Staff Editorial: Bookkeeper

It was recently announced that the National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind has filed a lawsuit against the Arizona State University for its distribution of Amazon.com's Kindle DX e-book reader, since blind students cannot navigate the device's menus. But it's clear that the lawsuit is only a minor hiccup in the inexorable and increasingly rapid incorporation of electronic sources at university libraries - in fact, it has already been announced on Amazon's official Kindle blog that menu navigation for the blind is under development and will be available in the future.

In 2005, former Dean of Libraries Charles Lowry reported since 1997, the university had gone from zero online journal subscriptions to some 4,000 full text journals, constituting the bulk of all subscriptions. Given the obvious prominence and significance of the trend toward electronic library volumes, we enthusiastically approve Patricia Steele's appointment as the new Dean of Libraries, as her expertise and experience centers on digital book collections. In the spirit of her previous work with Google's effort to digitize millions of books, Steele has emphasized her intention to increase electronic holdings, which are cheaper than their ink-and-paper counterparts. We hope she's successful in shielding the library from further funding troubles.

In the last two years, budget cuts have forced the university's libraries to cut a quarter of its journal subscriptions. Broad journal access is an essential resource for researchers, and has been described as a significant lure for prospective graduate students and faculty. But there is little hope of the library's budget increasing enough in the near future to reverse the slide in subscriptions. As the subscription costs of already-expensive academic journals steepen, there is no doubt that the university must look for creative solutions to enable greater access.

Unfortunately, there isn't an obvious solution. A recent study explored the potential cost implications of widespread university adoption of open-access journals in the life sciences. Even if the university could organize a nation-wide effort to adopt the open-access journal model, our financial woes would likely remain or even potentially expand. The study found that, although the open access would provide substantial savings for the majority of colleges and universities, the most productive research universities would fund an increasingly large portion of publication costs, since the open-access model is supported by submission fees rather than subscription fees. The study found that the universities whose costs would significantly increase are generally those with libraries of 4.29 million volumes or more, a number we're rapidly approaching.

But Steele's most important role might not be in the digital realm. She'll needs to be a vocal and aggressive advocate for maintaining and increasing the library system's funding, which has repeatedly fallen victim to financial gutting by the administration. Provost Nariman Farvardin has expressed his confidence in Steele's ability to work with "the resources available." We hope that in her vision of an increasingly prominent library, Steele instead uses the language of "resources needed." It's a hard pitch amidst tumbling stock markets and university furloughs, but it's a pitch worth making. As Groucho Marx famously said, "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."