From No Shelf Required:
Academic library staff has been shrinking for 2 decades, while the quantity of scholarly content has grown exponentially. In the 1960s Richard Abel & Company began the Approval Plan service as a systematic approach to help libraries manage the volume of new books published. Libraries rely on vendor services (i.e., companies catering to libraries) to discover and acquire much of scholarly content. Since the 90s, libraries have also depended on vendors to provide shelf-ready services for print books, customized cataloging, to manage financial transactions electronically, and to maintain online interfaces to support collection development and acquisitions processes. Ebooks brought another layer of labor and complexity to library workflows.
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Within a decade of their birth, ebook aggregators entered mainstream library collecting. Initially, the ebook appeared as just another format or manifestation of the print book; the library choice expanded beyond paper or cloth to include ‘e’ versions (in many cases PDFs). Technology changed this: ebook models have upset the balance in traditional library collecting and continue to challenge traditional understandings not just of collection development, but of the role of the academic library.
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Treating print and digital content as alternate universes was until recently common across all parts of the ecosystem: publishers, libraries and vendors. Two factors made this approach unsustainable:
- academic libraries do not duplicate title purchases – as a rule just one copy of a title will be acquired, so comprehensive vision of titles acquired, regardless of format, is essential
- digital acquisition and access models escape print book constraints in many significant ways
Link to the rest at No Shelf Required
have the libraries been shrinking or the staff for them shrinking?
the title says one, the quoted part of the article says the other.