The events of September 11 cause us to confront hard choices as we look at the balance between the liberties our society cherishes and the security our society demands. As of the writing of this newsletter, the USA Patriots Act had just been enacted, but its implications are not yet fully understood. It appears as if library circulation records may be more vulnerable to FBI scrutiny than they have been. Watch this space for updated information as we receive it.

The UIUC Library is receiving requests to remove certain U.S. government publications from our shelves. Materials received under the US Federal Depository Library Program are only deposited; we don’t own them and thus must follow written instructions from the Superintendent of Documents to return or destroy certain materials. However, we’re now also receiving phone calls from people representing themselves as employees of various government agencies requesting that we remove specific items from our shelves. We’re reviewing each request with University counsel to determine if there are any reasons why we should comply.

In an open society we run enormous risks. Any individual or group of individuals can cause great damage. We try to protect against such damage, but the potential remains. One way is to make ourselves as aware as we can of the risks and take steps to ameliorate them. An alternative is to limit the free flow of information, which is how totalitarian societies operate. While security may improve, the spirit of civil society is lost. We cannot let that happen here. Already, valuable information is being pulled from agency web sites.

Some states are also taking down some of their information from the web. New Jersey has decommissioned Web databases detailing the state's reservoir system and hazardous chemical sites in an effort to keep the information out of the hands of terrorists. The move comes just days after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency removed from its site risk management plans that detail steps communities should take in the event of a chemical disaster.

The Association of Research Libraries has just released its annual statistics for 1999/2000. In addition to data for individual libraries, it reports on trends found among its 120 members in the US and Canada. Here are a few from 1986-2000:

Serial unit cost has risen 226%

Serial expenditures have risen 192%

Monograph unit cost has risen 66%

Monograph expenditures have risen 48%

Serials purchased have fallen 7%

Monographs purchased have fallen 17%

Interlibrary borrowing is up 190%

Total expenditures rose 105%

CPI rose 57%

Rankings for the UIUC Library:

Volumes in library: 3^rd (Harvard and Yale are still 1^st and 2^nd)

Volumes added (gross): 10^th

Microform units: 1^st

Total library materials expenditures: 23^rd

Total salaries and wages expenditures: 16^th

Total Library expenditures: 18^th

Expenditures for monographs: 20th

Total Items borrowed: 3^rd

Total staff: 12^th

It is not hard to estimate that within only a few years, the University of Toronto (currently ranked fourth) library’s holdings will surpass ours in size.

In the same issue of Nature, David R. Worlock, Chairman of Electronic Publishing Services Ltd., addresses the question "What winners will emerge from the battles over access to scholarly data?" He looks to a number of developments for answers:

1. conventional publishing in the hard sciences is too slow; there is an inexorable pressure to connect the e-print services of the world and to create a two-speed scholarly communication economy;
2. although print is not under threat, a culture of reading outside core publications is growing;
3. the university and library are being sharply redefined, in both the terms and style of access by scholars and in the ownership of tradable intellectual property;
4. librarians are emerging into powerful network-resource administrators; years of library consortia and licensing arrangements underline the power of collective bargaining and remind libraries that if they have the intellectual property, they can be traders too;
5. outside the consortia and in the less-developed world, a genuine poverty of access is emerging;
6. the world of print is underpinned by commercial publishing;
7. rapid consolidation creates economies of scale, prevents players from being cut out by new intermediaries, and accounts for the reinvestment forced on publishers by expensive digital conversion and new formats such as SML.

The University of Chicago (UC) has received a $1.5 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support two digital distribution initiatives: the Chicago Digital Distribution Center (CDDC), the first short-run digital print facility operated through a U.S. university press; and the BiblioVault, an electronic repository for backlist and current university press titles. Officials say the two initiatives will greatly enhance the ability of university presses to keep scholarly works in print and help them continue to publish frontlist monographs in specialized subjects, a practice that has become an economic challenge for scholarly presses under traditional offset printing.

UC Press officials say that funds from the Mellon grant will support the preparation of 5,000 books for short-run digital printing and, eventually, for online searching. The CDDC will serve not only Chicago, but also the many scholarly presses served by the already established Chicago Distribution Center (CDC), the press's traditional distribution center, which serves a number of university presses including those at Alabama, Iowa, Minnesota, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Ohio, Ohio State, Tennessee, Temple, and Wisconsin. The BiblioVault, an electronic repository of books in digital form, will make backlist books and new publications available to scholars for online searches. It will also enable participating publishers to deliver their books to scholars in new ways as technologies evolve. Officials at participating presses will deposit both electronic files for frontlist and backlist titles, which will be prepared by the University of Michigan Library Digital Library Production Service for BiblioVault. The grant will also allow the CDDC to develop an appropriate intellectual property management system. The CDDC will have an initial capacity of 36,000 books a year.