This has been (and will be) much discussed on liblicense-l (www.library.yale.edu/~llicense) from many people's viewpoints. For starters, let me summarize -- online -- my personal view on some factors. For a research library, archival considerations are paramount. Some few publishers have adequate backup arrangments, which as a minimum include the guarantee that the material will be available from a national library or institution of comparable stature if they go out of business or otherwise cannot provide the material. Without these provisions, no research library should even think of discarding the original titles, or stopping to subscribe in paper to important titles in its field, though this would be different for a non-research library. Even with this provision, a research library that has especially strong holdings in a subject on a national scale probably has the responsibility to keep paper as long as the paper is still published--there is an urgent need for this responsibility to be organized on a systematic basis. An example from my own institution: as biology selector at Princeton I discontinued print subscriptions to many journals in biology, even some of the most important journals, because in the absence of medical and agricultural schools we gave up the attempt at comprehensive coverage many decades ago, and are not a collection of archival stature in this subject. (The users, by the way, have not complained, or even noticed--they look online first.) The mathematics and physics selectors did exactly the opposite, keeping essentially all subscriptions in print as well as electronic, because the collection in this area is one of the most complete anywhere. In some subject areas, quality of reproduction is a consideration. For currently published science material from major publishers, the quality of reproduction in the online version is at least as good as the paper, and high quality copies ar e much more readily printed than photocopied--especially in color. I cannot speak about other subjects. Material converted to electronic format in earlier years may be a problem. To take an example from a field I know about, the woodcuts in the early volumes of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society are considerably clearer in the original than on JStor. (This is not an inherent limitation of electronics or of JStor: this material was scanned some years ago.) Another problem is oversized material: material larger than a conventional journal or book, such as Harper's Weekly, is very inconvenient to view and especially to print in electronic format. Whether the existing print copies material can be appropriately removed from the main stacks and kept in storage is a more flexible matter. The only guide here is actual use at your own institution, and the ease of recovering items from your storage facility, including both individual articles and comp lete runs. I think no research institution should physically discard existing print runs if any suitable storage can be found. It should of course be noted that while MUSE, ScienceDirect and so on can substitute for a printed subscription, JSTOR by intent covers only backfiles and cannot be used that way. And I am sure we all realize that the versions of journals obtained from aggregators have no promise of permanent availability, and are not suitable replacements for proper print or electronic subscriptions by any research library (though they are very good values for many other purposes). All of this is my personal view only. Dr. David Goodman Princeton University Library and Palmer School of Library & Information Science, Long Island University dgoodman@princeton.edu ----- Original Message ----- From: Lauren Corbett <lcorbet@EMORY.EDU> Date: Thursday, December 5, 2002 5:57 pm Subject: Re: Using JSTOR vs. keeping print > I would like to see reponses on the list please! > > As a tangentially related question, I'm interested in knowing how many > libraries, particularly large academic libraries, are still > subscribingto print when they have Project Muse, Wiley > Interscience, or Science > Direct, etc. > > I know some smaller libraries that dropped print several years ago > wererelying on the larger libraries at least continuing the print > archive;I'm wondering now if the larger libraries are dropping > print too and the > need for an archiving solution is growing in importance. > > -- > Lauren Corbett > Acquisitions Team Leader & > Interim Division Leader for Information Resources > Emory University -- Woodruff Library > ph: 404 712 1818 > fax: 404 727 0408 > > > > > Janice Ouellette wrote: > > >Hello all, > >I'm new to this list and I apologize if this issue has been talked > into>the ground already. > > > >For those Libraries which hold subscriptions to JSTOR (or Project > MUSE)>- has the decision been mad e to remove print volumes and rely > on this > >electronic archive? If yes, can you share the rationale, and if no, > >please share reasons also. > > > >Could you respond to me offlist? > > > >Cordially, > >Jan Ouellette > > >
