ABSTRACT
The role of academic libraries as content providers has always placed librarians in a unique situation relative to their role as selectors and purchasers of content. Libraries and librarians are the customers but not the primary consumers. Their role as customer is an intermediary role, executed on behalf of their particular community of consumers. As has been noted in numerous discussions of the serials/ scholarly communication crisis, these consumers are also creators of the content being purchased. When purchasing traditional print containers (books and journal subscriptions), the library customer has, for all intents and purposes, always dealt with a monopoly marketplace. Unlike the domestic customer, faced with a bewildering range of choices in home electronics, or a business customer, able to choose among multiple manufacturers as the supplier of widget X, libraries have had to buy content from sole sources and function in a seller's market. Society all-pubs offerings, focused on a subject area and advantageously priced, and some limited bundling (Part C offered only in conjunction with subscriptions to Part A or B), have not been unusual. If more than one publisher offers content in the same subject area, the typical result has been consumer pressure on the library to purchase multiple containers of similar content-an outcome consistent both with the exponential growth of research and publication and with the desired goal of making all the relevant literature readily
available to the researcher/consumer. It is in the context of finite or scarce resources that choices between journal offerings are made; collection development or selection is an exercise in the allocation of resources as well as an exercise in providing content.
