I'm a librarian at a private, independent liberal arts college with
roughly 4000 FTE.  Our patrons are primarily students, not research
scientists.  We are price and product takers.  That means we have to live
with what is available, and we have very, very little voice in pricing
decisions or which serials are available to us in what format.

>>From my perspective on the periphery, Mr. Harnad and Mr. Henderson each
miss or choose to gloss over key points.

Mr. Harnad, IMHO, does not give enough credit to the editorial process.  It
is extremely important for our library to have journals we can trust to have
good content.  Maybe some day it will work to turn students loose into a
vast pool of indexed and even annotated self-published articles, but we sure
ain't there now.

Mr. Henderson consistently lays the blame for the serials crisis at the
feet of university administrators, but I think this misses most of the
true problem, for two reasons.

First, even assuming that everything Mr. Henderson says about research
university spending is true, that says nothing about the spending at the
College of Saint Rose and the thousands of institutions like us.  The 120
or so ARL libraries could buy every single journal published, but that
wouldn't sell enough subscriptions to keep many publishers alive.  I would
think that publishers have to sell many subscriptions to smaller
institutions to make ends meet.  Our college gets by, but we aren't
salting away profits by starving the library (or by any other means).

Second, there are too many instances of sharp price increases by
commercial publishers to blame it on ARL library non-spending.  Any one of
us could point to a journal that doubled, tripled, or quadrupled in price
when it went from a society or small independent publisher to a commercial
publisher.  For instance, the BI journal Research Strategies was published
regularly by Mountainside Publishing for $34 in 1997.  It is now in the
hands of JAI/Elsevier, and for 2000 it costs $125 for a journal with no
more articles and irregular publication.  And I would be curious to see
any reasoned argument that the current Research Strategies has
higher-quality content than it had in the past.

Steve Black
Reference,Instruction, and Serials Librarian
Neil Hellman Library
The College of Saint Rose
392 Western Avenue
Albany, NY 12203

blacks@mail.strose.edu
(518) 458-5494