A review of the Library support for an academic program should cover a range of resources and services. Recent developments, however, dictate a particularly close look at the serials collection. Over the past twenty years, there has been one constant pertaining to library materials for the sciences and for biomedicine in particular. The library has not able to afford to buy many of the journals that are needed by the faculty and students. Because the key literature for graduate study and research in the sciences has always been the scientific journal and with the average price of a single journal in some biology disciplines at $1,000, the library could not support the programs as well as desired. During 1999, that began to change. The key factor in most of this was the consortial purchasing of access to electronic journals. Through this arrangement, the Brown University Library obtained the electronic journals not just to the print titles we had been receiving. We obtained access to the electronic journals of all the titles that any of the libraries in the consortium had been receiving.

A case in point is the department, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB). The first few large deals with publishers - Elsevier (gaining access to 700 new titles), Academic (140 new titles), Springer (248 new titles - mostly science), and Kluwer (561 new titles - many are science), were great for EEB. However, there were many titles that were central to the work of the department that had been requested over the last five years that we could not order due to lack of funds. As it happened, several of those journals were published by Blackwell Science. When the Library joined that consortium deal, we got access to 290 electronic journals - 173 of which we had not had before even in paper. At about that time, the Library made the deal for the BioOne journals. These were journals from smaller biology societies. We had most of those journals in paper, but with BioOne, we then had electronic access right to the graduate students' or faculty members' desktop. (In the past few weeks, the Library made a consortial deal with Wiley that includes 150 new titles - mostly science. Electronic access to 40 titles from the American Psychological Association will become availalble later in the Fall.)

All departments in BioMed benefitted greatly. For example, a faculty member from Physiology & Pharmacology had requested more than once that the Library purchase Journal of Controlled Release. Its current annual subscription cost is $2,685. We were never able to order it. However, it came as part of the Elsevier - ScienceDirect deal.

The addition of the electronic journal format in conjunction with our print subscription has provided great convenience to Research. The addition of hundreds of journals previously accessible only be Interlibrary Loan or in-person visits to other universities has been a great service to students and faculty.

The publishers have agreed to terms that previously would not been thought of as very likely. However the future is uncertain. The Library may have the opportunity to continue with access and terms much like we have now. The publishers may radically change the terms and charge more for the journals that we get now through the consortium deals. Or, the initiatives by scientists/authors may reduce the role of the for-profit publisher and the journals may move increasingly into the public domain. Another unknown with the electronic journals is the issue of archiving. Libraries and faculty will need to be assured of continued access to electronic journals. This is a transition period as library consortia and others are working to achieve a dependable, secure electronic archive.

Much of this evaluation of Library support had to focus on the journal literature due to its importance to Research. There are other areas that should be noted. The major Indexing and Abstracting Services, MEDLINE and Biological Abstracts, are available to the students and faculty. The purchase of books does take a back seat to the journals in the Library acquisitions. The collection of books has room for improvement. In particular, multi-volume sets priced in the thousands are usually not purchased. This past year, a subscription to an electronic encyclopedia was started - Encyclopedia of Life Sciences. It is intended for undergraduates primarily. As an electronic subscription and therefore more efficiently updated, this may be the forerunner of other purchases in the biosciences. Encyclopedias such as the Encyclopedia of Immunology have been made over the years. However, the nature of these subjects and the fast paced changes make it hard to justify the $800-$1,000 price tags. The electronic subscriptions to reference materials may make these purchases more attractive in the future.

Despite the fact that there are numerous departments within the Division of Biology and Medicine, the Library distinguishes only between Biology and Medicine in its support of all these programs. Thus it is impossible for us to break down our expenditures by department or program within the larger division. The table below gives our expenditures for Biology and for Medicine for the most recent 6 years for which we have data. The increase in expenditures for BioMed over the 5-year period is well above the overall increase in expenditures for the Library in the same period, a result of the dependence on serials subscriptions and the steady increase in prices for them.