Essay in Faculty Voice, 2008/9 (forthcoming):

History on Paper:
On the Disappearance of “Journals” at McKeldin Library
(for The Faculty Voice, UMD)
Paul S. Landau
Assoc. Prof. of History (Africa), College Park
October 10th, 2008

Last fall, I discovered that in my sub-field of history — African history — seven out of eight major journals (I inquired about eight) would no longer appear on Mckeldin’s premises. Even premium journals such as Africa, The Journal of African History, and African Affairs, were gone. No longer would fresh copies be stacked on the metal shelves among the Current Periodicals, no longer would they be bound into orange and avocado hardbacks, no longer smartly shelved with their ancient antecedents. Henceforth new “issues” and “volumes” would be words only, written in light, shimmering over menus of further text.

Which is, I hasten to add, far better than nothing. It would certainly be worse not having any access to the mainspring of knowledge generated in my field. We still get legible versions of the text of the articles. That is important. But nothing should disguise the major scholastic and archival shift that has been undertaken. Some of the abrogated paper journals stretch back in unbroken series on our shelves to the early twentieth century.

What the heck are “journals” (or “periodicals”) anyway? They serve different purposes for different fields, with very different budgetary costs, and varying utitlity. But for us historians, they represent the medium for half our work-product. Aside from directly communicating with students, we publish, essentially in two forms: hard-bound first-edition monographs and compendia bought by most libraries (often accompanied by or followed by paperbacks, more usually bought by
the public); and thin, paper-bound books issued quarterly- or semi-annually, also bought by libraries. Both require authors to submit to the process of “peer review.” The second kind of book — the journal — is left on an open shelf for a year, under its name, and then a bindery sews issues together into volumes under hard covers, and they are shelved. At least in the subfields I know about, journals feature the most ground-breaking work, sometimes years ahead of monographical treatments.

Granted, there has been an explosion of journals over the past ten or so years, perhaps a vague echo of the financial bubble which has now burst. Quality has not always been high. There remain, however, influential, core journals, which are still preeminent, still going strong in bound paper, and which the library has been collecting that way for many, many decades. Those have been switched too. People at the library quickly assured me that Africa was not (deliberately) targetted, and indeed the scope now clearly takes in many fields. The “switches” are negotiated not by journal-title, but wholesale, with third-party institutions selling subscribers access to publishers’ entire lists, so they are becoming almost automatic. The history of Russia, of the British Empire, of Science, have also been heavily impacted. The Current Periodicals area, traditionally a critically important part of a functioning University library, is growing smaller and smaller.
The library’s policy published on its web page tells us that recent “user surveys” suggest wide support for the electronic switches, “for many titles,” but, and here is the crucial rider, “especially titles that are not core for any campus research or teaching programs.” Did the library make an effort to discern these criteria? No one I spoke to in my department knew about the policy when I first asked around about it, although a few of them had suspected as much. Ergo, the library did not require faculty input order to make their switches.

The library staff kindly made me aware of the University Library Council Minutes. They are an informative, though head-ache inducing, way to learn about how the policy was formulated and implemented, and with what priorities (http://www.lib.umd.edu/deans/ULC/2008/minutesULC2008-03-12.html). One may also now read the posted page, “Policy On Collecting Only Electronic Versions Of Journals.” The Africanist journal “switches” had (it transpires) been made over the past several years. The underlying reason for the policy, as for many departures in library affairs, is, no surprise, cost.

Indeed, the Dean of the library, Charles Lowry, conveyed a sense of management under crisis, noting the unsatisfactory funding situation at the library, compared to all our peer institutions. In an hour-long chat Dean Lowry graciously had with me, I raised not only the matter of the shift away from paper in mainstream journals, but also the McKeldin reserve reading desk’s move away from print and paper: faculty are not presently permitted to leave a short paper or a photocopy (or two) of a published chapter, article, or manuscript, at the reserve desk. Faculty must (not may) use ELMS even for a small seminar class. Just as with the reserve room desk — I suggested to Dean Lowry — more and more material has to be accessed electronically at McKeldin to be seen.

Indeed, with Dean Lowry’s energetic guidance, and under financial pressure, McKeldin Library has been turning away from paper and print, its historic purview, and looking toward a bright and virtual future. Down with bricks and mortar, up with I-Phone and lap-tops, at home or in a café. Many students do not mind losing print, and, happily, in the digital domain, the university is nationally competitive. The DRUM project especially, for instance, a digital repository housed here, is exemplary. What matter if we get the digital versions of journals, and not the paper itself? Why care? Here’s why.

Don’t we get to archive the journal’s contents electronically? Not necessarily . . .

In the switched journals I’ve looked into, we don’t actually “collect” electronic versions, either back issues or current ones (despite the “Policy on Collecting . . .” claim). We just pay yearly for continued access. JSTOR and other services provide us with access to back issues (some we have in paper, some we no longer collect). So, should McKeldin library ever stop subscribing to the services that provide us access to new and old journals — if intermediaries fail, or hike their prices, or cut back their business — our students may lose access to a particular run. Then, for as long as we remained desubscribed, we would not “have” any of the issues after the last paper copy received. This is already happening at some universities.

Doesn’t it cost more to bind and store journals, than to subscribe electronically?
Over the short term, maybe, maybe not. Who can tell what the future will bring to computing platforms and protocols? Over the long term, surely not. Paper and print is still the best and most proven way to preserve written knowledge at low cost for very, very long periods of time. Short of catastrophic fire, it is hard to imagine our library losing its bound journal runs unless we decided to get rid of them.

One might say, Yes, yes, but surely electronic is better than print-only subscription.

We can’t go back to the old days. I agree. We can’t because it is scarcely an option, whatever we would do. Nowadays, publishers supply digital versions with their print subscriptions, for subscribing institutions themselves to archive and provide. After all, libraries can easily scan journals and put them on ELMS, or e-mail them to requesting faculty, so this is really only a convenience. The point is: Only having paper is no longer one of our options! The choice is between owning paper and pixels, or renting pixels.

What about the cost savings?

For some “switched” Africanist journals, the difference in price per year for current issues is not very much: even five or ten dollars per year. There are science journals (not History of Science journals) for which this differential amounts to many thousands of dollars, and cost is indeed a major issue. But for most of the journals in History, the difference is not much.
Okay, then, but don’t we find electronic journals easier to search and browse?
In some ways — 24/7 visual internet access — clearly this is a plus. In other ways, not so much. Consider that it is quite easy to amble through a functioning Current Periodicals room, picking up copies of journals with “Africa” in their titles, and leafing through them. Same for other interests. Well, go on-line to McKeldin’s website now, and try “browsing the Africanist historical journals for this past year.” Hesitating? That’s because it is not easy. Even if you know the names of the major journals, it is a task. (Go ahead, try it!) Just because computer users deploy the word “browse,” does not make the word mean the same thing. Now, once you have found something interesting, in an on-line trawl, studies show that your retention rate from reading it on a screen is far lower than from print. Assuming the goal is still a beginning-to-end read through of at least one article, as we in the Humanities continue to pretend, each reader still has to hit the “print” command: an ecologically unsound principle.

The library argues first that a persistantly inadequate level of funding compels their current policy, and second, that the equivalence between paper and electronic access makes the switches of no great moment. The absence of consultation, the issues of long-term cost, ease of use, openness, permanence, and ecology, are all reasons to question this explanation, and to revise the trend toward derogating print in favor of digital-only. There is one more reason. In order to make use of printed text, a person has, in some measure, to take an active part in learning: to travel, to devote time, to summarize, note down. The reader must be present and processing. That one does not have to digest digital text to use it, will be apparent to faculty in whose courses students have shown them as much, scarcely aware that they are committing plagiarism. Just like paper books, paper journals help our students, whether they always feel so or not.

Let there be no mistake: electronic media is terrific. I personally have used e-mail consistently since 1992, and at present I have a blog on a website on which I post daily JPEG files, an audio and slide assigment for my class on the History of South Africa. I just read two dissertations on line, one from an American and one a Dutch university. Internet access to OCLC and ILL and the Library of Congress catalogue and JSTOR is great. My students use ELMS (I have twenty-six readings up) and do internet-based research assignments, locating primary and secondary material internationally. But what is actually housed in our library, is worth considering separately. We must actively decide what we want there.

Ultimately we all wish to maintain McKeldin as a fixture on our campus. The success of McKeldin’s internet coffeehouse is gratifying, as it draws students into the McKeldin building. But the ultimate worth of the library is whether students do other things besides on-line work there, which, after all, they can do anywhere. The right to ask one’s students to read important material in bound print, should remain (for central and important work) with faculty, not library administrators. The library must not end its collection of important historical journals in print. Yes paper takes up valuable real estate at the center of campus.

That’s the point.

N.B.:
In February of this year, at my request, other Africanist and Africa-connected history faculty, Ira Berlin, Hilary Jones, David Sartorius, and Peter Wien, joined me in a letter to the University Library Council, James F. Klumpp, and Dean Lowry, asking for the reversal of the journals policy for the central periodicals in the field of African history, at least the top few of them. Our letter also made the case for suspending further “switches” in all historical fields until a better and more complete consultation had been undertaken with faculty for their areas of specialization. We have received from Mr. Klumpp in March a polite but clear defense of the existing policy, projecting specific budgetary shortfalls, a picture which can hardly have improved since then. No action has been taken to restore any Africanist journals.