11th Edition

Gloria J. Leckie, Karen E. Pettigrew, and Christian Sylvain, Modeling the Information-Seeking of Professionals

There weren’t many surprises in this article. People’s information-seeking habits are influenced primarily by accessibility. Quality, though a factor, may take a backseat to efficiency, familiarity, timeliness, or cost. Having all of these various studies compiled into one is indeed valuable, though not thrilling reading. How well does the model apply to other professionals outside the engineering, health care, or legal circles? How well does it work when we apply it to librarians as professionals? Or how could libraries use the model to think about users’ information-seeking processes?

John Willinsky, The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship

The issue of open access is really a complicated one, though it seems at first glance to be relatively unproblematic (cut out the publishers!). I kept thinking about “Minds@UW” (a University open-access project) and wondering to what degree it gets used. At the library where I work, we’re in the process of surveying students and faculty in our department to see whether they feel a large-scale effort to use the space would be fruitful. We currently have a few articles available, but only those that are past copyright. I was also struck by the open-access journals that require the authors to pay a fee to be published, or a fee to have their articles made accessible. Is this really a feasible approach? Can most professors or departments afford these fees?

I really question the notes on page 82—the numbers quoted by William G. Bowen for the cost of storage of a journal volume and binding of the volume are way off, in my experience. At my on-campus library, we pay $5.80 per volume for binding, and he quotes a range of $24-$41. I also have Double Fold in mind, I’ll confess. $35,000 a year for a large university library (plus a capital fee of $90,000) to have access to JSTOR is not particularly “little”—and then, even if the library is saving by dumping its paper journals (and I can’t imagine it’s saving $35,000), is it gaining anywhere near the same permanence in the electronic versions? And what on earth are the “retrieval for users” costs of $45-$180 per journal? To take it off the shelves and make a copy? To drive to a storage unit and back is still nowhere near the quoted fees, unless the storage unit is hours away, which is unlikely. I’m not sure that I buy that it costs between $48-$353 a year to store a printed volume, either—perhaps I need to go look at these other articles.

What exactly does Willinsky want libraries to do?