There are four significant ways in which I believe the information environment has changed since work begun on this paper. Trends have intensified and become established as common practice.

These trends are

1. The familiar and ubiquitous WEB
   
      The research library community is using the WEB differently. We have become fully reliant upon WEB based resources, switching from files stored on a local computer to information shared over the WEB, promoting a willingness to consider the possibility that digital publication is sufficiently mature to serve as an archival record. This view is encouraged by recent collaborative arrangements between major publishers and large U.S. universities to develop archives.
2. The E-only journal collection

      As the WEB evolved and became more and more reliable, publishers began to promote more actively e-only access to their journals. In addition to the elimination of costs associated with paper output, e-only is allowing the marketing of the publisher's entire output to a library or consortium.
      This has led to a shift from selection of scholarly resources on a title by title basis to the licensing of an entire publisher's output. The research librarian community is of different minds on this issue - "the big deal" may, as Ken Frazier has suggested, be moving us away from active selection. It may also be returning collections to the "just in case" mentality of collection development through encouraging us to add journal titles to our libraries, even though they are not a priority on our local campus. On the other hand, efficiencies regarding financing and acquisitions are cited as positive benefits, along with, of course, enlarged access to the literature.
      An extraordinary and very recent example of the E-only comprehensive approach has been the recent announcement of the World Health Organization: WHO and the world's six largest medical journal publishers will offer to approximately 100 developing countries access to 1,000 of the leading medical and scientific journals over the Internet either free of charge or at deeply discounted rates. WHO, in partnership with the Soros Foundation approached the six biggest medical journal publishers - Blackwell, Elsevier Science, Harcourt, Kluwer, Springer and John Wiley to develop affordable pricing for online only access to biomedical journals.
      What is important here from the knowledge management perspective is that these titles will be available in electronic form only despite limitations in the information infrastructure in the developing world. This program changes the playing field, providing access to an array of titles that may not be available to all researchers in the developed world. It has the potential for leveling the playing field! This exciting initiative is worth careful scrutiny for what it can tell the world about the uses of information and ways of overcoming "the digital divide."
      It also pushes the publishers' agenda that the real price break will come only with the conversion to electronic only publishing of journals.

3. The change in scholarly communication

   A shift has occurred in the thinking of many publishers, aggregators and research librarians as the transition to the e-only journal occurred. Librarians are moving away from the provision of scholarly resources on a title basis to the "least publishable" unit - the article. We are beginning to see a different role for the journal - less a communication device for the identification and discussion of new ideas - this is now being done more effectively over research networks and preprint services - long before the journal is printed. The journal's function is becoming limited to an archival role.

4. An acceleration of consortia development worldwide

   Numerous consortia - regional, national and international provide ever-growing options for the acquisition of digital information. Consortia development is scaling upward with the appearance of national and international groupings. A worldwide marketplace is being developed by publishers and vendors to benefit from government and private support to libraries who organize themselves in collectives on the presumption of more access for less money.
      At issue is the growing complexity of site licenses where the terms and conditions of use are defined outside the familiar copyright structure. One recent example of guidance for librarians in the development of site licenses is the IFLA document (March 2001) that outlines basic principles for licensing (http://www.ifla.org/V/ebpb/copy.htm), such as a price for electronic journals that is unbundled from the print price, provision for interlibrary loan, perpetual access to the licensed information by some workable means, and archiving consideration.
      Economics continues to be a, if not the, driving force behind cooperative purchasing. The story in the Canadian research library community parallels developments in the U.S. and elsewhere. The 27 research libraries in Canada that form the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) saw budget increases of over 73% over the past decade, but a falling Canadian dollar and huge price increases reduced spending power by one-half.
      To "fight back" those research libraries and other libraries involved in service to academy have banded together in a consortium of 64 members to create the Canadian National Site Licensing Project (CNSLP) with a total budget of 50 million dollars. Pooling resources nationally is an obvious strategy. This national initiative is beginning to supersede other collection arrangements and shows a "scaling up" of consortia membership to a national level. This brings a high degree of visibility to the CNSLP project and advances the electronic agenda by making titles available electronically that had been previously cancelled or were never available at an institution.
      This experiment is helping us to understand better the unpredictable world of scholarly publishing as it has evolved in the years since the project was first conceptualized. The CNSLP remains a mid-term strategy, entrenching the monopoly of large commercial publishers and providing them with an organized and expanded customer base. But at this point in the history of scholarly communication, alliances such as the CNSLP are an effective defensive strategy.
      Trends in Canadian research libraries exhibit another interesting example when viewed within the North American context through the ARL statistics. My reference point is the most recent edition of the ARL Supplementary Statistics in which 13 Canadian research libraries are ranked. Only 3 of these 13 appear in the top half of the overall ranking of ARL Libraries (Toronto, Alberta, and the University of British Columbia). However, in the supplementary statistics where the percentage of the library budget allocated to electronic resources is measured, 11 of these 13 Canadian research libraries are in the top half; moreover, the top 5 in terms of the percentage spent on e-resources are all Canadian, and all but one Canadian library is in the top one-half of the ARL libraries. Having been less well supported, as is the case of most Canadian research libraries and feeling more deeply cost increases and devalued currency, Canadian research libraries appear to be embracing the e-journal more enthusiastically than their American counterparts.
      Meeting the challenges of these trends in web-accessible e-resources in a consortium arrangement requires a comprehensive approach to accessing of these resources, a new model of knowledge access management, a new approach to the online catalogue and to metadata to bridge the gap between print and electronic resources.

   Bridging the gap between print and electronic resources: Towards knowledge access management:
      It has always been the case that all aspects of library service depend on the accuracy and efficiency of library technical services. Effective technical service operations today require a new definition and a shift from adding materials to an online catalogue, to offering access to resources, local and remote.
      Knowledge access management requires the integration of MARC data, that is, library metadata, with metadata from other communities - archives, geospatial, numeric, museum. The online catalogue becomes a metacatalogue - in which the OPAC functions as effortlessly and comprehensively as Internet search engines.

   Expenditures for Electronic Materials as Percent of Total Library Materials 1999-2000

   1.	Laval	48.07
   2.	UBC	34.74
   3.	York	28.71
   4.	Waterloo	26.83
   5.	McGill	24.62
   7.	Guelph	22.70
   22.	Queen's	17.30
   36.	Toronto	14.76
   44.	Manitoba	14.46
   45.	McMaster	14.36
   54.	Saskatchewan	13.29
   103.	Western	3.35

   
   12 out of 109

   (missing: Alberta)

   Frances Groen
   Director of Libraries
   McGill University

   
   

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