Stevan, The general thrust of your argument is certainly correct. The overwhelming majority of scholars have access to only a tiny fraction of the existing corpus of relevant literature. In my paper (A) I give some figures for library spending by various institutions. During the academic year 1996-7, Harvard spent $71 million on its library system, which even as large and rich an institution as Brown University spent only $15 million. Clearly Brown scholars had access to only a fraction of the resources of Harvard scholars. You can quantify this by looking at the source of this statistics, namely the compilation by the Association of Research Libraries of statistics on holdings, circulation, etc. available at <http://www.arl.org/stats/index.html>.
However, looking at serial holdings does not by itself say too much. First of all, there are measurement problems, with different libraries using different classification schemes. A more serious problem is that of relevance. Something on the order of 2 million articles appear each year in the STM literature. Clearly no more than a fraction can be looked at by any single individual, or even the entire faculty of a small institution, say. Furthermore, there are issues of quality and substitutability. If your library gets the top journals in a field, that may be enough for you and your colleagues, especially since for most questions, there are many sources of information that will be satisfactory (a factor that I discuss in paper (B)). Thus the harm from not having access to the entire literature may not be as great as raw statistics might make it seem. However, that having access to more information is better can be seen from the observed behavior of scholars. That is what my paper (B) is largely devoted to, showing that people will use even esoteric materials if those are easily available. More evidence is available in sources such as J. Luther's report, "White paper on electronic journal usage statistics," Council on Library and Information Resources, Oct. 2000, available at <http://www.clir.org>. Quoting from page 7: Recent data from OhioLINK show that more than half of the articles selected by users come from journals not currently held by the library. ... There is increasing evidence from both libraries and publishers that current holdings are too limited to meet user demand ... Although there are and have always been complaints about too much information, people do like to have access to everything, and do derive benefits from it, even though it is often not easy to quantify such benefits. Best regards, Andrew References (both available at <http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/eworld.html>): (A) "Competition and cooperation: Libraries and publishers in the transition to electronic scholarly journals," Journal of Electronic Publishing 4(4) (June 1999), <http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/> and in J. Scholarly Publishing 30(4) (July 1999), pp. 163-185. (B) "The rapid evolution of scholarly communication," to appear in the proceedings of the 1999 PEAK conference, <http://www.si.umich.edu/PEAK-2000/>. ************************************************************************ Andrew Odlyzko [email protected] AT&T Labs - Research voice: 973-360-8410 http://www.research.att.com/~amo fax: 973-360-8178 ************************************************************************
