Fee for External Users of the Herbarium

[Curtis Clark]

At 04:12 PM 01/26/97 -0500, Diana G. Horton wrote:
>The best argument that I can come up with is that the Herbarium is *not*
>comparable to these other facilities because none of these other facilities
>have a counterpart at other institutions that is utilized by our faculty
>at no cost.  I will have to stress the reciprocal nature of herbarium loans.
[...]
>institute a fee for borrowers of our collections.  I also suspect that he
>will come back and say that each of us will have to generate sufficient
>grant funds to cover the cost of borrowing specimens.

Does your library have interlibrary loan (ours is now called document
delivery service)? Does the library pay for it? Do faculty pay for it?

Do students or faculty at uiowa pay to receive e-mail? To send e-mail? To
view World Wide Web pages at other institutions?

A lot of things about universities are reciprocal, and it's definitely a
win-win situation for everyone, because a university always supplies things
it has in abundance (thus low in cost) and gets things it has little or
none of (thus high in cost).  But what happens is that people like your
Chair try to "cheat", to get resources without paying for any in return.
The early adopters of cheating make out (literally) like bandits, but the
more cheaters there are, the less cheating pays off, and eventually
everyone is impoverished. That an early adopter of cheating would be
willing to impoverish all of higher education in exchange for a clear
short-term personal gain says a lot about his priorities.


------------------------------------------------------------------------
Curtis Clark                       http://www.is.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
Biological Sciences Department                     Voice: (909) 869-4062
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona    FAX:   (909) 869-4396
Pomona CA 91768-4032  USA                          jcclark at csupomona.edu