World-class universities need world-class libraries and information resources: But how can they be provided?

Abstract

Faculty undertaking research at the cutting edge of their subject must have access to the worlds knowledge base: it is a key infrastructural requirement of a research-intensive university. The challenge is how to organize and deliver this requirement, either within a single university or jointly across, say, a nation state. Over the last few years themost obvious trend in science journals has been their arrival on the Internet and libraries have chosen, or been forced, to outsource much of their provision onto publishers websites. This has yet to occur on a major scale in the humanities and social sciences, or in the provision of undergraduatematerials, and so the paper formstill predominates but for how long is an interesting question. If I speak as a scientist, and not as a librarian (or University Rector), the electronic trends of the past few years have many virtues. The speed of access to scientific articles, as well as the efficiency of hunting for materials, has been transformed by the web. In many areas especially biomedicine the provision of powerful databases and search engines created by the NIH mean I can cover my own areas of endeavour (biological clocks; reproductive biology) thoroughly, easily and quickly with a small investment of time each week.There are downsides, of course. Few scientists browse in their libraries anymore.What is more the sheer growth in overall publicationmeans that review journals have become more important (e.g. Trends in⋯; Annual Review of⋯) whilst weekly publications like Nature, Science or Naturwissenschaften, must be read to retain a sense of what is happening more widely in science. All these trends may be causing certain distortions. Only a few percent of articles submitted to Nature are being published so that if one submits an article the chances are that it will never be read by a research scientist but judged rapidly, and rather crudely, by the publishing team. That is negative and in some ways it lowers the esteem of such weekly publications.More broadly it reflects a trend in many countries that scientists must publish in those journals with highest impact factors. Within the research library itself the changes have been more profound. The web has proved itself a truly disruptive technology: it brings great benefits but at the same time it threatens the traditional place of the university library at the heart of the institution.Librarians have responded flexibly to the challenges but one aspect has defeated all of them: the continuing rise in acquisition costs that outstrip underlying inflation. The traditional approach to excessive cost pressures is to adjust expenditure between activities but this has proved difficult because the traditional roles of libraries have not disappeared whatsoever, indeed they may have intensified. Perhaps we are really watching a world-wide trend whereby information resources are becoming more important within society. Put another way this information aspect of a university is growing relative to some other aspects. At a university or supra-university level the pressures become most obvious in financial terms. So what, if anything, can be done about it? © 2008 Springer-Verlag London Limited.