Matters

The Chronicle: 11/7/2003: A New World of Scholarly Communication: "Higher-education leaders invariably have long lists of difficult issues to confront. These days, high on my list is the future of our university libraries. Although libraries form the basic infrastructure of the academic endeavor, I have come face to face with an unhappy fact: University librarians are now being forced to work with faculty members to choose more of the publications they can do without. The ballooning costs of academic publications are preventing faculty members and researchers from gaining access to the world's scholarship and knowledge.
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One impediment stands out, if only because it is within our collective ability to remove. The homage that we pay to the Association of Research Libraries' membership index -- which ranks the association's more than 120 member libraries largely according to the number of volumes they hold on their shelves -- is self-defeating. The index does not count the electronic or print materials that library consortia own and manage, and thus provides no incentive for consortium members to forgo acquiring holdings that are otherwise available to the system as a whole. Even though the membership index rewards inefficiency and waste, we continue to treat it as a meaningful measure."