Rick Anderson
Acting Dean

 1990s: The Gutenberg Terror comes to an end
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Stage 1: Journals
Stage 2: Books – piecemeal (NetLibrary, etc.)
Stage 3: Books – wholesale (Google, Hathi Trust)
 2000s: Gutenberg is tamed and domesticated
 Print on demand
J. Willard Marriott Library

 Library hegemony comes to an end
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Massive drop in unit price of information
Radical increase in ease of finding
Ready reference becomes a social exercise
Full-text searching obviates the proxy record
Access (for many) becomes virtually ubiquitous
Meanwhile, librarians working busily to undermine their own role as brokers (OA)
J. Willard Marriott Library

 The collection is a bad guess at patron needs
 Massive budget cuts make collecting hard to defend
 Reference service is bypassed and unscalable
 The OPAC is completely eclipsed as a discovery tool
(even with WorldCat)
J. Willard Marriott Library

J. Willard Marriott Library

J. Willard Marriott Library

 The collection is a bad guess at patron needs
 Massive budget cuts make collecting hard to defend
 Reference service is bypassed and unscalable
 The OPAC is completely eclipsed as a discovery tool
(even with WorldCat)
 Circulation is down dramatically
 Gate counts are up, but the stacks are deserted
J. Willard Marriott Library

Initial Circs Per Enrolled Student
16
14
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
1997 1998 1999 2000 2001
J. Willard Marriott Library
2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010

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Online  just-in-time (both e and p)
Online  breakdown of collection walls
Higher prices/less budget  less speculation
Higher prices/less budget  less archival purchasing
Less circulation  strong e-only momentum
Online + better data + higher prices + less budget  the end of the Big Deal and of the Medium Deal (title-level journal subscriptions) in favor of the Tiny Deal
Bottom line: Less collecting (ponds), more real-time brokerage
(access to the river)
J. Willard Marriott Library

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Formalised stance: e-first/patron-first
PDA pilot programs: MyiLibrary, ebrary, NetLibrary, EBL
Espresso Book Machine
No more bibliographers/subject specialists
Instead, College & Interdisciplinary Teams
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SHEM (Science, Health, Engineering, Mines)
SEBS (Social Sciences, Education, Business, Social Work)
FAAPH (Fine Arts, Architecture/Planning, Humanities)
DOCMAPS (Documents, Maps)
MEDIA (Multimedia)
INTERINTER (International/Interdisciplinary)
J. Willard Marriott Library

 The future of the library will not look much like a library
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Small, focused local collections of books
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Access to enormous public collections (Hathi, Google)
Few subscriptions, if any
No packages
A need for consolidated brokerage service at article level, not title level
 Journals are going the way of the record album
 We ’ re headed back to a “ song ” economy
 Journal publishers are going the way of the record label
 You can ’ t make as much on a 99-cent song as you can on a
$15 album
J. Willard Marriott Library

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Sclerotic librarians
Fainthearted library leaders
(Legacy accreditation structures)
(Legacy RPT structures)
(Justifiably) fainthearted publishers
Customer-focused competitors
J. Willard Marriott Library

Contact:
Rick Anderson rick.anderson@utah.edu
J. Willard Marriott Library