ATTITUDES OF SELECTED GRADUATE FACULTY TOWARD THE USE OF LIBRARY FUNDS TO PAY FOR ELECTRONIC ACCESS TO SCHOLARLY JOURNALS

Current and future technology can affect the allocation of resources normally committed to the acquisition of hardcopy scholarly journals. Data from the study of full-time graduate teaching faculty at seven academic institutions in the North Texas area show the effects of three variables upon their attitudes towards reallocation of library resources to spend less money on subscriptions to scholarly journals and to spend more money to pay for online access and searching of bibliographic and full-text databases with online or offline printing capabilities. Of the three variables--seniority and age of faculty (tenured vs. non-tenured), discipline (pure science vs. social science-humanities), and level and intensity of graduate degree granting program (master's vs. doctoral)--the discipline in which the faculty members were based (pure science vs. social science-humanities) proved to be the significant factor in accounting for differing faculty attitudes toward the issue.;While the majority of the respondents indicated they would regret not having local ownership of hardcopy scholarly journals in their university library, the majority of them also indicated that they supported the use of library funds to pay for guaranteed access to full-text scholarly journal databases with offline or online printing capabilities rather than to purchase hardcopy journals to be housed in their university library. This suggests the time may be right for academic librarians to take the lead in educating their faculties to today's technological and fiscal realities in the world of information procurement for research. Perhaps the increasing application of and presence of CD-ROM technologies in libraries will serve to bridge the psychological gap between local ownership of hardcopy and the viewing of materials on a cathode ray tube (CRT) or computer generated printouts.