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Editorial

491

As the new editor of College & Research 
Libraries I have to wonder if it still makes 
sense to print this journal. As a librar-
ian I have been counseling some of my 
constituents, particularly scholars in the 
sciences and professional fi elds, to move 
electronic, if they haven’t already. Freed 
from the constraints of print publication, 
ideas can be shared more quickly, eco-
nomically, and universally. Yet I like my 
print copy of C&RL, as I suspect many 
of you do. This small, manageably sized, 
print journal arrives in the mail regularly 
once every two months. It is about a hun-
dred pages of text and charts with half 
a dozen articles and half a dozen book 
reviews. It is easy to carry around when 
I travel, and that is when I get a lot of my 
professional reading done. Is it just me 
and my generation—still part of a print 
culture—or is it that printed books and 
journals are a convenient and comfortable 
medium for reading that will remain with 
us for some time to come?

Predicting the future of print publica-
tion is a risky business. The death of print 
has been greatly exaggerated for at least 
the last two decades, but it is hard not to 
notice that change is occurring and the pace 
is quickening. Law, medicine, engineering, 
the sciences and some of the social sci-
ences now share their journal scholarship 
primarily online. Only monographs and 
the journal literature in the humanities, 
arts, and popular writing seem to be hold-
ing out in print. But have you checked out 
your public library lately? Many of them 
have the latest novels, popular non-fi ction, 
audio books, and videos ready for you to 

To Print, or Not

download to your favorite viewing device 
for several weeks before they disappear 
from you screen—prett y convenient com-
pared to checking out, lugging around, and 
returning books and recordings.

Of course, we are not really in an “ei-
ther/or” situation. Digital and print can 
co-exist and even complement each other. 
Information today, with few exceptions 
such as fi ne printing, wants to be—needs 
to be—digital in production, in discovery, 
and in mass storage. Print remains an 
excellent format for reading and “making 
sense” of information, and we under-
stand its strengths and weaknesses as a 
preservation medium. In this hybrid and 
shift ing information realm, there are im-
portant research and operational question 
for academic librarians about the right 
balance between print and digital, about 
what current media to acquire, and about 
how best to manage our massive legacy 
of print collections. I am particularly 
interested in this latt er question and in 
answers that can provide eff ective strate-
gies for the consolidated mass storage of 
print as we move to a more fully realized 
digital information system. 

For the time being, we will hedge our 
bets at C&RL. We will continue to print our 
journal every other month. Maybe I will 
glimpse a serious librarian in an airport 
lobby or on a plane with his or her head 
buried in a print copy. Or light up your 
laptop, we are online too, so you can dis-
cover us and read us however you like.

Joseph J. Branin
Editor, College & Research Libraries