JUST IN TIME DOCUMENT DELIVERY: "EXCELSIOR" OR "CAVEAT EMPTOR"?

James H. Sweetland, North American Convenor

A currently popular slogan in library collection development, adopted like many other buzzwords in the library from business, is "just-in-time" delivery. In essence, the argument is that the traditional library's collection has a "just in case" inventory, but this is too difficult and too expensive; thus the library should aim at delivering the requested material upon demand, or "just in time".

While it is certainly true that no library has even been likely to hold everything some user might, someday, request, and both the volume of "published" information (in all formats, print and otherwise) and its cost has increased dramatically, the adoption of a just in time strategy has a definite downside. Some examples--

Recently, United States employees of the United Parcel Service went on strike. Due to its past record and its reputation as reliable and inexpensive, a surprisingly large number of businesses in the U. S. depended heavily on UPS as a supply system. When a work stoppage in this system is combined with a lack of inventory, a disaster was on its way. During the strike, which lasted about two weeks, retailers ran out of stock, while manufacturers were in danger of running out of raw and semifinished materials. Fortunately, there were a number of other delivery systems, albeit often slower and more expensive; more fortunately, the strike didn't last very long. However, this event serves to remind us that any reliance on external sources of supply is thus also a heavy reliance on the delivery system. Yet, with the exception of a few organized library systems, nearly all forms of interlibrary lending rely either on government postal systems or private services like UPS.

However, there is an important issue for libraries in the current craze for just-in-time delivery beyond the reminder that lack of local control can cause problems. Several recent studies indicate the nature of this problem. A recent attempt to offer a seminar in Native American studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was impeded by the fact that two critical journal runs were held by only one nearby library, at a university which did not generally make them accessible to students outside its own community. (Manoff, 1992). Perhaps more important, a recent study of cooperative library selection found, for various topics, less than one-fifth of the items purchased were considered shareable with other libraries (e.g. the library buying the title would not expect to lend it via interlibrary loan) (Hacken, 1992). In fact, recent data suggest that US and Canadian research libraries are primarily buying only for their own use, ignoring "peripheral titles" they once might have purchased. (Chambers, 1992; Cummings, 1992). A study of language and literature collections in the US by this author and a colleague (Sweetland & Christensen, 1997) has found that smaller academic libraries restrict purchases to items for current course needs, with little concern for either a complete collection, or for identifying what other libraries might be buying. Or, in effect, "resource sharing" to date has been heavily based on assumptions that someone, somewhere, holds the material you lack and your users may request.

An obvious question, of course, is "so what? " In theory, the development of full text services via the Internet will change the situation in the long run. In the meantime, of course, we have several types of document delivery sources, ranging from the traditional interlibrary loan (or sending of photocopies) to increasingly sophisticated electronic text delivery systems.

Such assumptions contain the classic good news/bad news: The good news, of course, is that publishers who make material readily available to end users as well as libraries (probably via an easy to use electronic format), potentially can sell a lot of individual articles, and thus make money. The bad news, of course, is that potential readers cannot assume their local library will have free access to an increasing amount of material. Unless significant numbers of publishers put at least full tables of contents, preferably full text/full image online, and unless they make a substantial amount of material available for free browsing, one effect of the diffusion of Internet based information will be a decrease in the amount of information, at the same time that some areas of endeavor see an increase in the amount of such information.

However, there is another aspect of this movement toward providing "access" rather than the document�who pays? If a library owns the item, generally speaking the user is not charged a fee for reading it. Similarly, in most traditional interlibrary lending systems, the user is not charged a fee (at least if the document is borrowed). However, as the library begins to feel that its role is only to provide "access" in the sense of pointing the user to the information, and as the electronic delivery systems begin charging for true access (to the actual text, graphics, etc.), then the user will be expected to pay. Or, in effect, the library in its traditional meaning of a collection of information paid for collectively, ceases to exist as such. Or, to put it another way, ultimately, is this any different from the "librarian" having a large collection of bibliographies, catalogs and indexes, and just telling the user to go to a bookstore whenever s/he wants anything.

In essence, this may be no more than to say, yet again, that "information rich/poor" is directly related to "money rich/poor". However, as we rush headlong into the brave new world of the 21st century, it would be useful for those who think of themselves as librarian to ask themselves if relying on "resource sharing" is such a good idea, and , certainly, to carefully examine our assumptions as to what "resources" are being "shared".

The above is primarily from a U. S. perspective. Do you have any reactions to these comments, perhaps from your region or your own experience. We would be very interested to hear them at our central discussion forum.

References:

Chambers, Joan. 1992. Access vs. Ownership: How Far Can we Shift? Colorado Libraries 18 (June), 18-20.

Cummings, Anthony M. and others. 1992. University Libraries and Scholarly Communication. Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, 78-79.

Hacken, Richard. 1992. The RLG Conoco Study and its Aftermath: Is Resource Sharing in Limbo? Journal of Academic Librarianship 18 (March), 17-23.

Manoff, Marlene. 1992. Academic Libraries and the Culture Wars: The Politics of Collection Development. Collection Management16, 1-17.

Sweetland, James H. and Peter G. Christensen. 1997. Developing Language and Literature Collections in Academic Libraries: A Survey." Journal of Academic Librarianship 23 (March), 119-125.

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