Serial Failure

Charleston Advisor Op-Ed: "Try this simple test in your library: take four random students, sit them one at a time at a computer with your library's Web site on the screen, and then ask each student to find a newspaper article on affirmative action. There is no substitute for actually watching the 'serial failure' that ensues, it is vivid, humbling, and sometimes breathtaking in scope. Of course, the failure in question does not fall to the students themselves: serial failure is rather the failure of academic libraries to facilitate students' access to articles, and it is without a doubt the most important access-related problem in academic librarianship. The sheer cost of journal scholarship is reason enough to merit concerted action to address serial failure. But in a world that offers students powerful internet searching at every turn, we consider serial failure to be a survival issue for academic libraries, one vitally important to maintaining and developing the relevance of the library to the academic lives of students. " This is a very good article--a must read!