on 5/17/00  Peter Picerno <ppicerno@choctaw.astate.edu> wrote:

> You can certainly add my "you got it" to the messages below. As
> information professionals, none of us _wants_ to deny information access
> to anyone: however, for those of us who do not work at research libraries
> with unlimited funds, we have the obligation to serve each of our patrons
> to the best of our financial (and other!) abilities. This means, very
> simply, that continually dumping money into the black hole of journal
> publishers -- whether they be corporate or society -- coffers, and when
> the demands of the publishers yearly exceeds the annual inflation and cost
> of living rate by 100% or more, and when our budgets do not increase (as
> mine certainly hasn't!!) in step with publisher demands, there comes a
> point when fiscal responsibility has to weigh in with the benefits of
> "owning" scholarly information.

Publishers are sinking in the same boat as libraries. Herbert
S. White pointed this out in a cartoon some decades ago.

If you would look at the skyrocketing of academic R&D funding,
rather than publishers' prices, you might see that it was the
universities that betrayed you and your patrons -- not the
publishers.

> What bemuses me is that publishers cannot see, or refuse to believe, that
> small and medium academic libraries WILL reach a point where they have to
> say "too bad, so sad" to many subscriptions. This IS the reality of the
> publishing world -- and if publishers want to price themselves out of
> business because they want to live in a fantasy world made up of surviving
> by the academic welfare system, they may eventually find themselves the
> bibliographic equivalents of street people.

The falling tide will ground all boats that don't
bother to put out to sea. If lowering prices would
not put them out of business, believe me, publishers
would happily lower their prices.

ARL statistics projected in a PW article a few years
ago indicated that ARL libraries would buy nothing
in a decade or two. Will they then employ librarians
or just mail order clerks?

> None of us is so idealistic to believe that information has no price. Yet
> none of us is so stupid to believe that one journal or monograph is the
> "pearl of great price" for which we will sacrifice all of the rest of our
> bibliographic resources.

Thank you for your comments.

Albert Henderson
Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY
<70244.1532@compuserve.com>