Ferryman South Africa

WHO PAYS THE FERRYMAN: A Consortial Perspective

University of Stellenbosch Library Services

6th Annual Symposium

October 2003

Ann Okerson

Associate University Librarian, Yale Library

Coordinator of the NERL Consortium

ann.okerson@yale.edu

The Not-So-Phantom[1] Tollbooth

Fig. 1 Illustration of a tollbooth on the US highway system

There's a special nightmare that librarians such as I suffer. In this nightmare, I am driving down a toll-collecting highway, but somehow the toll booths are coming closer and closer together and every one charges more than the last one did. The thought of paying these toll collectors is truly frightening, the more so when I realize that in the dream, I am always alone in the car, the lines are getting longer and longer, I'm getting weary, and I'm running out of coins.

In this talk, I will say a little bit about why this nightmare has such vividness for librarians: the pressures of cost and price that increasingly squeeze library budgets. But I will say even more about the possibilities for ameliorating our condition, possibilities that arise when we begin to realize that we do not have to be alone in the car. Librarians have cooperated across distances in many ways for many years, but in the last decade the emergence of a robust and energized movement of library consortia has put a new kind of "car pooling" at our service. The benefits of consortia are many -- though they are no panacea. We will talk about the benefits, the limits of the benefits, and a little bit about the possibilities that lie beyond. The fundamental idea is simple: that there is strength in numbers. Let us think for a few minutes about how we organize that strength and seek to apply it to address common problems.

Let me say at the outset that "consortium" is a word for many different types of organizations, even when formed by libraries. There is no unified consortial approach to library issues and each group develops its own course and agenda. That is as it should be. Each group has a distinctive organizing principle: some are geographically-based, some are based in common interests or problems, while others arise out of pre-existing structural relationships (e.g., research universities in a single American state funded by that state's government). The differences in rationale for bringing together the group often define the differences in approach and agenda. The most common agenda item for recently organized library consortia has been acquisition and licensing of digital information resources, but as will emerge, the range of issues goes significantly beyond that common challenge.

A Brief History

My own work in library consortia dates back to late 1995, when I arrived at Yale just as the first large commercial publishing (both for-profit and not-for-profit) enterprises in online reference works and journals were getting under way. At that point, I was a ringleader in founding the NorthEast Research Libraries consortium,[2] which brought together originally a dozen or so large research libraries in the northeastern United States, with the specific aim of working together to license electronic content for our libraries. NERL has grown to include 26 "core" ARL member libraries and 39 affiliated libraries, mostly still in the northeast, though including now as well Notre Dame in the middle west and Stanford on the west coast. In discussing consortial issues here, I will draw upon that NERL background and some examples as well of cooperative successes of subsets of members working together in smaller groups.

Not long after NERL's founding and as a consequence of being its coordinator, I also became involved with early stages of organizing the International Consortium of Library Consortia,[3] which brings together 162 groupings from all over the world. ICOLC has been meeting in North America twice a year for about seven years (the European ICOLC meets once each year in the fall) and fosters information interchange between times, exchange designed to share information about best practices and emerging developments, the better to help member groups form and pursue their own agenda. In working with NERL and ICOLC, I have seen the way our institutions have responded to the first generation of challenges of managing digital information, as we seek to control our own destinies in a rapidly changing world.

Factors That Drive Up Library Costs

Some of the pressures libraries face drive up costs more or less directly. We (and our institutions) have gradually learned in the last twenty years to handle costs associated with acquiring, maintaining, and then replacing information technology infrastructures that are essential for daily work (for example, computers, software, the "library management systems" that nearly all libraries use). Whenever tempted to think of some digital content resource as "free" or "cheap," we now remember that one part of the fully loaded cost is the cost of the network and the desktop systems that give us access to it -- not even the underpinnings are free. The paradigm for such technology has, while changeable, been relatively stable for the last decade (i.e., information accessed through networked desktop or laptop system running basic productivity software, a browser, and e-mail software), but with the explosion of possibilities of handheld, wireless, and integrated devices, universities and libraries may well face new de-stabilizing pressures at almost any time. Those must be counted under the costs of doing business, for whatever plan we follow to update or refresh such technology, we have relatively little control over what the world will tell us we need as old technologies fade and new ones arrive.

With technology cost pressures come pressures from our users.

Library readers want more services (because they have seen or imagine that these are possible), their expectations of rapid and personalized service increase rapidly (for the same reason), and of course they would like, ideally, to have all content digitized and available at their desktop -- yesterday. For the moment at least, many expect libraries to provide all the wonders of digital information without giving up attachment to any of the habits and preferences of paper publication. There is simply no way that libraries can respect those user preferences without either accepting cost increases or difficult trade-offs.

But in the same decade or so, university and library budgets have remained remarkably resistant to out-of-pattern increases. Within institutions, libraries in the United States and around the world have seen their budgets grow, but by and large that growth has been at or below the rate of growth of university budgets, rarely with any transformative increases to recognize changed circumstances.

Fig. 2 ARL chart: Library expenditures as a proportion of University expenditures

In the last couple of years, the faltering US economy, the falling dollar, falling stock markets (thus falling value of the endowments that support many of us, particularly the private universities), and the pressure on governmental budgets have all put university expenses under renewed pressure. In some cases, university budgets dependent on state funding have seen unplanned cuts imposed in the middle of an academic year, as happened to one NERL member that saw its acquisitions budget cut, by 50%, about 4-5 months into 2001-02 fiscal year. That library had to cancel all of its book plans and drop many databases that were renewable at the end of the calendar year. Other libraries have not been able to recruit staff or add additional holdings for a couple of years. In the recent Annual NERL meeting (October 16-17), most of our core libraries were able to provide data about the state of their collections budgets to the group, and while these increases probably look good to you -- we are group of mostly private schools -- they do not begin to keep up with the demand for and availability of library content.

Fig. 3 NERL Round Robin

Incidentally, before we leave the topic of costs, it is worth mentioning the imminent appearance (by year's end, I believe) of a JSTOR/Ithaka study on the relative costs of handling print journals versus handling e-journals. This is the first study of its kind, based on data from 11 small, medium, and large-sized college and university libraries (Yale was a participant in the study). My sense, from having served for the past year on a small advisory committee to this project, is that the findings may surprise us: the costs of handling electronic journals, are at this time, still very high, not far off of print costs. The clear savings is, obviously, in all-precious and expensive space -- but at the sacrifice of the certain long-term archiving medium that print provides and electronic -- so far -- does not.

And Then There's Pricing (Entirely Different Topic From Costs)

Meanwhile, of course, libraries also face steep rises in prices for services and products we wish to acquire. I distinguish between costs and prices because the two are managed in different ways. Being internal, costs may be less tractable but perhaps more under our control, while prices can be managed only by negotiation or by a discretionary choice about what (not) to buy. Publishers set content prices with an eye not only on their costs but also on the marketplace and on their selling strategies. All of us in this room have seen many publishers in recent years change business models repeatedly as they attempt to find the right pricing for an era of technology and transition. (One famous encyclopedia publisher, for example, went from charging institutional subscribers to providing free access to the public paid for by advertising -- and then when that model failed, came back to universities to ask us to pay subscription fees again!)

How those prices have risen in the aggregate, and what pressure they have put on libraries' buying power, can be seen from these all-too-familiar charts:

Fig. 4 ARL's Monograph and Serials Costs

Fig. 7 Average 2003 Price for Scientific Disciplines

Among libraries' more sobering lessons, is that, counter to our fondest dreams and expectations, the move of the publishing industry to electronic formats has not reduced prices in any useful way. It is not quite true to say there is no advantage to electronic pricing, but the fact is that for nearly all electronic journals, e-prices are at least 90%+ of print and the margin is shrinking (in part as users demand services and features of the e-resource they would not have thought to ask from print). Moreover, librarians find that we have had to re-purchase, in e-formats, many materials we already hold in print or microform, just as purchasers of recorded music found themselves buying on CD titles they already held in vinyl albums in the 1980s. Many in this room can list examples, key among them the ISI citation indexes that we had bought laboriously volume by volume to line our shelves for many decades. These ISI data are now available in electronic form with hugely increased usefulness -- and for Yale with a price tag of an additional approximately $ 0.3 million for information we had previously purchased at relatively high prices.

And as the biblical writer said, "Many shall pass to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased" (Daniel 12.4). The great underlying pressure is that more and more scholars, scientists, journalists, and writers are publishing more and more books, articles, compilations, poems, and the like, with unrelenting creativity and increase. Libraries that seek to maintain serious collections can make choices about what to acquire, but when the river into which they dip their ladles runs higher, faster, and deeper every year, we are inevitably left scooping as fast as we can and wondering whether any relief will ever come our way.

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And The Good News Is… Way Beyond Shared Cataloging (But It Began There)

Libraries have long been able to benefit from the remarkable spirit of collegiality and collaboration that unites them. Even if university faculty members compete with each other for grants and prizes, even if universities compete for the best students (and in the US even for the best football teams!), librarians have long known the benefits of shared labors.

We have just passed the hundredth anniversary of the first project that gave many libraries the benefits of cooperation: the Library of Congress began plans in 1898 for sharing its subject headings and in 1902 began selling actual printed catalog cards to libraries, to save on local cataloging costs. That level of cooperation was a path-breaking idea at the time and later became more and more a reality, particularly in the post World War II world. Libraries saw in the 1960s and 1970s the birth and rise of OCLC and RLG, with their primary missions being to share knowledge and save on local costs. Librarians then spoke then of "automation" as the medicine for what ailed us -- and cost-effective benefits were achieved. Digital "content" was, for the most part, decades away.

It is important to emphasize that information systems have made possible-- and have completely transformed -- the great bulk of today's library work, quite independent of the emergence of digital content as a concern. We can know our own operations and finances better than ever. Not only can we know better what readers want, but we can also better calculate costs and compare information with colleague institutions with relative ease. The hand-crafted "interlibrary loan" of a generation ago already depended on union catalogs, and many in this room will remember what it was to search for items in the huge printed volumes of the British Library and Library of Congress catalogs.

Not only were emerging information systems giving institutions the power to re-think internal operations, but they were accelerating libraries' ability to act together in either brand new ways or on activities previously accomplished with inefficiency in endless local repetition. Here follow some powerful examples of recent cooperative, consortial activities, which can save on costs, reduce prices, and offer exciting new reader services.

Consortial Borrowing/Lending: "Borrow Direct"

Today, the further emergence of online catalogs and systems makes it possible to devolve much of the borrowing work to our readers, who can do it for themselves with ease and deep satisfaction. For example, several years ago the libraries of Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University came together to develop a software and service which would allow the users of our respective libraries to treat the catalogs of all three libraries as one, for InterLibrary Loan purposes. The initial effort was called "CoPY" but as it proved itself and planned to expand, it was re-named "Borrow Direct," to acknowledge two things: (1) that no copying was being done! and (2) that this service mimicked a circulation rather than an ILL activity. That is, the BD program allows patrons sitting at a workstation to initiate book requests from partner libraries. The requested books are delivered within four days to the library of the reader's choice, via expedited delivery such as UPS. No professional librarian sees or touches the transaction at any time. When the book arrives in the building, a circulation department staffer pulls the item and an online notice is sent to the reader to pick up the item(s) at the circulation desk, where they are checked out. Currently, Borrow Direct serves 7 libraries in the northeast; each is a member of NERL though BD is not a NERL activity and not likely to become one. It is worth noting that BD may never need to expand to all 26 NERL members, who may already be delivering similar services through their small local group of libraries such as the Boston Library Consortium, which now uses the same software as BD.

Consortia that engage with end-user borrowing have reported both stunning user satisfaction and cost reductions. I brought along some data to share with you.

It may be worth adding that, as a result of the existence of Borrow Direct and its impressive successes, the Collections Development Directors from the 7 participating libraries began meeting this past February to determine whether, in light of easy portability of books among institutions (BD currently does not handle periodicals or other non-books formats), it might be possible to coordinate at least some collections purchases among the participant libraries. Agreements are being crafted in three pilot areas (Film Studies, Middle East, and Engineering), and if these succeed, over time additional subjects may be added to cooperative agreements. Historically such agreements have not worked well, so it remains to be seen whether a much improved borrowing/lending capability will reverse past history.

Consortial Negotiations for Content -- Making a Market

The awareness of common problems and opportunities, emerging through discussions among librarians in the 80s and 90s about the "serials pricing crisis" led to the first electronic licensing consortia. For example, NERL organized tiself around effective negotiating with content and software suppliers for electronic information resources, at a moment when literally no one had a sure idea how to go about pricing and selling such things. I am certain that both publishers and libraries have benefited from the anarchy of the mid to late 90s -- for already we are settling down into routine ways of doing business as our experience grows.

Sharing information at multiple levels has made it possible for libraries to discuss together our relations with our publishers and vendors. This has made us smarter consumers first of all, but gradually it has also made it possible to present a common front to vendors far more easily than ever before. As a result, the market has become more transparent.

NERL has negotiated energetically with 50 or so suppliers who currently provide member libraries with electronic content. Earlier this year, NERL members developed and promulgated widely (that is, not only with suppliers, but also throughout the broad library community) the "Principles for Licensing Electronic Journals."[4] They advocate for price control and cost containment, affirm member libraries' right to manage their collections and budgets, insist upon uninterrupted service, argue for use of serial agents for package deals, perpetual access and archival rights, the right to electronic interlibrary loan, and affirm the right of any NERL member to have the right to choose to join or not join a given contract (all NERL deals are optional for all members -- there is no requirement to sign up).

What effect have the principles had? It is early to say, of course, but we have discussed them in depth with vendors, compared their offerings with our principles, and in a handful of recent negotiations we believe we have gained ground in key areas -- that said, the price obstacles are far from gone. But given the huge amount of public play that vendor discussions are now receiving on various e-mail lists, one senses that not only are individual consortia aiming for the best possible arrangements with publishers, but that together, without collusion, we are making similar demands of our suppliers. The Principles have received such wide play and have proved so sensible, that a week or two ago, in its annual fall meeting, the Oberlin Group of Library Directors (75 fine US liberal arts colleges that send the highest number of students per capita into graduate programs) passed a resolution to adopt these principles for their own dealings.

How much money have we saved for member libraries by licensing as a consortium? Here again let us consider costs, and then prices.

First, costs: NERL, with its streamlined operations (about 1.5 staff are charged to the members, along with expenses, totaling around $100K per year). For about $3,000 per year per member (plus affiliate fees per database), NERL members have an agile, efficient, staff focused solely on their needs. NERL headquarters approaches vendors, seeks quotes, shares information with members, receives feedback, and handles most of the contractual and license transactions. NERL is very cost effective.

Second, prices: Each year, our NERL program librarian and I review the asking price of each information resource against what NERL members have paid for that resource and we create a "NERL Savings" report for the members. Obviously the savings per institution vary, depending on which resources a member takes and on the terms of a given contract. On average, the price savings look to be around 20-25% per resource, but some are smaller, while others are much more. At times we do not save on the price but we receive more benefits: access, perpetual archives, and the like.

In summary, NERL members acknowledge that they could no longer live without the NERL service -- they could not replicate the staffing at their own institutions nearly as efficiently. To suppliers, the NERL office provides one point of contact for suppliers -- who also assert that we make their life much simpler -- hence the discounts.

A Digression Into Open Access -- Will It Reduce Prices?

The answer is a definite, but -- on my part -- a skeptical (wishful) maybe. The hotly debated issue today is evoked by the motto "open access". The open access movement labors mightily to build a world in which the barrier of price between reader and vendor for scientific and scholarly materials will disappear. The goal is irresistibly attractive and rarely more so than when looking at developing nations, the former Soviet bloc, and other parts of the world where access to information priced for first world users is sometimes no more than a distant dream. (To be fair, commercial and other vendors have been taking some aggressive steps to bridge that part of the "digital divide."[5])

What remains unresolved, however, are the twin issues of costs and payment. How low can costs be driven for electronic production and distribution of scientific information? And, when we know that, who can pay those costs most efficiently? How will it be possible to produce scholarly literature of excellence, with high degrees of functionality, in times of rapid technological change, if there is little capital to invest into the scholarly publishing system (because we are reluctant to do so or we cannot afford it)? How can page charges (perhaps paid from researchers' grants) resolve the issue? Are there other governmental or institutional third parties that can contribute? The jury is emphatically still out.[6]

Coordinating "The Last Print Copy"

As noted above, we have addressed in our consortia even more than cost, pricing, and negotiation issues. NERL members, in the annual fall meeting two weeks ago, made progress on some additional tantalizing issues.

Early in the meeting, delegates identified "things that keep me awake at night." Interestingly, while budget was a significant cause of insomnia, greater sleeplessness resulted from fretting about a responsible and seemingly imminent transition from print to electronic journals, books, and other content. In another "round robin," members pooled information about projects in other groups such as the Consortium for Inter-Institutional Cooperation (Midwest), the California Digital Library, and the Center for Research Libraries to facilitate the move to electronic-only by coordinating the retention of print back-up copies, so long as print shall last. All agreed that it is time for NERL to mount a pilot, since it would be wrong to assume that we could as a regional consortium rely on other consortia to take care of our back-up needs. Therefore, members agreed to a pilot project testing a back-up rationale for two publishers: Elsevier Science (ScienceDirect titles) and the American Chemical Society (its full-text journals). In brief, NERL HQ will obtain "canonical" spreadsheets of each publisher's complete title list and each NERL member library will indicate which print titles it intends to keep beyond 2004. An analysis of responses will be conducted next spring, and a small working group will be created to review the list and make recommendations for dividing responsibilities. Other consortia may be consulted if NERL's gaps are significant and unmanageable. If the pilot works well, the group will move on to other publishers' lists.

Shared Depositories And Repositories

The "last copy" discussion led, in turn, to a conversation about shared physical off-site repositories for library materials, which are also emerging in various locations, such as Harvard's outside of Boston and the joint venture between Columbia, New York Public Library, and Princeton (RECAP, near Princeton). Effective use of these repositories and paging of books back to campuses is made possible and linked together by information technology -- the technology that lets readers know what is located in such collections, has them order books online, lets the orders be processed and prepared quickly, and lets the items retrieved be delivered and tracked quickly. Off-site repositories continue to grow even as retrieval and delivery systems become more efficient. The NERL group imagines a number of regional repositories for lower-used materials (in which multiple copies are weeded to one or two), each ultimately a link in a highly effective, efficient, distributed national repository system. This is an exciting concept. The question is: who will take it on? The group articulated a sense of "bottom up" growth for several years, and then a possible coming together as consortia of consortia.

Long Term Digital Access -- The LOCKSS Opportunity

NERL's October agenda also included a discussion of the LOCKSS[7] Alliance as an example of a cooperative enterprise designed to explore the interrelated issues of digital preservation and a sustainable model for assuring continual access. Developed at Stanford Library, LOCKSS, "Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe," is an access/backup solution for journals and other content. LOCKSS members may choose locally to cache copies of e-journal titles of greatest interest to their readers. The LOCKSS software has extant copies checking each other and correcting copies that may become corrupt

Not only NERL, but also all other libraries, worry whether publishers that sell e-resources will continue to offer access to material from paid-for years, should a subscription be cancelled, as well as whether the information itself will simply survive. The LOCKSS project is one avenue for imagining an environment in which inexpensive cooperation assures the actual retention of journal issues, and NERL's (selective) participation in that activity will give us at least some degree of control over the information. LOCKSS requires a minimum of six libraries to cache any given journal title in order for appropriate checking of content accuracy to continue and for possibly corrupted copies to be corrected. Thus, in order to succeed, LOCKSS requires cooperation on at least a regional, if not a national or global scale. Such cooperation is surely challenging to organize!

Reflections

If consortially we are hard at work on service improvements, cooperative purchasing, interlibary borrowing and lending, as well as fostering of regional and national print and electronic repositories, can we now imagine building beyond those to truly national and even global systems of information that not only tell where books are but make it possible to rationalize even more redundancy out of our systems and vastly improve access to users who now have the least access to the riches of large collections? In such enterprises it may be possible to swap out current costs (by eliminating redundancies) directly for improvement in services of a kind that might otherwise impose substantial new costs. That is the dream.

What still presses us? First and most important is the traditional insulation of scholarly communication and scholarly productivity from the budgeting issues of institutions that acquire information. As voracious information consumers, the scholars and scientists who work in our universities are under every incentive to make libraries' problems as acute as possible! As the progress of science and scholarship, moreover, reaches more institutions in more nations, it can only be expected that the efflorescence of published material high value will continue, independent of all budgeting and resource questions. If we are optimistic about our institutions and our culture, then we need to be pessimistic about that pressure ever letting up significantly.

Some cost pressures are for the moment ineluctable but at least allow us to imagine respite. For the moment, users seem to insist that if a resource is available in both paper and electronic form, we acquire both. There are now many straws in the wind to suggest that this insistence is fading, and every a priori reason to think that at some not distant date it will fade significantly, as readers get used to the idea of accessing large parts of the journal literature in online form only. Of course, there is another cost to universities when that happens: the local cost of printing copies of works that are actually cited and read. It is sobering to realize that many such costs do not appear as library costs and so we will doubtless see at least some of our "good news" in libraries eaten up elsewhere in the system.

For now, libraries will continue to see a continuing boom in demands for additional new services and features (such as cross-linking among resources, searches that go beyond individual publishers or journals, and much more). In the short run, those demands will increase costs, but at some point, it is reasonable to hope that growth in such features will become part of "business as usual" and demand for ever-newer features perhaps may taper off.

I believe that we have only begun to tap the creative possibilities of consortia, cross-library partnerships, and collaborations. Institutions in countries with strong national involvement in higher education may find it possible to accelerate cooperation to the point where the local library becomes the treasure house of a given institution's unique possessions, but where a much wider body of citizenry has high quality, inexpensive access to collections vastly greater and more powerful than any we now imagine. The old dream, going back to the 1940s, of instant online access to everything in the Library of Congress, may not come true in anything like the way we could have imagined, but services and access that are very nearly as good and extraordinarily robust may be, if not quite within reach, then not quite beyond our grasp either.

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