Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
together with libraries to provide a structured network integration of
services. It may well be that campus bookshops as we know them will
disappear in a networked environment as will certain of the topic
supplier middlemen unless they restructure. University presses, a
declining force in recent years, may well become transformed as they
mutate into distributors of information from their own and other
universities in electronic format, thereby making available information
that was too prohibitively expensive to produce and distribute in
conventional form.
(Steele, 1995)
A decade later, the integration of POD production, publishing and
libraries is becoming increasingly feasible, as developments at Sydney
and Michigan universities have confirmed. As students reduce their
purchasing of books and textbooks, the offerings of the campus
bookstore have largely become a mixture of university memorabilia,
paperbacks and course reading material. Meanwhile, university libraries
are moving large numbers of books and bound serials into off-campus
stores so that information/learning commons facilities can be installed.
The similarities in access to and provision of information 'fast food' will
blur and integrate the roles of the library and campus bookstore.
The historic decline of the academic monograph
Bauerlein (2009), citing Association of Research Libraries data, reveals
that the number of monographs purchased by US research libraries rose
just 1% between 1986 and 2006. The British Academy (2005) was
greatly concerned about the impact of such trends and the decline of
the scholarly monograph:
In the 1960s and 1970s, far fewer monographs were published than now,
with routine global sales of 1500 or more. But these sales levels were not
sustained, and a declining sales step-curve has been evident throughout
the past quarter century, with a vicious circle of declining sales driving
higher prices driving declining sales. Individual publishers have
responded by issuing more and more individual titles, but with lower
expectations of each. Global sales can now be as low as 250 or 300 in
some fields. At some point in the 1990s, the UK academy ceased to be a
self-sustaining monographic community: the subjects that have survived
