The Hidden Cost of Sharing

Situ, P., & Voyles, J. F. (2008). Collecting forever or just-in-time: An alternative to enhance customers’ access to Chinese language materials through resource sharing. Resource Sharing & Information Networks, 19, 39-50.

This university has a physical storage issue that impacts its Chinese language collection especially. Off-site storage was not an option, and the types of materials in this collection are less likely to be available in digital format. The library decided to try a just-in-time approach (versus an anticipatory approach, or "just-in-case" as they put it). They decided to use ILL to meet the patrons’ needs instead of buying books.  

The program worked well enough, but what I found potentially perturbing was an idea discussed in the literature review.  The paper's authors cite Ferguson & Kohoe (1993) as showing ILLing articles being cheaper than owning them.  This would be problematic as a widespread policy for multiple reasons: if no one buys the periodicals, no one can borrow them, and the fewer people who invest, especially in academic publications which don’t enjoy wide circulation to begin with, the harder it is for periodicals to survive.  The journals can’t meet their overhead costs, so they are forced to raise their prices, which hurts everyone.  Another cited work (Ameen 2005) said patrons didn’t “care how the library obtained materials for them,” the encouragement of which attitude could lead to unrealistic expectations and a sense of entitlement in the patrons, and which wouldn't take into account the cost or consequence to creators or manufacturers. 

The section is a bit choppy—the authors included the ideas without connecting them critically—so it’s not clear if they agree with these ideas, or whether the original articles offer solutions or no (or in what context the original authors discussed these topics), but to me it demonstrates how important it is to raise awareness among our patrons about what goes into our trying to make as much information available to them as possible despite the limitations of space and budget, and the repercussions--ethical and otherwise--of some of the choices that we make to do it.

References 

Ameen, K. (2005). Developments in the philosophy of collection management: A historical review. Collection Building, 24(4), 112–116.

Ferguson, A. W., & Kehoe, K. (1993). Access vs. ownership: What is most cost effective in the sciences. Journal of Library Administration 19(2), 89–99.