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U.S. academic libraries have substantial resources to commit to advance the research and teaching and learning agendas of their institutions. In the aggregate, academic libraries annually have $2,000,000,000 in purchasing power for materials. However, the disproportionate increases in the costs of scholarly information continue to erode the ability of libraries to meet the information needs of their users. If academic libraries consolidated their purchasing power and pooled their resources, the results for higher education could be transformational. Effectively, a universal digital academic library could be established to serve higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which two of the editors discuss topics having to do with scholarly communication, including open access publishing, scholarly publishing, and the history of the academic press.

The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) is one of the nation's oldest and most respected academic consortia. The CIC libraries hold more than 85 million volumes with print collections occupying approximately 10 million linear feet—or 2,000 miles—of shelving. The price tag for maintaining CIC print holdings, in stacks and storage facilities, is approximately $200 million per year. Between 2009 and 2011, the CIC University Librarians (ULs) affirmed a list of core principles for developing and managing a shared storage program. The ULs made an initial investment to support building a shared collection of 250,000 journal backfile volumes to be housed at Indiana University. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This session explored how e-books are more serial-like than traditional printed books. The book “container” is eroding now that publishers supply abstracts, MARC records, and DOIs at the chapter level. Booksellers offer e-book packages that can be leased with annual renewal costs and options to trade content in and out. Libraries have to adjust workflow and budgets to handle monographic content that has continuing costs and may not be permanently owned. The panel presented viewpoints of the differences and similarities between e-books and e-journals from the perspectives of a librarian in a consortium, a bookseller/e-book aggregator, a knowledgebase creator and researcher, and a consultant to libraries. The challenges of e-books were highlighted and audience discussion was encouraged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examined whether angling catch behaviors, angler characteristics, and angler evaluations could explain the decisions by anglers to harvest caught fish. Particularly, we determined if the propensity of tourist anglers to harvest caught walleye (Stizostedion vitreum), northern pike (Esox lucius), and smallmouth bass (Micropterus Dolomieui) was related to variables that measured catch rates, angling effort, catch rates for substitute fish species, motivational item importance, and/or social group variables. The results showed that catch rates and angling effort were essential for explaining anglers' decisions to harvest caught fish. Although explaining much less of the variation in the harvest behavior among anglers, the results also showed that standard concepts of human dimensions research such as substitution, motivation, and social groups were statistically related to the decisions of harvesting caught fish by anglers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many libraries have entered into cooperative or consortial agreements to reap the cost benefits of electronic purchases, to share a library system vendor, or to divide collection-building responsibilities. However, among such cooperating libraries the formal coordination of approval plan profiles has seldom been attempted. Many questions need to be answered before a group of libraries could enter into a cooperative approval plan. Would the political and administrative costs of designing and maintaining a cooperative profile be sufficiently offset by a broadened overall collection among cooperating libraries? To what degree do libraries acting independently achieve the same approval plan results that a formal coordination of profiles would generate? The Triangle Research Libraries Network (Duke University, North Carolina Central University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is comprised of four geographically- close institutions that have been building cooperative collections for more than 50 years. Some of their agreements have been quite formal and others have been quite informal. This study looks at the degree of approval plan overlap among TRLN libraries; at circulation data for these overlapping titles; and at lists of titles not acquired within the consortium. The results may inform the question of whether separate, uncoordinated approval plans already meet the need of the TRLN consortium, or if consortial approval plan cooperation might benefit the group. An examination of monographs in four selected Library of Congress classes supplied to the TRLN libraries by Yankee Book Peddler over a six month period in 1997 provided data to examine issues surrounding a consortial approval plan. The degree of overlap among the four institutions was defined, and circulation statistics showed whether books acquired by multiple libraries had a high level of use. A list of YBP titles not acquired by any of the libraries during the same time period wasalso analyzed, to examine whether formal cooperation might have usefully broadened the overall collection. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]