THE HIDDEN COSTS OF "JUST-IN-TIME"

James H. Sweetland
North American Convenor

Libraries and many other organisations have become enamoured of, if not wholly dependent upon, "just in time" delivery of materials, not to mention information. The basic theory of this approach is that one can achieve substantial savings in space and inventory cost by maintaining a very small inventory. The classic example is the automobile factory where each needed part arrives at the assembly point just moments before it is needed.

In libraries, probably the best known example of the approach is in interlibrary loan. Assuming an ideal system, the library does not have the material required until the moment of the request, at which point it delivers the material while the user waits. Of course, with traditional interloan systems, there is usually a wait of several days, but between commercial document delivery systems and the increasing availability of documents (especially journal articles) via "suites" of journals on the Internet, we are approaching true just-in-time delivery.

There has been a considerable discussion of the attractions of this approach, especially in manufacturing, and a reasonable amount of discussion of the attractions for libraries in expanding the concept to a larger part of the collection. In fact, one way of thinking about the presentation of the Earth�s Largest Library could be to see it as the ultimate just-in-time system: there is no collection at the library at all, and the user is able to obtain the material within a few days, at most, of the request. The model for this approach, of course, is Amazon.com, the Internet-based bookstore. Amazon, in fact, has only a few thousand items actually in stock, and relies on wholesalers and book dealers for most of its materials.

Thus the library (or bookshop for that matter) relies not only on another agency for its stock, but also on a third agency for the delivery of that stock. It has been only a couple of years since many large businesses were inconvenienced, and many smaller ones faced utter ruin in the US, just because of a workers� strike at one delivery service United Parcel Service. The service was unavailable for just a few days, yet with small (or no) inventories, both manufacturing and distribution businesses began to shut down for lack of raw materials. Fortunately, the strike did not last long.

However, at the present the US is approaching an electrical power crisis, with the state of California in the lead. In brief, there is insufficient electrical power available, so that prices have doubled or more, and the state is considering drastic measures to reduce consumption. Along with discussions of the problems of deregulation (California eliminated government regulation of utilities), another explanation for this situation has arisen: for the past several years the utility systems in many states and cities have gradually moved out of the power-generating business and found greater profits in becoming only power-distributing businesses. They stopped building new generating plants, instead relying on purchasing surplus power from other plants around the country.

Thus the total amount of generating capacity almost stopped growing, while the demand continued to increase. With a particularly severe winter in 2000-2001 thus far, there is now more demand for electricity than there is capacity, so that surpluses which had been sold to California are now being used near the generators. Or, Adam Smith�s "invisible hand" of supply and demand applies again.

It is not a tremendous leap to apply the above to the library. If libraries rely more on remote sources for their materials, then they are relying not only on the suppliers of that material (such as the publishers), but also on the delivery system. This system includes not only the Internet as such, but also DSL, telephone and similar lines, cables and the like any one of which could fail. In fact over the years we often see failures in these "intermediate" delivery systems.

And, over the long term the model of the power crisis may also apply to libraries. If fewer institutions buy actual copies of any sort of material, unless that slack is taken up through individual purchases, the price per copy must begin to rise as fewer copies are sold. With fewer copies available, a relatively small local catastrophe could have wide effect the main server crashes, and all those relying on it lose their entire journal base. Or perhaps a firm goes out of business (it happened with Maxwell, for example), and their whole backfile of stock comes off the Internet.

Or, short of catastrophe, consider this: some recent studies of citations to URLs suggest that the "death rate" of Web sites may be around 10 per cent or more each year. Thus within only four years about half of all the sites are no longer available. Imagine a situation where we knew that book paper (to take just one example) was known to dissolve completely within 10-15 years. There would be major efforts to copy and preserve material before it was completely lost.

Before we invest too deeply in replacing local holdings with access, it may be time for us as a profession to begin considering the implications of this movement. Perhaps in the long run just-in-time is not always the most cost effective way to obtain material for libraries. Perhaps the archival function of libraries, even for electronic materials, is not yet gone.

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