Abstract
For scholarly journals, the academic community is today in the midst of a major format transition away from print and toward an electronic-only future. Ithaka S+R's regular Faculty Survey, most recently conducted in the fall of 2009, indicates that faculty members have grown increasingly comfortable with relying on local journal collections in electronic formats. For those journals where print no longer serves an important access role, preservation is the format's principal remaining role. Ithaka S+R's What to Withdraw study therefore focuses closely on the preservation considerations associated with print.
For scholarly journals, the academic community is today in the midst of a major format transition away from print and toward an electronic-only future. Negotiating this format transition responsibly requires high-quality research and policy-making to inform the collaborative action of libraries, publishers, researchers, academic administrators, and other stakeholders. This article highlights recent and planned research and policy work from Ithaka S+R that is relevant to this transition.
FACULTY ATTITUDES AND LIBRARY STRATEGIC IMPLICATIONS
As digital formats have grown more popular in recent years, libraries have faced growing pressure from academic administrators to reduce the growth curve of tangible collections and reduce the share of their budgets allocated to such collections. For this reason, faculty attitudes are especially important, because only when users are truly comfortable relying exclusively on electronic versions can a transition move forward successfully. Ithaka S+R's regular Faculty Survey, most recently conducted in the fall of 2009, indicates that faculty members have grown increasingly comfortable with relying on local journal collections in electronic formats.Footnote 1
Regarding current issues, approximately three-quarters of respondents agreed strongly that “if my library cancelled the current issues of a print version of a journal but continued to make them available electronically, that would be fine with me.” Most scientists and social scientists, and indeed many humanists, agreed strongly with this statement in 2009. Individual library decisions aggregate across the community to create falling demand for print versions, leading to questions about the wind-down of print journal publishing. And yet, only 39 percent of faculty members agreed strongly that “I am completely comfortable with journals I use regularly ceasing print versions and publishing in electronic-only form.” Journal publishers and libraries face an important challenge in determining if, and perhaps when and how, to wind down print publishing of journals that are no longer significantly valued by users in that format.
Electronic versions of current issues are usually produced from the same workflow as print versions and can sometimes contain additional features that the print version lacks, and the decision to forgo acquiring something is a relatively simple decision. But backfiles must be digitized using manual processes guaranteed to introduce at least minimal errors, and considering whether to withdraw print versions from a library collection can have an emotionally vexing element to it, in addition to extremely complicated preservation and collection management aspects.
To gauge the enthusiasm of faculty members for a format transition for backfiles, Ithaka S+R's Faculty Survey has used an exceptionally strongly worded statement: “Assuming that electronic collections of journals are proven to work well and are readily accessible, I would be happy to see hard-copy collections discarded and replaced entirely by electronic collections.” In 2003 and 2006, the Faculty Survey found that approximately 20 percent of respondents agreed strongly with this statement. From 2006 to 2009, however, the share expressing strong agreement had nearly doubled, to 37 percent. Another 27 percent expressed moderate levels of agreement that they would be “happy” to see such collections “discarded.”
While these figures on print journals are far from overwhelming, they suggest a significant uptick in faculty comfort with new approaches to collections management. Against this backdrop, pressure has increased for academic libraries to reduce the growth curve of tangible collections, and they almost always decide to begin with scholarly journals. In some cases, academic libraries have elected to join a variety of collaborative enterprises that allow them to reduce their local print collection without losing access to print versions when they may be needed. In other cases, libraries have simply chosen to withdraw print versions in favor of digitized journal collections, without that backup. In both cases, the interrelated problems of collection management and preservation are moving steadily to the community level from the local level. Consequently, to ensure that preservation values are maintained, a system-wide analysis of preservation is needed.
WHAT TO WITHDRAW?
For those journals where print no longer serves an important access role, preservation is the format's principal remaining role. Ithaka S+R's What to Withdraw study therefore focuses closely on the preservation considerations associated with print.Footnote 2
To provide a system-wide analysis of the purpose of retaining print for preservation purposes, it is important to examine the needs of all libraries and their users collectively. Ithaka S+R's analysis finds several rationales for retaining some copies of the print version: the need to fix scanning errors; insufficient reliability of the digital provider; inadequate preservation of the digitized versions; the presence of significant quantities of important non-textual material that may be poorly represented in digital form; and campus political considerations. The appropriate disposition of print copies of a given journal should vary depending on the characteristics of the print original and its digitized version in each of these categories.
One mechanism for expressing risk measurements during a format transition is in the form of a time horizon. Librarians have sometimes discussed preservation responsibilities as if it were possible to undertake perpetual commitments, but especially in the transition from one format to another it is useful to specify exactly how long the community feels it is necessary to ensure that the old format remain available. In such a case, a specified time commitment coupled with regular reassessment of priorities and responsibilities at the conclusion of that time commitment can permit better decision-making. The model that is used by What to Withdraw therefore examines the minimum period of time that access will be needed to at least one copy of the print original.
This methodology provides for preservation frameworks that vary based on risk profiles. For example, text-only materials require less concern than image-intensive materials, while high-quality digitization processes and appropriate digital preservation practices for digitized materials similarly indicate lower concern. These rationales indicate the need for at least one print copy of well-digitized, digitally preserved, text-only materials to be available for at least twenty years.
In order to guard against losses over time and assure the availability of a single copy after the stated time horizon, a greater number of print copies of any digitized title need to be secured today. In the exemplar scenario, a minimum of two page-verified print repository copies would be needed. When such well-digitized, digitally preserved, text-only journals are held in two page-verified print repository environments, other libraries can safely withdraw their print holdings if they so choose.
Once the What to Withdraw paper was released, the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries endorsed the approach formally and the library community began to ask how the underlying framework could be made actionable. In response to these requests, Ithaka S+R created a prototype decision-support tool. Using data from JSTOR and the print repositories that it helps to sponsor at Harvard and the University of California,Footnote 3 Ithaka S+R created a simple spreadsheet into which a librarian can input certain variables and then receive a list of titles for which the local copy is not needed for preservation purposes. Those titles can be assessed further as candidates for deaccessioning, but other titles should be considered for retention since they may be needed for community preservation purposes.
NEXT STEPS
Most journals do not meet the criteria for withdrawal outlined in the What to Withdraw report, in some cases simply because needed data are not yet available, and in other cases because they do not meet the criteria of the “ideal scenario” outlined in the report. For this reason, Ithaka S+R has proposed further steps to increase the number of journal titles that can be assessed for disposition, pending funding to support such work. In conjunction with these further research steps, we hope to play a role in the creation of a more comprehensive decision-support system that will empower libraries across the country (and potentially around the world) to make data-driven decisions about what to retain and what to withdraw, in order to ensure that preservation interests are not ignored in the transition from print to electronic formats for scholarly journals.
Notes
1. Roger C. Schonfeld and Ross Housewright, Faculty Survey 2009: Key Strategic Insights for Libraries, Publishers, and Societies (New York: Ithaka S+R, 2010),http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research/faculty-surveys-2000-2009/Faculty%20Study%202009.pdf (accessed August 3, 2010).
2. Roger C. Schonfeld and Ross Housewright, What to Withdraw: Print Collection Management in the Wake of Digitization (New York: Ithaka S+R, 2009), http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research/what-to-withdraw/What%20to%20Withdraw%20-%20Print%20Collections%20Management%20in%20the%20Wake%20of%20Digitization.pdf (accessed August 3, 2010).
3. JSTOR and Ithaka S+R are both services of the same not-for-profit organization, Ithaka.