The library should provide network access to as many resources as possible. These include journal articles, bibliographic databases, new book additions, etc. Electronic services will both give researchers better access to the literature, but also save them valuable time. Although leisurely perusal of journal issues has value, it is also time consuming, and expensive, if the library actually subscribed to the range of journals important for all faculty at UMBC. We should focus our efforts instead on helping faculty search the literature electronically, and then supplying the required articles with as little faculty involvement in the mechanics of this process as possible.
There is no question that faculty would far prefer that the library contain a well stocked set of journals for each UMBC researcher. Unfortunately, this is not going to happen, and alternatives must be aggressively explored. The scholarly literature is growing much too fast for UMBC's library to keep up. The age of electronic information retrieval of traditional library journals is surely coming. The question is when it becomes economically attractive for a large scale shift to electronic journal retrieval. UMBC may have an advantage here in that we are somewhat more specialized that larger campuses, and will not need to retrieve large numbers of articles in as many fields of research as larger campuses.
The library needs to aggressively ``sell'' this concept to the departments. We perceive that we presently have a ``chicken and the egg'' problem, in that the library can't convince departments to cancel journals in order to fund electronic article retrieval because departments aren't convinced that the library can do so successfully. Unfortunately, the library does not have the resources to start any significant level of these services without cancellation of journals.