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Background for the Planning Project
Yale Library as a Player
The Yale Library has, for close to three decades, been cognizant of and aggressive about
providing access to the numerous emerging forms of scholarly and popular publications
appearing in "new" electronic formats, in particular those delivered via the Internet and
increasingly through a Web interface. Initially, indexing and abstracting services and
other "reference" type works found their way into electronic formats and rapidly
displaced their former print instantiations. By 1996, full-text content from serious and
substantive players such as Academic Press (AP) and JSTOR were entering the
marketplace, and libraries — and their readers — became quickly captivated by the
utility, effectiveness, efficiency, and convenience of academic content freed from its
traditional fixed formats. By the summer of 2000, Yale Library, like most of its peer
institutions, was spending over $1 million annually on these new publication forms,
offering several hundred reference databases and thousands of full-text electronic
journals to its readers. Expenditures for electronic content and access paid to outside
providers last academic year alone totaled nearly $1.8 million. In addition, we spend
increasing sums both on the creation of digital content and on the tools to manage digital
content internally — e.g., a growing digitized image collection, a fledgling collection of
university electronic records, digital finding aids for analog materials in our collections,
and our online library management system, which includes but is not limited to the public
access catalog.
The electronic resources that Yale makes available to readers, both on its own and in
conjunction with its partners in the NorthEast Research Libraries consortium (NERL),
quickly become heavily used and wildly popular — and increasingly duplicative, in terms
of effort and price, with a number of print reference works, journals, and books. The Yale
Library, with its significant resources, 300 years of collections, and long-term
commitment to acquiring and preserving collections not only for its own but also for a
global body of readers, has acted cautiously and prudently in retaining print texts not only
for immediate use but also for long-time ownership and access. It has treated its growing,
largely licensed (and thus un-owned) electronic collections, moreover, as a boon for
reader productivity enhancement and convenience, even to the point of acquiring
materials that seem to duplicate content but offer different functionality.
Nonetheless, it is clear that the Library (and this is true of all libraries) cannot endlessly
continue on such a dual pathway, for several compelling reasons: 1) the growing level of
print and electronic duplication is very costly in staff resources and to collections
budgets; 2) increasingly, readers, at least in certain fields such as sciences, technology,
and medicine (STM), as well as certain social sciences, strongly prefer the electronic
format and the use of print in those areas is rapidly diminishing; and 3) traditional library
stacks are costly to build or renovate. All libraries face what NERL members have
dubbed the "Carol Fleishauer"[3] problem: "We have to subscribe to the electronic
resources for many good reasons, but we cannot drop print — where we might wish to —
