Association of Research Libraries (ARL®)

David Paul Nord
Journal of American History
Indiana University

I work in a small business in a small house on Atwater Street in a small city in Southern Indiana. It's a quiet place, just a handful of employees, and we mainly work alone, in silence. No customers come in, no physical product goes out. Our physical product is manufactured in and distributed from Montpelier, Vermont. Most of the local folk who drive by have no idea what goes on in this house that looks like any other house on Atwater Street. Only the steady come and go of the FedEx, UPS, DHL, and Postal Service trucks suggests that this house could be a communication hub of some sort. And it is. It's the nexus of a worldwide community of scholars. It's the headquarters of the Journal of American History.

Though we regularly work in solitary silence, the JAH is a real community in ways both visible and invisible. Most visibly, we create a quarterly periodical that goes out to 12,000 subscribers, including more than 2,000 libraries. The authors of our articles and reviews engage the works of other authors, and their articles and reviews are in turn engaged by thousands of readers. This scholarly communion extends over space -- it's worldwide -- and over time. Our first issue appeared in 1914, and it is still accessible and, like all printed materials, decodable for as long as the human species remembers the English language. This is the visible community of a journal, the traditional, intertextual, scholarly community of authorship, editorship, and readership; of citation, criticism, and revision.

But an invisible community of scholars also lives in the communication space created by a academic journal. Each year more than a thousand individuals contribute directly to the Journal of American History. This number includes the 20 to 25 article authors and the more than 600 book, film, and exhibition reviewers whose names appear in bylines. It also includes hundreds of people whose names don't appear in bylines but who are intimately involved in the community life of the Journal: our Editorial Board, our article prize committees, our international contributing editors, who suggest foreign-language books and articles for review and bibliographical listing. It also includes my favorite group, the 300 or so article manuscript referees. Each year these many hundreds of people are engaged with us in behind-the-scenes, interpersonal communication -- this in addition to the more visible, mediated communication that occurs through the pages of the Journal. In short, our journal -- any journal -- is a great, collaborative scholarly enterprise.

No wonder it is so quiet on Atwater Street. We spend all our time communicating but with distant correspondents. We read and write; mail, fax, and e-mail. With the rise of e-mail, we rarely talk on the phone anymore. I can easily go all day without a phone call, yet I'm constantly in direct communication with authors, Board members, and manuscript referees, who are then, through me, in communication with each other. Do these people imagine that they are part of an actual community? Many certainly do. We develop especially close personal relationships with article authors; many remember fondly and forever their involvement with our wonderful chief copyeditor, Susan Armeny. Rejected authors sometimes nurse their resentments just as long, another sign of a very personal relationship. Scores of book reviewers and article referees work for us repeatedly, over decades, and feel a genuine personal connection to the work we do together.

For example, recently we sent an e-mail note to a tardy referee nagging him about a manuscript review. He replied with a plaintive plea for a few more weeks to get the job done. I told him that I'd let him off the hook completely, that I could get along without him on that article. He was grateful, but worried that I would put him on our deadbeat list and thus banish him to the outer darkness beyond the JAH communion of saints. (Yes, we do keep such a list.) This was not a fate he could bear. I forgave him and blessed him and sent him happily on his way. Of course, not all our volunteers are so committed to the community. Book reviewers, for example, are often late; and we have a sequence, a kind of crescendo, of "nag" e-mails or letters that we send to them over the course of many months of tardiness. The first is gentle; the last is pretty tough. In what we call the "super-delinquent nag" we demand that the review be filed in ten days or the book be returned by priority mail. This nag goes out only after the reviewer is three to six months late. My favorite response to the "super-delinquent nag" was a reviewer who told me, with great indignation, "I can't do justice to this book in ten days."

The kind of community I'm describing here is, to use the current jargon, a virtual community. It involves bonds that are personal and emotional, as well as intellectual and professional -- but it is non-geographical. None of these people -- whether they love us or hate us -- ever shows up at the house on Atwater. So, could the office of the Journal of American History be located anywhere? The answer to that question -- for the time being -- is "no." If the JAH is to be located in Southern Indiana, it must be in Bloomington, the home of Indiana University. Academic journals obviously need university people for staff, especially faculty and graduate students. But, traditionally, history journals (all journals, perhaps) have also needed university libraries. I say "traditionally" because change is under way. The scholarly community of a history journal is still intimately linked to libraries; but that link may weaken in the Age of the Internet.

Traditionally, the relationship between the Journal of American History and libraries -- like our relationship with our community of scholars -- has been both visible and invisible. The visible components of the journal/library relationship lie in the community of authors and readers. Authors use libraries to conduct research for articles. Readers use libraries to read the Journal, both new and back issues, and to find books that are reviewed and sources that are cited in our articles, our review essays, and our "Recent Scholarship" bibliographies. The Journal is not just a display of new scholarship and a repository of past scholarship; it is also a library reference tool. It is both part of a library's collections and a library finding guide. In other words, readers need a library to operate a journal properly.

The invisible, behind-the-scenes library/journal connection is just as important, perhaps more important for explaining the location of our office within walking distant of a great university library. For each article, we conduct what we call a "spot check" of citations. We can't fact-check the accuracy of every statement or note, but we can check many of them, simply by strolling over to the Indiana University library. We also use the library to compile our "Recent Scholarship" bibliographies. In each issue we list all American history articles that have been published in some 650 scholarly journals. We receive some of these journals in editorial exchanges. Most we read in the library. We also use the library's catalogs and reference works to track down information on people we might want to use as reviewers and referees.

In other words, the library has always been a vital nexus of information and communication for the Journal of American History, for finding texts and people, for linking texts and people. The journal and the library are complements of a unified communication system. They are not free standing; they support each other. Will this interdependence continue? I have some doubt. Indeed, it is already changing. How it is changing will be my subject for the remainder of my talk this morning.

Last month, the Journal of American History -- in partnership with the American Historical Review, the University of Illinois Press, and the National Academy Press -- launched a full-text, online edition. The service is called the History Cooperative, and it is currently freely available on the Web. Beginning in 2001 it will be restricted to individual subscribers and, through site licenses, to people affiliated with subscribing libraries. Will the History Cooperative change the journal/library relationship? Indeed, it will.

But online publishing -- a very visible change -- is not the whole story of the scholarly journal's new life in the Age of the Internet. Our relationship with our scholarly community and our relationship with libraries has already been altered by the electronic revolution.

Our relationship with the invisible communion of saints who help us put out the Journal has been vastly improved by the electronic revolution, mainly by computerized record-keeping and by e-mail. What used to be an enormous card file in a row of steel cabinets is now a computer database of records on some 9,000 scholars who provide us with book and manuscript reviews. Like any businesses today, we can now easily maintain and manipulate huge data files -- in our case, the records of the members of our scholarly community. And through e-mail we can deal with them in writing, yet informally and in nearly real time. Like teenage Internet recluses, we sit still and silent on Atwater Street, while inhabiting a vibrant, virtual community of a thousand historians spread out across the country and the world.

Our relationship with the Indiana University library has changed as well. Though the Journal's fact-checkers and bibliography builders still go to the library, I never go there for Journal reference work anymore. Or, I should say my body never goes. I do all reference work online, tracking down books, articles, and people. I use the Indiana University library as a portal to reference materials, but whether I'm using a database for which IU pays or whether I am out in the free world of the Web, I usually don't know or care. In the past, I telephoned the IU Reference Service Desk. I haven't done that in at least a year.

Much of the rest of our invisible, behind-the-scenes relationship with the library will eventually go virtual, too. Today we use the periodical room to compile our bibliographical lists, but at some point I assume we will be able to peruse all journal articles online. We go to the stacks to check footnotes, but increasingly full-text journals and book services will allow us to do that online. If no one from the Journal needs to set foot in the IU library, do we need to have a relationship with that library? I use the IU online catalog to check on book citations, but only out of habit. I could use the Library of Congress catalog -- or any other catalog of any other library in the world. Do we need to be within walking distance of a great research library to put out a journal? It's a pleasant stroll across campus, especially in the spring. But it's a stroll we increasingly need not take.

And what about our visible communion of saints, our readers? Do they need to make their own strolls to their own libraries? Do readers still need a library to operate the Journal of American History? Yes, they do. But that need, too, is fading. At the moment, readers still need to go to the library in person to get the books and many of the articles that appear in our reviews, bibliographies, and footnotes. The old-fashioned, intertextual linking of sources that a journal provides still takes the reader to the library stacks. But now reading the Journal itself, while it may still require the reader to go to a library for a site-licensed subscription, does not require the reader to go there physically. Current issues are now available online through the History Cooperative and back issues are available through J-Stor. In some ways, the university library has already become a portal to collections, rather than the collection itself.

In the future, the reader will be able to operate our Journal, including its intertextual features, almost entirely in cyberspace, where intertextual becomes hypertextual. As the articles in other journals become accessible online, our "Recent Scholarship" bibliographies will be able to link to them directly. At some point, the books we review will be available online as well, either in electronic form or through purchase via hot links to publishers and booksellers. As our authors learn to compose their work with electronic linking in mind, many primary and secondary sources cited in articles will be accessible online -- just a click away. Increasingly, the Journal itself will be able to perform the finding and linking services traditionally performed by the library. So, do we need libraries?

I know this is a question that has not escaped your attention. Indeed, it seems that nearly every article written about libraries these days tries to gaze into the electronic future. What role will libraries play in a digital, virtual world? It's a big, troubling question, with lots of possible answers. For example, in a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Martin Raish of Brigham Young University describes the future library as a collection of databases and links to databases, while the key service role of the library remains the traditional one of helping patrons navigate. Now that means helping them navigate the cyber seas. Raish predicts the rise of what he calls the "just for me" library, where the patron can customize almost everything to fit his personal needs and desires. He goes on to explain what he means:

In the "just for me" library, the catalog will not bother me with links to databases I don't use: It will eliminate them on my personalized interface. On the other hand, the system will notify me of new books in my areas of interest, suggest related works, and offer other features from an extensive menu -- just as online booksellers already do. (Martin Raish, "Academic Librarians Offer the Crucial Human Element in Online Scholarship," Chronicle of Higher Education, April 21, 2000, p. B5.)

This description of the future library sounds a lot like the future journal. At the Journal of American History, we are already planning to provide individual subscribers (the members of the Organization of American Historians) with similar customized bibliographies and book announcements, either delivered by e-mail or through a personalized interface with the History Cooperative. While the Journal's content won't be "just for me," the service functions, the finding functions, of the Journal probably will be. In other words, because the Journal is itself a finding guide -- it has always been a finding guide -- in the electronic future it will gradually evolve into a portal site for linking to, as well as locating, other scholarly resources. The readers won't need the library's finding guides or links to operate the Journal of American History online. The Journal will be a library -- at least a library as Martin Raish imagines it.

And perhaps as Jerry Campbell of the University of Southern California imagines it. In his recent White Paper on the "scholar's portal," Campbell writes, "In the best of all possible Web based worlds, the subject library of the future might be conceived of as a highly customized, narrowly focused search engine adapted to the character of publications and research habits of a discipline." (Jerry D. Campbell, "The Case for Creating a Scholars Portal To the Web," Prepared for the Association of Research Libraries, April 13, 2000.) Campbell describes a library function, but this is just what an online journal will do as well.

Is this a problem for the Journal of American History? I don't think so. For us and for other journals, the electronic future will offer daunting challenges but also real opportunities to make our scholarly communities more lively, interactive, and strong. All of the roles that a scholarly journal plays among its readers, reviewers, and referees -- communities both visible and invisible -- could be improved in the Age of the Internet. Already it is much easier for us to engage our volunteer workers and our readers. In the future, it should be easier to achieve the intertextual, hypertextual scholarly ideal of research, writing, criticism, revision, and more research. For the journal editor, it is a fascinating future to contemplate.

Is this future a problem for the library? I think it is. As scholarly journals usurp the finding and portal functions of libraries, as they become specialized online libraries themselves, the question becomes more pressing: What are general libraries for? Right now, as you all know, university libraries are fast becoming enormous clearinghouses of databases. They subscribe -- often at great expense -- to online information services, which they then make available through site licenses to their patrons. The collecting, packaging, and licensing of databases and digital texts by large vendors and the concentration of subscriptions in the large research libraries suggest that there are significant economies of scale in electronic publishing. But where do those economies lie? Mainly, I suspect, in fulfillment and billing, not in publishing itself. And it seems to me -- a callow non-expert on these financial matters -- that these economies may evaporate in a future of computerized micro-transactions. The economic nature of online materials -- zero marginal costs and declining transaction costs -- may not fit for long the big vendor/big clearinghouse model. If we can have "just for me" online catalogs and finding guides, why not "just for me" links to databases, links that involve fleeting, ad hoc relationships between vendors and journals or even individuals -- rather than subscription relationships between vendors and libraries? This could, perhaps, be the electronic future for scholarship, and it would be a future without what we have, for hundreds of years, called "libraries."

But I love libraries. I'm a student of the history of books and newspapers, so whenever I get the chance, I take off for the American Antiquarian Society, or the Newberry Library, or the Library Company of Philadelphia. And I use the Indiana University Library nearly everyday. I work in a house on Atwater Street in Bloomington, Indiana, partly because the library is just a stroll across campus. But for Journal work I seldom go there. And if I don't go there in person, I wonder how long I will need to go there in cyberspace. I suspect that you folks are wondering that, too.