Bound volumes of journals covered by JSTOR online.

There is a very interesting article in the September 1 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled Library Renovation Leads to Soul Searching at Cal Poly (note: that link will self-destruct after five days. Chronicle subscribers can always use this permalink to the article).

It would seem that a library renovation and addition at Cal Poly Pomona will result in less space for printed volumes, and the dean of libraries, Harold B. Schleifer, has overseen an aggressive weeding plan which has shrunk the collection by 43,000 volumes.

One of the most contentious issues has been what to do with printed volumes of journals that the library also has in digital form via JSTOR. The librarians under Schleifer apparently were not comfortable with the plan to discard these volumes, but the plan went ahead. Judging from the responses of the faculty interviewed for the Chronicle article, the faculty weren’t consulted on the decision:

When Ms. Bricker, the architectural historian, heard that JSTOR journals were sent to the trash and that books were going to storage, she was dismayed.

. . .

But [professor Zuoyue Wang] did not know that the library had completely discarded the old paper versions of journals archived on JSTOR.

. . .

Like many professors on the campus, [Jane Ollenburger] did not know that the library had thrown out paper journals to make room for such study spaces. “The academic part of me is appalled,” she says.

At CC we have just finished a JSTOR withdrawal project that took all of last academic year to prepare for and all of this summer to complete. We tried to be sure that faculty knew exactly what we were planning, and that they had final say over what was being withdrawn. So I hope that we will avoid many of the problems that seem to be cropping up for Cal Poly. But only time will tell if we did the right thing. (I have already had a new tenure-track faculty member say to me “I can’t believe you threw out all those journals!”)

But that’s not really what I want to talk about; I’m interested in something that the aforementioned professor Wang said: “As a historian, I’m concerned…. When you discard journals, students lose the ability to browse. That’s something I would regret. I can see why the library would take that step, but I wish they would have let us know.”

Now, I think I know what he means: it is easier to flip through a printed volume and take in very quickly a lot of things about the publication that aren’t as obvious when looking at an electronic journal. Articles may catch your eye due to chance adjacencies, illustrations may jump out at you, etc.

But whether a library pitches the JSTOR volumes or not, the fact remains that browsing the physical stacks of a library is going to give a scholar a less and less complete picture of the available scholarship.

I remember arguing several years ago that it was something of a disservice to faculty to put out the week’s new print copies of journals at UCSD’s Science & Engineering Library, since it represented such a small percentage of what was actually published and available that week. At the time it made sense to continue to display those journals since they tended to represent the best, most prestigious, and most expensive stuff we had to offer. but I think that will decreasingly be the case.

Rather than saying online = no browsing, I’d rather see faculty and librarians get together to think about what browsing (or serendipity or whatever) means in the online environment. After all, you can browse TOCs in JSTOR quite easily. And what about the browsing of a keyword search results list?

In an ideal world, browsing online would be better than browsing paper volumes because of hyperlinking. Once you found something interesting, the citations in the bibliography would be hyperlinked to fulltext copies, the author names would be hyperlinked to the author’s entire output, etc. We are a long way from such a linktopia, but what we have still beats the hell out of an entirely printed collection for satisfying the “I want to see that now” urge.

I have linked to this before, in my post on Lurving Wikipedia, but there is a strong case to be made for the Web as a serendipitous browser’s paradise.

Are there browsing skills for the online world that we can teach? And will they get any traction with students who seem to always want to cut to the chase? In my experience, undergraduates on a deadline aren’t a very “browsy” bunch.

And are there ways to better build online collections for browsing? Anyone doing a good job right now?