1. See, for instance, Tefko Saracevic and Paul Kantor, "Studying the Value of Library and Information Services," Journal of the American Society for Information Science 48 (June 1997): 527-563. The terms used by readers to describe values attributed to the use of libraries include "convenience" and closely related concepts, such as "effort required" and "frustration.'' Saracevic and Kantor observe that users rarely assign monetary value to library services but often refer to their time saved. [BACK]

2. "How Libraries Can Help to Pay Their Way in the Future," Logos 7, no. 3(1996): 238. See also Bowen's paper, "JSTOR and the Economics of Scholarly Communication," presented at the Council on Library Resources conference held in October 1995 (available at http://www.mellon.org/jstor.html ). [BACK]

3. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Report, from January 1, 1994 through December 31, 1994 (New York, 1995), 19; The Andrew W.Mellon Foundation Report, from January 1, 1995 through December 31, 1995 (New York, 1996), 48. [BACK]

4. A good general account of productivity is provided by the National Research Council, Panel to Review Productivity Statistics, Measurement and Interpretation of Productivity (Washington, D.C., 1979). [BACK]

5. The productivity gains expected of information technology have sometimes been slow to appear, creating the so-called productivity paradox. Federal Reserve Board economist William Wascher argues we have had unrealistic expectations of information technology, which accounted for less than 8% of equipment expenditure in 1994 and was a "relatively minor input in the production process" (BNA Daily Report for Executives, 10 September 1996, p. C3). [BACK]

6. For a fuller account of the difficulties, see Morton Owen Schapiro, "The Concept of Productivity as Applied to U.S. Higher Education," in Paying the Piper: Productivity, Incentives, and Financing in U.S. Higher Education, by Michael S. McPherson, Morton Owen Schapiro, and Gordon C. Winston (Ann Arbor, 1993), 37-68. [BACK]

7. Libraries are no strangers to concerns about productivity. Indeed, the successful application of information technology to library cataloging is one of the great if not widely acknowledged productivity success stories of higher education. At Yale, the largest library investments we are now making-ranging from preserving and shelving the collections to the retrospective conversion of catalog records and the on-line delivery of information-are fundamentally motivated by productivity issues. The productivity issues that inform decisions to build off-campus shelving are particularly interesting. They involve productivity trade-offs between traditionally impermeable operating and capital budgets and appear to put the productivity of library operations in competition with reader productivity needs. [BACK]

8. See, for instance, Frank Guliuzza III, "Asking Professor Jones to Fix the Crisis in Higher Education is Getting More and More Expensive," Academe (September/October 1996): 29-32. [BACK]

9. See, for instance, Robert Zemsky and William F. Massy, "Expanding Perimeters, Melting Cores, and Sticky Functions: Toward an Understanding of Our Current Predicaments," Change (November/December 1995): 41-49; William F. Massy, Resource Allocation in Higher Education (Ann Arbor, 1996); and Charles T. Clotfelter, Buying the Best: Cost Escalation in Elite Higher Education (Princeton, 1996). [BACK]

10. Arthur Levine, "Higher Education's New Status as a Mature Industry," Chronicle of Higher Education, 31 January 1997, A48. [BACK]

11. This description of the Scully Project and parts of my commentary on it draw heavily on Max Marmor's Preliminary Report on the project of 6 September 1996. I am much indebted to Mr. Marmor, Christine de Vallet, and Donald J. Waters for their collegial and critical review of the ideas advanced in this paper and to Elizabeth Owen for her neverfailing and generous willingness to describe the practices of the Teaching Fellows in Professor Scully's course. [BACK]

12. To achieve these results, the project managers enlisted the help of a senior administrator and two Webmasters at Yale's Information Technology Services, a graphic designer from University Printing Service, and student assistants for HTML markup and image manipulation. For copyright reasons, access to this Web site is restricted to members of the Yale community. [BACK]

13. Mistakes in the administration of a survey left us without statistically meaningful measures of student use of the Web site or opinions about it. [BACK]

14. Some, but not all, of the Teaching Fellows made use of the Web site in preparing for their classes and in making assignments. The e-mail addresses for Teaching Fellows provided at the Web site encouraged some exchanges with instructors outside of class sessions. [BACK]

15. Dr. Carl Jaffe is director of the Center for Advanced Instructional Media at the Yale School of Medicine. The center was founded in 1987 to explore the educational and communications potential of new interactive multimedia computing technology. Through the center, the Yale University School of Medicine is one of the leading developers and publishers of multimedia medical education programs. The center is a recognized leader in information design, medical illustration, and interface design for networked information. Center projects have won many national and international awards for excellence in educational design and technological leadership. More information about the center is available on the Web at http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/. [BACK]

16. Absent from the cost model is any consideration of copyright management costs. This is a significant and unsettled matter in the use of digital images for instructional support. The presence or absence of such costs in a full-scale digital image database would have a significant impact on the bottom-line results of the cost model. [BACK]

17. However, estimating the cost of maintaining the Scully Project data over time does deserve some discussion. The primary experience of universities in doing this estimating lies in maintaining on-line catalog data and-more recently-in maintaining institutional business data as we adopt new administrative software to solve the Year 2000 and other problems. We have learned that it is very expensive to maintain bibliographic and business data over time as we move from one computing environment to another. Institutions generally do not budget for these costs. Recognizing that past practice is an unacceptable model for the preservation of library materials, Yale's Open Book Project endeavored to model the cost of reliably preserving large bodies of full-text library material in digital form over long periods of time. The Open Book cost model, applied to the Scully Project, suggests that the cost of maintaining a small Web site is $470 a year or $2,049 for six years. Focused attention to preservation is required because digital media are inherently the most unstable of information storage media, and hardware and software have high obsolescence rates. If we do not heed Preserving Digital Information: Report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information, with its sobering account of the technical difficulties and significant costs involved in the long-term preservation of digital information, we will find the wonders of our silicon-based technologies to be houses built on sand. The Report was commissioned by the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group, Inc., and published by the commission in May 1996; its work was led by Donald J. Waters and John Garrett. [BACK]

18. This comparison assumes these are alternative means of support rather than duplicative. In fact, both means of support were provided in the fall 1996 term, and students made use of both. [BACK]

19. That is, the cost model shows a -$703 balance over 16 years, or essentially breakeven performance on 16-year expenditures of $59,000. Of course, it is quite unlikely that the facts, estimates, and assumptions used in the cost model would remain static for as long as 16 years. [BACK]

20. Teaching Fellows conduct most of their discussion sessions in the Yale University Art Gallery, to relate Professor Scully's lectures to actual museum objects. They conduct conventional classroom discussions, supported by slides, only three times each during the term. For the sake of simplicity, the cost model deals only with these conventional classroom sessions and does not try to model the cost of bringing digital images to locations throughout the gallery. Teaching Fellows often bring photographs to the gallery to enrich the discussions, so access to digital images there would actually be quite valuable. [BACK]

21. See National Research Council, Measurement and Interpretation of Productivity, 33-34. [BACK]

22. See, for instance, Kenneth H. Ashworth, "Virtual Universities Could Produce Only Virtual Learning," Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 September 1996, A88. [BACK]

23. Another "what if" scenario, not developed here, for increasing the productivity of the investment in digital images is to imagine Professor Scully's Introduction to the History of Art being taught on the Web, with a large increase in enrollments beyond the 500 that the lecture hall now permits. This distance learning scenario raises a host of questions, not least that of how the rights to the image content of such a course would be secured and managed. [BACK]

24. This finding is most tentative, given that the cost model is sensitive to the highly variable costs of equipping a classroom for digitally supported instruction. [BACK]

25. This lack of attention is evident in the Chronicle of Higher Education account of Professor Stephen Murray's use of video media to teach architecture at Columbia University (see "Video Technology Transforms the Teaching of Art History," Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 February 1997, A20-22). Having described Murray's remarkable video presentation of Amiens Cathedral that cost some hundreds of thousands of dollars, the Chronicle reporter Lisa Guernsey describes Murray as insisting "the projects are worth it. 'What really convinces us is how they inspire students in the classroom,' [Murray] says. 'They are captivated to study further'" (A22). [BACK]

26. Scott W. Blasdell, Michael S. McPherson, and Morton Owen Schapiro, "Trends in Revenues and Expenditures in U.S. Higher Education: Where Does the Money Come From? Where Does It Go?" in McPherson, Schapiro, and Winston, Paying the Piper, 17. A recent General Accounting Office report found that tuition at four-year public colleges has risen nearly three times as much as median household income over the past 15 years; see Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 September 1996, A59. [BACK]

27. And in observing comparative measures of productivity gain in libraries and other operations of the university, we will also have created a powerful tool for helping to decide among competing technology investment strategies. [BACK]

28. See "Why Colleges Cost Too Much," a so-called investigative report on higher education costs (as exemplified by those at the University of Pennsylvania) by Erik Larson in Time, 17 March 1997. [BACK]

29. The Western Governors' University has been widely reported over the past two years. See, for instance, the account in the New York Times, 25 September 1996, B9. The Chronicle of Higher Education for 27 September 1996, A35-36, reports a similar initiative among twelve Scandinavian institutions. [BACK]

30. New York Times, 25 Sept. 1996, B9. [BACK]

31. See, for instance, Theodore Marmor and Mark Goldberg, "American Health Care Reform: Separating Sense from Nonsense," in Understanding Health Care Reform by Theodore Marmor (New Haven, 1994), 15-18. [BACK]

32. Richard Lanham, "The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution," in Richard Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (Chicago, 1993), 23. [BACK]