The extent to which a university is being prudent rather than miserly in
not spending all its endowment returns is much-debated. I and almost all
other librarians and faculty obvious think that in general the university
should spend more than 1/3 or 1/2. This is a matter of major concern, but
its effects are not limited to libraries. If my university were to spend
half again as much of its income from the endowment there would be many
useful things to do with the money in addition to library resources.

In fact, if my admittedly extremely wealthy university were to spend twice
as much on the library (which would not be that much of its income), and I
think it certainly can and certainly should, I would suggest that most of
the money be used for increasing the number of professional staff devoted
to direct user services and user outreach, and not primarily to the
acquisitions budget.

I do not think our administrators mistaken when they say that scientific
journals as currently published are in large part not worth the money. I
think they are very much mistaken when they say we can reduce our
expenditures on them when we do not yet have an alternative system
implemented.

I think they are indeed looking at quality and, Al, that you are not.
You have been maintaining on this list and elsewhere that everything
currently published, and more, is worth publishing, even at the current
costs. I know that in my subject this statement shows an ignorance of the
relatively low worth of most of it, and I suspect this is true of many if
not all other fields. (It might help you realize this if -- off the list--
you and I were to examine some of the actual material published in any
field we both understood.)

The provision of the optimal information does not mean provision of the
maximal information. No researchers could do original research if it was
also necessary for them to keep track of literally all conceivably
relevant work. What the librarian's role is, in both reader services and
collections building, is to help them find the information they need, and
avoid the information they do not need. The second part of that is the
harder.

But for all the information they need, they are no longer dependent upon
the scientific journals for distributing it or even for validating it. I
will not recap all the proposals, and I do not claim to be able to predict
what the successful system will prove to be. But I do know that we could
adequately distribute all current research at very much less cost without
loss of essential function, and I think we will.

Libraries do need additional resources. We will not get them if it is not
thought we will use them wisely. Spending yet more over the indefinite
future on the present system of scientific journals is about the most
unproductive use of the money I can imagine. I, like you, want everything
possible to be available for research. But I know that this can only be
done if it is made available at a practical cost. If you insist upon
making it available in a way appropriate only to the most prestigious
material , the result will be that it will not be made available at all.
The more esoteric the material, the smaller the audience, the truer this
is. The more a university library is a research institution, the truer it
is. Even if some research libaries were funded as you hope, most of the
educational world would not be able to afford them. The more important you
general availability is, the more important low cost is. I think it more
important to disseminate the results of research and scholarship than to
price them as luxuries.

Al, a personal plea: if you would direct your efforts to finding out what
researchers and teachers really need now, and helping us get it, you would
do much more good than if you continue to maintain, contrary to all
experience over the last decade at least, that what they need is a bigger
and more expensive version of a cumbersome and outmoded system.

 David Goodman, Princeton University Biology Library
 dgoodman@princeton.edu            609-258-3235

On Mon, 22 May 2000, Albert Henderson wrote:

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