Library Acquisitions: Practice & Theory, Vol. 12, pp. 191-195, 1988 0364-6408188 $3.00 + .OO Printed in the USA. All rights reserved. Copyright @ 1988 Pergamon Press plc

CHARLESTON CONFERENCE 1987

THE LIBRARY AS MARKETPLACE IN A COLLECTION MANAGEMENT ENVIRONMENT

MARTIN FAIGEL

University Bibliographer and Director of Collection Development

University of Alabama Library

Box S

University, AL 35486

One of my pet peeves is library selectors who think their job consists of marking up copies of Choice or Weekly Record and shipping them off to Acquisitions for lesser beings to fill out order cards, check price and availability, and incidentally whether the library already owns a copy. These are often the same people who expect the physical responses to their orders to float into the library within two weeks. They fail to meet their responsibility to learn the kinds of things that acquisition conferences teach us about the external economic and practical real- ities of dealing with the information industry. They remind me of people who want to make love without the inconvenience of having sex. Few library collections, to my knowledge, are the result of immaculate conception.

On the other hand, one can make a mistake in focusing too closely on a single external real- ity, that of the economic aspect of the dissemination of information. We risk losing sight of a complex set of processes out of which multiple library markets emerge-and I would encourage you to remember that there is no single, monolithic library market, just as there is no single group of publishers to be characterized as good guys or villains, “white hats” or “black hats.” To be more specific, perhaps conference attendees too insistently ask a single question, namely: “How can I buy cheap from people who wish to sell dear?”

In a world 6f ambiities that even professional economists are hard pressed to explain and reconcile, there are numerous forces that affect libraries as fiscal entities in their role of link in the chain of information dissemination. So, I will take a few steps backward, with the hope of taking one giant step forward, for a broader view of the forces-positive and negative- that shape the library as marketplace. I will be doing this more from the perspective of the collection development librarian than that of the acquisitions specialist, and I will inevitably be simplifying and glossing over fiscal management issues and dilemmas central to the rui- son d’&e of this conference.

In looking at these other forces to which I have referred, we might begin by examining one supremely important aspect of the anatomy and physiology of the relationship between pub-

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lisher, vendor, and library, namely size or scale. There are over 100,000 serials published every year that are of interest to academic libraries-and my remarks are limited to that segment of the library market -and the rule of thumb is a 2% increase in new titles every year. According to one academic bookseller, his approval plan division reviewed some 32,000 cur- rent book titles last year of possible interest to academic customers. So, a basic building block of the marketplace is the sheer immensity of the bibliographic universe with which libraries must come to terms, each in its own way. Hendrik Edelman has said that for research libraries the major issue is identifying what slice of the bibliographic universe is relevant to their needs and then designing the macro and micro strategies for acquiring it.’

How libraries position themselves vis-a-vis the problem of the control of the bibliographic universe, and what posture they take: these are decisions which shape and reshape libraries as players in the marketplace. They affect how libraries organize and assign responsibility for selection, what programs for training and orientation they need to create, how funds will be allocated, what the basic budgeting process and the structure of the budget will be like, even how to negotiate the logistics of routing selection tools such as Weekly Record that serve as mechanisms for bibliographic control to a squadron of selectors. This last example presumes that we do not rely on the happenstance of direct mail flyers appearing on librarians’ desks and thence into their consciousness as the principal means for furthering our knowledge of the bibliographic universe.

Edelman identified a number of possible macro decisions for acquiring the maximum amount of the desired slice of the bibliographic universe with the minimum of effort. These include gift and exchange agreements, approval plans, blanket plans for all of a given pub- lisher’s monographs, standing orders for monographic series, and depository status for national and international government publications. Given the mix-and-match options of these acquisition mechanisms, the physiognomy of the library market, even one limited to research libraries, can be quite varied. There are still other ramifications to consider if one’s specific bibliographic slice includes a high concentration of foreign language materials that support area studies programs, or entails the purchase of costly journals that inhabit science and technology collections.

Another force of importance equal to the scope and scale of publications hoping to attract purchase orders is the environment in which libraries carry out their mission: local, regional, national, international. No library unilaterally sets the agenda for determining the biblio- graphic slice it will acquire. It is of course influenced by the goals and priorities of the par- ent institution and by short and long-term needs and expectations of patrons. We need to constantly remind ourselves that patron needs are not set in stone and that there may be sud- den, major, even precipitous shifts in needs and demands within a single library as a par- ticipant in the information marketplace. For example, at the University of Alabama, one out of every three faculty members is new to the campus since 1981. These newcomers are more oriented towards publication than ever before, and they expect to find the requisite research materials to which they are accustomed already in the library. If they are in the sciences, they know they are expected to bring in grant money; in turn, they expect the library to provide the necessary material that will make them competitive when they are finishing last-minute grant proposals.

This list of environmental forces will be familiar to many librarians. Other equally famil- iar forces include matters such as the demographics of campus enrollment and its role as a

‘Edelman, Hendrik: “Selection Methodology in Academic Libraries, *’ Library Resources and Technical Services,

23, no. 1:36 (Winter 1979).

The Library as Marketplace 193

source of income; changing government agendas in the support of basic research and devel- opment activities; the rising cost of “doing science”- being a benchman - and the fractiona- tion of disciplines that brings into being ever more specialized journals. Finally, international economics, trade deficits, stock markets, and the arcane wonders of currency fluctuation and fiscal speculation on a global scale have invaded the illusory tranquility of academic librari- anship.

One key environmental factor that may be the most crucial of all, at least for academic libraries, is the very reward and recognition structure of academia and the professions. I have lunch occasionally with a promising junior faculty member who is a medical anthropologist and who is, as our campus public relations office would say, “widely published.” As it hap- pens, some of the publications bear the imprints of well-known scientific publishers located in Holland and Germany. I asked him if he would be willing to boycott the publishers guilty of unjustifiable price increases and send his manuscripts to other journals. His immediate answer was a firm no; he understood the dilemma libraries face, but his papers would reach the intended audience only if he continued publishing in those journals. If he wanted his career to flourish, he had better reach that intended audience. In other words, the publish or perish dictum seems to be going awry in the hands of a clumsy sorcerer’s apprentice and is threatening the flow of information it was intended to create and stimulate. It is the presence of this embedded market reward structure of academia that, among other things, makes me question the future of desktop publishing as an acceptable means of communication. There will still be a role for the publisher to play in the dissemination of information, by provid- ing the added value of a referee panel’s seal of approval for tenure review committees.

A variety of environmental factors is coming into play to make the library as market an increasingly complex place in which to work. In the forefront are fiscal conditions which are unprecedented in their swiftness and the havoc they are wreaking on the materials budgets of even the largest American libraries: high subscription prices, unmanageable inflation rates, and a devaluation of the dollar that compounds the problem. It is not uncommon to hear categorical statements to the effect that we are hostages to our science collections and their costly periodical subscriptions, at the expense of the rest of the budget for materials (usually monographs).2 My university administration has decided that “high tech” science is impor- tant to it; it is next the library’s job to try to implement this priority, summoning up as much selectivity and fiscal responsibility as we can. We have always had this responsibility to inform administrators and faculty of the fiscal implications of the goals they have set for themselves. During the darker fiscal days of the 197Os, libraries did not always communicate their needs and problems to this external audience; rather, they tried to flesh out shrinking materials bud- gets with cutbacks in other expenditure lines, especially personnel, in the rest of the budget.

Unlike the previous decade there is now an urgency that is causing librarians to take up new initiatives and adopt new tactics. To some extent, tables are being reversed as librarians carry out finely tuned studies of the marketplace inhabited by journal publishers, sharing their find- ings, often at the title-by-title level, with other libraries, and, almost for the first time, con- templating cancelling unique subscriptions to former untouchables such as prohibitively expensive scientific journals.

What is perhaps most striking among the new initiatives is that librarians in academia are presenting information on the economics of publishing directly to faculty, who are both the producers and the end-users of what appears between journal covers. At the risk of crying

21f the citation analysis studies I have done are correct, journals can be more important, even for people in the humanities, than the books whose budgets have been turned into sacred cows by librarians.

194 M. FAIOEL

wolf, librarians are asking them to join us in responding to an apparent economic breakdown of the structure of scholarly communication. The fracture lines already apparent will not be easily reversed by the introduction of miraculous new technology so long as academia’s reward system follows the rule “plus ca change.” From a Malthusian perspective all of us may have to come to terms with the realization that today’s external environment is normality, that the environment of the 195Os, 196Os, and part of the 197Os, with its expectations of seemingly boundless human and natural resources, was an aberration, part of the delusion that this would be an American century of limitless vistas that would never come to an end.

Technological changes in the way we disseminate information are perhaps the most unpre- dictable force for us to deal with in coming to terms with what seems a strange new market- place. What we can be sure of is that there will be positive and negative reverberations. On the negative side, so much is happening, both faster and more slowly than we expect, that we must live with a good deal of complexity and uncertainty. We must wonder if the bright new machines we purchase for our libraries today will be tomorrow’s Edsels. Among the new forms of information delivery that are now standard in libraries is online data base search- ing, with its pay-by-the-minute metering of actual use. Compare our acceptance of the terms dictated by the database vendor, with the stance we take with our fixed cost, prepaid paper subscriptions. There we justify OUT expenditures on the basis of unmetered, and un-meterable, potential use. The future availability of data bases on CD-ROM or loaded into institutional mainframes may return to us the possibility of budget costs known in advance, assuaging the concerns heatedly expressed in the 1970s about creating a society of the information-rich and one of the information-poor. However, I contend we will have to cope with chaotic and uncertain pricing of new delivery technologies for quite a long time, rendered even more com- plex by emerging copyright issues. At the same time we cannot predict with any certainty whether, and for how long a time, traditional, paper-based delivery systems will retain their vigor and coexistence status in steady-state materials budgets.

On the positive side, libraries have a chance to influence the kind of new technology that the marketplace will offer to its library customers. I have in mind a recurrent theme at LITA’s 1987 preconference on optical disk publishing. Producers kept challenging librarians for feed- back on how they should design their products, what these products should contain, and how they could make use of our knowledge of patrons to design user-friendly systems. It is up to us now to demand that the CD-ROM products marketed to us are cost-effective, appropri- ately priced, and responsive to a broad spectrum of patron information needs.

Technology may also make us more knowledgeable as buyers, managing better our book stock and our funds. Thanks to the kind of information that online circulation systems can or should provide, we can develop a more sophisticated and unobtrusive picture of what our patrons are using-what might be called a marketing study in other lines of work. This can help us to refine our buying patterns, to make market decisions, and even to join the ranks of those who consciously market their products, disseminating specialized information about the library’s electronic resources to targeted groups of patrons.

These are just some of the forces, and they impose limitations even on the most assertive, proactive librarians among us. We have a better chance of successfully dealing with these fac- tors, conquering or at least coping, by turning to collection development and management analytical tools and strategies that allow us to focus our attention on the factors and processes that matter the most. Perhaps too often we fight and win individual acquisition skirmishes but lose the war aimed at safeguarding our stance as a player within the information indus- try. Collection management implies planned, well-managed change. It places limits on what

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we can or cannot control that help each library define its own specific market situation, and the opportunities that accompany it.

So, I would end by suggesting what the library market should be, not necessarily what it is. It should be a process for dealing with the future, for planning the future. The market in which each library finds itself should be the result of a carefully considered and consciously adopted position within the chain of information dissemination. That position should derive from the basics of a collection management program: a knowledge of local collections; a knowledge of what our existing community needs; our best guess as to the anticipated needs of future members of the community; and a knowledge of the priorities established by our parent institution. Librarians may have to take the initiative and try to identify any consensus that exists. We may even be asked to reconcile irreconcilable conflicts. Libraries as markets should know why they are buying specific items and how those items relate to the existing col- lection, a collection that is a series of coherent contexts, the whole greater than the sum of its parts. It should never be a mere assemblage. To the extent that we build assemblages, we risk being an undifferentiated library market in which we are vulnerable and in which we allow the other players to dictate today’s and tomorrow’s intellectual and fiscal relationships.