How the Library chooses resources - Penn Printout, Apr 1995

The University of Pennsylvania's Online Computing Magazine

April 1995 - Volume 10:4

The judgment of Solomon: How the Library chooses electronic resources

By Stephen Lehmann and Bob Walther

One of the oldest, best known, and most widely respected bibliographic tools in humanistic scholarship is the annual bibliography of the Modern Language Association. Because of the size and range of both the information it makes available and the scholarly constituencies that it addresses, it has for many years been an obvious candidate for electronic access and retrieval. As technologies improve and offer scholars readier access and more powerful control over databases like the MLA's, librarians find themselves facing a complicated array of alternatives. In a difficult economic climate and an extremely volatile technological and publishing environment, the tradeoffs are not always easy to assess. This article gives a behind-the-scenes look into the factors librarians weigh as they decide how best to create electronic access to information within the constraints of the Library's budget.

The players

The Data Producer. In this case, the Modern Language Association-- the 30,000-member professional association of academics working in literature, languages, and folklore. In the print environment the MLA has been its own publisher--offering, for example, the MLA International Bibliography to its members at a steep discount. In this way it has maintained, as both producer and supplier, close control over its costs and revenues.

As with every large membership organization, there can be tension and a divergence of interests between the professional staff that manages it and the membership that it serves.

The Vendors. Given the large hardware costs and high degree of technical expertise required for the electronic provision of information and the users' desire for standardization, data producers generally provide their product--the information--through the services of commercial vendors. Vendors create the software that makes the data accessible and usable. They market it, for a profit, often in packages with other databases, to libraries and other users and pay royalties back to the data producers for the "raw material." Over the last 10 years five different vendors have been involved in providing the MLA Bibliography in one electronic form or another.

The Users. In our case the campus community--especially faculty and students in English and other modern languages, linguistics, folklore, as well as scholars working in a wide range of related humanistic disciplines. Although the MLA Bibliography is the single most comprehensive bibliography in literary studies, some scholars disdain it and prefer more specialized indexes in their own disciplines (such as Bibliographie der deutschen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft); undergraduates would often rather use something less specialized that focuses on major core journals (such as the Humanities Index). Further, some scholars argue that the electronic provision of bibliographic information in the humanities is relatively unimportant and that the Library should focus on the provision of full-text databases. And yet, all this being said, Penn scholars have strongly articulated their desire to have desktop electronic access to the MLA Bibliography.

The Library. It is the Library's responsibility to acquire information resources for teaching and research in the University. Resources are limited, and every decision involves tradeoffs in terms of what is offered and who benefits. The Library is guided by a strong sense of common purpose: to provide in the most useful way possible the information needed by Penn's faculty and students. Nevertheless, in the end hard choices have to be made, with as much equity and as clear an understanding of user needs as possible.

Competing technological options

The history over the last 10 years of the Library's efforts to make the MLA Bibliography available electronically illustrates how the issues of access, cost, ease of use, and technological change interact in complicated ways. The earliest electronic access to the MLA was through the pioneer commercial database vendor Dialog, beginning in the late 1970s. It offered a clear advantage over the old printed product in terms of searchability: While the printed volumes had to be perused a year at a time, and their crude organization and indexing made it very difficult to find articles on topics other than "What was written about Dickens in 1978," computerized searching allowed for very rapid and powerful access to every item of information in the database. The main drawback of the online access provided by Dialog was that it had to be done in the Library, one user at a time, and that the clock was always ticking loudly because the charges were based on the length of the search session.

The clear, overriding advantage of CD-ROM technology, when it arrived in the late 1980s, was that once the product was paid for, there would be no further charges for use. As soon as the MLA bibliography was offered by the H. W. Wilson Company, Van Pelt Library subscribed to it. The cost was considerable (it is currently $1,400 per year), but it allowed us to offer free access any time the Library was open and with a much simpler user interface. Unfortunately, the CD vendor decided to include only the database from 1981 to the present, so researchers who wanted earlier years (the online file stretched back to the mid-1960s) still needed to access Dialog. Nevertheless, the CD was popular and became one of the most heavily used databases in the reference department. As with Dialog, however, the CD could only be used in the Library.

The next technological leap forward occurred in the late 1980s when the Library began to offer remote access through PennNet to selected databases, to allow faculty and grad students to use them from their homes or offices without incurring any direct costs. To do this we leased the data tapes directly from the producers and loaded them into the Library's online system. So far we have mounted Medline, ABI/Inform, PsycInfo, the Wilson databases, and most recently, Current Contents. This is an expensive option for the Library, requiring consider-able hardware and staff costs, but it has major advantages for the user: The databases have the same interface as our Library catalog, are available on the same menu, and link the citations to our journal holdings in the Library catalog.

When, in the fall of 1991, we initially contacted MLA staff about leasing their database for loading into our system, they were not interested, fearing, they said, an erosion of their revenues from the printed and CD-ROM versions. In 1993 they reconsidered and announced that the tapes were available for lease but at prices considerably higher than comparable databases in other fields--$25,000 per year for the current file (1981 to present), plus $8,000 for the backfile to 1963. By comparison, PsycInfo, the much larger database (it has abstracts) produced by the American Psychological Association, is priced at $12,500 per year. The Library is still trying to convince the MLA that its pricing is unrealistic.

Meanwhile, commercial access to the MLA database became more complicated for the Library when the MLA and Dialog (its online vendor) could not come to terms on a contract renewal and the database was suddenly pulled off the Dialog system. This meant we lost the heavily discounted student access to our only source for the full MLA file back to the mid-'60s. Subsequently, the MLA negotiated a contract with another online vendor, OCLC. The OCLC interface, FirstSearch, is designed specifically for untrained users. It is menu driven, to simplify searching, although some power is sacrificed. Until the Library can get the data tapes for local mounting at a reasonable price, we are providing remote access to the MLA through FirstSearch--back to the fee-per-use system we started with! (With our current arrangement, however, the Library picks up the entire cost. See the sidebar on page 19 for information about getting an MLA FirstSearch account.)

Although the MLA is a particularly complicated case in its details, it captures the overall complexity involved in the application of new information technologies in the academic environment. We can also draw some general observations from our MLA experience:

As new technologies are improved upon and superseded by still newer technologies, their relative advantages and disadvantages are not always clear-cut. In the interest of optimizing service, the Library will sometimes provide overlapping formats (e.g., print, CD, online). This can get very expensive and can be confusing to the user.
Even if the per-unit costs of new technologies drop over time, overall use is increasing at such a rate, and so much more information is being made available electronically, that aggregate costs increase enormously.
Non-profit information providers such as the MLA are not necessarily as responsive to the interests of the academic community as one might expect. Given the long-standing unhappiness in universities with commercial publishers, this is worth keeping in mind.

Phrases such as "information superhighway" and "library without walls" suggest an ease and effortlessness which may indeed characterize some aspects of electronic information. But these phrases are misleading if they suggest that new information technologies come about easily and effortlessly. Changes that may appear from the outside to be rapid and revolutionary, are often, as we have tried to illustrate, a series of small, incremental steps, and these not always in a straight line. We see it with the MLA Bibliography, and we see it in different ways with other information sources the Library wants to provide--each offering new promises and new challenges, and, we hope, real improvements for Penn's scholars.

STEPHEN LEHMANN is the Humanities Bibliographer at Van Pelt Library; BOB WALTHER is Online Services Coordinator, Reference Department, Van Pelt Library.

Sidebar: Passwords for MLA FirstSearch access

Personal passwords for the MLA on First-Search are available to Penn faculty and grad students at no charge. To obtain a password and logon directions, stop by the Van Pelt Reference desk and fill out an account request.

                           MLA: The Options

                Print  Time-share  CD-ROM    Locally    Time-share
                       (online               loaded     (online
                       in-library            data tape  networked 
                       access)                          access)

Year
introduced     1922    1978        1989      1993       1993

Software        MLA     Dialog      H.W.      MLA/NOTIS  OCLC
Vendors                             Wilson               FirstSearch
                                    Platter
Coverage of
database       1921    1966        1981       1963       1963
                                   ----
Accessible
from 
home/office    no      no           no         yes        yes
               
Intuitive
interface      yes     no          yes         yes        yes

Powerful       
Search         strong
software       no      yes         yes         yes        weak no
                                                        
Seamless
online 
connection 
to Library's 
other 
resources      no      no          no          yes        no
                                                          --
Limit on 
number of 
simultaneous
users          yes     yes         yes         no         no
                                  
Cost           low     moderate    low-      expensive  unpredictable-
                                   moderate             grows with use

This chart lays out the primary criteria by which the Library assesses successive generations of electronic technology, here specifically in terms of the MLA International Bibliography. It simplifies, of course, the complexities of the choices. The emphasized text indicates a major drawback of a particular technology.