Academic Research and Electronic Publication

Although the terms in which the RWO initiative was originally couched proposed a comparison of cost between print and digital resources, and on demonstrating the viability of the digital medium as a tool for scholarship and teaching, it has become evident in the course of our research that this focus was in some respects premature. This is by no means because we have found the digital tools unviable--on the contrary, every indication points to impressive gains and improvements which are made possible by the use of online resources (detailed below). However, a meaningful cost comparison requires a stable product, a comparable kind and quantity of material, and a comparable infrastructure of use. At present these conditions do not yet obtain for a useful comparison between printed texts and the electronic texts which represent the most promising direction of digital resources for academic use. The RWO collection is still, in effect, an experimental tool, a technology which must still be regarded as a research effort.

The terms "experimental" and "research" deserve further explanation, since they seem to imply something which is unfinished or not yet functioning. In fact, as our subscribers are finding, the RWO/WWO site is functioning very well, and the collection itself has reached a state of critical mass where it can be truly useful for research and teaching, although of course it will continue to expand for years to come. What we mean by "experimental" is that this technology does not represent the endpoint of some line of research, but rather its midpoint. Far more than HTML, richly tagged TEI/SGML/XML is a technology with tremendous untapped potential, from the standpoint of both delivery systems and data creation. Software which can fully realize this potential, and the substantial collections which will make online research truly natural and efficient, are still in the process of development. To an extent, even the encoding methodology is still a matter of ongoing research. The still-experimental nature of these matters is not evidence of their intractability, but rather of their scale and complexity, which is directly related to their promise as the foundation for a truly functional digital library system.

If, therefore, we would like to claim that digital resources and tools do offer substantial gains over conventional media, in both cost and function, this claim can most convincingly be made by pointing to the long-term future prospects for these technologies, once the appropriate infrastructure has been established. It is tempting, given the apparent wealth of material currently available on the web (in HTML and in more sophisticated systems), to assume that this material actually represents the achievement and the fulfilled promise of digital technology for the academy. In fact, it represents the mistakes, the wrong turnings, the failed or partially successful experiments, the compromises made in the process of working towards that achievement, and the immense usefulness of these materials is a lucky by-product of experimentation. We can also see from the proliferation of online materials that the issue is not primarily one of viability but of which methodologies are most successful: which ones enable people to make fundamental improvements in their work.

No firm conclusions, we feel, can really be drawn about the future profile or cost of online technology from what is currently considered representative, and least of all from ongoing research efforts, which is how the Women Writers Project still envisions its work. However, what we can describe are the areas in which our research shows online resources offering potential long-term cost savings, substantial changes in the ways that research costs are incurred and met, and (perhaps most importantly) substantial improvements in the efficiency and effectiveness of research and teaching.

Research-related travel

Faculty responding to our survey reported average annual travel costs of $1400 to consult research materials at rare book libraries. Since a substantial proportion of this travel is necessitated by the unavailability or limited availability of these materials in other formats (e.g. scholarly editions, facsimile editions, microfilm), easy online access to these materials would obviate a considerable amount of these travel costs. There is currently a problem of scale here, since most rare texts are not in fact available online in a research-friendly form, but there are large-scale initiatives like the WWP's (notably Early English Books Online) which may be a start.

Online access can also make research travel more efficient, and allow the researcher to accomplish more for each travel dollar. Many scholars spend valuable research time simply reading or transcribing texts or making notes on their content, which equally can be done from an online source. Moreover, scholars often travel to visit collections without knowing exactly which texts they want to consult, and waste time skimming through materials which prove irrelevant. Online resources allow scholars to search large collections and identify materials of interest in advance, allowing them to make the best use of their time in the archive.

These are clearly advantages which are purchased for the scholar by the institution. Clearly the shift in cost (up or down) will depend on whether the institution is paying for the travel to begin with, and on how many of its faculty travel for research. Over the long term, however, once the startup cost of digitization has been met and a system of online research has become natural to the research community, the net effect will be that access to research materials will be much more evenly and widely distributed. Money which formerly supported individuals' research will now also benefit faculty who would not have qualified for research grants, or who could not afford to subsidize their own travel. The institution may pay the same, or more, but it will get more research for its money.

Curricular xeroxing, course packets, and textbooks

Although we do not have estimates of the amount spent by students on course-specific materials, the costs are substantial, on the order of $100 per semester, and many of these materials are useful only for a particular course--textbooks and anthologies of which only small excerpts will be used, specialized course packets, xeroxes of reserve materials. Replacing these with centrally accessible online resources would allow efficient reuse, in addition to the obvious and frequently cited benefits of round-the-clock universal access to reserve materials.

Important changes in costs

Clearly most of the cost savings described above are in fact the result of shifting costs from one level of consumer to another.

• shifts in the funding of the preparation of textual resources: from individual scholars and editors (funded by salaries, small grants, and fellowships) to scholarly digitization projects (funded by large grants, faculty release time)
• shifts in purchasing: from individual volumes (purchased by libraries but also by faculty and by students) to larger collections (purchased by the library only)
• shifts in the allocation of research funding: from travel grants to visit libraries (by departments, for research faculty) to digital collection purchase (by library, for entire campus)
• shifts in the allocation of funding for teaching: from textbook and photocopy purchase (by student) to digital collection purchase (by library)

These shifts are accompanied by changing expectations about the independence of institutions, and a new sense of the need to harness networking and the metaphor of networking as a model for more efficient, more effective use of resources. Indeed, the current high cost of digital resources may perform a backhanded service by forcing institutions to think globally in both the creation and the purchase and dissemination of these resources.

It is important to note that our understanding of digital resource creation is still limited and growing very quickly. The current costs of developing these materials do not represent the ultimate cost of resource creation; rather, they are the costs of discovering how to do resource creation. As a result, generalizing from the current costs can be misleading, and a desire to see an immediate reduction in costs as a result of moving to a digital platform is unrealistic.

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