Is it really safe to dispose of print journals? Nigel Lees thinks we need a policy of decentralisation for the national print archive.
It is becoming fairly common for libraries to send ‘Round Robin’ emails to various listservs asking if anyone wants back sets of journals they are disposing of. Sometimes this can be an excellent way to fill the gaps in or add to your collection. More often than not the last thing a library wants to do is increase its storage costs. So what happens to this print? Does most of it find a good home or is it dumped to landfill (or perhaps turned into recycled paper)? Often we do not know.
As the manager of a major chemistry research library, not immune from the economics of storage, I am disturbed by what is happening, especially in libraries with large or dedicated science and technology collections. A number of chemistry departments have closed down or are threatening to do so. The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has been extremely active at the highest levels in government to raise this issue and find workable solutions. If chemistry departments close, who will want the material held in their libraries? Many chemistry journals are, of course, of use to other sciences, notably biochemistry, forensic chemistry, medicinal chemistry and material sciences, but many will not be. Libraries cannot afford to store collections not being used any more.
Demise of the Science Museum Library
The well-publicised demise of one of the most important science libraries in the world, the Science Museum Library, gives us even more cause for concern.1 Though other libraries may well come to the rescue and the collections may be preserved, this situation, and the low-level disposal of collections referred to above, raises a number of important points, illustrated here with reference to chemistry but applicable generally.
- Should we develop a national print disposal and retention policy, setting up some sort of ‘clearing house’ so that valuable material is not accidentally thrown away? Hence we could avoid ‘…but I thought you were keeping it…!’
- Is the present system of emails to listservs, informal contacts, etc working well enough to make an extra level of bureaucracy unnecessary?
- Do we assume that popular chemistry journals can be disposed of because someone else will keep them?
- Are we all so happy with electronic archiving it is now safe to dump print equivalents?
- Are collections of any use these days? What is the point of a collection? Can we collect ‘electronically’ in the same way we do in print?
- How can we justify storing little used but significant journals, such as Chemisches Zentralblatt and its predecessor titles or Russian-language chemistry journals?
- How many libraries have dumped (not stored away) complete runs of RSC or Elsevier journals as they have bought outright the electronic archive?
No doubt we could add to these questions. In essence there are three fundamental points. How do we as librarians responsibly dispose of print? Does it really matter if collections die as long as we know someone out there has an accessible copy in print or electronic form? Can we agree on what should be kept in print, by whom and where?
Obviously the national library in a country is an important contact but it is not always able to take material. The British Library used to have a service called BookNet which served as a sort of clearing house where you could advertise your journals or books for disposal. The email to various listservs asking for help is its successor. However, BookNet did not constitute a national policy on disposals; it just provided some help for librarians wishing to dispose of print responsibly.
However, the argument has moved on from finding shared storage space to active de-duplication of printed stock. For example, how many copies of printed Tetrahedron, an organic chemistry journal, does a country need to keep? Are the copies kept by the national library enough or do we need, say, five, 10 or more copies to ensure a safe and viable archive is kept for the next 100 years or so? It could be argued that print is not necessary now and that electronic archiving of retro-digitised back sets of the print is all we need focus on. This raises further questions on the ownership of the electronic archives (usually the publishers) and how we can maintain access to them at an affordable price. If the print still exists somewhere and is readily available this becomes less of a problem.
In the UK the development of Suncat,2 a national periodicals catalogue, will help in checking the existence of a journal in a collection but not necessarily whether the institution in question will keep it indefinitely. In my view it is the decentralisation of the ‘national archive’ that really ensures that knowledge is kept for posterity (the Lockss principle – Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe). This is generally applied to electronic copies but is equally applicable to the print archive.
The Research Support Libraries Group (RSLG) final report published in 2003,3 which recommended the setting up a Research Libraries Network (RLN), had much to say about collaboration, the print archive, access and borrowing, as well as electronic access.
UK-wide strategic framework
The RSLG was chaired by Sir Brian Follett, and was asked to ‘make recommendations for a UK-wide strategic framework and mechanisms for promoting collaboration in the development and provision of library collections, their long-term management, and services to support research’. This report is essential reading for anyone interested in how the UK’s library and information strategy will develop.
It noted that the UK is well supplied if not oversupplied with print (paragraphs 136-138, pp. 40-41, in the final report). It recognised that planned de-duplication (‘de-accessioning’) of stock could be a way forward but that it also has inherent costs. It noted that there was still unease about the adoption of electronic archives as a replacement for print and that long-term access to electronic materials is not yet guaranteed.
From discussion with publishers and other librarians it is also clear that the move to electronic-only is gathering pace. Are these libraries, though, buying an archive in perpetuity or licensing it for a period of time?
In 2001 a report for the Higher Education/British Library Task Force on collaborative storage was published.4 This report discusses among many issues the differences between a co-operative storage facility, where libraries share the space, and a collaborative facility, where the collections are actively managed and policies on duplications are formulated. The report also lists a number of case studies worldwide.
We are fortunate in the UK in having a very active national library and important library bodies such as Curl (the Consortium of Research Libraries in the British Isles), of which the British Library is a leading member. Curl’s strategic plans call for greater collaborative resource management and it has set up Curl-CoFoR Collaboration for Research. Retention, de-duplication and mapping of collections form an important part of this strategy.5
The following are promising new projects.
Cass (Collaborative Academic Store for Scotland)
This is already a full-scale collaborative store and could point the way for the rest of the UK. Cass is a collaboration of six major research library partners in co-operation with the National Library of Scotland and was established in 2004 by the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (Scurl). A collaborative store has been set up which will manage the collection of mainly low-use research materials in a pro-active way. This will include access to material via inter-library loan and possibly electronic document delivery in the future and de-duplication of titles where appropriate. A seminar, ‘Cass: one year on’ was held in March at the National Library of Scotland6 to assess the progress of this five-year project.
M25 academic consortium collaborative storage project
The University of London has had a depository library store at Egham for many years and this is now filling up. It is a shared resource or overflow for the many libraries within the university. The M25 Consortium, which comprises more than 50 academic institutions, including new recruits such as the RSC’s Library & Information Centre, has just taken on a project officer to investigate a collaborative journals store for the libraries within the consortium. It is very early days but the fact that they are investigating setting up such a store is good news indeed.
Information on other storage sites can be found from Cass7 with further links to Duke University in the US.8
In our quite understandable rush to offer everything electronic to our users have we lost sight of the printed archive of material kept for the last 500-600 years or more?
It is clear that this subject has been discussed in some depth by a number of bodies and in a number of reports but perhaps it has not received the high profile or publicity it deserves. I believe that this issue comes under the general heading of national collection management and thus requires some form of overarching responsibility that perhaps the new RLN could offer. Collaborative storage need not mean an extra storage centre, although this is what many people understand by the term. It could mean institutions agreeing to hold selected printed materials as part of a distributed national archive.
There are many thousands of collections in the UK, large and small, some well funded, others struggling with part-time or temporary staff. It is these smaller collections that could well be overlooked as we focus on the bigger picture and yet it is in the larger academic libraries, with the British Library and other national libraries, that progress can be made.
Can we separate the issue of electronic archiving in perpetuity from that of a national print archive? Though not discussed at length here, many libraries might be tempted to dispose of print copies of their recently bought RSC electronic archive, for example, on the understanding that as long as they can maintain it, or pay the RSC to do so, print will not be necessary.
I believe that we cannot afford to be complacent, on the understanding that copies of print will be kept somewhere, accessible to all, or that the electronic archiving issues will be easily and affordably resolved. These difficult issues need to be addressed by libraries in the spirit of collaboration.
References
1 Science Museum Library (www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/library/).
2 Suncat (http://edina.ac.uk/suncat/).
3 Research Support Libraries Group Final Report, 2003 (www.rslg.ac.uk/).
4 A Study of Collaborative Storage of Library Resources, 2001 (www.bl.uk/about/cooperation/pdf/blhe-colstor.pdf).
5 Collaboration for Research (www.curl.ac.uk/about/coforfinal.htm)
6 Cass seminar (http://cass.nls.uk/oneyearon.htm).
7 http://scurl.ac.uk/projects/cass/resources/sites.html
8 http://library.duke.edu/about/depts/lsc/building/others.html
Nigel Lees is Manager, Library and Archival Services, Royal Society of Chemistry (leesn@rsc.org).
Updated: 13 July 2005