The challenge of managing journal collections

Abstract

I have the bad luck of writing on a topic that requires me to begin with a confession of a certain degree of failure. It is not a confession in which I stand alone, but a corporate confession on behalf of our profession. We have not exactly managed our journal collections well, if by manage we mean to have maintained some larger understanding of what has been going on with journal publications and by virtue of that understanding to have influenced those publications in a way which served the best interests of scholarship, libraries, and educational institutions. We have, rather, been late in our analysis and understanding and correspondingly marginal in our efforts to have a salubrious effect on journal publishing, particularly the publishing of journals by commercial agencies and the generally perceived declining quality of journal articles brought about by intense pressures for faculty members to publish. We are, I am pleased to say, rectifying the matter of inadequate understanding of the larger situation surrounding journal publications. We have many individual libraries and librarians to thank for that as well as our various library associations and their subgroups. I call your attention to one of the latest analyses of the problem. This is an excellent study conducted by the Association of Research Libraries entitled Report of the ARL Serials Prices Project (ARL: Washington, D.C., May 1989). The heart of that report is two studies, one being “A Study of Trends in Average Prices and Costs of Certain Serials over Time” conducted by an independent corporation, Economic Consulting Services, Inc., and the other being an exceedingly perceptive study of the many complex factors that have given rise to the current situation with regard to journal and other serial prices. I commend this report to you. Our growing understanding aside, there are some things that we simply do not manage. Journals have become and are presently the key medium in the advance of science and technology. We have been made acutely aware of the increasing rapidity of the advance of human knowledge in these areas. Even if we were to cure the problems of quality control, multiple