ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries


May 1987 /  273

S ettin g  th e  r e c o r d  str a ig h t o n  th e 
S u rvey o f S ch o la rs

By Herbert C. Morton
Director
Office of  Scholarly Communication 

and Technology

and Anne Jamieson Price

Staff Associate
Office of Scholarly Communication 

and Technology

A response to “The ACLS Survey and Academic 
Library Service. ”

are indebted to Ronald Epp and JoAn Segal 
for spelling out some of the implications for librari­
ans of the ACLS Survey of Scholars (C&RL News, 
February 1987), but we disagree with some of their 
criticisms, and are troubled by others that either 
miss the mark or are dead wrong—including the 
attribution to us of statements that appear no­
where in our text. (The survey was conducted by 
the Office of Scholarly Communication and Tech­
nology, 1) to gather data about humanists and so­
cial scientists as producers and users of scholarly 
materials and 2) to obtain their views on a wide 
range of issues, such as library service, applications 
of new technology, and academic matters related 
to scholarly communication, such as peer review. 
A preliminary report of the findings appeared in 
the Summer 1986 issue of our newsletter, Scholarly 
Communication.)

Like Epp and Segal, we will reserve our bou­
quets for the end, and we will begin directly with 
our rejoinder. Their criticisms fall mostly under 
two headings: that we slighted “areas of critical 
importance to the library community” and that we 
misinterpreted our own data.

Half full or half empty

Epp and Segal criticize us “for analyzing minor­
ity responses” rather than the majority, as if this

were evidence of deception. The first example they 
cite is a passage where we report that a substantial 
minority of respondents say they rarely find an ar­
ticle worth reading in their discipline’s major jour­
nal (the percentage ranges from 19% to 43% , de­
pending on the discipline). They indicate that we 
should have stressed that the majority of respon­
dents do find an article worth reading in their disci­
pline’s major journal.

We disagree, though we acknowledge that this is 
a matter on which opinions may differ. The deci­
sion to use the “minority” response is conventional 
practice whenever the minority number is more 
relevant and more significant. For example, the 
Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the emphasis on the 
unemployment rate, even though well over 90 % of 
the labor force has been at work since World War 
II. The unemployment rate is a much more reveal­
ing and more sensitive indicator of changes in the 
level of economic activity and of the welfare of 
workers in the labor force. Closer to home, educa­
tors and librarians are campaigning against illiter­
acy by citing the large minority of adults who are 
functionally illiterate rather than the larger per­
centage who read and comprehend.

We cite the minority figures in a number of in­
stances when we think it is appropriate to do so. 
Thus, given the concern of journal editors with 
stagnant or declining circulation, we thought it



274 /  C & R L N ew s

more im portant to identify trouble spots. Simi­
larly, we report th at 20 % of the respondents say 
that informal prepublication distribution of m ate­
rials is a t le a st as im p o r ta n t as m a te ria l in 
journals– a finding th at has aroused a good deal of 
interest because it was widely believed th at this 
practice was largely limited to scientists.

We also noted th a t a large m inority of all respon­
dents found the book collections in their library— 
and to a lesser extent their journal collections— 
inadequate for their research needs. To be sure, 
most respondents are satisfied w ith all aspects of li­
brary collections, but if librarians are concerned 
about improving their support of scholarship, as 
they say they are, it is much more instructive to 
identify the areas where users think collections are 
least adequate. The purpose of our survey was not 
to see w hether scholars like their libraries—the 
shelves are already sagging under the weight of 
user surveys saying this is so—but to identify weak­
nesses as well as strengths. W e also thought the rel­
a tiv ely  low  r a tin g  of book co lle c tio n s for 
research—at all institutions, research universities 
as well as colleges—was a confirmation of w hat li­
brary spokesmen have been saying all along, th at 
no university library can be self-sufficient today 
and th a t resource sharing is essential. And we said 
so specifically.

The most serious charge of slanting our interpre­
tations is based on statem ents th a t we did not 
make. Epp and Segal write as follows:

“The survey authors interpreted the statistics 
when they affirmed th at ‘only’ 77 % of the scholars 
have one or more people in their departm ent w ith 
whom they share research interests, and th a t ‘only’ 
61 % regularly ask someone in their departm ent to 
comment on their work. Readers may be led to 
share the survey authors’ conclusion th at this is a 
deplorable situation where ‘40% have no one in 
their d ep artm en t to ask for comments on their 
m anuscripts.’”

We did not conclude th a t the situation is deplor­
able and we did not cite either figure—77 % or 
61 % —in the text. Both appear in a table in which 
the column headings are neutral, and which indi­
cate no judgm ent on our p art regarding w hether 
the percentages are high or low, good or bad.

The quoted word “only,” which is inserted twice 
by our critics in this passage and which conveys the 
impression th a t we slanted the interpretation, does 
not appear anywhere in our discussions of the ques­
tions about sharing of research interests and com­
menting on papers w ritten by colleagues. Our re­
p o rtin g  w as fa c tu a l; w e drew  no inferences. 
Readers who have any doubts about w hat we said 
are invited to tu rn  to the last full paragraph on 
page 6 of our report.

What we left out and why

The most detailed and indignant criticisms are 
directed at us for slighting im portant issues. The

“most surprising” omission, in their view, is that 
we did not address the issue of preservation of dete­
riorating source materials: “Surely scholars are not 
indifferent to the fate of these irreplaceable m ateri­
als,” they say.

We agree, and indeed would go farther: we do 
not think it requires a survey to establish th at fact. 
On this m atter, we think Epp and Segal have con­
fused the im portance of the issue of preservation 
w ith the im portance of asking scholars to answer 
questions about it.

There is not much to be learned from asking 
scholars w hether they think the m aterial in crum ­
bling books should be preserved, and not much 
purpose in asking them  w hether they think the 
diethylzinc process for mass deacidification is the 
right way to go, or w hether microform is the most 
appropriate medium for preservation.

W ith regard to preservation, the big need is to 
educate scholars about the threat to our recorded 
heritage and the role they might play in advancing 
the cause of preservation. T h at’s w hat the National 
Enquiry tried to do a decade ago, w hat our office 
has tried to do in our newsletter, and w hat the 
NEH and the National Commission on Preserva­
tion and Access are doing. We thought the limited 
space in the questionnaire m ight be better devoted 
to asking scholars about m atters on which they 
have had experience or on which they are well in­
formed.

Scholars are, of course, in a position to render in­
formed opinions on another issue th at was not cov­
ered in our survey. We were criticized for failing to 
address m atters of “institutional governance and 
academic powers.” On this issue, the opinions of 
scholars are indeed w orth getting. But we need to 
remind our critics th at we were conducting a sur­
vey of “scholarly com m unication,” not “higher ed­
ucation,” and while m atters of institutional gov­
ernance no d o u b t have a bearin g  on scholarly 
communication, the link is less direct th an  it is to 
the issues th at we sought to examine.

Epp and Segal seem to give little thought to the 
purpose of the survey and the fact th at there is a re­
lationship between the length of a questionnaire 
and the likelihood th at it will be answered. O ur list 
of omissions—questions th a t we w anted to ask but 
had to leave out—is far greater than theirs. To re­
duce the questionnaire to m anageable length, we 
cut it by about 40 percent—from about 125 ques­
tions to 75 (many of them  w ith m ultiple parts). The 
problem we had to face, in discussions w ith our 
consultant and advisory committee, was deciding 
how long the survey could be before it would get 
tossed into the waste basket. W e think we pushed 
our luck by mailing out a 16-page questionnaire 
which, according to pretests, required 30-40 m in­
utes to fill out. W e can agree to disagree on the spe­
cifics of w hat should be included, but we reject the 
im plication th a t questions w ere om itted cap ri­
ciously, w ithout forethought.

W e are also called to account for failing to recog­



Man 1987 /  275

nize that scholars have been inconvenienced be­
cause they had to “travel to another city to get ac­
cess to rare m aterials.” But again, given the 
limitations on the length of the questionnaire, the 
issue is whether this aspect of the access problem is 
more important than the access questions we asked 
related to interlibrary lending, electronic searches 
and so on.

We were criticized on two occasions for failing 
to ask scholars whether they read Choice (Mr. 
E pp’s journal) and Booklist. But as we stated 
clearly, the purpose of the question to which our 
critics referred was to probe the scope of respon­
dents’ reading habits outside their specialty—from 
general book review media to publications on sci­
ence for the non-scientist. We were not surveying 
readership of book review publications aimed at li­
brarians, such as Choice or Library Journal.

This does not exhaust our disagreements with 
our critics, but it probably exhausts the reader’s 
patience—and the space allotted to us. Let us sim­
ply add that we do not want to suggest that we 
think our survey is above criticism. It has a number 
of limitations that we point out in our report, and, 
with hindsight, we can see a number of ways in 
which it could have been better. We simply believe 
that in general Epp and Segal have zeroed in on the 
wrong targets and in many instances have not 
fairly represented our purpose and results.

Looking ahead
In view of our response, readers may wonder

whether there is a brick in the bouquet we toss now 
to Epp and Segal. There is not. We applaud them 
for doing, and doing very well, what no other com­
mentators have done: to explore the implications of 
our data when the findings seem convincing and 
relevant. We are pleased that they did indeed find 
some of the results worthwhile, and, more impor­
tantly, that they were able to generate a kind of 
action agenda by drawing on the survey and on the 
ARL report, “The Changing Agenda of Scholarly 
Communication,” which was discussed in less de­
tail in the same article. No, the bouquet is genuine. 
On balance, we think their article is highly con­
structive, and we hope that it leads to further dis­
cussion and action.

The authors respond:
I wish to thank Herbert C. Morton for his re­

sponse to our article. While not wishing to engage 
in a point by point response to his criticisms, one 
personal matter is worth noting. As a member of 
the American Philosophical Association I was one 
of the scholars chosen to participate in the survey. 
Suggestions by Mr. Morton that academic librari­
ans failed to see the larger purposes of the survey 
are not deserved. Jo An Segal and I stressed our con­
cerns for larg er issues—such as academ ic 
governance—and we made an effort as well to give 
some indication of concerns that would be peculiar 
to a survey participant.—Ronald H. Epp, Manag­
ing Editor, Choice.

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