----- Original Message ----- From: "Arthur P. Smith" <apsm...@aps.org>
> The main focus of your "tragic loss" article was the obsolescence of > paper, and the resulting consequences. One consequence which was perhaps > not widely anticipated is expanded access to research journal content - > now available from > the desktop instead of having to go to the library. And the increased > availability that > consortium deals and other special arrangements are providing. So the > library as a physical > facility is less useful, but as a provider of information, surely the > utility > of every library has grown over the past 8 years? Are the other things > you mention > (phone, fax, email, etc.) really a substitute for traditional scholarly > communication? The SPARC paper (http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/ir.html) identified four features of scholarly publishing: registration, certification, awareness, and preservation. Given the growth of e-journals, consortia agreements, and aggregators (or, in the case of the big publishers, simply a single publisher's holdings), what role does the institutional library - and it's librarians - have in the future of scholarly publishing? Is the future of the research library a web page of user names and passwords, along with a form for "request-a-journal"? (... if the research literature was Open Access, perhaps even this would be supplanted by a single Google-search?) All the best, Tim.