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From The Libraries
If you haven’t visited the MIT Libraries’ Website recently http://libraries.mit.edu/, you may not be aware of the Libraries’ substantial and growing investment to bring digital information resources to your desktop. The Libraries currently provide access to approximately 150 databases and nearly 1000 electronic journals, in all subject areas important to the Institute’s curriculum and research programs. There’s something for everyone, and we encourage you to explore the possibilities. Even if you haven’t visited the Libraries’ Website, you may have been using some of these resources by connecting directly to a publisher’s or society’s Website. Although you may not be aware of it, in many cases the Libraries’ payment to the publisher or society has enabled your access to the products.
The purpose of this article is to let you know why we are investing in these resources and how this new type of library "acquisition" differs from our traditional activity of buying books and journals for your use.
Why Are the Libraries Investing in Digital Information Resources?
Networked information resources expand your options for where and when you can work, and often how, and how effectively, you can work. The goal is to enable you to use digital information sources in your office or laboratory, or from distant universities or other sites where you may be working on a temporary basis. Your students can use them in their dormitory rooms or from another state or country within the context of a distance education program. You and your students can use these resources at any hour of the day or night, regardless of time zone. In many instances, digital information resources also offer improved functionality over traditional print resources. For instance, a digital database may enable you to search many years of a reference work much more quickly than you could in the multiple volumes of a print publication. Some of the electronic indexes now provide "hot-links" to journal articles, and most full-text databases provide keyword searching. As digital databases and full-text products develop, we expect that their features will diverge more and more from those of print resources, incorporating multimedia, for example.
The Libraries are investing in these resources because they are the next generation of research tools, providing an improved means to maintain currency in the various academic disciplines, and producing research results within a competitive time frame. In spite of the notable advantages of digital information resources, however, we do expect print resources to survive in tandem, with a natural discrimination developing for the various purposes of scholarly communication.
How Do the Libraries Select Information Resources?
Choice of resources provided is based on pertinence to MIT’s research and education programs, size and breadth of the potential user group, price, and functionality. The Libraries have established a separate budget line for expensive, interdisciplinary information products, and decision making is entrusted to a standing committee of librarians from the five divisional libraries: Barker Engineering, Dewey, Humanities, Rotch, and Science. The committee members are responsible for appropriate consultations with faculty and with other librarians. In most cases, there is a trial period for the product before the decision to purchase is made.
As digital products emerge in the marketplace, substantive differences from print publications are becoming obvious. In selecting print publications, librarians have chosen within genre with long histories and established traditions: monographs, journals, indexes, conference proceedings, etc. In the digital marketplace, the product types are still developing and diversifying. Significant changes are evident, however. The way electronic journals are being marketed provides an example.
Many e-journals are sold only within a package of all of the journals of a given publisher, with no option to select only those titles most appropriate for a given institution. In another pattern, an intermediary vendor provides a selected set of journal titles from various publishers, intended to fulfill the needs of a designated group such as undergraduates. Again, there is no option to select only those most useful to the MIT community or to add others that the provider has not selected. The tradition in library collection development has been to select individual titles (books, journals, etc.) that are judged to directly support a university’s education and research programs. In the case of digital resources, the selection decisions are based on the advantages and disadvantages of competing aggregations of content. In addition, the content of some of the aggregated products fluctuates from year to year!
How Do the Libraries Acquire and Manage these Products?
In most cases, digital information resources are not purchased; they are licensed for use by the MIT community for a fixed period of time. The Libraries actively negotiate the terms of the licenses with providers to ensure that all members of the MIT community may use the products in accordance with the customary standards of scholarship, as well as to protect MIT against liability. End-users of the products also have responsibilities, however, and the Libraries try to make users aware of these by screen messages and "clickable" access to use restrictions or to the licenses themselves.
Each of the licenses negotiated by the Libraries contains a definition of the MIT community. The Libraries attempt to ensure that these definitions reflect the array of users who can obtain MITnet accounts. In addition, the Libraries’ walk-in users are allowed to use the products from library workstations. However, providers are usually unwilling to include access to users they believe are potentially separate customers. Alumni, for instance, represent a user group that is too broad for providers’ interests. Likewise, the inclusion of distance education students whose degrees will be granted by other universities may be impossible to negotiate.
Control of on-campus use of networked resources is managed by IP (Internet Protocol) filtering. The way this works is that the Libraries provide the publisher or vendor with MITnet IP addresses. The server on which the product resides checks the IP address of a person requesting access to the product to determine whether he or she is based at an institution that has paid for the access. Remote access by MIT community members from their homes, their travels, or distance education sites is managed by a proxy server (the "GO" service) which utilizes certificates to authenticate users. Some products are restricted to on-campus use by the terms of the licenses.
The acquisition of digital information sources, then, is considerably more complicated and less standardized than the acquisition of print books and journals. While every effort is made to facilitate the negotiation of licenses, the process can delay access to a product for several weeks. In addition, the Libraries take advantage of purchasing through a consortium of libraries when significant price reductions can be realized. Purchasing through a consortium may affect the timing of product choices and may limit the ability to negotiate licensing language.
What are the Ramifications of Access rather than Ownership?
A significant unresolved issue related to licensed information resources is the lack of permanent access to the information. In the case of print resources, the Libraries purchase and own the content (although not the copyright). The Libraries may, and usually do, retain the print resources permanently. Books and journals from 20 or 50 years ago provide a rich mine of information for active research in many disciplines, for retrospective research into aspects of a discipline that may have lost and then regained scholarly interest, and for studies of the histories of the disciplines themselves. One might think of the print model as "pay once, use forever."
In contrast, the model for the licensed digital product is "pay for one year, use for one year." In most cases, the license for a product does not transfer ownership of the content to the Libraries. If the Libraries (for reasons of rising prices, budget constraints, or waning scholarly interest) do not renew the license and pay for it on an annual basis, the MIT community will no longer have access to information content licensed in previous years. If the provider ceases to offer the product or goes out of existence, the result will be the same.
Even in those cases where the provider agrees to ensure perpetual access, there are legitimate reasons to be dubious of that guarantee. For one, commercial publishers in the print environment have not typically maintained backlists after they were no longer profitable. For another, few publishers last as long as universities. For yet another, there are many difficult issues related to migrating products while hardware and software develop over time. Libraries have centuries of experience managing the shelving and preservation of print materials (with many problems related to the latter still existing), but libraries and publishers are only beginning to develop standards and gain experience with managing "digital shelf-space." Meanwhile, some trusted third-parties are also experimenting with providing archiving services.
The MIT Libraries’ mission includes preserving the record of advances in knowledge in the relevant areas of science and technology, as well as architecture, linguistics, and many other disciplines. In this interim period, while the standards and structures for managing digital collections are developing, the Libraries continue to purchase print resources for that purpose, at the same time carefully monitoring emerging alternatives.
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