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College & Research Libraries News

The Way I See It: Ownership and access: A new idea of “collection”

By Michael Gorman

Michael Gorman is dean of library services at California State University, Fresno; e-mail: michaelg@csufresno.edu

Access not ownership” always had more of the bumper sticker than of insight about it. This slogan, so popular at the highwater point of digital hype, derived from a business practice known as “in time, not in case.” The idea was that the actual physical presence of spare parts and the like in expensive on-site warehouse space was immaterial and the only thing that mattered was their availability when needed. (It is worth noting that strategic strikes paralyzed large parts of the auto industry when the “in time, not in case” philosophy was put into practice.) In any event, the equation of library materials with widgets and libraries with warehouses should have been enough to set the alarm bells ringing. As in most such cases, the analogy with business was faulty and shallow and the importance to library users of accessible physical collections remained unexplored.

There is an arrogant elitism in the whole

“virtual library” idea; an elitism that says, irrespective of the desires of library users, electronic storage, transmission, and access will be their only available recourse. As anyone with the slightest feel for library service will tell us, ownership more often than not equals availability equals unqualified access. The time has come to look upon library materials as divided into the classes of available and not available; to cherish physical collections because they meet real needs and make possible a variety of services; and to integrate electronic resources into our idea of “collection.”

The card catalog had many defects. Perhaps the greatest of these was its division of materials into two irrelevant (to the user) classes. The card catalog, in effect, said, “This library owns (or believes it owns) this item”—a response that did not address the user’s implicit question, which was, of course, “Can I have this item?” Online systems, in marrying circulation and cataloging records, are a great improvement, not because of their form (electronic) but because of their responsiveness to real user needs. The time has come, it seems to me, to redefine the idea of “collection” and to rethink the ways in which users gain access to documents in the redefined “collection.”

The modern library collection

Looked at from the point of view of availability, a modern library collection has four main components:

1) Tangible objects (books, sound recordings, videos, etc.) owned by the library and housed in the library.

2) Intangible electronic documents (on CD-ROMs,. mounted on the library’s computers, etc.) owned by the library and available without a fee at terminals connected to the library’s systems.

3) Tangible objects owned by other libraries and available through interlibrary loan and other resource-sharing systems.

4) Intangible electronic documents owned and maintained by other agencies and available electronically for a fee or without payment.

It is evident that the first two categories are the likely first choice of most library users— they have the merit of being instantly available (in most cases) and free. They are also listed in the online catalog or, in the case of the second class, somewhere else in the library’s integrated system. Increasingly, information about classes 3 and 4 is available in online systems through connections to databases as diverse as the OCLC online union catalog, Melvyl, CARL, ERIC, etc. Many systems are also giving their patrons easy access to the Web. Given the ready accessibility of these four concentric circles of library materials, the discussion of what constitutes a “collection” becomes somewhat metaphysical. From an accountant’s point of view, a “collection” consists of items bought and paid for; from the librarian’s and, most important, the library user’s point of view, the “collection” is that universe of materials that is readily and freely available.

The keys to availability and the factors that make this new definition of collection possible are bibliographic control and preservation. Librarians have mastered the art of bibliographic control for the tangible objects they own and have built complex systems to make the whereabouts of those objects known. We have also made great strides in the preservation of fragile materials and, by virtue of our stewardship, have ensured that the recorded knowledge and information of the past and present will be available to future generations. Are we up to the challenge of extending that bibliographic control and preservation to electronic documents? I believe so, if we have the necessary determination, organization, and confidence. ■