Chapter Six : Interpretation of the results
6.6 Cost of providing the service and impact on staff time
6.6.1 Purchasing and organizing the material
A number of departments in the library are involved in the purchasing or acquisition of journals and the organization of the journals in the library. The impact of e-journals on that process will be discussed below.
6.6.1.1 Administration and management
Journal collections represent a substantial cost and very sizeable fraction of the library budget. Journals have always required serious attention from the University Librarian. In Science, journal costs represent most of the materials budget. E-journals raise new issues which call for the involvement of the Technical Services manager and Acting University Librarian to an even greater extent.
Activities include:
Communicating awareness of the e-journal collection to users Obtaining institutional funding and support
Joining consortia
Contract negotiation and review
Setting and revising strategies for electronic resources acquisition
Building a library staff with appropriate skills and managing change Restructuring workflow and re-organising staff changes.
The transition from print to e-journals will have a large impact on the workload and
involvement of the Library‟s administration. It is always more difficult and time consuming to manage change than to maintain the status quo.
6.6.2.2 Systems staff
To develop and support the infrastructure needed for access to e-journals, the internal systems functions will have to be re-organised and centralised in a new library systems department . At present this is not so in the Library. Library computer support and staff development is provided by the IT assistant. The latter is responsible for the servers, software installation and upgrades. A percentage of her time is allocated to e-journals since the use of e-journals is growing and is a significant component of infrastructure use.
But this person also serves as the Webmaster, who spends about 25% of her time on e-journal access. She maintains the library Website with HTML pages listing e-journals by subject, titles and vendor. This is done with assistance from the subject librarians who have compiled and maintain the lists of e-journals on the library Home page.
6.6.2.3 Technical Services
Although there will be reduced staff time for the print journal processes (saving), there is a huge increase in professional level tasks. The costs for the staffing of the Technical Services balance out, but are more weighty on the professional side than the clerical side.
E-journals offer new challenges due to the number of e-journals now available and the complexity of management and access issues. The selection, ordering and cataloguing processes for e-journals are more complex than for print journals. There is also a sense of immediacy with e-journals that may not always be the case with print journals. Once
e-journal titles have been set up, users have come to expect immediate uninterrupted access.
Technical Services operations have also been greatly challenged by the need to maintain dual formats. Since most e-journals are really traditional journals in electronic format,
acquisitions and processing procedures for managing e-journals will not differ significantly from those of print.
In the Technical Services department, the transition to an e-journal collection has had a direct impact on the day-to-day work of each staff member. Changes in workflow and procedures were dramatic, with very large shifts in costs. It is clear that with a decrease in print titles, there will be decreased workloads for tasks related to the print format but the role of the serials librarians has expanded with the influx of e-journals. Direct costs for cataloguing print titles and maintaining MARC should decrease. Binding fees should also be reduced.
6.6.2.4 The purchasing of the journals
The selection process of e-journals is more complicated than that of print journals. Academic staff, subject librarians, and the University Librarian choose print journals. However more departments are and will be involved in the selection of e-journals.
All the selection factors for print journals, such as content, cost, ISI impact factor, and importance to the collection, also apply to e-journals. Developing an e-journal collection is much more complex than developing a print collection. Common considerations in evaluating print are subject discipline, cost, quality, collection balance, faculty interest. In addition, new factors such as interface options, search features, display formats, access restrictions, linking capability and format must be contended with.
Ordering a journal no longer means that the library pays for physical issues or volumes.
E-journals are different because the library will access them rather than own them. To guard against the abuse of intellectual property in the digital medium, publishers require libraries to sign licence agreements that delineate who comprises the user population, what constitutes
„authorised use‟ of the information and how long the access to the information will last. The library will have to develop a worksheet or checklist to apply to licence agreements. There are many aspects of licenses such as interlibrary loans, remote access, technical support, licence expiration and usage statistics to be dealt with. A single person may be required to handle this multifaceted task.
Print journals typically come in many separate issues annually, and when many print journals are taken by a library, the costs of recording the arrival or non-arrival of issues mounts greatly. Journal check-in includes a great deal of clerical-level work, yet opening the journal packages requires some sophistication in journal title selection or part discernment given the look-alike titles and title changes. The library also has to stamp dates of receipt, marks of ownership and attach tattle or anti-theft slips. Almost every change in a print journal, whether of its packaging, frequency of issue, title, organization of content, generates both increased direct costs in subscription fees and a good deal of hidden handling costs. With e-journals, savings accrue from the time required to check-in print issues, claim non-arrivals and replace missing pages. E-journals will eliminate a great deal of the clerical and semi-skilled work.
For e-journals, prices must be negotiated, trials arranged and competitive sources and package deals evaluated. Other additional factors are comparability with print content and visual quality, linking capabilities, interface design, archival policy, length of back files, availability of use statistics and access restrictions such as where (off-campus) and to whom (walk-in users).
6.6.2.5 Organising the journals
The amount of work required to organize and update the bibliographic record and holdings of e-journals is much greater than for print journals because of the inconstant nature of the e- journals. Cataloguing not only has to deal with a volatile collection but they will also have to maintain links from catalogue records to full-text. Libraries consider e-journals as part of their library resources and as such these journals should be reflected in the catalogue. UND Libraries uses complete original cataloguing for e-journals. The 856 field which is the uniform resource locator (URL) field is completed. With UND the pure e-journals are only catalogued on URICA and electronic equivalents of print titles. The library system, URICA, is a Web- enabled catalogue. The Web-based OPAC has a clickable link directly to the e-journal. The library also maintains a HTML list for the Web page.
But at UND libraries in addition to the URICA record, separate Web pages were created for e-journals. Cataloguers are required to add and delete titles on URICA and maintain the library Web page. Maintaining access points to e-journals both in the library catalogue and
Web page require a different set of skills from the activities associated with maintaining access points for a print collection.
The amount of work required to update bibliographic records and holdings of e-journals is much greater than for print journals because of their erratic nature. Journal holdings, access points and content are all subject to change at the whim of the publisher and/or the
aggregator. Libraries rely on user feedback to determine whether there are problems accessing electronic resources. This method is thought to be faster, more efficient and more cost effective. For example, when an issue of print does not arrive, the library claims the missing issue from the vendor or publisher. When an issue of an e-journal fails to arrive, there is no vendor claim. As there is no check-in of the issue, the catalogue does not alert the library to the missing issue. Instead the library must rely on user feedback to find the problem.
Offsetting the decrease in activity levels and costs related to the print format is a very large increased workload for both acquisitions and cataloguing functions related to providing access to e-journals. The e-journal collection is also less constant than a print collection in that the electronic distribution is not tightly linked to calendar year only subscriptions, so journals are added continuously and sometimes cancelled during the year. This feature is an advantage but one that creates additional work.
With the circulation function providing access to the journals, there should be reduced staffing due to the fewer items to be shelved. Shelving activities will be affected with the onset of e-journals when journals are no longer physically stored in the library. But UND libraries are not at that stage as yet and there is still a strong user population for the print journals and monographs. But in the future there is likely to be a decrease in the need for shelf and stack maintenance and user photocopying.