by Syma Zerkow and Judith Hiott
As a part of Houston Public Library's annual periodical drop/add period, we received a request from a librarian to subscribe to the journal, Internet Research, from MCB University Press. The price information that accompanied the request listed an electronic version of the periodical at $500 less than the cost of the combined print/electronic subscription.
At this same time, the library began developing a plan to reorganize the Central Library. With a collection of about 2,000 print serials, good public access to the collection has been a constant challenge. Given new access potential provided by the evolving digital serials environment, simply rearranging the existing collection did not seem like an adequate response to the problem. Furthermore, the amount of room available to house the existing collection of serials would not be adequate if our print subscriptions continued to grow at the current rate.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, our evaluation determined that our users are increasingly showing a preference for online material over print. Several statistics reflected this conclusion: a 30% increase in the use of the library's commercial databases; an 80% increase in the use of its website in 1999; a 35% decrease in the reference statistics at the Central Library over a five year period; and a 51% decrease in periodical retrievals at the Central Library over a six year period. More and more patrons are satisfied with the information they find online at their local branch libraries and from their homes via remote access. We concluded that the library's role of making users of all ages good consumers of information requires increasing the quality of the online information available to them where they want it.
For these reasons, Houston Public Library decided to explore duplicating some of the academic serials titles available at our Central Library as electronic subscriptions. By doing so, we hope to gain a broader knowledge of all of the factors involved in developing and maintaining the serials collection of the future.
We began this process by defining our initial goals. We decided to add electronic versions of serials that we currently subscribe to in print at the Central Library since the initial evaluation decision regarding the importance of the journal to our collection had already been made. We also knew that many publishers offer reduced pricing for electronic editions of journals that are subscribed to in print. An initial collection of 100 titles was an informal target. We wanted to offer access to these periodicals at branches and remotely to library cardholders. We wanted the articles searchable by a single index as well as available issue by issue. We also wanted to own the periodicals in the event that if we decided to drop print subscriptionsor the publisher decided to stop printing hard copieswe would have a continuous run of the periodicals. We set a maximum amount of $10,000 that could be spent on this start-up project. Subsequent development of the e-journal collection would take place in the regular serials drop/add process with the regular serials budget.
We conducted a survey of the publishers and distributors of electronic journals to determine who had the largest collection of journals available. EBSCO and OCLC offered the largest collection of e-journals with indexed access. Though EBSCO offered more journals, EBSCO is not HPL's subscription vendor, a requirement of using their service. On the other hand, the library already subscribed to OCLC FirstSearch and the index with access to the journals, Electronic Collections Online (ECO). OCLC was our obvious vendor choice.
A comparison of the Central Library serials holdings against the ECO holdings identified 95 titles that the library already owns in print. Of the 95 titles, 60 of them were available through OCLC's Print Subscriber Program (PSP), meaning that print subscribers pay no additional cost for the electronic subscription. Since they had not yet dealt with a public library, OCLC obtained permission from the publishers to make the journals accessible not only at the Central Library but also to branches and cardholders via remote access authentication. All of the PSP publishers agreed to these terms without additional expense, and we paid OCLC an annual per title access fee. Beginning in March 2000, 48 titles were added; at that time there were 12 titles that had not yet been set up for access by OCLC. Currently, we are in the process of adding 17 more. Because the service is relatively new, none of the titles have more than three years of back issues.
Nineteen of the remaining 35 journals not available through the print subscriber program were Johns Hopkins University Press titles. Since JHUP owns its own online journal service, Project Muse, we began exploring the possibility of obtaining all of the Project Muse titles for a single subscription price. The annual price for all of the titles for a single building ($4000) was within our budget. However, the cost for multiple buildings was $1600 per building. With 36 library buildings, this cost did not meet our project budget allocation, nor did it seem realistic in terms of our expected usage by some of our branches. We contacted Project Muse and inquired about using some other pricing model. We have a two-month trial of the database while we try to negotiate a pricing model agreeable to both parties.
We obtained quotes through OCLC for the remaining non-PSP titles. Nine publishers were contacted for quotes, and the varied nature of the results reflects the uncertainty of publishers about pricing in the online market. For access at all of our 36 library buildings, some of the responses included:
The biggest issue we encountered during the project was how to handle overlap between our aggregated journal services and our electronic journal service. The advantage of e-journals is that, if you continue to purchase access, the issues are available in perpetuity. In developing ECO, OCLC committed to creating a digital archive and obtained the right from all participating publishers to mount all content at OCLC (OCLC, 1). Another advantage is that most e-journals are delivered in PDF format. Since this is a digital picture of the print title, all of the graphics that go with the article are available. A survey of the fulltext holdings in all of the aggregated FirstSearch databases found 22 of the 60 journals in the print subscriber program were also part of a FirstSearch database. However, aggregators do not provide the archival guarantee nor do many of them provide all the graphics that are in an article or all the articles in an issue (Tenopir, 142; Frazer, 2-3). We decided that the advantages of providing these titles outweighed the expense and accepted the overlap. In the future as we evaluate e-journal subscriptions on a title-by-title basis, we will certainly consider whether the journal is valuable enough for overlap with our aggregated services.
Though we have just begun to catalog our e-journals, secondary access to journal titles via serials records in our web-based catalog is another fortunate by-product of e-journal subscriptions. For patrons who use the catalog frequently, it will be a pleasant surprise that some of the information they want is a few clicks away from their search results. Access to cataloged Internet sites, e-journals, and even e-books via the 856 field in the MARC record promises to make the catalog increasingly valuable as an access point for fulltext content in addition to books on the shelves.
The other great news about e-journals is that now there is an easy way to determine which journals are used and which collect "electronic dust." OCLC provides statistics on use by journal title for all of the titles in ECO. This information is also available from some aggregators; but, in the aggregator model of delivery, a library does not have control over which journals are added or dropped. Thus, aggregator statistics for collection development purposes is limited to gaining an understanding of what subjects are popular. We could add e-journals, and possibly print journals, on popular subjects as indicated by their usage as part of the aggregator database.
The initial use of fulltext articles from the journals is low but consistent with the first six months' use of many of our other databases. Considering the unevenness of subjects covered in the small collection, we are happy with the initial results. The fact that subjects covered with the most depth by the collection also have the journals with the most use makes us optimistic that, as the collection gains depth, the use will increase dramatically.
We are already aware of ECO enhancements that would be useful for our library. For some of the humanities and social sciences journals, we can predict demand for more of the back issues. Literary criticism has never been extensively available at our branches and is one of the areas we would like to develop. Having back issues of these titles would enhance the service greatly. Accessing titles from a service like JSTOR through the ECO database would increase the value of the product for us.
As a public library we would like to see electronic versions of some of the popular journals available on an archived subscription basis. They will certainly take on the glitzy look of the popular periodical websites already available, but our hope is that full content including photos and graphics will be available and archived.
Because in the long run we think it will be cheaper and because customers will demand it, we picture a future in which only the journals that make money as print journals will continue in print. More and more scholarly publishing will consist of "true electronic journals," those that have never been published in paper and have the interactive features made possible by the Web environment (Anderson, 25). There are many positive benefits in terms of presenting the information. For instance, analyses of music and art could be enhanced by audio and pictures. Footnotes can include links to the actual articles cited. However, archiving such information is a challenge and is a long-term content strategy for the ECO archive (OCLC, 2).
Will the archived e-journal model replace the aggregator model for delivering serials articles in public libraries? If growth in the number of titles and some of the enhancements we are hoping for happen on a large scale, we think it is a possibility. However, the popularity of products offered by aggregators suggests that such a transformation would take place within the current aggregator industry and would take years. Furthermore, an acceptable solution for publishers to minimize revenue loss and copyright infringement must be found before more creative and affordable pricing models can be made available to public libraries.
How will Houston Public Library's serials subscriptions change in the future? We have not changed much yet, but we have not ruled out any options. We will soon weed our current print collection of short runs of journals to which we no longer subscribe as well as back issues of journals whose information dates quicklyespecially if a local academic library is archiving the same journal. Branch print periodical collections are increasingly being defined as browsing collections in which back issues circulate. We will certainly add electronic-only subscriptions to new scholarly and popular titles in the future. Some of these new titles will be true electronic journals. The radical Central Library optionsdropping print subscriptions of titles for which we have e-journal subscriptions or substituting e-journals (from a service like JSTOR) for back issueshave not been seriously considered at this point. Even in the less scholarly public library environment, these decisions are not made lightly. But, as the serials industry is transformed by the digital world and our users' preferences become clear, these options certainly will not be ignored.
Syma Zerkow is coordinator of materials selection at Houston Public Library. Judith Hiott is assistant coordinator of materials selection at Houston Public Library.