"With the advent of the Internet, there was a sense that everything would be accessible and either free or cheap. Scholarship would flourish, and faculty would become more productive. This would happen because the Internet would bring universal access to vast amounts of material. However, this dream has turned to a nightmare. And, as with all nightmares, there is an element of truth. Faculty and students have become more productive. Access to journals in offices and homes has become a reality. Faculty and students are now accustomed to having whatever they need at their fingertips. The nightmare is that, although information is now electronic and widely available, libraries have to pay for it. And pay dearly." Susan Vaughn, Associate Librarian for Collection Development
Libraries have changed dramatically: once repositories of written knowledge kept on shelves, libraries are now gateways to a wealth of material which they either own or (more typically) license. Every undergraduate has Academic Source Premier which gives him or her hundreds of academic journals in full text. More advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty have access to over nine hundred Elsevier journals (a collection we would never have been able to afford in paper), as well as nearly two hundred IDEAL (Academic Press Journals), about 125 Wiley Interscience journals, and many other packages. Chemistry faculty are able to assign American Chemical Society journals to their classes for routine assignments. SciFinder Scholar has made Chemical Abstracts more accessible, with the result that a tool infrequently used in paper has become the heavily-used standard for any respectable chemistry department.
Unfortunately, these resources are not inexpensive, much less free. Yet, in the two to three years we have licensed most of them, students and faculty have developed quite a dependance on e-journals.
"Who would not be more productive if he or she could search an enormous body of literature from any physical location, find what was wanted, download it, cut and paste it into a document, and all this without ever having to budge from a nice, comfortable chair? And what faculty member would not assign additional research and readings to students, once they can read and access them from home, the Library, or the Library Café?
"While quality of the Library's collections has always had a direct connection to academic excellence, until the advent of e-resources faculty regularly traveled to other libraries to complete their work. Then, electronic journals made this all but unnecessary: Brooklyn College parleyed its collection of print journals into a powerhouse of electronic subscriptions. Then came the fall of 2002." Susan Vaughn, Associate Librarian for Collection Development