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Today at the Dean’s meeting, I spoke up about the crisis in library funding. I thought it was a pretty good impassioned plea. No reaction. Finally, one of the Deans said, “You know, Jim, I wish I could get worked up about this, but you guys are always in crisis.” I know - libraries are black holes. They suck up every bit of money you throw at them and come back for more.

Ours is not the only library that’s having trouble paying for materials, not by a long shot. And most of the blame lies with the publishers of academic journals.

Back when I was just a psychology professor, I never thought much about journals, and even less about the publishers. If I needed an article, I got it from the library. If I wrote an article, I tried to get it published in the best journal I could. Now that I’m in charge of our library, I am appalled at how academic libraries are getting gouged by the publishers.

The continuing crisis referred to above comes from the fact that the publishers of academic journals routinely inflate the price of our journal subscriptions up to 10 percent a year, sometimes more. The NDSU Library maintains over 8,000 subscriptions to databases, journals, and other serial publications. This year, it will cost us about $148,000 more than last year just to keep our periodicals and electronic resources intact. This is not atypical - it happens every year.

In these days of flat budgets, the consequences of ever-inflating subscriptions can be devastating. Just do the math. Let’s say you have a million dollars worth of subscriptions (we have much more, in fact) and 10% inflation. Next year, holding even will cost you $1,100,000, the year after, $1,210,000, the year after, $1,331,000, ad nauseum. As a result of these increasing costs, we have cut our journals until we can’t cut any more, and are now cannibalizing our book budget. Believe me, librarians are not happy if they can’t buy books!

As publishers are going increasingly electronic, they don’t have nearly the costs for printing and mailing that they used to. Yet they keep raising their prices. Why do they do it? Because they can.

Our faculty must have access to the current literature in their fields so they can write grants, do their research, and publish in their own right. So we can’t very well not subscribe to the journals, even though they’re robbing us. (I think it’s pretty ironic that our faculty don’t get paid for their articles by the journals that are getting rich off of them.)

Publishers have even started selling individual articles at steep prices to force libraries to purchase subscriptions rather than buy information article by article. A particularly egregious example of this strategy is The Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, an important publication in that area. An online subscription to this journal is $3000 per year, and it would cost $21,000 for the entire run of the journal. Individual articles from this journal cost from $200 to $600 each.

Do we have to keep taking it, even though we’re mad as hell? Maybe not. Recently, the Max Planck Institute of Germany canceled 1200 Springer journals due to Springer’s refusal to negotiate reasonable prices (see story in Open Access News). According to a post to a librarian’s listserv by George Porter of Cal Tech, “The Max Planck Society, for those unfamiliar, operates 80 research institutes with more than 12,000 staff members and 9,000 Ph.D. students, post-docs, guest scientists and researchers, and student assistants…. In US - centric terms, my interpretation is that this is roughly equivalent to all of the National Institutes of Health, the DoE labs (Los Alamos, Livermore, Fermi, Brookhaven, etc.), and the NASA research centers (JPL, Dryden, Langley, Glenn, Ames, etc.) canceling all Springer titles for all locations.”

Some collective action along these lines by American universities might have a salutary effect on profiteering by the publishers of academic journals.

Acknowledgement: I am indebted to Mark England, our Director of Information Resources, for much of the data and ideas presented in this post.

The NDSU Library is heading into a year of significant changes. Some changes are already happening, some are on the horizon, some are currently “irons in the fire,” but likely to happen.

I have already written about our A-to-Z database and Link Resolver, which will make it possible to search all of our databases at once and easily find full-text electronic articles if they are available. You can actually access this service right now, but our Electronic Resources people aren’t quite ready to put it in the spotlight. (See last two posts.)

One thing that is definitely going to happen is that the NDSU Library will begin piloting a new Integrated Library System for North Dakota libraries. The ILS is the computer system that runs the whole library enterprise. We use our ILS to buy books, catalog them, and make them available to patrons through the OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog). Our current ILS is ALEPH, which is a product of the international firm, Ex Libris. ALEPH has been adopted by North Dakota to run virtually every library system from those at public and school libraries to those at the major research universities. A lot of people, myself included, confuse ALEPH with ODIN (the Online Dakota Information Network). Actually, ODIN is a consortium of libraries in the state that has chosen to run Aleph. Each library pays a yearly fee to support Aleph, and NDSU’s proportion of the total is substantial. Right now, there is no alternative to ALEPH, but rising concern that Ex Libris is not keeping pace with Web 2.0 technology.

The NDSU Library has been chosen to bring up an alternative ILS, so that a year or two down the line other libraries in the state will have an option. In particular, we will be installing a sophisiticated system that should appeal to the research universities and largest public libraries. We will be issuing a Request for Proposals to vendors in a couple of weeks, and will be evaluating products this fall. We expect to make a final decision on adoption by January, begin migrating data to the new system in the spring, and have the new system up and running by next August. All this will be going on in the background, with patrons continuing to use the current ALEPH system, until the new system goes public at the beginning of the Fall 08 semester.

Another thing that’s going to happen is that the Library will get a completely redesigned website. Expect to see a totally different homepage, with a much better look and feel, in about a month. In the coming months, we will be migrating content to the new website, but this will be going on behind the scenes. When it’s all ready, we’ll put the current website away and go public with a dramatically different new website. John Schulz, our web designer, has been working with student and faculty groups to construct a new website that will incorporate Web 2.0 technology and be much more satisfying to our patrons.

Our last new thing is establishing the Library as a resource for faculty and students interested in using social media tools like blogs and wikis. We have formed an NDSU Social Media group, which includes representatives from faculty, students, ITS, and University Relations, with the goal of having the Library host an open blogging facility like the University of Minnesota’s UThink. There’s a lot to work out concerning issues like security and appropriate use, but we are making progress. Currently, we are trying it out with some classes from the English Department, but we hope to start opening it up to NDSU students and faculty in the future. Similarly, we hope to start hosting wikis for NDSU before too long.

The summer has flown by, school’s started, and I can’t believe my last post was back in July. When I started this blog, I was told that you have to post every week or so, or people give up on you. My excuse is that I’ve been out town a lot for the past month. Plus, there hasn’t been that much to write about. Now I’ve got things to write about, so it’s time to get back in the saddle.

First of all, we’re starting a new academic year, so welcome back to all of our returning students and faculty. And for new students and faculty, just plain welcome! NDSU is a great place!

If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know that I am not a librarian by profession, but came into the position from faculty ranks. (Hence the title, “An Academic in Libraryland.) I’ve learned a lot about libraries since I started in May, 2006. And I’m proud to say we’ve made some big changes since I got on board.

As we go through the new academic year, we’ll have a number of changes in personnel. Sad to say, we have lost Kathy Enger, our Social Sciences librarian, and Nem Schlecht, our übergeek (UNIX Systems Administrator). They have moved on to great new opportunities and we’re really happy for them, but they will be sorely missed. We have, or will soon have, searches going on for a new systems administrator, a full-time serials librarian, a full-time cataloging librarian, and a new Dean of Libraries.

There are also a number of technical changes in the works. Much of this is behind the scenes, with the main effect that materials will be ordered, cataloged, processed, and put out on the shelves a lot more quickly and efficiently than in the past.

Something more apparent to our users is the link resolver and database for electronic journals. (See last post.) The Link Resolver will give students and faculty faster, more efficient access to the articles in many of the 3700 journals that are only indexed by Academic Search Premier. The Link Resolver will also provide faster, article-level, access to many (but not all) references in dozens of other databases that the Library provides - databases like Agricola, the CSA Technology Research Database, ERIC, GeoRef, INSPEC, MEDLINE, METADEX, PsycINFO, SciFinder Scholar, Sociological Abstracts, and Web of Science.

These utilities make it much, much easier to find journal articles on line. Rather than searching multiple databases, you can search everything at once. For example, try the EBSCO Academic Search Premier. Type anything you want into the “Find” box at the top, and the odds are that you will come up with many hits to full-text articles. The Academic Search Premier database indexes 8,224 journals (7,132 are peer-reviewed). Academic Search Premier contains the full text for 4,486 journals (3,718 of these are peer-reviewed). Or go to the new NDSU Library Ejournal List to search thousands of titles. The current statistics for this new A-to-Z journal list are: 32,593 unique titles containing 47,659 links. We have less than 500 titles left to add, so we are about 98% up.

Warning: this is still very much a work in progress, so everything may not work perfectly now. Try it out anyway. The existing NDSU Library Electronic Journals system can still be used for research until further notice.

The NDSU Library is now acquiring web-based tools that will give you a much more efficient and effective way to find articles from journals in our collections, especially our electronic journal articles.

Currently, if you need to locate an article that you have found while searching one of our databases, you need to search for the journal title in several library search tools, including our catalog. If you find the journal title with our library search tools, you will spend time running down the volume, issue, and article that you want. Considering how many databases we have, and the searches necessary to find the articles you want, you might be tempted to give up before finding your article. (Don’t give up before asking for help at the reference desk!) Finally, if we don’t have the journal in our collection, you’ll make a real or virtual trip to the Interlibrary Loan Department for more help.

Soon, you will be able to enter your query or search term in a database, find the articles you want, and, if full-text electronic copy is available, you can link right to the articles – without taking intermediate steps to locate the correct title, volume, and issue.

The keys to making all this work are very clever innovations called the OpenURL standard and a link-server or link resolver. Most of us know URLs as addresses for websites. OpenURL (which was developed by a librarian, by the way) encodes metadata as a URL. Metadata is the information that allows you to locate author, subject, title, etc., in the on-line catalog or a database of journal articles. An OpenURL puts metadata on library holdings out on the web. A link resolver parses the elements of an OpenURL and provides links to articles or appropriate services as identified by the library. The link resolver interacts with specific web tools like search engines and databases to provide users with specific pieces of information, like a specific article.

Our particular OpenURL/link resolver products are from EBSCO Information Services. EBSCO’s A-to-Z knowledge base is a comprehensive list of titles from all major data bases and e-journals. This list is not maintained at the NDSU Library, but rather at EBSCO’s own site. EBSCO works with NDSU Librarians and knows which electronic resources NDSU subscribes to, and thus provides access those electronic resources we have permission to view. EBSCO’s LinkSource link resolver works with the A-to-Z knowledge base to find information across different collections and present links to all the full-text articles we have a right to access. It will also link to other relevant services such as the online catalog or an ILL form.

Knowledge bases and link resolvers make life easier for users and librarians by greatly simplifying access to library resources. Libraries that have implemented these tools report that they are easy to use and quickly become essential to researchers. We’re excited that we’ll soon be able to offer them at NDSU.

If you’re interested in learning more about OpenURL, link resolvers, knowledge bases, etc., the Utah State University library has a nice FAQs page that even I could understand. The on-line Library Journal has an interesting, but more difficult article on how all these tools have evolved.