College and Research Libraries


364 College & Research Libraries 

notion that we may be not only in the late 
age of print, but also in the late age of 
text. Unfortunately, his arguments for 
the continuing importance of text sound 
a lot like those of the supporters of the 
textual canon and do not take into ac-
count important changes in our society. 
Thanks to television, there are already 
many people for whom text is not a part 
of daily life. Computer imaging, voice 
recognition, virtual reality, and ease of 
access to them through networks seem 
likely to accelerate that trend. If you read 
Writing Space (and you should), abandon 
linear argument and read it as a source 
of ideas, a book that will pull out your 
associations with text and give you asso-
ciations that you can use in your work 
and further reading. You'll get mad oc-
casionally, you may reject some of the 
ideas, but there are so many ideas in here 
that some of them are bound to change 
the way you see your Post-It Notes, a 
page of this journal, and those lines scrol-
ling past on your terminaL-James Camp-
bell, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. 

Scholarly Communication and Serial 
Prices: Proceedings of a Conference 
Sponsored by the Standing Conference 
of National and University Libraries 
and the British Library Research and 
Development Board, 11-13 June 1990. 
Ed. by Karen Brookfield. London: 
Bowker-Saur, 1991. 155p. acid-free, 
$45 (ISBN 0-86291-478-7). 
As the subtitle indicates, this book 

consists of thirteen papers and summa-
ries of subsequent discussions presented 
at a June 1990 conference in Great Britain. 
In the keynote address, Jack Meadows, 
chief librarian at Loughborough Univer-
sity, provides an overview of the groups 
involved in the production and use of 
serials as well as the factors to be con-
sidered in evaluating the current role of 
serials. His focus is entirely upon scien-
tific, technical, and medical (STM) seri-
als, and though some of the other 
authors do not mention this specifically, 
in fact the entire conference is concerned 
with the STM situation. Meadows does 
not point out all the motivations for 
scientists to publish papers, missing the 

July 1992 

crucial one of creating a paper record of 
research for promotion and to support 
grant applications. Similarly, in the dis-
cussion of the STM community (labeled 
"authors and readers"), he does not 
address two important characteristics, the 
increasing size of the population of scien-
tists performing and reporting research, 
and the tendency for much research to be 
reported in small articles rather than in 
extended ones, the so-called "salami slic-
ing" of scientific reporting. 

Margaret Boden of the University of 
Sussex outlines in "Appraisal of Re-
search" the function of peer review and 
some related issues of current signifi-
cance to the research community as well 
as to librarians. Once again, however, 
some important points are not men-
tioned. She does not cite the work of 
Stephen Cole on the sociology of peer 
review in the sciences and social sciences 
or his key notions of "core knowledge" 
and "research frontier knowledge"; she 
refers only obliquely to impact measure-
ments based on citation studies and the 
import/ export of references as developed 
by Eugene Garfield. 

Duane Webster attended in his role as 
executive director of the Association of 
Research Libraries and presented two 
excellent papers. The first, ''The 
Economics of Journal Publishing: The 
Librarian's View," provides, uniquely in 
this conference, the conceptual frame-
work as well as the supporting statistics 
for the fiscal dilemma confronting librar-
ies as STM journal costs continue to 
exceed both the general inflation rates of 
the publishing industry and the ability 
of research library budgets to support 
subscriptions in the breadth and depth 
once thought desirable. This paper also 
describes one ARL initiative for coping 
with the crisis, the foundation of the ARL 
Office of Scientific and Academic Pub-
lishing. Webster's other paper, "A Per-
spective on the Politics of Change from 
the United States," argues for substantial 
alterations in the modes of distributing 
scientific and scholarly information 
through the electronic telecommunica-
tion networks already present and in 
development. In essence, he states the 



case for funding and development of the 
U.S. National Research and Education 
Network (NREN) as well as for more 
effective and extensive exploitation of 
coordinated collection development and 
services. The sole quibble this reviewer 
has with Webster's exposition is his in-
accurate depiction of the debate between 
the proponents of local ownership and 
those who predict a rosy future based on 
the so-called paradigm of access. There 
may be some political reasons for this 
construction. 

Gordon Graham's paper on the pub-
lisher's perspective on the economics of 
journal publishing is a gentlemanly re-
view of the recent history of the situation. 
Although he attends to the important re-
lationship between publishers and librari-
ans, he passes lightly over the possibility 
of altering the expectations of the scholarly 
community, which is ultimately the con-
sumer as well as the supplier of texts. 

Two papers on scholarly communica-
tion in the sciences, one by Anthony 
Pearce about physics and another by An-
thony J. Turner on biochemistry, present 
discipline-based views and describe the 
influence of the learned societies on the 
present crisis. 

In ''The Future of Scholarly Com-
munication" Colin Campbell, then vice-
chancellor of the University of Nottingham, 
suggests a plan for regional coordinated 
collection development and advocates 
more experimentation with information 
technology. 

Cliff McKnight and Lynne Brindley con-
sider the electronic journal and the elec-
tronic library respectively. McKnight 
presents some experiences in applying 
mainframe computer resources to a journal-
publishing venture, the BLEND project, and 
a hypertext electronic journal based on a 
CD-ROM workstation, the Project Quar-
tet. A useful feature of McKnight's paper 
is his presentation of some schematic 
models of information delivery systems. 
Brindley's paper rehearses the advances 
which suggest to her the possibilities for 
a true electronic library, and in the con-
clusion to her excellent brief she offers 
seven assertions which, taken together, de-
scribe the path to further developments. 

Book Reviews 365 

Bernard Naylor's paper, ''The Politics 
of Change in the United Kingdom," ex-
amines the matter of "scholarly esteem" 
and presents several models for under-
standing the current situation, if not the 
future. 

The concluding panel discussion iden-
tifies three main themes arising in the 
conference (escalating serials prices, 
technological alternatives, pressures to 
publish), problems of traditional serials, 
alternatives to traditional serials, and 
presents observations on the possibili-
ties of reducing published output. 

A program for action is outlined fea-
turing four steps subsequently under-
taken by various groups concerned with 
the problem on both sides of the Atlantic. 
These steps are: creating an experimental 
electronic journal; lobbying for change in 
the appraisal of research; continuing the 
development of a technological infrastruc-
ture suitable for communicating scientific 
and scholarly reports; and studying how 
scholars find and use information, espe-
cially with regard to serials. 

Despite the minor shortcomings of 
many of the papers, this is a valuable re-
sume of the crisis in the system of scholarly 
communication via serials. Although there 
are a few obvious differences between the 
British and American environments, the 
relevance of these discussions is ap-
parent to the global research library 
community. Given that Bowker-Saur is 
merely reporting the results of a confer-
ence funded by others, the price of the 
volume is unwarranted. Perhaps in the 
future, alternate modes of distributing 
the proceedings of meetings as obviously 
fruitful and important as this one could be 
managed.-Michael A. Keller, Yale Univer-
sity, New Haven, Connecticut. 

Clotfelter, Charles T., Ronald G. Eh-
renberg, Malcolm Getz, and John J. 
Siegfried. Economic Challenges in Higher 
Education. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 
1991. (A National Bureau of Economic 
Research Monograph.) 422 p. acid-free, 
$39.95 (ISBN 0-226-11050-8). LC 91-
23330. 
This book consists of three long 

economics essays on student demand for