Abstract:
In December 2003 and January 2004, Anna Creech interviewed four consultants: Marilyn Geller, Helen Henderson, October Ivins, and Judy Luther. Their work focuses on various aspects of the serials industry. They discuss how they became consultants and issues surrounding the changing roles of serials librarians, electronic publishing, scholarly communication, the consolidation of subscription agents, and other aspects of the serials industry.
These days, there are quite a few entrepreneurial individuals from the ranks of librarians, publishers, and vendors who have struck out on their own to create businesses that serve to bridge gaps wherever needed. Most industry consultants have spent time in all three of those professional realms before following an interest that led them out into a self-defined profession that makes use of the knowledge and understanding they gained. Drawing upon their diverse experience, these individuals bring fresh perspectives and cutting-edge knowledge to institutional problems, and are able to find solutions that may not have occurred to those mired in the traditions of their respective institutions. There are many industry consultants with a variety of specialties and interests. Marilyn Geller, Helen Henderson, October Ivins, and Judy Luther are four whose interests and expertise are relevant to the serials community. The author spoke with them on the phone in December 2003 and January 2004.
Marilyn Geller began her professional career as a cataloger at Harvard University. She started working in serials after she switched jobs and went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She says, "I thought cataloging was incredibly important and I wanted to be the best cataloger ever, and serials cataloging presented that opportunity." While at MIT, she was appointed to an electronic journal task force during the early nineties when e-journals first began emerging on the scene. This interested her in electronic resources in general, which eventually led her to leave libraries. "I thought that libraries were moving too slowly and too methodically. The methodical part is a good thing, but the slow part, in this environment, isn’t. I saw opportunities in the commercial environment because commercial organizations move a lot more quickly. I see an awful lot of exciting stuff happening in libraries now, and while the commercial environment is still moving forward in the same way they were before, there are also lots of opportunities in libraries."
After leaving MIT, she went to work for a subscription agency and gained insight into that "other side" of serials. She did not intend to become a consultant, but when she made the decision to leave her position at the subscription agency, several other companies offered her some enticing jobs. Rather than deciding on one, which she was not ready to do, she ended up working with all of them as a consultant. "For the first several years, everything I did came to me. I never went out and sought work. It just seemed like a great thing to do. People were offering me all these interesting things that were finite. I could go and do them and then I could move onto something else that’s really interesting. For several years it was a wonderful opportunity to see all sorts of different companies and libraries and non-profit organizations and be part of them without being tied to them."
Currently, Geller is serving as one of the co-chairs of the North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) Program Planning Committee, and regularly works with publishers, vendors, non-profits and libraries to help research and develop their digital opportunities. She is most proud of her contributions to Harvard’s part in the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s E-journal Archive project.1 "It is absolutely the most important thing that libraries can do. Figure out what’s going on with archiving and make a way forward. I think that because there are a variety of places in the world where you can get information and information services, whether they’re free or for a fee, but there is no other organization anywhere in contemporary society that is responsible for protecting and preserving our intellectual history. It’s only libraries and museums that ever do this. It’s a crucial thing to do because if you lose your intellectual history, then you end up not having building blocks. I also think that one model is not enough. Preserving that electronic history is too important and if one model goes down the tubes - if you’ve got two models out there then at least you’ve got the other one. Those models have to be based on different technology, different business models, different economics, and maybe even different organizations. And, I think you’ve got to say, with the way the world is now, on different geo-political bases. You can’t guess who’s going to be in charge of what country and what they are going to do with the intellectual content of libraries. There need to be many different models out there, but in fact people know this now and even if we don’t have something solid right this second, we do have lots of powerful brains working on it. You can see that it’s going to happen. It’s okay now to say, ‘I believe, and therefore I will acquire electronic materials for my library, even though I don’t know what’s going to happen to those tomorrow.’ I truly believe this."
Helen Henderson has had a long and varied career working in libraries and commercial entities. She began as a geologist, and after receiving her MLS in the early seventies, she went to work for the British National Bibliography (later part of the (British Library). She spent most of the decade in various libraries, but it was when she became the head of information services at an engineering company that she became interested in serials. In 1982, she co-founded a consultancy company and was also the Executive Secretary of EUSIDIC (the European Association of Information Services) where she started her long career of organizing conferences. (The latest in these is the Cranfield Conference in Prague in June 2004). Her consultancy company later merged with another international company developing library automation software, and was eventually sold to Dawson in 1996. Henderson stayed on for a while as a consultant, and helped them develop Information Quest. After RoweCom bought Dawson, she left the company, and continues to work on her own as a consultant for publishers, vendors and subscription agents. Most recently, Henderson’s company produced the scoping study for the new SUNCAT (Serials Union Catalogue for the United Kingdom) and worked with OCLC to create a strategic business plan for a rights and resolutions service. One of her current projects is working with publishers to organize their subscriber database and as a sideline to hopefully create a database of institutional identifiers that will assist publishers in identifying their customers. She is currently and active member of the UK Serials Group and is joint editor of their publication Serials with Hazel Woodward (university librarian at Cranfield University). She believes that setting up the companion electronic newsletter Serials e-News is one of her most important contributions to the current dialog on issues in the serials industry.
October Ivins worked in two libraries as a student assistant while in college, and it was those experiences that led her to librarianship. After college, she worked with Marcia Tuttle at the University of North Carolina in the serials department, although she really wanted to be a reference librarian. After she was promoted to serials acquisitions supervisor and began meeting with vendors and being involved in negotiations, her interest in serials and publishing increased, and she eventually attained an MLS. She returned to libraries as the head of serials and later acquisitions LSU. During that period, she worked on the ALCTS SS committee that developed serials vendor performance guidelines2 and wrote a column Serials Prices column for Serials Review for four years.3 By the mid-nineties, she had become disillusioned with libraries. "I left libraries in 1995. I was deeply discouraged at that time. I was so frustrated with libraries. Here the web had come out and all these other things were going on, and it looked to me like libraries were going to completely miss the boat and become completely irrelevant to students and researchers. That’s when I started a doctorate in library science at UT Austin. I initially wanted to explore digital library costs, but that led me to seek a deeper understanding of the commercial and content-producer side. I took marketing, e-commerce and information industry courses in the MBA program as well as public policy, telecommunications and qualitative research methods in other departments. I’ve been really pleased that we finally woke up and figured out that we did need to embrace the web and deal with some of these things—UT offered a digital library course, taught by an adjunct."
Since leaving libraries, Ivins has worked with two publishing services dot-coms and is now an independent consultant as well as an associate consultant with Informed Strategies, a company founded by Judy Luther. Her focus is on helping non-profit and society publishers understand the library community and make choices that will move their businesses forward. She is interested in looking for a common ground between all parties and finding ways that people can work together to find solutions. Ivins has done program planning for NASIG and ALCTS. She is presently the chair of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) Education Committee which develops seminars and pre-conferences, and helps the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) develop workshops. It is the educational aspect of program planning that most interests her. She tries to encourage people to get out of their comfort zones. "Don’t just talk to the same people. Don’t just go to the same meetings. Go to a publisher’s meeting. Go to a reference librarian’s meeting. Go see what people in a parallel universe are doing and what you can learn from that."
Judy Luther began her career in academic libraries, first with an undergraduate degree in library science, and later with an MLS. After nearly thirteen years in libraries, her interests led her to a career change, and she began selling to them, working as a regional sales representative with the Faxon Company and then subsequently as director of North American sales for Thomson ISI.4 During her ten years with the Faxon Company, she obtained an MBA because she "wanted a greater understanding of the dynamics and culture of the for-profit side." She believes that this degree has been useful in her work. She wishes that economics were a required course for everyone, including librarians. "It helps you understand how markets and people behave and their motivation. It provides a perspective that has practical applications in life."
In 1997, she created Informed Strategies, a consulting company that works with players in all aspects of the serials market.5 "I didn’t decide not to do library work; I was intrigued with the big picture and the chance to work with many libraries. The opportunity was on the vendor and publisher side. As a consultant, I have a chance to work with many publishers, which gives me the broad industry view. I’ve worked with many libraries, I’ve worked with many publishers, and that’s what I find intriguing and exciting about being an industry consultant."
Currently, she has been working with publishers to help them develop a parallel electronic process to their pre-existing print process. She considers the White Paper she wrote for the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) on e-journal usage statistics to be a significant contribution as it highlighted the need for a collaborative effort between librarians and publishers.6 Project Counter has since established a working group and best practice guidelines.7
On becoming a consultant
These four industry consultants have spent many years in various aspects of the serials industry. They have specialized in those aspects that interest them, and will occasionally collaborate on projects where a range of backgrounds and expertise is needed. Luther suggests that those still in the educational process should follow their passions and take any classes that interest them. "What I enjoy most is the autonomy to learn about topics and to address questions that stimulate my curiosity. It’s paid off, because I’m not the only one who wants answers to those questions. What I learn is of value to others. That’s the dynamic around an industry consultant - asking leading edge questions, working to understand how the pieces fit together in this changing industry."
Ivins agrees, and suggests that those interested in becoming industry consultants need to have "basic business training, marketing, accounting, project management, and even systems training." Some of the best advice she received on being a consultant was given to her about ten years ago by Barbara Meyers. She says that Meyers told her, "The only consultants I’ve seen who haven’t made it - who haven’t succeeded - are people who try to do it as a part-time job or I’ll test this or I’ll see what this is like. She said if you go into it tentatively, you wouldn’t have the commitment to really make it pay off. She said you have to treat it like a job. You have to devote the resources to staying current, to maintaining contacts, to marketing yourself."
Henderson simply recommended that anyone interested in becoming an industry consultant should work in as many different environments as they can. In addition, she believes that library schools need to expand their curriculum. "I’ve felt that up until the last five years or so, the library schools taught too much about cataloging and classification and not enough about marketing. To be a librarian these days, you need to be part accountant, part lawyer, and part marketer."
On being a consultant
Consulting work can be both exciting and frustrating at times. On the one hand, a consultant is never tied to one institution or corporation for very long, but on the other hand, once their work is finished, they have no say in how it is implemented. Often times, problems are handed to them because the institution has not been able to find a solution themselves, and therefore a great deal of "brain space" is needed, as Luther likes to describe it. Part of the reason why she and Ivins team up on projects so frequently is because Ivins will bring her perspective and experience to a problem in a way that Luther may not have considered herself. Just as hiring a consultant adds another brain to a problem, collaborating with other consultants brings in more experiences and potential solutions.
Sometimes a consultant is needed when two groups of people have trouble understanding the needs of the other. That’s where Henderson comes in. She says, "I have a very varied background, so most of what I do is explaining to one set of people what another set of people either want them to do or what they ought to be doing for them. As much as anything, I am an interpreter." She enjoys the strategic thinking and the problem solving aspects of interpreting the needs and desires of different groups of people. Having run her own international library software company she has a lot of experience of the management, legal and financial issues facing all parts of an information company and is thus well able to advise subscription agents, publishers, and database producers, each with their own priorities, cultures and subcultures that may not always be able to communicate well.
Geller alternates between the brain space aspect of consultancy and the hands-on aspect of filling in where an extra pair of hands is needed. "A lot of times organizations have projects that they already developed and they need somebody with some larger understanding of what’s going on as well as the capability to actually do some hands-on work that will help them finish that project or get it moving or get it over a hump or something like that. There are a lot of times when I’m an extra pair of hands."
Her other focus area is project management for Internet development. Sometimes what is needed is for someone to come in, take a bare bones idea, and formulate a plan for the best way to implement that idea. Geller will "work with the organization and manage the project, keep it on track and organized, and act as the administrator based on the fact that I have an understanding of the background of what’s going on."
On the role of serials librarians
The responsibilities and day-to-day tasks of the serials librarian has been changing over the past decade as electronic publications have become more widely collected by libraries. No longer are they checking in issues by hand, and in some places such as the University of Nevada at Reno, serials librarians are no longer checking in issues at all.8 The nature of the delivery of electronic publications has required a change of workflow if check-in procedures are applied to them. In many cases, libraries have chosen to forgo the check in of electronic issues as a timesaving measure. As for claiming, the shear quantity and nature of electronic publication makes that task nearly impossible. Thus the burden of collection maintenance has been lessened as the size of the print collection has been reduced. These four consultants agree that there is a visible shift in the responsibilities of the serials librarian away from meticulous record keeping to those responsibilities commonly given to electronic resources librarians. Meanwhile, the day-to-day tasks of print serials collection maintenance have been passed on to library clerks. Luther simply states, "The serials librarian of the past will be extinct. What we do is actually going to change. What the serials librarian is doing today is going to be very different than what needs to be done in the future."
Having spent much of her time in libraries as a paraprofessional working with the nitty-gritty of serials acquisition, Ivins is most concerned with this shift and the decrease in serials librarians in general. "I think there are fewer serials librarians than there used to be. When people leave they get replaced with paraprofessionals. Support staff is doing my old job at Louisiana State University now. There are many fewer assistant department heads. I think administrators tend to see serials as a more clerical function, and they can have the head of technical services make the vendor decision, which I think is a real loss. I don’t know what’s going to happen when my generation of librarians retires. I don’t really see a lot of people coming behind. The other side of that is that I don’t think support staff are fairly compensated for the work that they do. That was another continuing frustration for me."
Geller is a bit more optimistic in her valuation of the serials librarian. She is less concerned about the shift of responsibilities to support staff and welcomes the transition of serials librarian to electronic resource librarian. "The skill that a serials librarian has is that he or she absolutely knows that nothing in this world is solid. Everything always changes. In the print universe, we have some basic models for how to deliver scholarly communication. Even with those basic models, every journal that comes across their desk has something tricky about it. The skill that a serials librarian has is that ability to take that variation and deal with it, monitor it, fit it into an old model, or create a new model for it. I can’t think of anything more valuable in the digital age than flexibility and the ability to deal with change. From my perspective, serials librarians are probably the people who are best suited for dealing with all this stuff. If you track the word "subscription" which is at the core of a serials librarian’s job, whether it’s cataloging or acquisitions or public service or whatever, the word subscription - the implication is that the relationship is on-going, and needs to be dealt with and adjusted to monitored all the way along, is so crucial to everything. We’re going to be monitoring so much more than just electronic journals, or the digital counterpart of the print journal. We’re going to be monitoring our ongoing relationships with a variety of service and content providers."
Regardless of what it is that the serials librarian is called, it is apparent that their responsibilities will include electronic publications. Anything that is of a continuous nature (e-books, databases, etc.) that is bought on subscription basis rather than a one time only purchase can reasonably be considered serial in nature. It is these types of materials that the serials librarian will be and should already be managing.
On electronic publishing
It is a common misconception among librarians that electronic publishing is less expensive for the publisher than the traditional print publication. While it is true that an electronic publication can be more efficient and less time-consuming, and there are some expenses saved such as printing and mailing costs, the real financial burden is in the transition from print production to electronic production. Luther aptly explains this, with an excellent parallel to libraries, "We used to assume that it is cheaper to publish electronically, but it requires that you re-engineer your internal operations to achieve those efficiencies. If you do everything you did for the print version and then you add on the cost of the electronic publication, it is more expensive. This is a tremendous period of transition and we have a lot of publishers who are still very much in that mode. It’s only some of the bigger guys who have gone through the re-engineering, and some of the smaller guys who had either the vision or the motivation to do so. I can draw a parallel to libraries that went through re-engineering their internal processes when they brought up library automation. You had no choice. The NOTIS library system treated journals and books alike. They took their book processing and their journal processing departments and put them together, because it became more efficient to do so in an electronic environment. Librarians were thrust into their own internal re-engineering as a result of library automation. Publishers need to go through a similar process with their electronic publications, but many aren’t there yet, and so we have a less efficient system."
Ivins expands on this, It’s many of the same issues of converting from manual to online processes with an ILMS, but there is no integrated publishing system—it’s more like each module is a separate product with a set of vendors offering variations. Where is the money for small publishers to implement even some of the modules?" There are related personnel issues. "Think about libraries ten years ago when you have to automate and think about what you are going to do with this check-in clerk who’s fifty years old and who’s never used a computer. It’s that same set of issues." For the larger science, technology and medical (STM) publishers, the transition is easier. They do not need to worry about things such as retention and staff size. However, according to Ivins, most of the smaller publishers are working with a staff of five or six who each have multiple responsibilities. She is concerned that the push from libraries for all publishers to go electronic does not take into account the differences between publishers in different fields. Nor does that push take into account the different customers serviced by those publishers. "The electronic is actually more powerful, more sophisticated than the print for the STMs. For the traditional social science and humanities publishers, it is much more like ordinary print, but a large part of their income - generally half of it or more - comes from individual subscribers who don’t necessarily want the electronic. The humanities and social sciences publishers, even if they wanted to go all-electronic right now, have two different user bases to consider. The STMs are priced on an institutional level. I feel like we spent fifteen years getting people familiar with the STM business model, and now we have to do it all over again to get people to understand that all publishers are not the same, and there’s this other group of publishers that have very different needs and business models. They’re really at risk. A thing like the "Big Deal" that ties up all the money with STMs is a problem. Preferring electronic - these people sort of bought the deal from ProQuest and EBSCOhost that the aggregator packages are just an enhanced index, they really are a finding tool, they won’t substitute for your title. Then librarians turn around and cancel the print because they’ve got it in ProQuest."
She is sympathetic to those libraries with budget cuts that have necessitated these print cancellations, but at the same time, she believes that librarians who have made those decisions need to take some responsibility for the peril that such decisions place on humanities and social sciences publishers. She adds, "What’s going to happen is these small publishers either aren’t going to make it, or it makes them acquisition targets."
On scholarly communication
Serials are one of the core models of scholarly communication, whether they come in print or electronic forms. For many years, they were published by societies and small publishing houses run by academics that were more concerned with advancing information than they were with profit. About thirty years ago, this started to shift as publishers became driven more by people whose interests are focused on short-term profits and shareholder expectations. Libraries, for the most part, are stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to subscription prices. Large publishing companies control a majority of the serials market, and in turn, their shareholders and economic forces control them. None of these consultants have easy solutions to this problem, but they are able to see both the publisher and the librarian perspective on this issue. Geller notes, "The problem with that economic model is that librarians are the ones who are paying for this stuff, but librarians are not the users. It’s very much akin to the problems in medical economics. Here’s a situation where a piece of the organization is laying out money not for themselves but for somebody else and therefore has no marketing power with the people they’re paying. It’s a very bad model. We know that there are problems in the health care industry, and on a smaller scale we’re seeing the exact same thing in the scholarly communications model."
Several alternatives to the traditional economic model for publishing have arisen in recent years; such as open access models where material is made available free to the user and may require the author to pay a fee for publication. None of these models are over-night solutions, but they do cause dialogue, and dialogue is the advice offered by Henderson. She says, "I think one of the things should be happening is more discussion between the academics, librarians, and the publishers, working together and looking at other sources of revenue. This could be a powerful alliance. If you think about what a library costs as a percentage of a university, it’s trivial – it’s a small amount of money. Yet, if you think about the dependence on information within that sort of teaching and research community, it’s huge!"
Geller adds, "One of the things that librarians in particular have to understand is that publishers do provide a service. It may be that this service is too costly or that the price tag that the publishers put on it is too costly, but it’s an incredibly valuable service, and frankly, librarians have enough to do without taking on the role of the publisher, also. There has to be a certain acknowledgement that each piece of this chain has some valuable contributions to make. That said, I don’t see that librarians have a lot of power in changing any of this themselves. I don’t see that publishers are really motivated to change. To be honest, I truly think that some of the publisher representatives that we see at conferences understand all of this also. They’re not having all that much fun watching the prices go up."
Ivins is interested in these alternative models, but cautions those who are considering stepping out on their own. She is concerned that librarians and academics may not understand all of the work and money that goes into publishing a journal. For many small and society publishers, most of the work of peer reviewers, authors, and staff is unpaid labor. When one considers the time it would take to set this up and maintain the necessary connections, she says, one should realize that this process is not cheap. Also, there is an element of academic culture that is deeply embedded in the traditional publishing model. She once had a conversation with a faculty member who was an editor for a journal published by a large STM publisher, and it was through that conversation she came to have an understanding of the culture and tradition of scholarly publishing. "He talked to me about his personal career path. He had started out submitting book reviews as a graduate student. He got some articles published and got to be a peer reviewer, and was eventually invited to be on the editorial board. Now, for two years he had been the editor-in-chief. He had the opportunity to send things out for peer review and to solicit book reviews. He was able to fund additional graduate students with his editor’s stipend, open doors for young professors he was trying to mentor, all of the good things it allowed him to do, and the personal prestige. He said a new journal is not going to give him any of this."
Ivins said that the stipend he receives from being the editor-in-chief is nothing compared to what he could earn as a consultant to the industry. She concludes, "There’s another whole side to this. I don’t think any of our models or any of the proposals have really shown an understanding of this whole cultural reward system."
Libraries frequently complain of being too under funded to keep up with the publisher’s annual increases in subscription prices, and while this may be true in most cases; there is a valid argument on the publisher’s part that libraries do not demand an appropriate portion of their institution’s budget. Ivins says there is some truth to that, but on the other hand, publishers have not made the economies they could. She says, "Publishers are stuck just the way libraries are. It’s an economic reality. Where is the money going to come from?" This is where organizations like the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) could step in, she says, and give those publishers the funding they need to streamline their process and be able to pass those savings on to subscribers.
Henderson believes that libraries should focus more on marketing their services to their institutions, and educating the users, so that those who control the overall budge will give the libraries a larger piece of the pie. She notes that before colleges and universities in Europe began charging students tuition fees, the students accepted whatever the libraries could provide them, but now that they are paying tuition, the students are demanding more from the libraries. She concludes that if libraries want larger budgets in order to provide all of the materials their users need, then they need to be more demanding and demonstrative of their value to their constituents. The increased requirements for management information, such as usage statistics, is part of this need to demonstrate value
On the consolidation of subscription agents
Even as larger publishers are absorbing smaller publishers, there is a trend towards the consolidation of subscription agents. With the collapse of divine, Inc.’s Faxon/RoweCom subscription business at the end of 2002, it has become more apparent that the margins on which subscription agents exist are becoming too small for them to continue. Henderson says, "The subscription agent margins are such that no normal company would ever operate on those margins." As it stands, libraries and publishers have fewer subscription agents to choose from than they had in the past.
Geller explains what she thinks may be the cause of this situation, "I think that subscription agencies are the most undervalued, important players in our chain. Of course, I have a vested interest in saying that because I spent so many years working in subscription agencies. I know absolutely that many-to-many relationship that subscription agency managed was so important for publishers and librarians. I think the problem was that it was such a competitive market and the "profit" involved was such a tiny slice of the pie that what we saw for a number of years was the equivalent of the gas wars of the fifties and sixties when gas stations across the corner from each other would keep lowering their gas prices by a penny. The prices keep going down and down and down on the assumption that the volume will help to bring in the amount of revenue you need. I think in so many cases, librarians felt that they could use this price war to their advantage by getting the best deal. You can’t blame them because of course they aren’t rolling in money. What they did by doing that was to force subscription agencies to go too far into the red sometimes. Librarians also forgot all of the incredible value that subscription agencies have given them over the years. Everything new that a subscription agency came along with had to be one of those things that the subscription agency would include for free along with lowering the service charge. All of the research and development costs were never reimbursed to the subscription agency. Publishers started saying, ‘Wait a minute, exactly what value are you giving me and why should I be giving you this fee for servicing my clients when I could go and do that?’ It got to the point where people were chipping away at the profits of subscription agencies so much that we’ve lost a number of subscription agencies. Literally, there’s just only so long you can stay in business if you don’t have the money. That’s why I think we’ve lost so many subscription agencies. I think that the consolidation is just going to end up with people being angrier with subscription agencies and once again they’ll lose the opportunity to see the incredible value that a subscription agency gives a library and a publisher."
As for libraries that are considering dropping or have already dropped their subscription agent, Geller has this to say, "In my household we subscribe - between my husband and I, and my children - we subscribe to maybe twenty magazines. I have trouble keeping track of it. If I don’t get an issue, I may not even notice it. If we’re talking about a household with twenty subscriptions that could use a good subscription agent keeping track of this for me, how can a library even think about going independent? That’s just one aspect of what subscription agents do for libraries. Unless they are large enough to have their own customer service staff, publishers also need the subscription agents in order to handle all of the orders from their customers. Can you imagine if you didn’t have that one person to call? You would have to find out who to contact in every single organization. You would have to keep track of all the changes in personnel in every single organization. Your address book would be full of stuff. It’s the many-to-many relationship; especially in terms of the actual business transaction itself. That’s where the subscription agency really shows its value. Being able to say to a publisher, okay we’re handing over to you two hundred and fifty subscriptions for these two hundred and fifty clients. We’re handing it all over to you in electronic data interchange (EDI) format that’s just going to shoot right into your business system, so you don’t have to re-key any of this or anything like that. You just put it into your circulation database and you just know who to send it out to, so here’s all the money. Can you imagine how valuable that must be to a publishing company?"
On budgetary cutbacks
The economic slump of recent years has affected library budgets and corporate profits in negative ways, so it would be a common assumption that these things have adversely affected the demands for industry consultants. However, in actuality, these consultants have benefited in some ways from the economic conditions. Henderson says that, "in the past publishers would have had more internal staff to deal with these things. Now, what they’re doing is outsourcing and hiring consultants more. They don’t have internal staff to do it." Geller concurs, but adds that she is "starting to see fewer consulting jobs out there and more consultants."
On continuing education
Luther and Ivins have figured out a way to keep each other informed on those things that are important to their work. Ivins says, "Staying current is a huge job. That’s one of the reasons why Judy and I team up. We were having one of a series of conversations where we were comparing notes on things that were going on and realized that one person couldn’t do it all. It might be really effective if we could sort of carve out things we keep up with and then synthesize for the other."
One of Luther’s interests is information architecture, which is a new area of concentration at her alma mater (Florida State University), but it seems that no one is quite able to define it.9 She would like to see either a library school offer a one-day class on information architecture or a professional organization create a pre-conference on the subject. Although she’s not going to be doing this work as a job, she "wants to understand the scope of it and to see case studies from our industry."
Summary
Consultants working in the serials industry are people who have experience with and an understanding of libraries, publishers, subscription agents, database vendors, and information technology producers. They are able to move easily among all of these aspects of serials, and as a result, they are able to see connections and solutions to problems that may not be visible to those enmeshed in their own spheres. They can be an extra pair of hands to help push a project to completion, or they can take an idea and design a plan to implement it. Most importantly, they are able to bridge the gaps between those in serials who cannot or will not understand the needs of the other players.
Notes
1. Harvard University Library Mellon Project Steering Committee and Harvard University Library Mellon Project Technical Team, Report on the Planning Year Grant For the Design of an E-journal Archive (Digital library Federation, Council on Library and Information Resources, 2003), http://www.diglib.org/preserve/harvardfinal.html (accessed January 21, 2004).
2. Association for Library Collections & Technical Services, Guide to Performance Evaluation of Serials Vendors, Chicago: American Library Association, 1997.
3. October Ivins, "Serials Prices," Serials Review 14:3 (1988) - 18:3 (1992).
4. North American Serials Interest Group, "NASIG HRD – Judy Luther," February 5, 2003, http://www.nasig.org/publications/hrd/names/luther.htm, (accessed October 24, 2003).
5. Informed Strategies, http://www.informedstrategies.com/about.shtml, (accessed October 24, 2003).
6. Judy Luther, White Paper on Electronic Journal Usage Statistics (Council on Library and Information Resources, 2000), http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub94/pub94.pdf (accessed January 21, 2004).
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