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Dean of Carnegie Mellon University's libraries since 1998, Dr. St. Clair this year was named academic-research librarian of the year by the national Association of College Research Libraries and recently began a Web site called Research Showcase, offering free access to scientific papers authored by Carnegie Mellon faculty and students.
She doesn't believe digital books will replace the real thing anytime soon, but she feels we're definitely headed in that direction.
Amazon kick-started the process with its Kindle, followed this year by Barnes & Noble's Nook. The real breakthrough, though, is likely to come once Google irons out the legal kinks in its plan to offer the public up to 12 million books it has scanned and digitized.
It costs academic libraries about $1 a year to store every three-dimensional volume they own, so going digital has obvious cost advantages, she said.
Yet the real action right now at university libraries is digitizing archival collections and using digital versions of scientific and research journals.
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There is not much negotiating room today with the organizations and scientific publishers that control the journals, she said, because researchers want the prestige of appearing in certain journals and the publishers "have a good for which no other good will substitute."
The bottom line: "Scientific publishing is one of the great cash cows of all time," she said. Reed Elsevier, the leading scientific publisher, reported operating profits last year of more than $2 billion.
But cracks are beginning to show in that facade, thanks to the open-access movement, which is trying to post research articles on the Internet for free.
PLoS, or the Public Library of Science, was established by leading scientists in 2000 with the stated goal of "opening the doors to the world's library of scientific knowledge by giving any scientist, physician, patient or student -- anywhere in the world -- unlimited access to the latest scientific research."
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