Geary brings up interesting points about libraries going to
digital journal subscriptions. I have seen this as a potential
problem ever since it first occurred since it directly affected my
profession (chemist). There are a few journals that allow an
institution to keep access to their past subscribed volumes even if
they stop subscribing, but most do not and thus as Geary said, the
library ends up with no collection if they ever stop. That seems
patently unfair and I'm surprised libraries have agreed to those terms.
Another problem is that when the library suffers a power
failure or worse, when the journal's server goes down, no one has
access to their material. At least with a paper copy you could read
it with a flashlight during a power failure. I often made printed
copies of articles because I would need to take the paper to the lab
in order to follow a procedure, but of course I would do that with
print journals as well.
Mark Minton
Quoting Geary Schindel <[email protected]>:
There appear to be a number of problems with the electronic media
that folks are still wrestling with.
This is really more an issue for university libraries and such but
many professional journals are going on line and are only available
through a subscription service. If a college or university
subscribed to a journal in print form, it would become part of their
collection and available as a hard copy to anyone that wanted to
view it. However, now that some journals are only available on line
through a subscription, they are only available if you pay for the
service. Some schools spend $100,000 or more to subscribe each year
to the journal services and most won't let you pick and choose
which ones you want - you have to buy their package. And if you
don't renew, you lose access to all the journals, not just the year
you didn't buy.
In addition, we assume that the electronic media is secure but to be
honest, this technology is fairly new and relatively untested. I
do know that I can't read the disc containing my Thesis because I
wrote it on a TRS 80 using a word star program. The only surviving
copies are paper (not that it was that important a work). However
books have survived for hundreds of years (assuming they are
printed on good paper) and minus a few book burnings.
The world of research, and library science, is being turned on its
head as we change media type. Search engines are very powerful and
have greatly added in doing research. The flip side is that it
could, in theory, disappear overnight.
FYI,
Geary
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