College and Research Libraries Guest Editorial The Coming Contest If, as now seems likely, many of the services provided by publishers and li- braries in the current print environment will be done increasingly by writers and readers for themselves once the most heavily used information becomes avail- able online, opportunities for both li- braries and publishers to provide their services to academic users well may diminish. While the new online medium will doubtless spawn new service possi- bilities, the plain fact is that there may not be enough room in a primarily online environment for both academic libraries and commercial publishers of special- ized scholarly information to grow and to remain key players in the academic information services arena. It is possible that libraries, if they are to continue to fulfill effectively their functions as pri- mary service agents, will decide either to take on additional responsibilities for specialized scholarly publishing-or that publishers, in order to survive and expand, will need (and will have the technical capacity) to assume many of the mediation and distribution functions previously performed by libraries. If this is true, and either academic li- braries or scholarly publishers-but not both-will eventually prevail in a pri- marily online environment, then which should it be? Of course, academic librar- ies will agree easily that ultimately li- braries should succeed, because they are more directly concerned and better able to deal with the information needs of academic users. Publishers, or at least the commercial ones, are indeed busi- ness enterprises, and customer service is not the fundamental purpose of business despite the proclamations of the current 458 "quality'' movement. The fundamental purpose of business is to stay in business: to grow and to increase return on invest- ment. Customer service is merely a means to that end. If growth and revenue could be better achieved by ignoring or mal- treating customers, then customers would be ignored or maltreated. There- fore, service quality is relatively simple for a business to define: high-quality services are those that generate increas- ing revenue, and low-quality services are those that do not. In contrast, libraries have at their dis- posal no such straightforward method to measure quality of service, and are also obliged by their professional culture and their institutional commitments to view service not as a means but rather as an end-so that all actions taken and all resources expended are justified exclu- sively by that purpose. That being the case, what would happen, one wonders, if at a certain point academic libraries began to suspect that commercial ven- dors were developing a capacity to pro- vide better service at a distance than libraries were able to provide on site? If service is the exclusive purpose of librar- ies, rather than a means to "stay in busi- ness," then would libraries, seeing that publishers could do a better job, simply convert themselves into warehouses, and advise their institutions to use the funding previously spent on libraries to provide instead access to the services of publishers (which would by that time have expanded themselves into full-serv- ice scholarly information brokerages)? Of course not. But the reason this will not happen is neither because libraries are imbued with some super-competi- tive spirit, nor because libraries are nec- essarily equipped to provide better serv- ices, but rather because libraries know so little about the quality of the services they do provide, that they would prob- ably never notice that an outside agency was capable of doing a better job. Be- cause service is so difficult (in the ab- sence of a convenient gauge like revenue) to monitor and assess, and be- cause the real needs of academic users are so diverse and complex, and because the library has always had (by virtue of its proximity to its users) what amounts to a monopoly on campus for print informa- tion services, and finally because service is the library's only purpose for existence, the library has preferred and has been permitted to define service quality on the basis of whatever service levels it- the library-provides. Since high quality service is the only purpose for the ex- istence of libraries, and since libraries exist, what they are providing must be high quality service. Libraries con- sequently will never be able to recog- nize, let alone admit, that another agency is providing academic informa- tion services superior to those provided by libraries, because that is by definition impossible. Only after users have in ef- fect rendered libraries totally superflu- ous by abandoning them for commercial vendors will libraries in their current condition be able to recognize that their services were inferior. What is to be done? To begin with, academic libraries need to acknowledge and to prepare for a situation in the not- too-distant future in which they will enter into a very real and strenuous com- petition with commercial scholarly pub- lishers and other vendors to become the dominant information service providers for students and faculty users. The more online publication becomes the accepted mode, the more opportunities, tempta- tions, and incentives libraries and pub- lishers are going to find to bypass each other. While one result of this might be that libraries and publishers will become so preoccupied with each other's tradi- tional activities that they will end up simply exchanging responsibilities over Guest Editorial . 459 time, a much more likely scenario is that one or the other will become the prevalent academic information provider. Academic libraries (and publishers) would be very foolish not to begin preparations now for that coming competition. Second, as part of this preparation aca- demic libraries must dispense with the mistaken notion that publishers and li- braries are in entirely different busi- nesses. Both libraries and publishers are fundamentally information intermedi- aries between academic writers and readers. It makes no difference what- soever whether those services are un- derstood as erids or as means. In a primarily online environment, moreover, it will be users (i.e., writers and readers) rather than libraries who define quality service. Third, libraries need to begin learning as much as possible about specialized scholarly publishing. To this end closer links should be established with com- puter centers and university presses. The aim should be a condition in which a fa- culty member, having completed some- thing for publication, will bring that material to the library. The library will then ensure that the material is referred to a nationally qualified editorial board; if the board accepts the item for publication, then it will be the library (after having done the necessary cataloging or index- ing) that ensures through its links with other libraries around the nation and around the world that the item is pub- lished; that is, that it is made known and available to students and scholars who are interested in the subject. Fourth, and perhaps most important, academic libraries now need to begin to concentrate on personalizing and humanizing relationships with their users, because it is only through continuous per- sonal contact and interaction that libraries effectively can begin to assess and refine service quality. We have become so ab- sorbed and preoccupied with the ability of computer mediated communication and· publication to eclipse location as a factor in scholarly collaboration and in- formation services that we have ig- nored-or at least resigned ourselves to 460 College & Research Libraries the unfashionability of discussing-the very real isolation and dehumanization that increasing reliance on online sources will necessarily entail. While proximity to users may no longer allow academic li- braries to assume a service monopoly, it does continue to provide libraries with their greatest opportunity to tailor services (including publishing) to meet local user needs-services that are demonstrably superior to those available exclusively at a distance. It will be risky and difficult, November 1993 but there is no alternative: the more rapid the advances of information technology, the more willing academic libraries must be to invest in enhancing their human resources. This is the real challenge, and if we are able to meet it, then we will succeed finally in supplying a truly su- perior information service as defined not by ourselves but by the preferences of our users. ROSS ATKINSON, Cornell University IN FORTHCOMING ISSUES OF COLLEGE & RESEARCH LIBRARIES Library Development Structures in CIC Institutions: The Search for Constituents G. David Gearhart and Gloriana St. Clair Affinnative Action: Opportunity or Obstacle Ellen Altman and Patricia Promis Indexing Price Trends of French Academic Books in the Humanities and Social Sciences Ronald E. Austin The NFS says more timber sales mean more logging which means more jobs. Even if the timber must be sold at a loss. Opponents say this annual deficit amounts to logging subsidized by taxpayers, and that the real motive is to build roads in previous~ road- less areas, preventing future wilderness designations. The battle between environmen- talists and developers is an issue of international importance. 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