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Home page for digital-law-online.info - Table of Contents - Introduction to the online version Chapter 1 – The Commission and Its Recommendations Chapter 2 – The Establishment, Mandate, and Activities of the Commission Chapter 3 – Computers and Copyright Chapter 4 – Machine Reproduction – Photocopying Appendix A – Summary of the Legislative History of Computer-Related Issues and the Photocopy Issue Appendix B – Public Law 93-573 and Public Law 95-146 Appendix E – Lists of Witnesses Appendix F – Alphabetical Listing of Persons Appearing before the Commission Appendix G – Transcripts of Commission Meetings Appendix H – Summaries of Commission-Sponsored Studies - Economics of Property Rights as Applied to Computer Software and Data Bases - Legal Protection of Computer Software, An Industrial Survey - Costs of Owning, Borrowing, and Disposing of Periodical Publications Appendix J – Selected Provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976 and Copyright Office Regulations |
Final Report of the National Commission on New Technology Uses of Copyrighted Works Appendix H – Summaries of Commission-Sponsored Studies REPORT TITLE: Costs of Owning, Borrowing, and Disposing of Periodical PublicationsCONTRACTOR: Public Research Institute, Center for Naval Analyses AUTHORS: Vernon E. Palmour, Marcia C' Bellassai, and Robert R. V. Wiederkehr NTIS ORDER NO.: PB 274821 BackgroundA library has two ways of satisfying its user's requirements for periodical literature: it may either subscribe and keep issues on the shelf, or it may borrow from another library. At low levels of usage, it is cheaper for the library to fulfill patron requirements through borrowing; at higher levels of usage, subscribing is cheaper. This study specifies a mathematical model which states exactly the conditions under which each course of action is preferable from the library's own point of view. The work done for CONTU represents an updating of the model originally developed by the same authors for the Association of Research Libraries in 1968. Specifications of the ModelLibrary Cost Components IncludedData were collected from three different libraries to estimate the magnitude of the following library costs, which vary depending on subscription decisions: (1) initial costs of acquiring and cataloging a new title; (2) annual recurring costs of maintaining and servicing journal materials; (3) internal costs of circulation, reshelving,and lending to others; and (4) internal cost of processing an interlibrary loan transaction. The model explicitly does not take into account the loss of browsing capacity due to dropping a subscription or the cost in terms of delay to the patron due to borrowing. Since the fee, if any, a lending library may charge for the use of its materials, or external borrowing cost-may vary widely from case to case, the model takes this as a variable, The levels of journal use at which libraries should either drop or add subscriptions, called the crossover points, are given for different specified external lending fees. Since lending fees often do not exist or do not cover the lending library's costs, interlibrary loan may be unrealistically cheap from the borrower's point of view, and the crossover points of journal usage from a social point of view would therefore be higher. Journal Usage over Time and Length of HoldingsUse of journal literature decays rather rapidly. Almost 80 percent of usage occurs within five years after publication, and almost 95 percent within fifteen years. Based on studies at two large libraries, the model includes two schedules—one for science and technology and one for {Page 128} the social and life sciences-to take this usage pattern into account. The number of years of back holdings that a library has on the shelves will vary from journal to journal. However, five requests or uses for a journal with five years of back files does not have the same meaning as five requests for a fifteen-year-old title holding. To account for this, the mathematical model includes a "normalization" factor. Since the crossover points are specified for journals with ten years of back holdings, one needs to adjust for the length of a particular journal's back files before applying the add/drop decision criterion supplied by the crossover point. Subscription PricesSince subscription prices vary widely, the model specifies crossover points according to different subscription price levels. Planning PeriodThe model uses a twenty-five-year planning period; that is, the library deciding whether to subscribe or borrow is assumed to take into account all costs and user requests up to twenty-five years away but to ignore any years farther in the future. Conclusions1. The crossover points are very similar for the decisions both to add a journal title and to drop one. The only difference lies in the library's one-time cost of acquiring a new title. 2. A typical crossover point for the add/drop decision is four or five uses per journal title per year. This is the result, for example, with a subscription price of forty dollars and external lending fees of eight dollars. 3. It is unlikely, then, that libraries will he engaging in much interlibrary lending activity that falls outside the limits specified by the CONTU guidelines (see Part I of this report), which permit each requesting library up to five copies of articles from the most recent five years of each journal title to which it does not subscribe. This is especially true given libraries' current tendency to maintain subscriptions even at very low levels of usage. |