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Judith Stokes writes:
>You bet your your bottom serials dollar, we would cancel the journals
>the A & I publishers deemed too expensive to include!  It is not only
>not "tacky" for the A & I industry to bring this issue to our attention
>BEFORE it becomes a footnote to 1995 serials price histories, it is
>exactly what librarians have been asking for!

>So far, we have learned that:--

>(1)  At present, most publishers supply their journals free of charge
>to major A&I publishers.  Presumably, they agree that inclusion in a
>widely held index is equivalent to free advertising that directly reaches
>their target clientele.

You are assuming something that is not true. I was assigned in the early
1970s by a major journal publisher (200+ titles) to make sure that A&I
services were paying for their subscription copies either in cash or
barter. The latter was acceptable only if the publisher had some use for
the index (my job as part-time librarian: to assess the value). What's
more I recall a major association publisher with some 70 journals selling
their author/title/abstract data on tape to an A&I service, saving the
latter the need to rekey it, rather than selling subscriptions to the
print product. Charging A&I services for subscriptions is more common
than some folks would lead you to believe.

>( 2)  Shift this cost from the journal publisher to the A&I publisher and
>the A&I publisher will pass it along to the libraries in one of two forms:
>... higher  A&I subscription prices, or
>... lower numbers of titles indexed (specifically, lower numbers of EXPEN-
>SIVE titles indexed)
>... or, perhaps some combination of higher prices and fewer titles than we
>would otherwise expect.

>(3)  The A&I folks want to avoid cancellations of their services, so they
>have to find out where the market is most flexible, price or service,
>before they can proceed.

>(4)  Already, we are in a spiral in which price increases cause cancella-
>tions which increase publishers' cost-per-subscription which causes price
>increases.

This too seems incorrect. Publishers' prices increase as the number of
pages + inflation forces them upward. The increase in pages can be
traced to the doubling of academic researchers over the last 20 years.
But that's only 1/2 the story. I am aware of many studies published over
the last 15 years or so, the latest called UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AND
SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATIONS (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), showing academic
library budgets cut drastically.

Meanwhile, DIGEST OF EDUCATIONAL  STATISTICS reports administrative costs
increasing -- at the expense of library funding. There seems to be plenty
of cash to provide low (and no-) interest loans and mortgages to
university officials, to pay for lobbying and public relations, to
speculate in real estate and other ventures, and to party. The CHRONICLE
OF HIGHER EDUCATION seems to come up with some story along these lines
once a month. At least two Congressional committees have taken an
interest as well. The latest AP (28 Sept.) cites increased health care
coverage and scholarships have drawn cash away from the library, faculty
salaries, building maintenance. It also observes that the number of
non-faculty professionals has increased 123 percent over the last 15
years.

Why not put the blame where it belongs?

>Seems to me, we are ALL better off if we do not generate that
>spiral anew, i.e., if publishers continue to subsidize the cost of providing
>journal issues to A&I publishers.  It may be the equivalent of charging all
>subscribers for the cost of providing an extra service to library users, but
>that may be a much smaller burden than sharing the increased cost-per-
>subscription among a significantly smaller subscriber base.

But "all journal subscribers" does not equal "all A&I subscribers," does
it? Many A&I subscribers are not sharing "the cost of providing an extra
service to library users" because they do not subscribe to all of the
journals indexed. In many libraries, the existance of A&I coverage plus
resource sharing equals an excuse to cancel the journal.

>In my library, it would work that way, no matter how the A&I folks respond.
>If index prices rise, I will cancel journals to pay for them because I
>cannot cancel the indexes (unless I can substitute a satisfactory competing
>index) because without the indexes I cannot even send students to a neighboring
>library or offer them document delivery to satisfy their needs.  On the
>other hand, if relatively expensive titles are dropped from certain index
>services, I will still cancel them, because I have a box of 98 titles
>faculty have requested in the last few years which ARE indexed in indexes
>we subscribe to, so I would drop the unindexed titles to fund the new titles.
>But mine is a severely underfunded library.  Maybe it is different than
>most???

Your solution, as I understand it, would be to supplement your
impoverished collection with ever shallower A&I services.

Why shouldn't an A&I service pay for the material it uses, just as it
pays labor, energy, printing, postage, and all of the other necessities
of doing business? Why shouldn't A&I services that cannot provide decent
coverage be closed?

Your concerns about having enough money to provide effective services
to your patrons are correct. I am only taking issue with the idea that
burden of solving the library problem must be solved by the publishers.
Neither commercial nor association publishers are in the business of
solving the financial problems of higher education. I have yet to turn
up a single learned society that has testified to Congress or taken a
position on the recent amendments to the Higher Education Act Title II-A
(which was recently deleted after a decade of non-funding) or the
'library' portion of indirect expenses paid on federal research grants.

It seems to me that libraries have been "used" to balance the budgets
of colleges and universities with a careless disregard of the effect on
the quality of collections and services. Moreover, the deletion of the
statement that inadequate collections can be harmful to research from
the latest revision of the ACRL standards for university libraries gives
me little confidence that library leadership cares one way or the other.

Al Henderson INTERNET:70244.1532@compuserve.com