The Future of Information Provision: Managing the Process of Change

Abstract

An analysis of how the market for individual research papers has developed, why document delivery is now being treated as a matter of importance both by publishers and librarians and how such developments may reach new markets for rsearch literature. It concludes with some observations on future developments. For the past 40 years, the volume of scientific and medical research information has grown at an astonishing rate. It has been distributed largely in the form of those printed volumes we call journals. There has always been a marginal activity, which we now call document delivery, in supplying copies of individual articles to customers who cannot find the journal issue they need in their own library. The British Library Document Supply Centre, and other national and regional libraries, have been supplying copies of documents in this way for 30 years. As long as it did not really affect the economic basis of journal publishing, document delivery was not seen as an issue of importance. However, since the mid-1980s the world of scientific and medical journals has increasingly been beset by change and uncertainty. It has become more difficult to maintain collections in the face of static budgets, the exponential growth in information, and price increases that regularly exceed the prevailing inflation rate. Journal subscriptions have been cancelled at an increasing rate over the past five years. Librarians are searching for ways of deploying their resources more evenly to meet their patrons requirements more effectively.