Austin, Texas
May 18-20, 1994

The Research Library the Day After Tomorrow

Foreign Acquisitions Task Force

Dorothy Gregor
University of California at Berkeley

The main feature of the Foreign Acquisitions Task Force's plan is to develop a network-based distributed model for coordinated collection development of foreign language materials among the U.S. and Canadian research libraries. We envision a multi-institutional North American network, a coordinated collection building for foreign material. The plan is geographically based and will recognize and be responsive to the differing needs and special characteristics of different parts of the publishing world. Participating libraries will function as "nodes," acquiring and distributing to other libraries. These "nodes" will then be connected in order to form a national network.

The primary recommendations approved by our presidents are:

• Build this distributed national collection of foreign language materials through the network of research libraries, including the Library of Congress; and

• In order to test the viability of this very large objective and to move towards it in an evolutionary way, initiate three demonstration projects in geographically targeted areas: Latin American acquisitions, Japanese language scientific and technical resources, and German language acquisitions. The rationale for focusing upon these three geographic areas is that each presents a different set of challenges and opportunities and different ways of organizing, acquiring, and distributing foreign language materials.

There are a number of reasons for selecting Latin American acquisitions as part of our demonstration project. The Seminar for the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM) has a proven history of success in working out cooperative collection development programs and can provide organizational support. The Mellon Foundation has recently indicated its intent to provide substantial funding for building a hemisphere-wide distributed system for Latin American library acquisitions that would link North and South American research libraries. Lastly, Latin American research materials are relatively inexpensive when compared to the Western European materials and are available almost exclusively in print at present; electronic resources are just starting to emerge.

The Japanese demonstration project will focus on Japanese language journals and serials in high-impact science and technology areas. The plan is to build upon the substantial progress that research libraries have already made in the last few years towards a network-based distribution program of acquisitions in traditional area studies. The new project broadens that scope to encompass scientific and technological resources. It will also establish close links with the newly formed Library of Congress Japan Documentation Center in Tokyo. The major goal is to expand access to, and include delivery of, journal articles. The Center for Research Libraries will take a lead role in organizing the Japanese project. The project also provides links to the recommendations of the Scientific and Technological Information Task Force and with the Task Force on Intellectual Property. Copyright law in Japan is far more restrictive than in some other areas of the world.

The German project will include subject matter in most fields of the social sciences written in all languages and published in Germany. The rationale for German acquisitions is based on the fact that this pilot project would cover a part of Western Europe, a "high-impact" area for many of our universities in the sense that in Western European studies the number of faculty is substantial and the number of titles routinely collected are quite large in number. Library research materials are expensive in this part of the world. The book trade and subject bibliographers are organized, and digitization technology is well advanced. The Library of Congress will take a lead role in the German project.

The goal of the three pilot projects is to provide test beds for the larger objective of the distributed national plan. We hope to demonstrate that different areas of the world could eventually be incorporated into an overall program of acquisition and distribution. We also hope to demonstrate that these projects can be done with very low overhead and a minimal governance structure. We hope that by the year 2000 the three demonstration projects will be implemented and judged successful. Actually, some of us on the task force hope we can do it well before the year 2000.

Our other recommendations will need to be realized if the three demonstration projects are to prove successful. These recommendations reinforce those recommendations of the other two task forces.

• Campus networks and the electronic infrastructure will need to be developed sufficiently to assure the access and delivery that will be critical to the success of a distributed North American collection.

• University librarians, technology managers, press directors, foreign area specialists among the faculty, and other faculty who routinely rely upon foreign language materials will need to be convinced that this model has produced improved results. That, whereas an individual university library may actually "own" less in some fields, it provides access to much more; that cooperation and sharing on balance is a better strategy--both individually and institutionally--than competition and acquiring.

There was a telling moment in one of our meetings in which one of our librarians began a discussion on the difficulty of achieving faculty acceptance of access rather than owning. A faculty member picked up the conversation and indicated how difficult it would be for the campus administration to accept this other strategy. And the administrator on the group then said, "It is those librarians who want to count anything other than their own as shadow." Well, as Pogo said long ago, "We have seen the enemy, and he is us." It is a large cultural change here.

Our task force is under no illusion that this objective will be easy to achieve. The current culture of our campuses is not well suited to securing broad, university-wide agreement to cooperation and sharing. We will need to think hard about the best strategies for connecting and convincing the various stakeholders.

Our task force offers a few suggestions in this regard:

• International institutes could exercise a part of the leadership in promoting the objectives of our program and assist in communicating these to other faculty.

• Graduate students may have an important role to play. In many fields they are more technologically sophisticated than some of their faculty mentors and less set in their research ways.

• Ultimately, our best hope may lie in the growing faculty familiarity with the remarkable possibilities of the Internet for furthering research and scholarship; these possibilities are already driving major changes in bibliographic use and consultation.

Leadership will need to be exercised at many levels. The AAU presidents and chancellors have accepted our recommendations and urge us onward, but it is up to us to organize the effort. We have taken the first steps--on to the next.