52 Advisor Op-Ed / The Charleston Advisor /July 2005 www.charlestonco.co ▼ ADVISOR OP-ED Reflections About Collections With the Help of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore SEVENTH FIESOLE RETREAT Melbourne, Australia 28–30 April 2005 By Ann Okerson (Associate University Librarian for Collections and International Programs,Yale University Library) <[email protected]> Ed. Note: The following paper was delivered as the opening keynote presenta- In the 1960s, h u ge amounts of money came into our hands in the U. S. , tion at the Seventh Fiesole Collection Development Retre at , in Melbourn e, Au s- for both new and old universities and libraries, all growing faster than tralia, April 28–30, 2005. staff could manage. So Richard Abel and Co. (Oregon) hired a cadre of subject selectors to do a piece of academic book selection that was being rep e ated daily in libra ries all over the country. His company then Introduction supplied its selected books on “ a p p rova l ” to libra ri e s , wh i ch could My ge n e r ation of Canadians loved the famous skits by Peter Cook, choose to accept or return the books. It was a brilliant idea, “outsourc- Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller called Beyond the i n g ” b e f o re the wo rd was a commonplace. Now “ o u t s o u rc i n g ” i s Fringe. Clueless, or wacky, or dilettante, or demented, or totally out- increasingly common, as academic booksellers, and not just in west- of-it Brits sat around and pondered the mysteries of the universe from ern countries, provide additional services such as online catalog copy their unique life perspectives, perhaps a coal mine or a mountaintop. or “ s h e l f - re a dy ” books upon delive ry. We re our libra ries to re claim the One of my favorites in BTF is “Aftermyth of War.” Here, heroic Eng- selection, acquisitions, and cataloging work that has been entrusted to lish folk contemplate life during the Great Second World War, consol- our commercial colleagues, our staff costs would surely at least dou- ing themselves throughout the bombings by having “a nice cup of hot ble. tea.” “Squiffy,” the wife says to the yokel towards the very end of the sketch, “it’s the end of an era,” and this time they console themselves N ex t , in this postmodern libra ry age, l a rge aggregat o rs of electro n i c by having “a nice cup of boiling hot water.” books are entering the marke t p l a c e : for ex a m p l e, n e t l i b r a ry, eb ra ry, and ebooks.com are among the newcomer generalists, while special- We are going to take the next short while to reflect on whether we are ists such as Safari, Knovel, and Books24x7 offer narrower ranges of reaching the end of an era, through the voice of a librarian as often as collecting ex p e r t i s e. As e-book consolidations pro l i fe rat e, l i b ra ry selec- not in the coal mine of collections. But please understand that , as I tion becomes even more fully outsourced and we in libraries have less look at the current and future academic research library scene, partic- fl exibility to reject titles. The Yale libra ry now “ h o l d s ” well over a half u l a rly with re l ation to collections deve l o p m e n t , the right or best strat e- million volumes of e-books purchased and licensed, none of wh i ch gies for moving forward with a long-term collections strategy aren’t were chosen as single titles (and a number of which replicate our print particularly clear to me. collections). All that is befo re the promise of the Google Print and other mass digitization projects. My primary message today is that none of us believes our libraries are s e l f - s u ffi c i e n t , and they are not. Ye t , in spite of evidence to the contra ry, Let me emphasize that all the developments described here reduce local we too often act as if we are still very much autonomous. collections and selection activ i t y, a n d – – h e r e ’s the hook that ge t s u s – – gre at ly expand the accessibility of mat e ri a l s . B u t , at the same time, wh e rever more and more selection wo rk is done outside of libra ri e s Building Library Collections: The End of an Era? and/or collections are licensed by us, content ava i l able through re s e a rch Libraries go back centuries, but the ambitious library, focused on and l i b r a ri e s , at least in North A m e ri c a , is becoming more similar each open to a broad community of users, is, for the most part, a very mod- year. ern concept. The antecedents of the Yale Library––troves owned and o p e rated by sch o l a r s of ex t ra o r d i n a ry learning and bri l l i a n c e – – we re The journals collecting enterp rise is in some ways diffe rent from book b r ought home to me re c e n t ly. We have just finished cat a l o ging and collecting, but in other ways it is now similar. Selecting a single jour- c o nve rting bibl i ographical re c o rds for one of these unique old encl ave s , nal biases future acquisition: once having selected a journ a l , the libra r- the Yale Babylonian Collection, nu m b e ring some 10,000 items, i . e. , a s i a n ’s default incl i n ation has been to continue re c e iving the subscri p t i o n large as the whole of Yale Library was until late in the nineteenth cen- indefinitely. Thus, until the 1990s, selection of journals––by contrast tury. Throughout this project, a joint venture between our library and to monographs––already felt “efficient” and was done almost exclu- the distinguished faculty curator of the Y B C , we heard stories about the sively title by title, with the business support being taken on by sub- “old” days when faculty and graduate students would drop their own s c r iption agencies (wh o , u n l i ke book ve n d o rs , do not select fo r work and go on “book hunts” through the warren of YBC rooms, in libraries). o rder to find a book for a visiting scholar who needed a particular item. That said, the zeal for seeing the benefits of electronic publishing was Collections in that storybook wo rld we re built with mu ch learning and nowhere so intense in the 1990s as in the area of scholarly, and partic- mu ch intuition; we now build teams of specialist bibl i ograp h e rs , s c o u r u l a r ly STM journ a l s , wh e re ch a n ge was rap i d. I was among the earl i e r the world to fill our gaps, and scoop up new publications. l i b r a rians invo l ved in consortial nego t i ations for wh at we now call “ t h e The Charleston Advisor / July 2005 www.charlestonco.com 53 Big Deal” (licensing all or virt u a l ly all of a publ i s h e r ’s titles in one some funds for acquisitions, and we now have a back l og of some 4 , 0 0 0 financial arra n ge m e n t ) , i n i t i a l ly with Academic Pre s s , in conve rs at i o n s books in these language s , titles that do not appear in the large cat a- that began in a corridor at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1995. Through loging utilities or databases. Nor can these booksellers supply us with the late 1990s, we begged publishers for such scaled-up arrangements c at a l og re c o rds . If we are successful, the 1 8 months of money we have and rejoiced at the greater comprehensiveness of titles for a small pre- will take care of less than half of the backlog, but we may not be able mium in dollars. Now the pendulum has swung, and librarians more to find someone for this work. often speak of the Big Deal as the devil’s spawn––while at the same That is, the biggest research libraries are still unable to polish off var- t i m e, we are impatient with publ i s h e rs of single titles who have not ious cat a l og back l ogs in unusual language s , or in special collections and found the cash or tech n o l ogical savvy to integrate their product with the archives, let alone the new media (particularly electronic) coming on rest of the world’s e-journals. b o a rd in tsunami-like quantities.