Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the scholars' ability to access the material. With collections and full text access to a
large of number of journals, scholars rarely need to rely on ILL services.
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Reduced real estate cost
. The availability of e-journals reduces the library's real
estate costs. Currently, libraries preserve thousands of volumes of serials placed on
hundreds of shelves. Given the physical limitations on sharing paper articles among
libraries, each library must maintain their own copies of a given serial. Often libraries
hold several copies of topics and other printed material so that multiple persons can
check them out. That is, universities allocate a large amount of physical space for
their libraries' archives. Electronic material obviously requires much less physical
space.
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Electronic material is also less sensitive to humidity and heat but requires
attention to damage caused by fire, flood and other natural disasters, much like paper
material.
Increased access by students and teaching faculty
. A study of the usage pattern of
JSTOR indicates a major increase during semester months and a major drop in usage
during the months of December, January, June, July and August. In some cases, the
drop is substantial (over 50%). Assuming that research faculty does most of their
research in the summer,
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one can conclude that during the semester months, ma-
jority of the access is for teaching purposes by research and teaching faculty and by
students.
6.4.2 The Challenges of Electronic Collections
Covi and Cragin
[10]
point out that while providers often add titles, they also drop
titles, leading to a lack of continuity in the material a library carries. In the past, when
a library dropped a subscription, it traditionally kept prior issues (archives). With
electronic collection services, when a provider drops a title, access to all previous
material to that journal is discontinued. Past issues are not archived.
To accommodate e-journals and collections, libraries require a different set of
skills. For example, scholars need less help with searches. However, some scholars
may require more help in accessing web sites and configuring their Internet browsers.
Libraries need information technologists that can help with the installation and main-
tenance of the library's Web site, configure network infrastructure and servers, and
set up backup and recovery systems. Whether electronic skills are more expensive
than traditional librarian skills and whether any added technology expenses are being
offset by reduced real estate costs depends on individual situations.
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In addition, current inter-library loan services send articles in digital form, reducing the time and cost
of delivery.
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Space reduction is true even if we include the need for a server room, networking and switching closets
and other Internet related technology.
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Therefore, we assume that the access to JSTOR during the summer months is predominately by re-
search faculty and postgraduate students conducting research.
