TOWARD AN ELECTRONIC JOURNAL ARTICLE DELIVERY SERVICE

V. OTHER POSSIBILITIES

A. Advanced Technology

The advent of image technology, which will be necessary for electronic journal article delivery, opens new possibilities for the SUS libraries. PC-based page scanners enable a number of applications. Digital cameras present another exciting alternativ e for rapid very high resolution image capture with gray shades and even color. To mention some applications, the SUS could use image capture PCs for preservation, creating an electronic reserve book room, or maintaining a copy of classics that are out o f copyright but used so heavily that replacements are frequently needed. Image capture technology has made such rapid advances over the past few years that microfilming, which is the current leading image capture technology for preservation, will soon be obsolete. UF will soon receive PC hardware and software as a gift from IBM to test scanning as a method of preservation.

This plan does not seek funding for these potentially beneficial applications. Grant sources will be sought to begin projects in these areas. It is important to note, however, that developing expertise with image technology for electronic journal deli very will lay a solid foundation for future image applications.

Another rapidly advancing technology is multimedia. Computer systems have advanced beyond text, numbers and even static images to sound, animation and now full-motion video. The multimedia encyclopedia is an innovative alternative to print, but will o nly replace a small percentage of the reference materials collected by libraries in the near future. This plan does not propose a systematic program in the area of multimedia. The priority now is to make improvements in journal article delivery. As mul timedia advances, it will be used in the classroom and the library. The SUS libraries will assess the role of multimedia, but it is much more likely to be stable and affordable later in this decade or early in the next than it is now.

B. Social/Cultural Issues

Historically, libraries have attempted to acquire all of the materials (books, journals, maps, etc.) that they would need to meet the diverse needs of their clientele (research and teaching faculty; graduate and undergraduate students). As the volume o f published information has increased beyond the ability of libraries to acquire it, access to information has risen as a service priority. This phenomenon raises a number of issues related to the role libraries play in their parent organizations. These issues are beyond the scope of this document, but the services proposed here are groundbreaking and therefore are not rewarded in the current systems of evaluation.

1. Accreditation

The strength of a university's library is measured by a variety of organizations for accreditation and membership qualification. Two major criteria for assessing the quality of libraries continue to be the size and quality of the collection. Little e mphasis is placed on improving access. As the time comes that libraries can compensate for the loss of serial subscriptions with access to a shared electronic database, the criteria will need to address access rather than ownership.

2. Tenure and Promotion

The T & P criteria heavily depend upon faculty publications. It is the irony of traditional library collection development practices that universities fund faculty to do research and publish articles in journals which the libraries then have to purcha se in order for the research to be disseminated. As more and more journals are acquired by commercial publishing conglomerates, the ownership of the intellectual effort is transferred away from the funding institution via the assignment of copyright of t he articles to those publishers. They are then able to impose restrictions and fees on the use of those articles by the institutions' libraries. In the case of electronic versions of printed articles, these restrictions and fees are more severe than the y are for the original print form. To cite the most serious example, "fair use" as previously defined for printed articles is disappearing for electronic articles. Some institutions are beginning to address these pressures through such policy changes su ch limiting the number of publications to be cited for tenure, disallowing faculty from assigning away copyright, and discouraging faculty from serving on editorial boards of journals which have had inordinate price increases (reflecting publisher price g ouging rather than true cost increases). U.S. academic libraries will need these kinds of changes for electronic scholarly articles to gain a solid foothold.