Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the nature of research: even in the print realm, most of a research
library's books are used, most of the time, like databases. The student
carrying a pile of ten books out of the stacks and into a study carrel
usually has no intention of reading those books from cover to cover, but
intends, rather, to interrogate them, looking for relevant chapters,
pages and passages. This he does, at great expense of time and energy,
by using crude and ineffective indexes. GBS makes this variety of
research immensely easier and quicker; even those books still under
copyright can be searched freely, and extracts read, copied and cited.
GBS does not make everything completely and freely available, but it
makes a vast amount of material easily and quickly searchable, and vast
tracts of it freely available - and does so far more completely, easily and
freely than any individual library ever could. This fact is what will affect
the future of the traditional library, and it is in this reality that the crisis
of the collection consists.
Publishers - the crisis of price
Libraries have been warning for decades of a looming budget crisis. The
genesis of this warning is both simple and undeniable: an inflation rate
for many scholarly publications (particularly journals in the hard and
social sciences) that has persisted at unsustainable levels for the past
several decades. Libraries, over the same period, have seen their budgets
increase at far lower rates (when they increase at all). There is no reason
to believe that either of these trends will change in the foreseeable future.
This reality has two fundamental impacts on the scholarly
information marketplace. First, libraries, saddled with rapidly
increasing prices for ongoing access to journals to which they already
subscribe, are able to buy smaller and smaller numbers of new
subscriptions each year, when they are able to buy any at all. Second,
and consequently, publishers find themselves able to sustain growth
only at the expense of other publishers. In other words, the rate at
which libraries infuse cash into the scholarly information environment
has stalled, while publishers work with increasing desperation to steal
shares of a shrinking market from each other. The crisis has been
looming for decades, but its inevitable arrival was greatly hastened by
a sharp and worldwide economic downturn in late 2008 and 2009.
Libraries throughout the world saw budget cuts - in some cases
