College and Research Libraries Editorial The Future of Scholarship One of my editorial themes over the last five years has been the need for li- brarians to change to meet the challenges of a significantly different future for schol- arship and thus for library service. Last May, the Research Libraries Group spon- sored a small symposium entitled "Schol- arship in the New Information Environ- ment" at Harvard Law School. The speakers at this conference inspired me to comment again about the new environ- ment for scholarship. Scholarly information: Stanley Chod- orow, provost of the University of Penn- sylvania, predicted the continuation of print for a long, long time, but the end of an era when scholarly text was fixed. He believes that multiple versions of schol- arly works with annotations of different scholars will exist simultaneously. Schol- ars, with the help of specialist librarians, will have to select among them. Toni Carbo Bearman, dean of the School of Li- brary and Information Science at the Uni- versity of Pittsburgh, also envisioned a hypertextual form where fixity no longer operates. She thinks that the idea of lit- eracy will have to be replaced by mediacy, an understanding of thought through media other than the printed page. Hal Varian, Reuben Kempf professor of eco- nomics at the University of Michigan, outlined the advantages of price discrimi- nation in valuing information; he pre- dicted that scholars will pay for informa- tion but that the costs for text will be negligible. Douglas Greenberg, president of the Chicago Historical Society, pre- dicted a continuing expansion of schol- arly interest with an increasing range of methodological approaches. Supporting all these new methodologies challenges libraries and societies that store source materials. More and more in- stitutions will begin to charge for the use of their unique re- sources. Library roles: As the library presents itself on each scholar's desk top, its need for a central geographical place on cam- pus vanishes. Chodorow thinks materi- als not converted to electronic form can be stored anywhere and made available only as needed. Ross Atkinson, associate university librarian for collection devel- opment, technical services, and preserva- tion at Cornell University, described the paper library as a drought with librarians as children of the drought in comparison with the electronic library which will pro- vide a flood of unmanaged information. He reconceptualizes the library as an in- stitution that identifies materials along a source/ needs continuum. The library will ensure access to all materials, but the speed of delivery to the patron will vary. The library will add value to certain ma- terials by creating a control zone in which some materials are available locally, some are quickly produced for less frequent use, and others take even longer to ac- cess. Librarian roles: Chodorow believes that librarians will be recognized as in- formation specialists; they will be jointly trained in information retrieval and in a subject discipline to navigate through the broad electronic information landscape. Atkinson reiterated his idea that the li- brary should become a scholarly pub- lisher for nontrade monographs, and Csewlaw J.Grycz, executive director of the Wladyslaw Poniecki Charitable Foun- dation, noted the need to add value, rather than just cost, in both the editing and review process and in the storage and 473 474 College & Research Libraries retrieval process. Bearman and Atkinson both discussed the continuing need for filtering and quality control. Varian viewed the librarian as the person mak- ing the decisions about how to maximize the amount of quality information that could be purchased with the materials budget. Library cooperation: Atkinson al- lowed his Doppelganger to speak to the less idealized explanations for the failure of efforts at cooperation. Head librarians flourish by maximizing the libraries' share of the academic institution's bud- get, and collection managers measure success through maximization of local holdings, which has been a key deter- miner of large library rankings. In this environment, spending local monies to meet national needs is virtually impos- sible. Similarly, the university sells itself on the reputation of its faculty, who are often more concerned with their own prestige than with dissemination of infor- mation. The current system supports all these agendas excellently. In this envi- ronment, talk about cooperation is far more effective than real cooperation. Atkinson noted that the Association of Research Libraries' directors could end the serials cost crisis by each requesting a thirty percent reduction in materials budget and five years of flat funding. The faculty would be in an uproar because of the potential damage to their reputations, and all the directors would be fired. Other realistic observations: Chodo- row, a scholar of medieval canon law, spoke about writing books for nine or ten or perhaps only six colleagues. Such works, which have always been subsi- November 1995 dized by library purchases, should not be produced in the same way as the works of Danielle Steele. Grycz and others noted the probable triumph of the entertain- ment industry in determining the intel- lectual property laws of the United States and hoped for some special provisions for the scholarly communications system. In response to Paul Mosher's question about the continued viability of the Chatauqua model (lifelong learning for the common person), the panel questioned whether states are willing to fund a first-class edu- cational institution. As education com- petes with prisons and health care, sup- port is eroding. Libraries and librarians are part of a system designed to serve a lifelong learn- ing model for higher education. The ideal behind that model was a democratization of learning; knowledge was a public good that should be made freely available to all. Now that whole system and its un- derlying ideal are being challenged. Li- brarians must make a stronger commit- ment to their role in the creation of scholarship-as scholarly publishers, or- ganizers, indexers, and information spe- cialists. Further, students are accustomed to doing research in a collection that has been screened. As these students begin to use resources on the Internet and to work with multiple versions rather than with a fixed text, the library's instructional re- sponsibilities intensify and proliferate. The digital library may cede its place in the geographical center of campus but specialist librarians should not cede their place at the center of the production and interpretation of scholarly information. GLORIANA ST. CLAIR You could buy a collection of CDs in these areas ... ... and still not match the coverage found in Biological Abstracts® on Compact Disc. w hy purchase several compact discs when you can rely on a single source for access to the widest range of life science journal literature: Biological Abstracts on CD . Comprehensive Jounud and Subject Coverage early 6,500 international journals are monitored for Biological Abstracts on CD, so researchers can pinpoint relevant refer- ences quickly and easily. 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