Journal Collection Management as a Cumulative Advantage Process

This paper outlines a problem confronting academic libraries: the exponential growth in the number of journals and the inflationary surge in their prices. It then establishes a theoretical framework for the solution of this problem by showing how the concentration of usage on a relatively small proportion of a library's journal holdings is a function of a series of sociobibliometric laws based on the principle of cumulative advantage. The paper argues that these laws are operative not only in library usage but also in the social stratification of scholarship, and it poses the hypothesis that the concentration of journal usage in academic libraries is partially a reflection of the process of the formation of scholarly elites. Described throughout the presentation is the increasingly central role being played by the citation indexes produced by the Institute for Scientific Information in both academic evaluation and library collection development. The paper concludes by showing the practical implications of the sociobibliometric laws for the management of journal collections in academic libraries.