our peril. Yes, Library of Congress (LC) subject headings are in many ways wonderful; yes, our carefully maintained authority records make rigorous searching and cross-referencing possible in ways that full-text searchability does not. But none of these things matter if our patrons are not interested. In her report to LC, Calhoun used an economic metaphor to explain the current status of the catalog. It offers, she says, an example of excess capacity a situation in which a good is offered to the marketplace in quantities greater than what consumers desire. But notice this important clarification: Most catalogers would deny there is excess capacity in today s cataloging departments, and they are correct. Library materials continue to flood into acquisitions and cataloging departments and the staff can barely keep up. Yet the key problem of today s

7 Acquisitions Issues in Serials 565 online catalog is the effect of declining demand. In healthy businesses, the demand for a product and the capacity to produce it are in balance. Research libraries invest huge sums in the infrastructure that produces their local catalogs, but search engines are students and scholars favorite place to begin a search. More users bypass catalogs for search engines, but research libraries investment in catalogs and in the collections they describe does not reflect the shift in user demand. 5 In other words, what is being provided in excess of demand is the catalog itself. The solution to this problem, she suggests, is not to eliminate the catalog, but to integrate its content with the other, more useful and effective research tools that patrons understandably prefer. The better libraries are able to insert their resources into the natural stream of patron behavior, the more secure their future will be. 3. Settle for much simpler and less perfect MARC records; actively investigate, and take risks in implementing new finding tools not based on MARC. Because MARC-based catalogs are likely to remain important for libraries for the foreseeable future, a rational method for building and maintaining them is needed. Because MARC-based catalogs are quickly declining in importance and usefulness to the library s stakeholders and staff time is limited, the only rational strategy is to minimize the amount of time and energy invested in their maintenance. This may mean accepting OCLC member copy or vendor-provided records with no editing; where copy is unavailable, it may mean creating quick, minimal records from scratch that do not include the fields that absorb most of an original cataloger s time. And now is the time to begin experimenting with user-created metadata; a few forward-thinking libraries are already moving in this direction, allowing their patrons to help them create descriptions and forge connections between information resources Quickly build and implement an IR, and find creative ways to use it to promote campus products and solve campus problems. The library s future depends on its ability to remain critically important to stakeholders during a time when the library s traditional functions are becoming less necessary. An institutional repository is one way for the library to fulfill an important role as a steward for its institution s scholarly output, but it s important to bear in mind that scholarly output is a broad term. IRs typically include locally

8 566 THE SERIALS LIBRARIAN produced research articles, and in some cases theses and dissertations as well. They can also include material from poster sessions, 7 digital multimedia collections, data sets, and other kinds of information products. It seems likely that very soon, no university will need its library to hold a print copy of Barnaby Rudge. But every university needs, and will continue to need, help keeping track of the huge array of scholarly output that emanates from it every day. A smart library will constantly look for more ways that the IR can be used to help solve a wide variety of information problems for its stakeholders. 5. Begin immediately redirecting staff time away from the care and feeding of non-unique, replaceable materials and toward the development of unique collections. If a good copy of Barnaby Rudge becomes permanently and reliably available for free online, then it becomes much less necessary for any particular library to hold a print copy. Unless, of course, the print copy in question is particularly valuable as a physical artefact if it contains handwritten notes by Charles Dickens or some other significant figure, or if it s a rare early edition. Other books, printed documents, and realia of various kinds may be important to a library because they constitute a unique or regionally significant collection that is unlikely to be duplicated elsewhere. Such collections will rise in relative importance as the importance of traditional, non-unique collections continues to wane, and will offer one more way for libraries to future-proof themselves. No matter how successful the Google Books project becomes, it will never give people the opportunity to hold a 17thcentury diary or a one-of-a-kind tintype photograph in their hands. CONCLUSION The future is taking shape before our eyes, and it is not a future that will require heavily staffed institutional libraries that either painstakingly build tailored (but non-unique) collections of research material, or that act as brokers for the wholesale purchase of incomplete research collections. The library that remains an essential resource to its stakeholders will be the one that has found new ways of meeting its stakeholders needs. The window of opportunity for doing so is closing, and libraries need to act quickly if they wish to remain viable in a radically different information environment.

9 Acquisitions Issues in Serials 567 NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Jia Mi and Cathy Weng, Revitalizing the Library OPAC: Interface, Searching, and Display Challenges. Information Technology & Libraries, 27, no. 1 (2008): Rick Lugg, EBooks and Approval Plans. Available at: ppnts/ebooks%20and%20approval%20plans.ppt (accessed August 7, 2008). 3. Rick Anderson, What Will become of Us?: Looking into the Crystal Ball of Serials Work. Serials, 19, no. 2 (2006): In this article I share statistics from the University of Nevada, Reno indicating that the number of books circulated annually per enrolled student had dropped by 55% over the previous 12 years. 4. Karen Calhoun, The Changing Nature of the Library Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools. March 16, Available at: calhoun-report-final.pdf (accessed August 7, 2008). 5. Ibid. 6. John Wenzler, LibraryThing and the Library Catalog: Adding Collective Intelligence to the OPAC. September 7, Available at: research/ltfl.pdf (accessed August 7, 2008). 7. Consider, for example, the start-up company Trapeze Media Solutions, which offers faculty an interactive repository for all research presented at your conference. Available at: (accessed August 7, 2008).