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BARBARA DEWEY: The sustainability factor is a real issue moving forward just from the
financial perspective, too.
MAIREAD MARTIN: Right.
BARBARA DEWEY: And a lot of people think that the material that's in digital form, out of
our catalog for example, or off the library web page, is free. And I think that notion
is out there because the internet is pervasive and it's out there.
But in fact, we spend millions of dollars a year to obtain access to large sets of online
journals, databases, et cetera. And there's a movement in libraries and in higher education
and in the scholarly societies called Open Access to really look at the financial model
of our faculty, creating knowledge, publishing it. And then we turn around and pay a lot
of money for it.
So some of the work that we mentioned earlier in our discussion today does play into a new
way of publishing, or at least a way to work with both the commercial publishers and the
University Press publishers, to ensure that we can deposit our own work and make it available,
at least after a certain period of time. So we'll be working through those issues at Penn
State, too. Because the rise in cost of these collections is not sustainable under tight
budget situations. So that's a big issue out there, too.
MAIREAD MARTIN: Yes.
BARBARA DEWEY: And we still buy books. People ask me on a daily basis, are you still buying
books? We buy thousands of books a year. We haven't made a complete transition to ebooks.
We have made almost a complete transition to digital journals.
And, in fact, out of Penn State Press we're helping journals who are still only in paper
form to move into digital form. And these are journals that are of interest to the scholarly
community, not just out of Penn State, some of them are, but throughout the world. A journal
that is not in digital form is not being accessed, I can guarantee that.
The book area is really in a state of flux because of devices and what's the business
model for selling an ebook. However I've observed, it's not scientific, but sitting in an airport
waiting room, many, many people reading on book readers, too.
MAIREAD MARTIN: That's right, of course.
BARBARA DEWEY: And so where we're going to have to work in partnership to figure out
how a lot of these programs that we're working on to digitize content, how is it going to
appear on mobile devices, on readers, on something we don't even know exists yet, what's going
to be the next thing.
So this is just another reason why the collaboration is so critical. And it's a reason why we've
been able to innovate where people from around the country look to see what is happening
at Penn State in a number of areas.