RE: Is it time to stop printing journals?

["Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>]

> I think print will continue to be necessary until we as a 
> profession can develop the confidence in e-archives that we now 
> have in print as an archival format. Will we ever develop that 
> confidence? What will it take?

As time goes on, I think permanent archival access is going to be 
a central function for fewer libraries.  During the print era, we 
all thought of ourselves as more-or-less permanent repositories 
of the information we selected.  But we paid for permanence with 
breadth -- we could afford to house our journals permanently, but 
we couldn't afford to buy everything our patrons needed.  Today 
we can flip that model: online access makes it possible for us to 
provide much more of the content our patrons want, but (in many 
cases) not to do so in a reliably permanent way.

This means we have to ask ourselves a serious question: to what 
degree is permanence of access more important than breadth of 
coverage?  I think the right answer will vary depending on the 
library.  A big ARL should probably worry much more about 
permanence than a community-college library should.  And it also 
probably depends on the kind of content.  I think the important 
thing, though, is that we stop assuming that permanence is always 
a trump-card issue.

---
Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
rickand@unr.edu