Re: Snooze/lose (Was: Academics and coursepacks)

On Mon, 14 Sep 1998, Albert Henderson <noblestation[_at_]compuserve.com> wrote:
>
> On 9 Sep 1998, Bernard Katz <bkatz[_at_]uoguelph.ca> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, 8 Sep 1998, Albert Henderson <noblestation[_at_]compuserve.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > You left out ARL's rise of interlibrary borrowing --
> > > mostly photocopies -- up 132%! (p. 10) And, at some
> > > institutions like LSU, the largely undocumented rise
> > > of "document delivery."
> > >
> > > Would you prefer ketsup or mustard?
> >
> > Before I choose between ketsup and mustard (no relish?:-), I am still
> > waiting to hear and understand why the spread of photocopying machines
> > (used in great nos. by undergraduates, who would not otherwise be
> > subscribing to journals - as I have noted in an earlier posting) has
> > any bearing on these issues. Mr. Henderson has claimed a correlation
> > in an earlier posting, but the mere coincidental alignment of
> > statistics does not explain the link. The shift from ownership to
> > access is principally for use by undergraduates, but it is when cost
> > per use rises well beyond all reasonable levels (in the case of top
> > research journals of interest to faculty and researchers/grad
> > students) that this strategy is applied such journals.
>
> Use by undergraduates has little bearing on the question of library
> photocopying as a substitute for collection development. Interlibrary
> borrowing may even be unavailable to undergraduates or limited in many
> places according to a study published by the American Library
> Assocation*.
>
> Concurrent with the commercialization of the plain paper copier,
> libraries fought very hard for the legislative exemption for library
> photocopying found in the Copyright Act of 1976. Repeated amendments
> were offered to copyright bills starting in 1965, according to the
> Report of the Register of Copyrights on Library Reproduction (1988).
> This was no coincidence. Photostat technology had been around for
> decades, but it was cumbersome, costly, and not economically as
> compelling as the Xerox model 914.
>
> Law suits are expensive. If it were not for photocopying of journals --
> and the devestating effect on the market for subscriptions -- we would
> not have seen Williams and Wilkins v. United States (420 U.S. 176.
> 1975) or American Geophysical Union et al v. Texaco (S.D.N.Y. filed
....[snip]...

I have refrained from responding to Albert Henderson's clarification re the true impact of the photocopier, as he sees it, until I had available to me the data from the 1986 national survey in Canada of photocopying practice, published by the Canadian Library Association in 1987 (Francoise Hebert, _Photocopying In Canadian Libraries; Report of a National Study). Since Mr. Henderson targets the use of photocopiers for Interlibrary Loan as the specific culprit in the cause of reduced subscripotions and hence increased costs of subscriptions for remaining subscribers, let me present some of the factual data from F. Hebert's very detailed study.

Articles from periodicals constituted only 1/3 of all ILL requests and in 97% of cases were filled by sending a photocopy to the requesting library. In the case of academic libraries, however, 57% of ILL requests were filled from periodicals and 99% of those were filled with photocopies. (1% of ILL requests to public libraries were for books, so clearly the bulk of ILL photocopies were made by the academic libraries in the survey, with special/governmental libraries also providing a fair no. of photocopies for ILL.When all libraries use of providing photocopies from periodicals to satisfy other libraries' ILL requests are corelated, it represents 32.1% of all ILL requests. As there were 663,720 ILL transactions in the year of the study, the no. of photocopied articles represents 231,054 requests.The relationship to the total no of copies made (exposures) is 8% of all exposures were for ILL purposes. I can provide more data, but I suggest that the above is clear enough - such photocopying for ILL purposes would not affect journal subscriptions in the manner suggested by Mr. Henderson.

On must also consider that some of the older periodical articles (not many) would be in the public domain, and many of the articles requested (especially in the case of public libraries) would be from the popular magazine area rather than the STM periodical area.

Cheers,

Bernard Katz, Head, Special Collections and Library Development McLaughlin Library, University of Guelph, Guelph ON Canada N1G 2W1

   and Chair, Ontario Library Association Copyright Action Committee bkatz[_at_]uoguelph.ca // (519) 824-4120 X2089 // FAX: (519) 824-6931 Received on Sat Sep 26 1998 - 22:38:32 GMT