Musings of Mine

Save the Library?

2009-05-28T03:43:00.000-07:00

Save the Library?

Part 1

The March of Dimes was created to raise money to cure polio. Many of us remember putting those little coins into slots in cardboard cards, which once filled, were sent to the March of Dimes to help other children avoid this deadly disease.

In 1955 Dr. Jonas Salk created a vaccine against polio. Polio was cured. The March of Dimes had achieved its goal, and therefore had no further reason to exist. But the organization did not “lay itself down.” Instead, it transformed itself into a fundraising organization to improve the health of babies by “preventing birth defects, premature birth, and infant mortality.”

This illustrates a very important principle in the life of non-profit organizations: once brought to life, they don’t want to die.

Thus it is with academic libraries. We are currently threatened by the revolutionary change from a world of information scarcity to one of information overload, yet academic libraries refuse to die.

So do public libraries for that matter. Therefore they have adapted by transforming themselves into multi-purpose community centers.

Visit your local library and see what I mean. Young mothers bring their children in for movie night; aged veterans come to hear lectures on World War II; the local high school a cappella group is giving a concert; and you can have your attic treasures assessed during the antiques fair. Plus you can borrow books; and DVDs, audiobooks on CD, and e-books; get tutored in English as a second language, surf the Web, and perhaps even get a cappuccino. The result: public libraries have doubled their traffic in the past 11 years.

The current recession has provided the icing on the cake. We have rediscovered that public libraries help poor people. And people who are pinching pennies. And people who are looking for jobs. Homeless people go there to sleep, and latchkey children find safe haven after school is out.

Academic libraries have also been adapting, but because so much of our adaptation is digital and our resources are delivered outside our buildings, we are in danger of becoming invisible. One might say that we are threatened with “extinction” due to our very success.

As I said in Chapter 1:

Academic Libraries are looking at a death spiral. We are caught in a financial squeeze where we can only do “less with less.” This trend has been developing over the past few decades, and if we keep playing it out, our library will end up as nothing more than a small office where tiny team of functionaries try to "broker" digital information for the campus--a virtual captive of the major commercial information vendors.

Too often, discussions about “the future of the library” are grounded in the assumption—stated or unstated—that we must “Save the Library.” I believe this is the wrong place to start.

The place to start is with this question: what are the information needs and information opportunities of the 21^st century academic research university?

Which leads to the second question: what should the university do to meet these needs, and to take advantage of these opportunities?

Let me say at the outset that no one knows the answer to these questions. The librarians don’t know. The faculty doesn’t know. The Administration doesn’t know. The students don’t know. And the technorati and digerati don’t know either. No one knows; but together we might figure it out.

Recently, I had the bracing experience of learning about a new assignment for Yale’s Meg Bellinger. Meg was until recently AUL for Integrated Library Systems and Technical Services. In September, 2008, Meg was named Director of the newly created Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure (ODAI).

ODAI… will guide collaboration among the schools, libraries, museums and other campus units that are developing strategies and systems for digitization and digital asset management. She will also coordinate the development of a University-wide digital information management strategy.

ODAI will be looking at the entire information landscape at Yale—everything that comes in, everything that goes out. Keep in mind this one sentence: her office “will coordinate the development of a University-wide digital information management strategy.”

In other words—my words—she is going to reinvent the library. That’s pretty cool. Whatever you call it, and currently the term “Digital Yale” is being tested, a new information regime will in effect be the “library” of the 21^st century.

Of course, it could happen that ODAI will issue its report, fanfares will be heard, news stories will be written, the academy will be abuzz, and then nothing will happen. Nothing. Zero. The report will go to where most radical university restructuring documents go: to the land of lost proposals and missed opportunities.

That would not be cool. ODAI has my prayers.

[For the Press Release, see: http://opa.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=6050]

Part 2—The Phone Rings…

So here’s the scenario. The phone rings, and the Chief Academic Officer says to the Library Director: “Listen, I just got a call from an academic think tank. They asked me what the Information Strategy is for our campus. Help me out here. What is the information strategy for our University?”

Do we have the answer?

Most of the time we act as though we do have the answer, and it’s very simple: Just give the library system more money and we will take care of it. Preferably 8% more each year, for all the years to come, because information is expensive and our patrons want it all.

This is decidedly not the answer. And besides, it was a trick question.

The Chief Academic Officer should already know the answer to this question. Along with the President, it is her or his duty to guide the destiny of the university—which is in essence an information enterprise.

But here is the real answer: No one knows what the information strategy should be for the university—yet it is the most critical question that could possibly be asked, right now, by the entire academy. And the person who should be taking the lead in shaping the answer is the Provost or Vice President for Academic Affairs.

Most University leaders are not asking themselves this question—nor are they asking their library director. This is why the ODAI study at Yale, cited above, is so critically important. Yale is asking the right question, at the right time, and at the right level—the very top level. This should be happening at every college and university in the land.

Let’s make a quick list of how this question touches upon the university’s mission:

· We are responsible for imparting information to the very people who will be running our information-dependent institutions

· We are responsible for teaching these people information-finding, information assessment, and information-utilization skills

· We are responsible for basic research in every field of inquiry; indeed, the government is giving us billions of dollars to do this, with a dollop from foundations and corporations

· We are the primary keepers of society’s information assets, and if we have substantial museums under our wing, this is even more true (a cultural artifact is also an information asset)

· Our community of faculty, students, researchers, librarians, and staff constitutes the largest body of people in this society whose primary purpose is to think about everything, and in a selfless way, and to share our thinking with the rest of the society for the benefit of all humankind. We sometimes refer to this as Our Mission.

So. Should our chief academic officer be thinking about the information strategy for the university? The answer is obvious.

Part 3--Who Ya Gonna Call?

In our last thrilling episode, the provost was dangling from a cliff. He had been asked what the information strategy was for his campus, and he didn’t know the answer. To whom should he place a quick call to get some fresh rhetoric with which to cover his derriere? Or, as they say in the movies: Who Ya Gonna Call?

Well, it should be the library. We have been thinking about this for decades. Academic librarians believe that it is Job One to study, adapt, and attempt to meet campus information needs, and we have plenty of white papers and proposals that reflect this thinking. But everyone seems to have forgotten our number. Or they pat us on the back and tell us we are doing a good job—when we know that our situation is deteriorating fast. Or they expect a silk purse information on a sow’s ear budget, then 92.5% of a sow’s ear, then perhaps only the tail and the whistle.

As a result, we are busy cutting ourselves. When I say cutting ourselves, I don’t mean cutting back on monographs; I don’t mean leaving positions unfilled; I don’t mean cancelling programs, though we are currently doing all of that. I mean cutting ourselves the way that teenage girls cut themselves.

Taiga Has a Meltdown

The Taiga Forum is a gathering of library administrators at the AUL level. For anyone reading this who is not a librarian, I can explain that this stands for Associate University Librarian. Most large libraries have several AULs, and indeed, it has come to stand for “senior library administrator,” of which even I, when I served as Library Development Director, was considered a part.

In 2006 the first Taiga Forum was held in Chicago. Heady topics were discussed, multiple crises were addressed. In the end, a very dramatic statement was issued—the “Fifteen Provocative Statements”—which ricocheted around the Internet. The statements could be seen as a rallying call to the academic library community. Some of the statements had a revolutionary quality, and painted a lively techno-future for academic libraries. For example, “academic computing and libraries will have merged. The library will be a partner in the Learning and Research Support Services Infrastructure.”

But the future ain’t what it used to be. The fourth Taiga Forum was held in Denver in early 2009. I wasn’t able to attend, but all of us in the library community were there in spirit—or were at least curious about what would come out.

Taiga 4 issued a revised set of ten “provocative” statements. Their document reads like a suicide note:

February 20, 2009

All statements are prefaced by “Within the next 5 years…”

1. ... all librarians will be expected to take personal responsibility for their own professional development; each of us will evolve or die. Budget pressures will force administrators to confront the "psychological shadow" cast by tenure and pseudo-tenure that has inhibited them from performing meaningful evaluations and taking necessary personnel actions. Librarians who do not produce will be reassigned or fired. –

2. ... collection development as we now know it will cease to exist as selection of library materials will be entirely patron-initiated. Ownership of materials will be limited to what is actively used. The only collection development activities involving librarians will becompetition over special collections and archives.

3. ... Google will meet virtually all information needs for both students and researchers. Publishers will use Google as a portal to an increasing array of content and services that disintermediate libraries. All bibliographic data, excepting what libraries create for local special collections, will be produced and consumed at the network level. [Strikeout in the original document]

4. ... knowledge management will be identified as a critical need on campus and will bedefined much more broadly than libraries have defined it. The front door for allinformation inquiries will be at the university level. Libraries will have a small information service role.

5. ... libraries will have given up on the "outreach librarian" model after faculty persistently show no interest in it. Successful libraries will have identified shared goals with teaching faculty and adapted themselves to work at the intersection of librarianship, information technology and instructional technology.

6. ... libraries will provide no in-person services. All services (reference, circulation, instruction, etc.) will be unmediated and supported by technology.

7. ... libraries will have abandoned the hybrid model to focus exclusively on electronic collections, with limited investments in managing shared print archives. Local unique collections will be funded only by donor contributions.

8. ... library buildings will no longer house collections and will become campus community centers that function as part of the student services sector. Campus business offices will manage license and acquisition of digital content. These changes will lead campus administrators to align libraries with the administrative rather than the academic side of the organization.

9. ... the library community will insist on a better return on investment for membership organizations (e.g., CRL, DLF, CNI, SPARC, ARL, ALA). All collaboration of significance will be centered around either individual entrepreneurial libraries (e.g., HathiTrust, OLE), or regional consortia.

10. ... 20% of the ARL library directors will have retired. University administrators will see that librarians do not have the skills they need and will hire leaders from other parts of the academy, leading both to a realignment of the library within the university and to the decline of the library profession.

SOS?

I have to confess that many of us do not know what to make of this statement. It is beyond “provocative.” It is an SOS. It’s as though our colleagues got into a room together, shared their symptoms, and realized that they were dying.

Now I wonder why? Let me see…. The last time I checked:

· Our collective average student gate-count was continuing to go down

· Book-borrowing was continuing to go down

· Walk-up, face-to-face reference questions are way, way, way down

· Faculty in the hard sciences say they don’t need us

· Many of our students will say when asked, that they “don’t use the library,” even though they, and our faculty, and our researchers use our digital assets in huge gulps and constantly want more.

· Academic library budget allocations are flat, or being cut, or perhaps just keeping up with CPI but not with the Academic inflation rate, and certainly not with the scholarly materials inflation rate. Simply put, this means that each year we are able to “buy less with less.”

· Electronic resources are costing us more and more each year. The average rate of cost increase is 8%. Soon, very soon, the cost of these resources will exceed our entire acquisitions budget. Run it out several more years and the cost will exceed the entire library budget.

· In order to afford these licenses, we are constantly cutting back on scholarly monograph purchases. The average sales figure for an academic book has plummeted from 900 copies (mostly to academic libraries) to less than 300 (mostly to academic libraries). This is killing our university presses.

· Many of the coolest new information developments are happening outside the libraries.

· There are people on campus doing something called “informatics.” They don’t work for the library.

And so on and so forth.

Gloom and Doom

Sorry to paint such a gloomy picture of the academic library. I am not saying something we don’t already know. To put it into a nutshell: most academic libraries most of the time get little respect, scant attention, and not enough money to even keep doing what we have been doing. On top of this, we have a pretty good idea of what the information revolution is doing—and will do—to the entire university enterprise. But nobody wants to hear what we have to say.

And on top of that, we are being raped by the largest information aggregators, whose quasi-monopoly over the top academic resources allows them to dictate their price. Every year they abuse us; every year we have comply with their unreasonable demands. The absurdity is that they are selling us our own stuff! Our faculty and our researchers created the content in the first place!

The result: anger, depression, frustration, withdrawal, anxiety, feelings of inadequacy, suicidal thoughts and gestures. It’s all there in the 2009 Taiga statement.

This process has been going on for years. It did not arise as a result of the recent economic downturn, though this has certainly made things worse.

And yet, ironically, the recession may be one of the best things that has happened to us in decades.

Part 4--When the going gets tough…..

…the tough get going.

The first time I heard this phrase, I couldn’t quite figure out what was being said. The biographer of Joseph Kennedy says that the scion of the Kennedy clan used to give this advice to his children when things got difficult. Don’t give up, he was saying, gear up and do something!

Academic librarians need to take the same advice. For years we have been feeling that times have been hard for the libraries. Well, now the going is getting really tough: cutbacks in allocations, hiring freezes, and layoffs at even the tippy-top of the ivory tower. Yale, Stanford, Harvard—all pulling in their belts. Yikes!

Managing in Hard Times

When Depression-force winds are blowing, it is natural to seek shelter and hunker down until the storm has passed. This is true whether you are a business, a university, or a university library. As a result we see examples everywhere of cost-cutting, belt-tightening, and the blunt instrument of across-the-board reductions.

The library world is abuzz with tales of woe: engineering library closed, digital scanning program abandoned and staff laid off, deeper cuts in scholarly monograph purchasing, journals cancelled, travel banned, salaries cut, new projects put on the shelf.

What will we find when we emerge from our root cellar in 2-4 years? Perhaps that our entire house has blown away!

There is a contrary line of thought. It goes like this: When the economy gets really, really bad, this is the perfect time to re-think and re-organize your entire enterprise. Forget incrementalism—the death by a thousand cuts—take a radical look at everything you do, every job description, department, service, physical operation, strategic and tactical assumption, and reinvent your business. You may just emerge stronger, lighter, better—and ready for new opportunities and challenges.

Within every organization there is resistance to change. Individuals want to hold on to their jobs, managers want to hold on to their department, senior administrators want to keep their mandates and their budget and their physical turf and their overall plan for the future. There is thus a strong “conservative” drive, and if cuts are going to happen, they should happen elsewhere in the enterprise.

This is even true in the library world, despite the fact that librarians tend toward the saintly, self-effacing, non-ego-driven end of the academic scale.

But when the entire enterprise is threatened, this kind of thinking has to be put aside. We must hang together, and stop hanging separately.

Libraries and Change

Academic libraries have been among the most adaptive, far-seeing units on campus. We were quick to migrate from paper-based inventory control (the card catalog) to computerized systems. Imbued with a “let’s get it in case our scholars need it” mentality, we purchased information in new formats—microfilm and microfiche, CD/ROM, VHS, CD, DVD, networked database, Internet portal, streaming audio and video services, and so on.

We encouraged faculty to experiment with these new tools, and we ran thousands of training sessions for our students, grad students, junior faculty (and offered individual training to senior faculty who might feel embarrassed to be seen among the unknowing). We created computing labs, learning labs, learning environments. We even relaxed our food policy and opened cafes!

We have become the “information broker” for the entire campus. We gave true meaning to the phrase “one university,” when others were barely paying lip service. When we purchased database licenses for our scholars, we insisted that this information be accessible to all of our scholars, across the range of disciplines. Thus business databases were not restricted just to business students; chemistry just for chemists, and so on.

We formed alliances with other libraries to share cataloging duties, and constructed a world catalog of our resources. We established joint purchasing consortia. We streamlined interlibrary loan, so that our scholars could get books faster and cheaper. We perfected digital document delivery. We scanned and mounted readings and multi-media content on courseware websites.

And during the past 15 years we have navigated the demands and fears of the faculty—our most demanding (and powerful) clients. We had to satisfy the faculty member who said that he had never learned to use a computer and didn’t intend to start at his age; the faculty member who demanded that a certain journal always be available, in paper, down the hall at her departmental library where she could walk down and scan its table of contents to keep up with her field, and now the faculty member who claims that he “never uses the library,” even though we are spending millions of dollars to supply him with access to thousands of e-journals.

Needless to say, being a “hybrid” library—one that straddles the paper-based world and the electronic world—has been expensive and awkward. But we have done it!

But now, as I said in Chapter 1, it is time to say goodbye. Goodbye to the “old” library and hello to the new, electronic, “minimalist footprint” library.

Even so, the embrace of the digital library won’t save the library.

Part 5—The Library is Dead…

University Presidents and University Provosts have often eyeballed the library as a place where one might save an occasional buck. If you work for a State University, then you know that State Legislators entertain similar fantasies.

We sometimes worry that these leaders “don’t get it” when it comes to the impact of computerization on our libraries. Well, they get it!

What they get is this:

· The marginal cost for creating one additional copy of any digital work is effectively zero dollars and zero cents;

· The cost for distributing a digital work to one person or ten million people is trivial;

· Books are rapidly being digitized;

· Journals are being digitized;

· Students, faculty, and researchers increasingly get their information from the digital library in preference to the physical library;

· Students, faculty and researchers increasingly share their new knowledge via the Internet that is, by digital distribution;

· The cost of hardware, software, middleware, and digital storage appears to be in constant decline;

Ø Therefore: Perhaps the library-as-we-know-it can be dismantled, maybe even abolished.

Ø Therefore: We can save money.

Ø Therefore: When my Library Director tells me that she needs MORE money to keep the library running, and to serve the needs of students, faculty, and researchers, she must be (a) hopelessly out of date, or (b) featherbedding, or (c) a terrible manager.

Academic librarians have been fighting a rear-guard action against this kind of technophoria for the past 15 years. I won’t go into chapter and verse, but among the sobering points we have made are:

1. Digital information is not cheap. In fact, the companies that control this information enjoy a virtual monopoly and are gouging us at the rate of 8% per year.

2. Digitization is not cheap. A high-quality scan of a 300-page book will cost at least $60, and we are talking about at least 30,000,000 titles out there—and in all languages in all the world, over 100,000,000. Do the math. We’re talking $6 billion, and that doesn’t count storage.

3. Digitization is not preservation. In fact, the most reliable format for preserving the information contained in a book is…a book! No lasting digital format or preservation medium has been identified, and even if it were, the cost of regular migration and adaptation of data will far exceed the initial cost of scanning and storage.

4. Enormous quantities of new information are being generated, and our scholars want it all. Think of the genomic library; the National Virtual Observatory; ArtStor, and on and on.

The net result of this “conversation” seems to be mutual frustration. Administrators and legislators are convinced that all this high-tech stuff should be saving them money, and librarians feel unheard, unappreciated, and unsupported.

On the library side, we will have to admit that the march of new technology is indeed bringing us ever closer to the Great Library in the Sky. That is, to having all scholarly information available in digital form, and accessible via the Internet. We also have to admit that we didn’t expect Google to come along and make a successful business out of searching for information. And that Google would get so fabulously rich in the process that it would scan 7 million books without worrying about the cost and be willing to spend hundreds of millions more to get everything.

I will discuss the serious flaws in the Google Books program, in a later chapter. Even so, we do need to recognize that the old library is dying, and a new information regime is taking over. As the French would proclaim, when the old king was placed in the grave while the new one stood alongside: Le Roi est mort. Vive le Roi!

Yo! Time to Roll!

The Microsoft spellchecker tells me that “Yo!” is not a word, even though Rocky Balboa brought it from Philly to the world in 1976. Yo! means “Hey you!” It means Stop and pay attention!

And “Time to Roll” means that it’s time to get moving, get the wheels turning, and unleash the power of our crack brigade of hot-eyed librarians.

In Part 4 I argued that this was not the time to hunker down and wait for the economic storms to blow over. I believe that now is the time to transform the library. This will not be easy. It won’t be fun. Re-birth is probably as painful as birth itself, and we will have to do some screaming to clear our lungs and get attention.

Our first objective is to get ourselves properly positioned. Here goes:

Seize the High Ground: Academic libraries have to stop arguing with those who are espousing the wonders of technology. We have to take the lead in proclaiming the death of the old forms, and the advent of new forms and fantastic new possibilities. We need to press for the development of a university-wide “Information Strategy,” and if the Provost or President won’t lead the effort, then we need to lead it, and inform them what it should be and where they should be making strategic investments. Enough of this “After you, my dear Alphonse,” stuff.

Cyberinfrastructure, cyberinfrastructure, cyberinfrastructure! Get used to saying it, explaining it, advocating it. We humans are busy creating a global information cyberinfrastructure. When it comes to scholarship, the research university is on the forefront of this development, and the academic library should be the core unit for interpreting, developing, and guiding this massive construction program. (Any librarian who doesn’t know what I am talking about needs to do some homework. Start at these two places: 1. http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf0728/index.jsp 2. http://www.acls.org/uploadedFiles/Publications/Programs/Our_Cultural_Commonwealth.pdf )

Take Back Academic Publishing. The academy needs to take back scholarly publishing. We have allowed commercial vendors to create monopolies over many of our critical journals, and we need to take them back. This in a “no quarter” situation. We should stop begging for a slowdown in price gouging. Elsevier and the like need to be driven out of this business. It is our business. (For bulletins from the battlefront, see: http://www.arl.org/sparc/ and http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html )

Stop Trying to be Harvard. Let’s admit it. We all want to be Harvard. Rich, famous, world-leading. It is the ultimate Academic Brand. For academic librarians, Harvard—and maybe Yale and Princeton—are at the pinnacle of the profession. They can buy whatever they want, and keep it all! Their librarian-to-student ratio is stunning. They lunch with faculty and share tidbits of erudition. How cool is that?

Funny thing: Harvard, Yale, and Princeton can’t afford to be themselves any longer. Like trust-fund babies, they have been living off their endowments for decades. Now times are tough. Perhaps there will be greater willingness to “hang together.”

Let Go of our Books. Research libraries have always believed that they should hold on to any book that has the least shred of academic value. We have rightly prided ourselves on this commitment to preservation and scholarly access. But we really don’t all have to keep everything. We really don’t each have to pay millions of dollars each year to each maintain low-use book storage facilities.

New scanning and print-on-demand capacities allow us to dramatically consolidate our holdings. Perhaps ten regional preservation and access libraries are needed for all of North America—certainly not 130! If the University of Chicago wants to be one of the ten, then all props to Chicago! We should establish a system for paying Chicago, and Harvard, and the other eight, to keep books on behalf of us all. If we want to see the book itself, to study it as an artifact, then there can be circulating copies, or we can travel to what will in effect become “museums of the book” and wallow to our heart’s and mind’s content. Those who simply want the text, drawings, illustrations—the content—will do fine with a high-quality online version, or a high-quality print-on-demand version.

Tactics

So enough with the grand principals. What, exactly, can an academic library do, right now, in these tough times, to get itself into fighting trim? In Chapter 1 I gave a quick outline of what steps should be considered:

· Get out of Real Estate

· Get in to or get out of the Book Storage Business.

· Get out of the book-buying business—only buy books when they are requested.

· Re-deploy your people

· Focus on the delivery of digital resources, services and tools

· If you have unique collections, treat these collections as invaluable assets for teaching and research that can be touched, analyzed, worked with.

All well and good, but what’s a particular library system on a particular campus to do?

An Action Plan

Here is one bold action plan. If you don’t like it, make up your own:

· Declare to the campus and the world that the next four years is a time of radical “re-tooling.”

· Ask the Provost and Deans for a guarantee of steady-state funding for this period (even if we close their library facility)

· Continue to provide and enhance digital services.

· Have the Library Director lead a team that meets with each Dean and key faculty leaders to develop a new model for information service. The hallmarks of this service will be:

o Minimal footprint

o Digital delivery of resources and services

o Virtual customer support

o Flexible staff who are constantly re-training, constantly in dialogue with faculty, embedded in the research and teaching process

· Focus professional staff on digital services, training, planning, and re-tooling.

· Re-deploy staff to develop new-model information-partnerships with the schools.

· Reduce the number of staff, dramatically raise pay, recruit talented people who are ready to become information partners with faculty.

· Reduce or eliminate storage facility.

· Get out of the “study hall” business

· Reduce stack areas.

· Close all libraries except those that are specifically endorsed and supported as “crossroads libraries.”

· Recast your “main library” and your “crossroads libraries” as Learning Labs.

This is a bet-the-company gamble. You say to the Administration: Keep funding us while we work with you to completely re-think information services for your faculty, researchers, and students. After four years, we will either have a new "information service" that you and your people believe in, or you get your money back in year 5 and figure it out yourself.

In addition, the Library Director and the Provost and the President should all undertake a major offensive to re-capture the field of scholarly communication:

· Work with the Federal Government (NIH, NSF, NEH), other academic institutions, and the soon-to-be launched Book Rights Registry to re-capture and re-conceive scholarly "publishing" (i.e., scholarly communication).

· Promote the SPARC agenda

· Embrace, advocate,and support Sustainable Open Access initiatives.

· Partner with others to develop a new non-profit scholarly publishing entity that can serve as an alternative to Elsevier and its ilk (see Chapter 12)

In Sum: Time to Say Goodbye. And Hello.

La Bibliotheque est mort. Vive La Bibliotheque!

Let's Just Do It Ourselves

2009-04-06T10:37:00.000-07:00

Presented for discussion purposes in “Proposal” form.

Proposal:

That academic libraries and university presses undertake a comprehensive program to scan books of academic value that are out-of-print. The goals of this program would be preservation, access, rationalization of collection storage, electronic repurposing of content, and the creation of a research database.

Linked with a print-on-demand and e-publishing program, this project could be self-sustaining.

This concept could be combined with the idea of creating a shared publishing entity for the production of new work, including the creation and maintenance of Online Academic Resources (Scholarly Hubs) which by themselves are currently not economically sustainable.

Background:

The impending Google Book Settlement shines a spotlight on the universe of out-of-print books (OP). In the Settlement, these titles are described as “not commercially available.” There are an estimated 20-30 million titles in the OP category, and the vast majority of these books are in publishing Limbo. The OP figure dwarfs the number of books in the Public Domain (2-3M), and the number of books considered “in-print" (2-3M)

Once the Settlement is finalized, Google will have a green light to scan OP titles for inclusion in its database, and for selective display, and commercial use--unless the rights-holder formally objects. This is one of the key concessions by the Author's Guild and the American Publishers Association—that is, allowing the "default" to be an assumed permission to scan.
Google's right to scan and sell OP titles is non-exclusive. This means that any other entity, whether commercial or non-profit, could undertake a similar program.

The Settlement will create a new entity, called the Book Rights Registry (BRR). The BRR will oversee the implementation of the program, and will have the power to enter into additional non-exclusive publishing arrangements on behalf of the authors and publishers who have registered with the BRR.

This would enable a consortium of academic libraries and university presses to undertake a major initiative to digitize OP books of interest to the scholarly community and make them available through POD sales, e-reader sales, and sales within each library through a device like the Espresso Book Machine. The income generated thereby could go to the partners and/or to a central entity which manages the program.

Scanned books can also be OCR'd to allow for individual word search across the entire database of books. This will allow new research opportunities.

This initiative could also include public domain titles. And it could include in-print titles. All that would be required would be the permission of the publisher or rights holder, and a mechanism for paying royalties from sales—presumably provided by the Book Rights Registry.

Beyond the Google Books Program:

At first glance, it may seem that the proposed initiative will duplicate the Google Books Program. In some aspects, it will. However, it is important to realize that there have been biases in the Google program which have created significant—and perhaps insurmountable—deficiencies in their scan corpus.

1. The primary purpose of the Google Books Program was to capture the text for inclusion in Google's massive search database.

2. The program was not undertaken as a preservation program.

3. The program was not developed with the requirements of print-on-demand in mind.

4. The program did not have academic research optimization as a goal. In fact, Google sought through its agreements with partner libraries to restrict broad research access to its scans. In the Settlement, Google continues to restrict access to the research corpus.

5. The program emphasized speed and throughput, often at the expense of quality.

6. While the Settlement addresses the author "class" and the Publisher "class," it does not address the rights of photographers, illustrators, and artists whose work may be contained in the books being scanned.

As a result, Google seems to have created a database of over 7 million books that will often yield low-quality images, poor files for print-on-demand, and empty pages where illustrations, charts, and other important material are blanked out. And the files themselves are not of "preservation quality," nor it is clear that other preservation needs (metadata, etc) have been addressed.

It is important to stress that Google does not have the exclusive right to digitize and re-purpose public domain and out-of-print books. Any enterprise, whether for-profit or not-for-profit, can gain the same rights that Google has, through agreement with the Book Rights Registry.

Critics have argued that Google has a true monopoly or a de facto monopoly in this arena. This is not true. In fact, Google has not negotiated any agreement for undertaking print-on-demand, but has only flagged its interest in possibly undertaking such a program. This would appear to leave the field quite open.

I suggest that academic libraries and university presses have the opportunity to focus on a subset of the book universe: books that are of scholarly interest. This does not mean only those works issued by university presses, but whatever individual works are deemed to be of scholarly value.

I further suggest that the economics of this situation allow us to undertake a program that will pay for itself. That is to say, a sustainable program to provide access, preserve books, and share knowledge.

Disruptive Innovation:

The book publishing industry is going through a period of "disruptive innovation," a term popularized by Clayton Christensen in his book The Innovator's Dilemma. A set of new technologies have rocked the foundations of this mature, $25 billion industry. These technologies also allow the entry of new enterprises which can take advantage of new pathways to production and profitability. This includes academic libraries and university presses.

Some of the most significant disruptive technologies are:

Internet & Web
Digital Download & Upload
IPod & ITunes
E-Readers & IPhone
Google Word Search
Mass Scanning Technologies
Print On Demand
Espresso Book Machine (miniaturized printer/binder)

When these new technologies are linked together, they create dramatic new economies and efficiencies. They also allow for the printing of one copy of a book, perhaps a completely unique copy, at a reasonable price and at a profit.

Amazon.com, for example, is able to sell books online, e-books, book downloads for the Kindle and IPhone, audio downloads, and so on. Lulu.com has created a do-it-yourself publishing entity that has enabled an explosion of user-generated content in book form (180,000 books, 25,000 e-books).

The Google Book Settlement, through its creation of the Book Rights Registry, bridges a major IP hurdle to scanning and re-purposing book content. The Settlement is expected to be finalized in September, 2009. However, Google has already provided $12M to begin the process of rights registry. (See: http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/ )

We can imagine a group of academic libraries, university presses, and cultural institutions, working with a major foundation or foundations—and with commercial vendors and suppliers--to create a non-profit entity that would take advantage of these new capabilities. Preservation and access would be first among the goals.

Using mass scanning techniques, and manual scanning technology, combined with post-processing software, storage, and quality control, this coalition could reissue every book that is registered with the BRR. (It is likely that most authors and most publishers will indeed register, since this is necessary to receive their proper share of Google revenues.)

The coalition could also re-purpose the scanned content for multiple formats and uses. One can image that book sales and license income would underwrite the entire cost of the operation, and generate a surplus that could be applied to new academic publishing, including experimental e-publishing programs.

Interested? Contact me at: corsonf@gmail.com

***************************************************************************

Adam Corson-Finnerty has worked in the research library and non-profit world for over 30 years. He is currently undertaking a two-year study of income-producing opportunities for the Penn Library system. His title is Director of Special Initiatives.

This paper represents his own views, and not necessarily those of his library or his university.

Time to Say Goodbye, Updated

2009-03-25T18:30:00.000-07:00

This article reflects my own personal views, and not those of my library or university. Permission is given to pass it along.

Time to Say Goodbye

Updated with Comments

April 3, 2009

Academic Libraries are looking at a death spiral. We are caught in a financial squeeze where we can only do “less with less.” This trend has been developing over the past few decades, and if we keep playing it out, our library will end up as nothing more than a back office where tiny team of functionaries try to "broker" digital information for the campus--a virtual captive of the major commercial information vendors.

We all know the statistics. We know that we are consistently falling behind the rising cost of academic information, with no relief in sight, and little sympathy from provosts who are agonizing over campus-wide budget cuts.

Impending doom has a way of sharpening the senses. We have delayed making hard decisions for the past ten years, and it is only now--when we are in really difficult circumstances, when everyone can see that the old formulas are not working--that we may be able to marshal our forces and re-conceptualize the enterprise.

Somebody needs to blow the whistle on the current game. If we keep trying to play within the traditional rules and boundaries, we are goners. Time to say goodbye to the old library. Goodbye to our buildings, to our bookstacks, to our sense of self-worth through sheer bulk.

Passing Lane Principles:

We are losing the race, and badly. Therefore we need a “passing lane” strategy that jumps our library off the track, out of the stadium, and into a new incarnation.

I am going to share ideas about giving up and letting go—but also about picking up and setting out. Just an outline at this stage. But this will be enough to start a discussion and will in time lead to another iteration of this article.

Get out of Real Estate

Close as many libraries as you can.

Get out of the Study Hall business.

Your remaining facilities should be recast as "learning labs" or "learning environments."

Downsize or eliminate your high-density-storage facilities.

Get in to or get out of the Book Storage Business.

Convert your storage facility into a regional storage facility that is self-funding, or

Pay another institution to store any books that you absolutely have to own, and

Pay this institution to loan you books as you need them from their combined holdings, or

Have this institution scan any book that you need and produce your own POD copy, and give it to the patron to keep (you really don't want it back).

Get out of the book-buying business—only buy books when they are requested.

Keep only what is heavily used

Use "scan on demand" ILL services wherever possible

Use print on demand

Use in-house or nearby print-on-demand service for quick production.

Re-deploy your people

Get your people out of supervising the study hall, standing-behind-a-service-desk, giving directions to the nearest bathroom.

Retrain Librarians as “Informationists” or "Informaticians" or whatever new term breaks them out of the old mold. Your new librarians will be full members of academic research teams, or will "team" with individual scholars, including undergraduates. Many on your staff will have to become data curators, if not database creators.

Focus on the delivery of digital resources, services and tools

Continue and strengthen your role as Information Broker for the entire University

Emphasize training patrons in information-finding skills.

Emphasize digital self-help.

Emphasize collaborative tool-development with faculty

Emphasize collaborative resource-building, and resource-sharing with other Research Libraries

Emphasize physical and digital preservation of assets.

Work with the Federal Government (NIH, NSF, NEH), other academic institutions, and the soon-to-be launched Book Rights Registry to re-capture and re-conceive scholarly "publishing" (i.e., scholarly communication).

If you have unique collections,

If you are treating them like museum pieces, then spin off a museum, or transfer them to a museum.

Otherwise, treat these collections as invaluable assets for teaching and research that can be touched, analyzed, worked with. This may become some of your most important work.

You can see where I am going. A stronger embrace of the digital. Letting go of the physical. Amazon.com, in contrast to the local bookstore. Google, in contrast to the reference desk. Going in the opposite direction of the U. Chicago Library system.

There is nothing new in what I am proposing. Every idea has been proposed or at least floated by some of our most weighty colleagues. Most of these ideas are supported in the new CLIR publication, No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21^st Century. http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub142abst.html

The CLIR document provides the starting point for developing a game-changing strategy. Every academic library administrator should read this report, and have this knowledge in common as we move forward.

Comments?

Send them to: corsonf@pobox.upenn.edu

ADDENDUM

Added April 3, 2009

My article seems to have struck a nerve. It has been circulated widely, and I have heard kudos from many corners.

As I said, there is nothing new in what I am saying, or in what I have proposed in outline form. These ideas have been circulating within the academic library community, most recently in the CLIR study, cited above, but also in the Taiga forum. See: http://taigaforum.org/

However, it may be that something short and blunt is needed right now, so I am not going to expand the article above. I suggest that it be used as a provocative discussion-starter, and therefore ask my colleagues to keep passing it on.

In addition to compliments, I would also appreciate emails that suggest additions to my argument, and additions or amendments to my suggested “steps.”

I would also appreciate criticism and push-back. So if you disagree with my thesis, please write and share your thoughts!

Comments Thus Far:

The first comment that I want to share may in fact be a criticism, using heavy sarcasm. I wasn't sure.

Perfesser Corson-Finnerty,

I reckon that was some fine reasoning on your part, as usual. Are we saying that, a young [Cath'lick] traditional Liberal Arts institution like ours in this age could actually get away without an actual Library. (Our student FTE is 397 or so!) We have yet to get into any Digitization projects (no staff for it!), and we are just started to get into electronic resources (primarily with the indispensible help of the VIVA Consortium). We would never come close to affording any of it, without 'em! Though we are getting better!

Staffing is meager, I (qua director) am one of 2 MLS professionals -- with development, tech services [Cataloging, ILL, circ] duties, occasional Ref Services duties, etc. It can mind-numbing sometimes, but getting to know the students (& their information needs) on a personal level is "priceless"! Folks in the Administration building would love to hear some of what you're saying... So I'm hesitating to share it with 'em! Though I probably will, b/c you are right: it is the way things are going. And sometimes I feel like I may be (in spite of my relatively young age) obsoleting myself!

Thank you for your erudite and thoughtful presentations.

Cordially, XXX

ME: thanks for your note. i would say, in response to your question about whether a small college, or any college, "needs" a library -- the answer is "maybe."

I believe that 99.99% of our conversations about "the role of the library" begin with the library and then try to justify its existence. I would prefer--at least as a thought exercise--to start with this question: what are the information needs of my college/university? Are they being met? By whom or by what unit(s)? Are they *not* being met, or only partially met? Then what do we need to do to meet these needs? If you then end up creating one office to meet university information needs, that office will be the new "library." That's why I like the notion of "reincarnation."

cheers,

adam

Second Comment:

Thanks for the ALADN posting today. I'm new to this position (6 mos) and new to higher ed development in general, so your comments today were very interesting to me, and certainly were consistent with other messages we've been hearing lately. I have two clarification questions for you: Can you please define as best you can what people mean by "learning labs" and "learning environments" and contrast that against the "study hall" phenomenon you refer to. Also, how might such "learning environments" relate to the "learning commons" and cafe-type environments that are being implemented lately? I guess I'm asking how do you know when your learning environment is not a study hall? What does that look like?

As an aside, I have to mention that my mind reels with the similarities between the issues you are discussing and those of my former field, the newspaper business. The struggle for relevancy in the face of the exponential expansion of digital information -- it's just eerily familiar.

Thanks, XXX2

ME: thanks for your note. i will take the easy comment first: yes, like newspapers. like book publishing. like the music industry. we are all getting clobbered by disruptive technologies. This is a *good* thing for the public, but very hard on traditional institutions, including the library. Interestingly, some of the disruptive technology can play to our advantage: print-on-demand, for example. I attach a link to my article about micro-publishing and libraries that you will find of interest, given your background. http://musingsofcorsonf.blogspot.com/2009/03/micro-publishing.html

as for learning environments, that is a harder thing to describe. Let me take a short raincheck on this, and get back to you. In the meantime, look at our Weigle Information Commons site. This is becoming a national model for a multi-media learning lab in an academic library. But I need to be able to describe it, not just point you to their website. And we have other things in the works. I'll chew on this. http://wic.library.upenn.edu/

See also the NY Times article on our work with special collections:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/education/edlife/rarebks.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=penn%20library%20rare&st=cse

adam

Third Comment:

Dear Adam,

Thank you for sharing this. I agree wholeheartedly with your statements!

Dr. XXX3, Dean of Library Services
[ At a Northeastern University]

Comment 4:

Thank you, thank you and thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience.

Best regards, XXX4, Development Director for the Library

[A state university in the West]

Comment 5:

Hi Adam,

I found your blog article extremely interesting. I think you really hit all the nails on the head, and I especially liked the “Re-deploy your people” and the “Focus on delivery of digital resources...”

I’m curious to find out what kind of response you’re getting from your colleagues...:-)

XXX5, CEO of Library Digital Services Company

Comment 6:

Adam:

Thank you for the note. I had read your piece, which is enjoying widespread cover on the internet, and in fact sent a copy to my Board and staff. I hope your article is provoking some good, innovative thinking, as it should.

XXX6, Head of Library Consortium

Comment 7:

[The Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL) comprises the libraries serving accredited US and Canadian medical schools]

Not quite a trend document but something to think about...

In my professional career Adam Corson-Finnerty has been one of the

bright lights.  He is not a library director but a library fund-raiser.

I met him through the Academic Library Advancement and Development

Network (ALADN) - one of the most helpful group of people I have ever

Met  Anyway, Adam writes on any number of topics but I think his best

efforts are on the future of libraries.  If you read his essay below

you will hear a little of what many of us have been saying.  What he

is proposing will not happen overnight but I do believe that any library

that depends on collections and walls to define itself is doomed

to failure.  Link to

the CLIR document at the end of his essay.  Some interesting thoughts

there.  Let me know what you think.

Cheers,

M.J.

M.J. Tooey, MLS, AHIP

Executive Director

Health Sciences and Human Services Library

University of Maryland Baltimore

Comment 8:

Dear Adam,

I was forwarded your article 'Time to Say Goodby' by an American colleague and was wondering if I could circulate it amongst academic librarians over here in the UK via the LIS-Infoliteracy mailing list as I think what you say should be discussed across this side of the pond.

I look forward to hearing from you

Best

XXX8

Micro-Publishing

2009-03-09T13:16:00.000-07:00

Micro-Publishing

Book publishing is going through a period of "disruptive innovation," a term popularized by Clayton Christensen in his book The Innovator's Dilemma. A plethora of new technologies have rocked the foundations of this mature, $25 billion industry. But they are also opening up new opportunities for successful ventures.

One such opportunity can be termed "micro-publishing." We would love to say that we invented the term, but Wikipedia already has an entry on it! See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropublishing

This article will focus on a particular piece of new technology, and the opportunities that it affords to libraries, university presses, bookstores, and copy shops. The technology is the Espresso Book Machine, version 2.0, from On Demand Books (ODB).

The Espresso Book Machine

The Espresso Book Machine (EBM) is a miniaturized printing press. It combines within a footprint of 6' x 3' a high-speed printer and a color cover printer, a binder, and a trimmer. It produces a 300-page paperback book in less than five minutes—indistinguishable from a conventional paperback—and for a materials cost of under $3.00. The EBM’s “iTunes-like” software system connects the book machine to a vast network of content, both in-copyright and out, and remits all publisher royalties (public-domain titles, naturally, require no royalty payment).

An example: suppose that you have scanned, as we have, the out-of-copyright book Caroline at College, by Lela Horn Richards. Your total cost to produce this book will be $3.08 (a penny a page for consumables, including cover), since there is no royalty due. Sell the book for $11.95 and you have quadrupled your money.

At the Penn Libraries we have formed a small team to explore entrepreneurial ideas, including the use of the EBM. This effort is supported by student researchers from the Wharton School's Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Research Center . Our analysis indicates that the EBM can "break even" with a relatively low output per day. If the machine "takes hold," as it has at the University of Alberta campus bookstore, it could produce a gross profit in excess of $100,000.

New Work

While printing an existing book may provide profit, the more intriguing and exciting use of the machine is to produce new work. When we spoke with Todd Anderson, director of the bookstore at the University of Alberta, he told us that they had anticipated their new EBM, which has now been in place since November 2007, with this list of possible applications:

• Cost-savings for students on textbooks and course-related materials
• Printing professor-generated books
• Doing custom reading anthologies
• Printing public domain books at low cost
• Replacing books for the library
• Printing library-generated facsimiles for courses
• Printing the bookstore's own scans

He said that Time Magazine came out on November 2, 2007, calling the EBM the invention of the year. The local press picked up the fact that UA had an early machine and gave them lots of publicity. “We got 224 emails in the first month, and ten times that in phone calls. Everyone was interested in what the machine could do for them.”

He was surprised to find that for-profit, author-originated books have come to dominate their use of the machine. This includes works of poetry and fiction, handbooks for conferences, publication of graduate work, customized textbooks, research studies, out-of-print books where the rights have reverted to the author, and family histories. He finds that he is not competing with local printers, since 400 copies is about the break-even point between the EBM and a short print press run. So he refers authors to printers if they want more than 400, and the print shops refer smaller orders to him.

He runs the machine from 9-5, seven days a week. He has a full-time operator, a 20-year old cashier who he reassigned to the machine. She has learned the machine so well that she is creating a training manual for it. He wants to get a second machine soon.

They have developed ancillary services, at a profit. This includes proofing and editing, jacket and interior design, scanning. They charge from $40-70 per hour for these services. He says that the demand is so high for new work that he could significantly increase his per-page printing fees and still have a backlog.

Todd says they took the first three months to experiment with the EBM. "We used it as a lab." They charged 5 cents a page, and had plenty of work. They produced 2,364 books. This represented 50 different titles:

13 new works by local authors
12 textbooks
6 out-of-print books
3 books for writing courses
13 books that they were asked to scan and print
2 research papers
1 presidential address

A faculty member brought him a nursing text that had reverted to her. The original list price was $76. He was able to sell it to students for $16 and make a handy profit. They have been able to print and sell a $160 chemistry textbook to students at $37.00.

He says that they have an agreement with McGraw-Hill, using the “primus” service. This allows them to select chapters from a text, and combine and print only the ones that the professor wants for his/her class. This saves students considerable money. He expects to do the same with “My Springer.”

He said that the machine “sells itself.” He has it out in the bookstore where people can see it operate, and seeing it inspires people to think of creative ways to use it:
• One science fiction writer had 50 copies done, traveled to NYC, hit the publishing houses with his copies, and got a contract with a major publishing house.
• Printing 300 copies of advance conference papers for an academic conference held at UA.
• Printing a version of Macbeth, with professorial annotations, for use in the Professor's course.

He says “Once people get the idea, you won’t lack for business. It’s amazing what perfect binding can do for an author.” Anderson reports that authors will often ask for an initial run of 5 copies; then come back for 25 more. One new book of poetry was printed at 100 copies, then again, then again. They have now printed over 500 copies, each copy at a good margin.

We asked Todd about the potential of the Google Book Settlement--which has identified a vast corpus of out-of-print work that may have reverted to the author—to produce faculty requests to reprint their older work. “They will be coming out of the woodwork,” he said. “They will dig them out from under the bed.”

Here at Penn, we have begun discussions with faculty and departmental administrators to see if there is interest in using our micro-publishing capacity. We hope to have a 2.0 machine in place this summer. We have already turned up interest, simply based upon a brief description via email.

One promising partnership has already begun to emerge, with Knowledge@Wharton. This pioneering online business journal, launched in 1999, now has over 4,000 articles in its database. The editor, Mukul Pandya, says that he has over 100 thematic compilations in his mind, all of them suitable for production on the Espresso Book Machine. We have agreed to test the concept by producing a full-length book on the current financial crisis, drawing from K@W. This book will be edited by Pandya and Wharton professor Yoram (Jerry) Wind.

Pandya imagines that the EBM will allow the production of customized reading books for Wharton's Executive Education program, where the average class is 30 participants.

This is the beauty of micro-publishing: that you can produce a run of 30 books, completely customized for the class, and still show a profit. Indeed, micro-publishing can be economical for an audience of one: Pandya imagines the idea of putting all 4,000 articles in a database, and allowing a patron to create his or her own book, based upon articles of interest.

Micro-publishing is in its infancy. As of this writing, only 15 installations of the Espresso Book Machines have occurred (or will shortly occur), in bookstores and libraries. Four of these include the first full-production version, the EBM 2.0. Watch for a publishing revolution happening soon in a location near you!

Print is Dead, Right?

2009-01-24T03:57:00.000-08:00

Several weeks ago I posted a discussion-starter on Linked-In. I got some interesting replies, and want to share this, and my wrap-up thoughts, in this blog entry. Here goes!

Me: Esteemed colleagues: Book sales have been flat for years, and now are trending down. Newspapers are imploding, and magazines may not be far behind. Print on paper is dead, right?

Senior Manufacturing Buyer at Large Publisher:

College textbook publishing has never been stronger. With people going back to school for vocational training or changing careers and the new emphasis on science and math, college textbooks sales are doing well.

Print Production / Project Manager Seeking a New Position:

As a print production manager, I am definitely seeing the trend down for paper. I'm not happy about it but I was recently reading PC Magazine and on the very first page, the editor stated I was "holding in my hand the last printed issue" as they were going completely digital. Am I one of last ones standing that still reads newspapers and enjoys the actual feel of the magazine with the little cards falling all over the floor?

I think the future is closer than we think and unfortunately for printers, digital is quickly replacing offset. PDF's and eBooks are replacing the hard cover and paperback. Web banners and email blasts are replacing trade ads. I think we have to face it and adapt.

PLEASE... someone tell me I am wrong!

Entrepreneur:

I don't know about dead, but risky for sure...Now that I can take my Kindle along on vacation/business trips, I don't need to buy print, but I still do. Also, you need to be smart about what to print. For example, we do a bunch of books which have replica's of old documents (pull out reproduced copies), like the Dec of Ind hand written by Jefferson, with his notes in the margins...it's hard to do that digitally.

Managing Director at film company:

Wrong. There is a whole culture of book lovers who will never give up hard copy. Curling up on the sofa with a good book is one of life's finer luxuries. I don't see any major bookshops closing, just the little ones they swallow up.

Then there are the collectors, the joy of leather binding and gold leaf.

Digital may be taking over information bytes, but paper books will never die.

Consultant:

To suggest that Print on Paper is dead is alarmist nonsense. I see very little evidence of a reduction in the number of book titles published annually. Despite our current recession (that is affecting all commodities) book and media print sales are definitely holding up relatively strongly in UK. Digital printing has certainly arrived and has found a market for ultra short run and for those geeks who enjoy electronic gadgets - BUT it's actual effect on the traditional market is minimal and certainly does not signify that it has mortally wounded Print on Paper. When the recession is over, say in 3 years time the traditional publishing industry will still be strong and will recover faster than many industries. The digital industry will continue to grown exponentially and will maintain its minority position alongside conventional print.

Information Dissemination and Communications Manager:

For those of us trying to deliver practical information to remoter parts of the developing world, particularly in the rural development field, print on paper is still the medium of choice. The internet has a long way to go before it reaches all the small, dispersed offices of the ministries of agriculture in these countries, and any way who wants to fire up an internet connection every time you want to refer to a farmer's guide or such like?

I'm all for paper -- I enjoy reading my newspapers, magazines and journals in the old fashioned way, and sometimes coming across a tidbit of information that I would have missed or overlooked if I were browsing or searching a website.

Project Specialist:

There was an interesting report the other day on NPR about how children today are learning in a totally different way than children did, say, 20 years ago (sorry - not sure what program it was on). The reason behind this is that everything is accessed online, and the type of mental functionality used for the two types of reading is completely different.

With this being said, I firmly think that the place we need to move toward is a marriage of the two - electronic and print. The hard thing here, and I have no solution for it, is figuring out the correct balance that ensures we aren't loosing new readers by not providing technology advances, and also that we aren't loosing old readers who would rather stay lost in their already-owned books than pick up an "e-book" and read on a screen.

I, personally, am one of those die-hard paper-readers. I will be forever paying to cart around multitudes of books, seldom letting any of the go. However, if the technology comes around that I am comfortable with using, then I will give it a shot.

Media Entrepreneur:

THERE WILL ALWAYS BE PRINT---The Sky Is Not Falling !!

The Internet came along and the nay sayers said print is dead. Now there are magazines and books in print about the Internet. Blogging is hot and there are magazines and books in print about blogging.

It’s not dead. It’s constantly shifting to different markets and changing because of alternative carriers and changing technology. Just like the three major networks once controlled most of television advertising, along comes cable and FOX and super stations WGN and TNT and the Internet and satellite radio, etc. etc.

Books on tape shifted to CD and now to iPods and MP3 players. VHS tapes are now DVDs. The sky is not falling.

Graphic Designer:

I tried to read a book on the computer once. I only have one eye left.

Independent Publishing Professional:

Printed books have been declared dead for almost 20 years now. Don't forget children learn to read from illustrated children's books read to them in a warm family settings---certainly not all, but the ideal for a literate society. Even though kids get all the electronic stuff early on, nothing reproduces the feel of a printed book, or reproduces the photos/illustrations as well as print. Kids may go thru a period of only reading textbooks, but many return to the printed word as they mature. New book sales are slow growth, but it's one of the few products that has extra lives as "used", and library checkouts are also up.

So keep on trucking!

Publication designer and illustrator:

My belief is that publishers and consumers will choose fewer, better quality books...books for pleasure, books with long shelf lives or with high value, rather than chase the big quantities and giant distribution chains.

Director of Sales, Print Products:

Printed books will never die. They have been assailed by MOVIES, TELEVISION, COMPUTER, CD-ROM, VIDEO TAPES you name it...all types of competition for our leisure or learning time.
We're still here.

I just attended a sales summit for Sam's Club, div of Wal-Mart and they have re-stated how important books are to their business and their product mix. While we may rail against the superstores, big box environments, and the Internet, the truth is more books are being sold in more places than ever before.

It is true that "content" can now be had in many different formats, but books are still quite popular....

To Wit...the wonderful Harry Potter and Stephanie Meyer's creatures of the night should remind you of the power of books TO A YOUNG AUDIENCE!

So don't bury us yet, Gutenberg's device is an elegant design for a wonderful, tangible and tactile object that has served us well for centuries and centuries and will continue to do just that.

Besides, what am I going to do with all of my nice bookmarks and book plates? And my bookshelves?

Sales Representative:

Adam, my grandmother used to love to throw an outrageous and controversial statement into a group of us youngsters, then sit back, grin and listen to the arguments. I think I detect a bit of Grannie in you. Thanks for initiating a really great exchange of ideas here. And thanks to all who contributed. I am a confirmed bibliophile and I do see, at least in the next decades, that marriage that [a previous writer] described. Those of us who learned to read in the traditional way will continue to hold to it, especially for recreational reading. I can see benefits to the new technology for data, research, etc.

However, if we fail, as parents, grandparents and teachers, to introduce our next generations to the pleasures of books (reading them, holding them, smelling them) in parallel with their inevitable use of the "new media," then we are paving the way for the brave new world of publishing so many of us decry.

Head of Information Services at a publishing group:

I moved out of Educational print production over 10 years ago now following the road to digital distribution. I'm amazed at how well print has held up over this period (although not in every publishing market). However, each medium has its strengths and weaknesses and too many under-estimate the simplicity, relative permanence and the pleasurable tactile nature of print. Radio is stronger than ever, despite the advent of television, and print will survive! Hang on in there.

Me again: You got me! Yes, I put this in as a "grannie" question to stir things up. And the exchange has been lively and interesting. Now I am going to get more serious.

I think that we are reaching a "tipping point" with regard to text on paper. I think that in one field after another, print will recede and electronic access will become primary. That doesn't mean that "paper is dead," though even this outlandish statement is not completely off the mark.

Some examples:

1. The Encyclopedia Britannica, the Oxford English Dictionary, and reference works in general. It is clear that electronic access has triumphed over print on paper. And if you want a truly ironic example, look at "Books in Print." I don't know if Bowker even produces print copies anymore, and I am certain that electronic access to their online version is triumphant.

2. Academic Journals. More and more journals are shifting to e-journals, and many new journals are "born digital."

3. Harlequin romances. Harlequin is bringing out every new book as an e-book as well. They also are exploring shorter romance stories as e-only, for $2.99.

4. Textbooks. I believe that Maple, an electronic textbook in mathematics, has been very successful. McGraw-Hill and others are bringing out electronic versions of their texts, and allowing customers to pick-and-choose chapters that are then printed out as "custom" books. How long before we have e-only versions of many, most, texts? The limitation so far has not been a preference for paper per se, but that paper copies are easier to annotate and highlight. As soon as this process becomes elegantly incorporated into e-textbooks, watch for a stampede.

Lets get serious in this discussion. I *adore* reading, love having books around me, work in a library, visit libraries when I go to a new city, have at least four different titles going at all times (the train, the bathroom, the bedside, the office). I love to receive books as gifts and give them as gifts, with a personal note to the recipient. But nostalgia and "book-loving" don't cut it if we are talking about the future of publishing. Give me facts, please.

Senior Editor:

I agree with [previous commentator]. Paper can never be dead for real BOOK lovers! I find reading on screen extremely tedious (though editing on screen is my job!). But there are enough paper book lovers like me out there who'd never settle for online reading for pleasure! Ppaer does have its own charm--its own sweet smell. :)

Head of Technology at a software company:

The new generation of youngsters are more inclined to digital media for reading. Print will not die in the immediate future but there will be slow down in printing. I feel audio books is slowly catching up and I understand that it can't replace all types of books.

Digital Content and online specialist:

Very interesting debate. I can't see a future without books because as a product they still work well. But sales are not assured when you order a print run (especially smaller markets outside US and UK) so it is reasonable to expect that there is a move from traditional print to digital print. And then as Harlequin and other publishers are beginning to do - test the market with an ebook first - then print if you get a great response.

I think we will see more books being used 'on the move' in digital format. Why not read on your reader or iphone when travelling to work - and perhaps you couldn't bear to leave that bedside book behind so you read it in different formats depending on your location? Or maybe Adam you will be reading an ebook on the train to work and another, printed book at home.

Either way I can't foresee printed books dying, just maybe publishers will print less of them and the digital format will become more common.

This revolution IS a huge change for the publishing industry and fascinating to watch. Australia only has one reader (the iRex iLiad) available for sale here to date- as far as I know - but I know a lot of 'non ebook purchasers' are becoming converted by reading on their iphones.

As the technology improves, so will ebook sales. But long live print I say, and yes - the smell of ink on paper and the FEEL of a book are still enchanting.

Principal at a design company:

I can't wait to read an e-book on one of these: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22plastic+logic%22

[This last commentator included a link to a new technology called “Plastic Logic.” Basically, it is a thin sheet of plastic that renders print and pictures in an e-ink mode. It can be rolled up, treated as a touch screen, and is altogether way cool! See also: http://www.plasticlogic.com/ ]

Writer:

I love books!!! - I write Books!!! - actually recently published a book but have had a number of people asking for an e- version or an audio version. In my view these are different media - the relationship with sound or an electronic gadget is not the same as with a book. I think digital is a trend we will ultimately reverse - passive absorption is lazy - reading takes commitment and is ultimately far more satisfying..... generally (is this just my experience?) people who read books seem to me better educated and more interesting.....

Internet Brand Manager:

Well, I can only say that I write on the internet, but I read only in print. And I think that in the future the digital and the print format of a book will be complementary products.

Educational Writer and Educational Consultant:

Brave to suggest it but, no, paper is not dead. It is, however, now part of a multimedia format and as such there will be a bit of re-jigging as the new digital formats grab a bit of the action but I think give it a couple of years and we will see sales stabilise.

My wrap-up comments:

The Amazon Kindle, the SONY Reader, the plastic scroll—they are not going to kill the printed book, or the printed magazine, or the printed journal. They are already dead.

Dead—if by dead we mean that they have lost their centrality to the transmission of information and culture. Radio started the process of undermining print, television accelerated it, and the Internet jumped up and down on the carcass.

How "bookish" are today's teenagers? Not very, according to a study financed by the Kaiser Family Foundation. America's teens spend 16 hours and 34 minutes a week watching television; 7:26 listening to music; 5:46 in various computer activities and another 1:53 playing video games. They spend two hours and eight minutes in reading.

The Kindle won't replace the book, but we need to recognize that the printed book is becoming more like the candle each day: attractive, useful in many contexts, but not usually necessary for the purpose of interior or exterior lighting.

Even so, the world is full of surprises. I sometimes ask my colleagues if they have read even one entire book online, on the iPhone, whatever. The answer is always NO.

BUT, if you happen to be a Japanese teenager, then your answer might be dramatically different.

In Japan, young women are using their thumbs to tap out serial novels. These stories of love, sex, and loss are posted to websites which are avidly scoured by other young women via their own cellphones or computers. One "cellphone novel" called Love Sky has garnered an estimated 20,000,000 e-readers!

And the story gets even better. The most popular cellphone novel website, Maho no i-rando, has become the host to over one million titles. And the most popular of the novels are being formatted and printed as books. Study the current Japanese best-seller lists and you will find that five of the top ten works of fiction started out as "cellphone novels." (Source: Broken Hearts, Sore Thumbs: Japan's Best Sellers go Cellular, by Norimitsu Onishi, NYT, January 20, 2008)

As Nat King Cole sang:

The radio and the telephone and the movies that we know
May just be passing fancies and in time may go
But oh, my dear, our love is here to stay
(Source: Lyricscafe.com)

In this essay, perhaps we can amend the words to read "our story is here to stay." Face it: we are a story-loving people. That love will find its way from the fireside, through the scroll and the codex and the book-on-tape—and is currently appearing on a screen near you.

So get ready for challenging times. Mark these words: Kindle 5.0 will give you everything: movies, TV shows, video games, news, magazines, blogs, YouTube, Facebook, text books, courseware, telephone, email, chat, GPS, music, audiobooks, crossword puzzles, instant translation, recipes, your photo album, your home movie collection, the latest in cancer research, your calendar, your scientific calculator, pornography, and the time in Sao Paulo.

If this sounds like a marriage of the wireless laptop, the iPhone, and the Kindle—well, you have cottoned on to the idea.

But you may not have grokked the idea. For those people unfamiliar with the verb "grok," it comes from the Martian language and was introduced to the earth by Robert A. Heinlein in his influential book Stranger in a Strange Land. To grok is to deeply understand something.

It is impossible to grok the Kindle, or the iPhone, or the PDA. Handheld devices are moving very quickly toward bundling every electronic service that we can imagine. But our imagination cannot grasp the place of this ultimate device in our culture. Its future is being written each day in the hands of millions of people, and no one knows where it will end up in the learning process, the entertainment business, the family, or the life of the individual.

Neil Stephenson has tried to imagine it in his book The Diamond Age. This author, famous for bringing cutting-edge technology into his novels, posits the ultimate book. There is only one such device, and it incorporates the most advanced "educational" programming of its time. The "book" is in the hands of a little girl. With it, she masters all the known universe.

I shall say no more. Read the book. Available through the Amazon Kindle for $7.96. Or in paperback, used, at Amazon, for as little as $5.56 plus shipping. (Pssst, you could also try your local library.)

Google and Out of Print Books

2009-01-19T07:45:00.000-08:00

Google and Out of Print Books

I have written about the proposed Google Book Settlement, and opined that it is good for the reading public. I believe it is also good for Higher Education. But it is not Great. One might say that Google est bonus , tamen Google est non valde

I live and work in the cat-bird seat of the Academy: the Library. The Academic Library has its nose in everything that every scholar has done, is doing, or hopes to do. To us, Google Books is just another information feed, yet it could be a hell of a game-changer.

One book may tell the story. It’s a volume that I picked up at a yard sale for $2.50 titled Popular Education and Democratic Thought in America. The author is Rush Welter, then a professor at Bennington College. The book was published by Columbia University Press in 1962, and reprinted in paperback several times, but has been out-of-print for perhaps 40 years.

I have the habit of reading a few pages from something nearby while my computer goes through its boot-up routines. I opened Popular Education shortly after the election of Barak Obama. The introduction begins with this line: “In order to understand the American people, one must understand their belief in education.” Welter goes on to assert that, in addition to a materialist conception of politics, ideas themselves have power, and in America the ideals of popular education and democracy are inextricably linked and have a profound social impact.

Welter asserts that ideas can become embedded in the national psyche, and bring about structural change; ideas like “equality,” “opportunity,” “justice,” “fairness,” “the right to vote,” and yes, “In America, any child can grow up to be President.”

Professor Welter’s book is relevant to our time, a time when American ideals seem to have broken the wall of racism, and renewed our belief in ourselves. But the book came out in the 1960s, a time when a growing body of students and their professors were turning against patriotic clichés to the televised reality of an inhumane war in Southeast Asia, and the ugly face of racism in southern killings and northern riots.

Welter’s work was buried under the movement to reveal the ugly forces at work in our society. Ideas and ideals? Forget about it.

Welter died in 2002. His friend and colleague, John Higham, Professor of History Emeritus at Johns Hopkins, penned a memorial in the Newsletter of the Organization of American Historians. Of Popular Education he said:

This may be Rush's finest book. Drawing on an abundant literature of political debates, scholarly inquiries, and popular tracts over a span of two centuries, it explored divisions of opinion with a fullness that matched its commitment to a single unifying theme. I suspect that it is no longer much read because educational history has turned decisively away from the history of ideas in order to immerse itself in the social history of schools and of the families, ethnic groups, and classes they serve… Sometime in the late 1980s, after we had become good friends, he remarked one day that he did not expect his work to be recognized during his lifetime.[i]

From a strictly commercial view, Welter’s book was dead long before he passed away. A few used copies can be purchased online, but once those are sold, or trashed, his work will have been buried ‘neath the sands of time.

Buried, save but for the nation’s libraries. There are 846 copies of his book being held in college, university, and public libraries around the country. So if I want to read Welter’s book, I can travel to any one of the 13 libraries within ten miles of my home that own a copy, or I can ask my local library to borrow it through inter-library loan.

Libraries keep things. And Research Libraries keep almost everything. Harvard keeps twelve million volumes. Stanford, Yale, UNC, and Penn all have between six and ten million books. At the Penn Libraries, we keep almost two million volumes in a high-density storage facility in the old printing floor of the Philadelphia Bulletin Building. Princeton, Columbia, and the New York Public Library have a shared storage facility in a large tract of land in central New Jersey. Books from these units can be retrieved within 48 hours.

But once Google comes fully online and Popular Education as well as virtually every book in any of these facilities is discoverable, readable, printable, even print-on-demandable at your local library or bookstore or coffeeshop—then do 846 libraries still really need to keep copies?

The answer will certainly be that they do not, and the trend toward regionalization and consolidation of holdings will accelerate dramatically. One can see the day when only a few copies will be preserved, with one or two designated as “master” copies, to be held forever.

They will be held forever for at least two reasons. The first reason is that the best preservation method for the text that is contained in a book is…..a book! Ink on paper outlasts every other text storage methodology that we have devised—certainly every digital technology.

There are currently no physical mechanisms that guarantee stable digital storage forever. And there is every reason to think that digital languages will change over time, requiring a massive expenditure to convert old data to new forms. Think of the 5 1/4 inch floppy disk. How many of today’s computers can read from this device? And if the text on the floppy disk is in an early software format like Wordstar, then what?

Paper and parchment have proven to be very durable long-term storage devices. A book of Shakespeare’s sonnets, printed in the 17th century, can still be read by today’s reader without the aid of any device, save perhaps glasses.

The second reason that physical copies of book will be maintained is that the book itself is an object of scholarly interest. Dozens of centers for the “History of the Book” have developed around the world. To such scholars, the physical object itself—the book as artifact—in essential.

It is reasonable to expect that some vast library collections will become, in effect if not in name, Museums of the Book. And that people will travel to these museums to look at books, read books, and study books. Many of the great “special collections” libraries already play this role. One thinks of the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Morgan Library in New York, the Huntington Library in California, the Houghton Library at Harvard. And, of course, the Library of Congress.

[i] Organization of American Historians Newsletter, May 2002, “In Memorium”

Google Book Settlement for Librarians

2008-12-31T07:16:00.000-08:00

Permission is granted to circulate this article, and to print and copy for non-commercial purposes.

Adam Corson-Finnerty is a senior library administrator at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of three obscure books that will be affected by the Google Book Settlement. The sentiments expressed in this article are purely his own and do not represent the views of his library or his university.

Comments are invited: corsonf@pobox.upenn.edu 215-573-1376

Google Book Settlement—For Librarians
By Adam Corson-Finnerty

Introduction

I think that the Google Book Settlement is good for publishers, good for authors, good for libraries, and good for the people.

The reading public will have millions of books available to enjoy, and copyright holders will get new revenue. It will bring us much closer to the Great Library in the Sky.

Once ratified by a judge, the privately negotiated settlement gives Google a green light to digitize virtually every English book in the world, not to mention a few million books in other languages. Whatever money Google makes from this enterprise will be split 37-63, with the lion’s share going to authors and publishers.

What’s Going to Happen

If the Settlement is approved by the presiding judge, as is likely, then here is what will result:

• We will be able to search for, and find, every book, and will be provided with information about its availability in the nearest library, and allowed to purchase online reading access, and be enabled to purchase a print copy at a fair price to be delivered to our office or home;

• We will be able to walk into any public library or college library, and read the full text online of every book in Google’s vast database, for free;

• Colleges and universities will be able to license community access to Google’s entire book database--allowing students and faculty to read and print every book.

This will happen because Google--at its own expense--will scan, process, and save a digital copy of every book it can get its hands upon. We readers will thereby benefit from the enlightened self-interest of our rich "Uncle Google."

Uncle Google will include all books in the “public domain,” that is, books that are out of copyright. There are a few million of those.

Google will include every in-copyright book that has gone out-of-print. In the Settlement, these are referred to as “commercially unavailable.” Out-of-print books are those titles that the publisher has decided to cease printing, cease stocking, and cease selling. These titles dwarf the size of the books that are currently “commercially available.” There are an estimated 20-30 million such titles in the US copyright arena.

Finally, we can predict that the Google database will also include virtually every in-print book, because publishers would be crazy not to make their stuff available through what will quickly become “the largest bookstore on earth.”

Google’s Folly?

My biggest concern about the GBS is that Uncle Google will decide it is a bad investment and back out of it. The Settlement envisions that possibility, and provides a mechanism for transferring the deal to another entity or entities, should Google back out.

The settlement establishes a non-profit organization to administer the deal on behalf of the rights-holders. It is called the Book Rights Registry. This Registry will be controlled by eight Directors—four selected by the American Association of Publishers, and four by the Authors Guild.

Why them? Because they were the ones who brought a class action suit against Google, on behalf of all US authors and all US publishers.

The economics work like this: Google collects its licensing fees, sales income, and whatever other revenue it manages to wrest from the book database, and sends 63% to the BRR. The BRR divides the lucre between various rights-holders. In this, the BRR will be very much like ASCAP, which collects royalties for music performance, and divides it among its "Composers, Authors and Publishers."

Under most book contracts, the rights to the work revert to the author once the publisher decides to stop selling the book. Under the terms of the Settlement, Google will be free to scan any book that is deemed not to be “commercially available.” A rights-holder can opt out of this arrangement, but there is very little reason to do so. Allowing your book to be brought back to life by Google will make you a little bit of money, make you “searchable,” and share your wit and wisdom with generations to come. And the deal is non-exclusive, so it doesn’t prevent you from making other deals.

Rights-holders do need to let the BRR know that they are out there, and give an address so the check can be sent. The agreement envisions that each rights-holder will receive a $200 per title "inclusion fee" for allowing Google to scan the book and make sections of it viewable on their site. Once Google launches its Subscription Service, rights-holders will get a small cut of the receipts. Should anyone pay for the privilege of viewing and “owning” an entire book, the author or publisher gets a piece. And should someone want to order a physical copy of a book, produced through a print-on-demand service like Lightning Source or Booksurge, then the rights-holder gets a cut of that too.

There are many ways that Uncle Google can make money from his book database. First, he will sell annual licenses to the full database, and to subsets of the base (Poetry, perhaps, or Self-Improvement). These licenses can be sold to school, college, and university libraries, as well as to printshops, corporations, and other commercial entities.

Public and college libraries get one free license for one machine in each library branch (or for every 4,000 – 10,000 students), the long lines at this one machine may cause them to purchase additional licenses—at a discount, one would hope, but a price will be paid.

Google will allow individuals to "purchase" digital access to its books, with the price being set either by the rights-holder or by Google. Google will also allow individuals to print out sections or an entire work, at a per-page fee. Advertisements will be placed alongside books— a microscope supply company next to Germ Hunter, for instance. A nanny service next to Jayne Eyre.

The draft settlement indicates that Google does not intend immediately to sell books through print-on-demand, but that it may decide to do so in the future. Similarly, the company may undertake sales of e-books for the Kindle, the Sony Reader, and other handheld devices.

In the strictest economic terms, Google is one of the few companies that has figured out how to monetize eyeballs. To Google, books are just more "content," another chunk of stuff that can be spidered and indexed and given an algorithmic massage, so that more people, spending ever more time in front of their screens, will keep on googling.

Disruptive Technology

New technologies are almost always disruptive. Once they are adopted, things begin to change. Sometimes whole industries change. Sometimes whole societies change. In this case, the combination of the Internet, e-commerce, and print-on-demand technology is upending the book publishing business. It will also up-end the library business.

While most librarians may be aware of POD, it is somewhat less likely that they will know about the Espresso Book Machine. Put this machine together with a book database, and you have the makings of yet another revolution.

The EBM does something very cool. It can print out a 300 page book, with color cover, in four minutes. The end product looks just like a “real” book—because it is a real book. Perfect bound, good paper, clear type. It’s a book.

The soon-to-be-released 2.0 version has a modest footprint, something like 6 ft. by 3 ft.. It will fit nicely in a bookstore, or the lobby of a library, or in a coffeeshop. The EBM has been called “an ATM for books.” It is not quite that yet, but the analogy is spot-on.

The materials cost for a 300-page book is just under $3.00. Amortize the cost of the machine itself, and you have a per-book cost of at most $6.00. Hook it up to the one-million-title Internet Archive and you can publish a lot of interesting and valuable titles—all free of copyright charges, because the books are in the public domain.

Now imagine hooking the EBM up to the Google database. If Google keeps on trucking, then what you will have is the ability to print pretty much every book ever written. Right there in your library.

From a business point of view, it makes perfect sense. The old model of “print, then distribute,” is completely flipped to “distribute, then print.” Very much like what has happened in the Music business—except that in the near term, the physical object (the book) will be the preferred outcome.

No doubt some librarians will worry about what these new books will cost? Indeed, what will it cost to buy a permanent “view” of a book on Google’s database? And what will libraries have to pay to have seven, then ten, then thirty million books available as a subscription?

The answer is, most likely, less than you might think. Remember that music didn’t really start to sell until Apple’s iTunes priced everything at 99 cents a song.

Google has proposed that initially the purchase of permanent e-access to a book will range from $1.99 to $21.99. Nothing higher, and a staggering 65% of the titles will cost less than $7.99. Google will seek permission from the BRR to adjust these rates after three years, and to price titles according to computer-driven algorithms that produce maximum revenues.

As for printed books from the Espresso Book Machine, one should expect that they would cost no more, and probably significantly less, than a book one buys at a Barnes & Noble store, or through Amazon.com.

Library subscriptions to the entire Google Book database are harder to predict. One of the most expensive databases in the academic library world is Science Direct. Each of America’s top research universities pays more than $1,000,000 per year to license its contents for their students, researchers, and faculty. They pay this astronomical sum because Science Direct provides access to more than 4,000 top journals in Science, Technology, and Medicine.

Google’s strategy will probably be quite different than Elsevier, the owner of Science Direct. Rather than “sell high” to a few institutions, Google will want to “sell low” so that its base becomes ubiquitous. After all, it wants customers for life, and college students will lose access to “their” books when they graduate—unless they purchase the individual books in print, or purchase permanent viewing rights.

An Alternate Universe

The Academic Universe is not the same as the Business World. The denizens think different. Differently. Different-ur.

Thus the academic “take” on the Google Book Settlement may be quite distinct from the Publishers’ take, or the Wall Street take, or the view at the Department of Justice. I know this because I live and work in the cat-bird seat of the Academy: the Library.

The Academic Library has its nose in everything that every scholar has done, is doing, or hopes to do. To us, Google is just another information feed, but it’s one hell of a game-changer.

Libraries keep things. And Research Libraries keep almost everything. Harvard keeps twelve million volumes. Stanford, Yale, UNC, and Penn all have between six and ten million books. At the Penn Libraries, we keep almost two million volumes in a high-density storage facility in the old printing floor of the Philadelphia Bulletin Building. Princeton, Columbia, and the New York Public Library have a shared storage facility in a large tract of land in central New Jersey. Books from these units can be retrieved within 48 hours.

But once Google comes fully online and virtually every book in any of these facilities is discoverable, readable, printable, even print-on-demandable at your local library or bookstore or coffeeshop—then do hundreds of libraries really need to keep copies?

The answer will certainly be that they do not, and the trend toward regionalization and consolidation of holdings will accelerate dramatically. One can see the day when only a few copies will be preserved, with one or two designated as “master” copies, to be held forever.

They will be held forever for at least two reasons. The first reason is that the best preservation method for the text that is contained in a book is still a book. Ink on paper outlasts every other text storage methodology that we have devised—certainly every digital technology.

Paper and parchment have proven to be very durable long-term storage devices. A book of Shakespeare’s sonnets, printed in the 17th century, can still be read by today’s reader without the aid of any device, save perhaps glasses.

The second reason that physical copies of book will be maintained is that the book itself is an object of scholarly interest. Dozens of centers for the “History of the Book” have developed around the world. To such scholars, the physical object itself—the book as artifact—in essential.
It is reasonable to expect that some vast library collections will become, in effect if not in name, Museums of the Book. And that people will travel to these museums to look at books, read books, and study books. Many of the great “special collections” libraries already play this role. One thinks of the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Morgan Library in New York, the Huntington Library in California, the Houghton Library at Harvard. And, of course, the Library of Congress.

But most research libraries will have the option of getting out of the massive book storage business.

The Digital Preservation Blues

Some of the “participating libraries” in the Google Books program have described it as having “preservation” as a major outcome. This is a dubious claim.

Oya Rieger is a senior librarian at Cornell. Her responsibilities include electronic scanning of books and manuscripts, the maintenance of a digital repository for the articles and papers that are produced by Cornell faculty, "e-scholarship" programs, "e-publishing," and digital preservation.

Long before Google decided to hoover up the world's books, Cornell, Michigan, Penn, and a handful of other institutions had begun the slow, careful process of scanning print materials, putting digital "facsimiles" up on line for all the world to read, and worrying about how these digital records would be maintained for future generations of scholars.

These efforts look rather puny in comparison to the Google operation. Cornell was digitizing about 1.5 million pages a year. That sounds like a lot, until you realize that this represents only 5,000 books. In contrast, the Google-University of Michigan initiative is scanning 30,000 books per week.

Rieger was asked to undertake a study of such large-scale digitization initiatives, and to ask whether they served the need for digital "preservation." Her conclusion:

[T]here is no evidence to suggest that the corporate and non-profit partners have any long-term business plans for maintaining access to digitized collections or for migrating delivery platforms through future technology cycles.

In other words, No.

Google has not undertaken its enormous scanning project with preservation in mind. The goal is current online access. Therefore, the initial scans were considered "good enough" if they could be easily read easily on a screen, and if 95-99% of the words could be "recognized" by OCR software (which converts pictures of words to machine-readable—searchable—text).

This is a perfectly understandable decision, from a business point of view. And the cooperating libraries—Michigan, Stanford, Harvard, Oxford—are to be commended for allowing Google to create a very good thing, even if it is not the ideal thing.

Rieger's study, "Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization," sets out what "the ideal thing" might require. A true preservation program requires very high quality-control standards. It may sound downright unappetizing, but a preservationist must deal with such things as ingest workflow, file format migration, and bit corruption. Suffice it to say that a complete re-scanning of every volume—under strict quality control standards-- may be just the start of a true digital book preservation program.

GBS Questions for Librarians

Broadly speaking, the Google Book Settlement is a good thing. However, I have some very specific questions that I have not seen addressed by the Library community.

1. The Book Rights Registry is a non-profit entity that plays a critical role in administering the agreement. The BRR is controlled by four author representatives and four publisher representatives, with five votes needed for decisions. Why aren’t there any voting library representatives on this board? Or “public” representatives.

2. This question is made more important by my reading of what happens if Google decides that the book-scanning business is a money sinkhole. We saw Microsoft bail out of the LiveSearch business, so this is not moot. If Google bails, then the BRR takes over the business (with some library participation) and must seek new commercial or non-commercial partners. All the more reason to have some “public” directors.

3. Here is something cool to think about. In-print books and public domain books appear to be the tip of the iceberg. The greatest number of titles are out-of-print but still in copyright. I have seen estimates of 20-30 million titles. In most cases, the rights to such works may have reverted to the author. Google is going to have a green light to scan these titles for inclusion in its database, and for selective display, and commercial use, unless the author formally objects. The author will get a cut of any revenue, through the distributive mechanism of the BRR. All well and good. But this also opens an interesting opportunity. Allowing your book to be in the GBS is non-exclusive. Therefore, authors could also give publication rights to a non-profit entity, perhaps their university library, perhaps to a coalition of libraries.

4. I have heard that Google’s scans are not preservation quality, and perhaps not even print-on-demand quality. That mass scanning and machine-only OCR cause many quality problems. This includes missed pages, pages that are blurry, pages that are cut off, foldouts that are skipped or distorted, meaningless word translations, and so on. Google itself is at pains to say something about this in the draft settlement:

17:10 Scan Quality. Google will strive to detect and eliminate errors in the Digitization quality or Metadata. Google makes no guarantees, however, regarding the Digitization quality or Matadata quality of any Book or Insert….

5. A related question: the Google Agreement is between the company and authors and publishers. Artists, photographers, and illustrators are not included. I have heard that this will mean the images in an in-copyright book will be blanked out. This would be a terrific lose to general readers as well as scholarly readers. One hopes that Google is pursuing a comparable “deal” with these groups.

6. A different sort of question is this: If Google is successful, then virtually every book ever printed in English, and millions of titles in other languages, will be available to read, print out, and purchase through print-on-demand. So most academic research libraries can get out of the book storage business, right?

You can see what I mean: save a few preservation master copies, and a dozen circulating copies for those who want to study the book as artifact, and dump the rest. For most of our patrons, if they want to read the book on paper, a printed facsimile should do just fine. Are we ready to crawl out on that limb?

7. I am really puzzled by what is said about “mining” the GBS database. Only “non-consumptive” research will be permitted, and scholars must apply for permission to use the database, stating their intent.

What the heck is "non-consumptive" research? Here is how the draft settlement describes the term:

"Non-Consumptive Research" means research in which computational analysis is performed on one or more Books, but not research in which a researcher reads or displays substantial portions of a Book to understand the intellectual content presented within the Book.
Got that?

This might appear to mean that you can count words and analyze patterns, but you cannot see the words or phrases in context, if seeing is indeed "consuming". Take this bit of possible research: Suppose you wanted to study how widely the term “fulsome praise” has transmuted from having a negative connotation to having a positive one. You would have to see the phrase in context, which means that you have to "consume" some additional words, maybe even a paragraph or two.

I have been assured by a representative of one of the chief library partners, that such research will be allowed. And, indeed, the settlement indicates "Linguistic Analysis" will be allowed. This is defined as "Research that performs linguistic analysis over the Research Corpus to understand language, linguistic use, semantics and syntax as they evolve over time and across different genres or other classifications of Books."

OK. So we can eat a few words, but not a "substantial" amount of words. One hopes—and assumes—that "consumptive" research which allows reading to "understand the intellectual content" of a work will be provided for under the "subscription" service. However, the subscription database would have to be organized to aid massive analysis by computer, and the ability to jump out to the text, and back in to the data. There is no indication in the settlement that the subscription database will be optimized for scholarly inquiry. Indeed, it appears quite the opposite—that there will be, in effect, two databases—one for substantial reading, and one for "non-consumptive" research.

Google will allow the establishment of two outside research bases, both of which are restricted to “non-consumptive” research. It is likely that a coalition of libraries led by the University of Mishigan will manage one such database. And I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Stanford will have first dibs on managing the other (but see my blog on the shakeup at the Stanford Library: http://musingsofcorsonf.blogspot.com/2008/12/shakeup-at-sul-stanford-university.html )

If my conjecture is correct, then the settlement represents a very significant loss to the academic community--the loss of true "consumptive" research.

The full text of the draft Google Book Settlement can be downloaded from
http://books.google.com/booksrightsholders/agreement-contents.html
See Also:
1. ALA/ARL Overview of Settlement:
http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/google-settlement-13nov08.pdf

2. Principles and Recommendations for the Google Book Search Settlement, by James Grimmelman
http://laboratorium.net/archive/2008/11/08/principles_and_recommendations_for_the_google_book

3. "Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization," by Oya Y. Rieger, A report to the Council on Library and Information Resources, February 2008. http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub141abst.html

Permission is granted to circulate this article, and to print and copy for non-commercial purposes.

Adam Corson-Finnerty is a senior library administrator at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of three obscure books that will be affected by the Google Book Settlement. The sentiments expressed in this article are purely his own and do not represent the views of his library or his university.

Comments are invited: corsonf@pobox.upenn.edu 215-573-1376

Shakeup at SUL (Stanford University Library)

2008-12-14T06:16:00.000-08:00

[Note that this article represents the opinion of the author only; that I have drawn my information from documents themselves and not from any contact with Stanford faculty or Library staff; and that I really do love books.]

Shakeup at SUL (Stanford University Library)

No, I’m not talking about personnel changes. This is much more serious than that.

The Stanford University Libraries just got what many of us in academic libraryland have prayed for: Massive Attention from its faculty. The results may prove that librarians should be careful what they wish for.

On November 13, 2008, the Stanford Faculty Senate was presented with a major report from its Committee on Libraries (C-Lib). The report was accepted, thus resulting in what appears to be a stinging whack on the head to both the Provost and the Library Director.

The Provost is currently reeling from a far more serious blow: a reduction of perhaps $100M in the General Funds budget over the next two years. This shortfall has caused Provost Etchemendy to require his administrators to present three plans that cut their budgets by 5%, and 7%, and 10% for the next year. (See: “President, Provost, Deans Ax Own Salaries” at http://www.stanforddaily.com/cgi-bin/?p=1801 )

As painful as these cuts may be, they may not affect the Stanford Library as profoundly as will the Faculty resolution. This unanimous decision sets a two-year process in motion—one that will steer away from a “virtual library” course toward what the C-LIB calls a “hybrid library.” And the hands on the tiller will be faculty hands, student hands, librarian hands, and old hands. Old as in “old-fashioned.”

OK, so maybe I am being overly dramatic. Turns out that a “Hybrid” library is what we are all aiming for: a library system that delivers the best digital resources *and* the best paper resources. Not a big deal—as an ideal—until you get down such things as money, personnel, shelf space, remote storage, browseability, money, Stanford’s Google Books partnership, physical space allocation, money and the positing of a model that’s supposed to be just dandy for the next 50 years.

The Back Story

Our tale ostensibly begins in 2007, when it was announced that SUL’s Meyer Library was going to be torn down and replaced with an academic computing center. Meyer Library happens to house the main corpus of the East Asian Library—about 350,000 volumes. The plan was that these books would be moved to the larger Green Library, and a large chunk of Green’s holdings would be moved to an off-campus high-density storage site. As C-LIB reported, “Faculty in many of the affected areas were alarmed by the specter of a good part of their research material leaving campus…”

So a Town Meeting was called. Provost Etchemendy presided. As faculty aired their objections and posed their questions, “the outline became clear of an already existing high-level decision not to build any expansion of bookshelf space on the central campus. This direction took most of those in attendance by surprise, for the faculty had not been polled widely nor publicly on the issue.”

The plot thickens. High-level decisions made in closed-door meetings; Faculty ignored; Bookshelves in stasis. Big mistake.

Mistakes don’t usually make for an interesting story. One needs an evil villain. Fortunately our tale has just what the story-doctor ordered: Google.

Yes, Google. Do-no-evil Google. Rich Uncle Google, who only wants to gather up every little bit of stray information, like little lost sheep, and place them in a nice, neat corral—so they can be easily found.

Stanford, we now recall, is one of the two keystone libraries in the Google Book Scanning program. The libraries at Stanford and U. Michigan agreed to open their stacks for Google’s massive digitization program, including volumes still in copyright. The Author’s Guild and the American Association of Publishers didn’t like this idea. They claimed Copyright was being violated. So they sued.

By the time a tentative settlement was reached, in October 2008, over 7,000,000 books had been digitized. Google agreed to split revenues with authors and publishers, and received a green light to continue. Stanford and Michigan were vindicated in taking the risk, and everyone lived happily ever after. Not.

Stanford’s C-Lib committee seems to have become unhappier and unhappier, the closer they looked into the implications of the Stanford-Google deal. “Our committee has concluded that a headlong leap into Google Books does not hold out equal promise to all disciplines within the University and threatens, in fact, to stifle research in some of them. We have tried to ask: what type of planning would we be doing today if Google Books had not come along?”

Indeed, the committee looked again at the Library’s formal, strategic plan, and discovered a wolf in sheep’s clothing: “Our effort will be to maximize desktop access to content.” Little had they realized what this phrase might portend.

With Google clocking at 7M books and heading for at least 15M, maybe 30M, the real possibility exists that the Stanford Library—and every other library—could dump their books and point customers to their screens.

Of course, somebody should keep a few master copies of every book, both as a preservation mechanism, but also so that the book-as-artifact can be studied. But it doesn’t have to be Stanford, does it?

Why can’t Stanford eschew the book storage business and Go Completely Digital? Isn’t this the inevitable future for most and/or all information-providing institutions?

Perhaps, but not in the lifetimes of the current Stanford faculty, or the next generation of scholars, or the one after that:

The sub-committee believes it will require at least two generations of

faculty renewal—something like 50 years—before electronic media take precedence over paper support in some fields of inquiry. Even then, serious research libraries will need to be hybrid institutions, able to fulfill seamlessly, and at the highest level, the needs of scholars working on both sides of the electronic/paper divide.

The electronic/paper divide. Who knew?

Having a Good Browse

If there is anything that characterizes the tone of the subcommittee’s report, it is an appreciation of browsing.

Browsing is a spatial practice within a physical domain described by an immediate research question. It is a process of discovery intimately shaped by the structures of a vertically-integrated library: at once human in scale (a reader’s body moves physically through a library), and psychologically satisfying for its moments of insight. Libraries of the future, whatever technologies they embody, should be mindful of this tradition and be designed to enhance the benefits of browsing, not render it obsolete.

Let me say right here that I adore browsing. What could be more satisfying that wandering through the stacks of a great library, seeing what surrounds a book that you have gone to fetch? Since my office is in the library, I often find myself returning with 10 books when I thought I was only needing one. The phrase “happier than a pig in mud” comes to mind.

But I am 64 years old. In the world of my youth, a library was a building. Now it’s a screen.

To read the C-Lib report is to engage in a wander down memory lane. To get us in the proper nostalgic mood, the authors begin with the 2008 Oxford Dictionary Online definition of a library: LIBRARY. A building, room, or set of rooms, containing a collection of books for the use of the public or of some particular portion of it….

The subcommittee notes that the majority of Stanford’s faculty (presumably meaning tenured faculty) “were trained using libraries of the sort just described.” And, further, that the art of browsing was highly important to their intellectual development, and should be important to undergraduate students, graduate students, and junior faculty: “Browsing is not a search through a vast panorama of knowledge. Indeed, the qualitative differences between browsing and searching are non-trivial.”

Non-trivial. A good term to keep in mind, since the subcommittee’s recommendations, adopted by the Faculty Senate, are certainly non-trivial.

But back to browsing. Much as I adore browsing, I have to note that in my 16 years at an academic library, I don’t see a lot students keeping me company. The aisles are not crowded. And I certainly do not see a lot of faculty. If you want to see a lot of browsing, go to a Barnes & Noble. Go to a supermarket. Go to a hardware store. There, you will see some browsing. You may even bump into people, even find yourself reaching for the same head of lettuce. Seriously, go someplace where active browsing takes place, and then go to the open stacks of a large academic library. I promise that you will not feel crowded.

Sorry, C-Lib, the campus answer to “how do I get to the Library?” is increasingly “Log On.”

Our mental picture of the college library has to be expanded. If we think of an ivy-covered building, or a building of any sort, we are being very twentieth century. The twenty-first century image of an academic library might better be an LCD screen. This could be a computer screen, a PDA screen, a phone screen, even an image on the inside of our glasses. Try this mental exercise: What is the first image that pops to mind when I write: CNN. It might be the concept, “news.” It might be a picture of a face on a screen. But I bet it’s not a mental image of the CNN headquarters building in Atlanta.

The academic library need no longer be thought of as a building or a set of buildings where service is provided and academic work gets done. This radical shift has caused some deep soul-searching about “the library as place.” Librarians and campus planners ask: Just how much physical space does an academic library need, and what should the space be used for?

This is not an easy matter. The physical library has a strong hold on our imaginations, representing more than the sum of the activities that may be conducted within its walls. We can trace this back to ancient Greek and Roman libraries, which not only stored scrolls and later, codices, but also included galleries, reading rooms, and gardens. Thus ancient libraries functioned as social spaces, as places for contemplation but also as places for conversation. Today’s public libraries continue this tradition.

In the United States, the main campus library building is often referred to as the “heart” of the university. It is described as a “crossroads,” an “oasis,” as a “center for intellectual exchange,” and even as “a great place to find a date.” It has been observed that ever since Thomas Jefferson placed the library at the center of his plan for the University of Virginia, campus planners have followed this model.

But the 21^st century academic library is “anywhere and everywhere.” It is 24/7/365. At least in theory, it will sustain a scholar who never sets foot in a library building and never borrows a (physical) book. This does not mean that colleges and universities should start closing their library buildings. It does not mean that new library buildings should not be built. But it does mean that the size and the co-located services in a library building are increasingly a matter of choice, and not a matter of necessity.

The “old” library was centered on the storage and accessibility of physical objects containing information: books, magazines, scholarly journals, newspapers, printed theses, manuscripts, VHS tapes, CDs, DVDs. Patrons of the old library had to physically show up in order to achieve their goals. Therefore it made sense to locate reading rooms, study lounges, study carrels, seminar rooms, reference services, research consultation, information skills training, group study rooms, group viewing rooms, classrooms, and even “learning cafes” on its premises.

The “new” library will increasingly be liberated from physical objects. It will still have and make available physical objects but increasingly its services will be digital, distributed, and largely self-managed by its patrons.

This makes possible what I think of as the “minimalist” library. That is, a library with a very small footprint, and perhaps with no “public” spaces. Just computers and offices, and the staff who feed them, and the staff who go out to the classroom, the study center, the lab, the student center, the dorm common room, the faculty offices—to provide coaching and training and to learn about new information needs.

On the other hand, there is nothing that requires a minimalist approach. Campus administrators can decide that they want a crossroads library, one that plays a broad social function for the institution. They can fold in a café, a bookstore, they can even design a campus mall of which the library is part. Academic computing can be relocated to the Library, as can courseware support and instruction. An “Information Commons” can be created that brings together various student advisors and high-tech instructors, along with cutting edge equipment and collaborative spaces. Lectures, exhibitions, musical programs, academic symposia, lunch talks, dinners with the President, cocktail parties, film festivals—all this and more can be offered in the library-as-campus-crossroads.

The decision is a choice, and the choice can be different for different units and for different campuses.

The Bookless Library?

At the heart of the Stanford flap is the question of the book. Are printed books essential to the 21^st century academic library? Do we have to keep them on campus? Is it important to have open stacks, so that collections can be browsed?

Libraries keep things. And Research Libraries keep almost everything. Harvard keeps twelve million volumes. Stanford, Yale, UNC, and Penn all have between six and ten million books. At the Penn Libraries, we keep almost two million volumes in a high-density storage facility in the old printing floor of the Philadelphia Bulletin Building. Princeton, Columbia, and the New York Public Library have a shared storage facility in a large tract of land in central New Jersey. Stanford has similar high-density facilities. Books from these units can be retrieved within 24-48 hours.

The C-Lib subcommittee clearly finds such facilities distasteful:

High-density storage facilities, like Stanford’s at Livermore, are truly remarkable

machines designed to ensure that no materials are lost. But they have nothing in common with libraries. Rather, they employ procedures used by companies like Toyota to store spare parts: it makes no difference to the filing system what a book is about, because the only parameters that matter are a book’s physical dimensions and coordinates in a grid of shelves and aisles.

This is a far cry from the sylvan groves of learning. Too far for the scholars who agreed to serve on the subcommittee, and whose report was adopted unanimously by the Faculty Senate.

Here are the key recommendations:

We recommend that SUL modify its emphasis when explaining its primary mission. We believe it is not “to maximize desktop access to content,” but to provide the most supple and flexible support in a hybrid environment of print and electronic materials.

We believe that 5.5 million volumes is a useful and practical figure for the size of a core collection based on center campus.

To house this collection, we recommend building a structure in close proximity to Green, possibly underground, featuring state-of-the-art compact shelving with books arranged by call number and accessible for browsing by users. It should hold about 4 million volumes….

The subcommittee recognizes that Stanford will not be able to keep all of its volumes on campus. Stanford Librarian Mike Keller notes that the University purchases between 100,000 and 150,000 new books every year, and Stanford, like most Research Libraries, is already full. If 100,000 books come in, then 100,000 books need to go out. No one at Stanford is suggesting that these books simply be thrown away—although that would be an option (see argument below).

Since the subcommittee wants to keep all of its cake, keep as much of it nearby as possible, and be able to get the rest of its cake quickly and efficiently, it also recommends improvements in finding every slice. That is, improvements to the catalog.

No book is to be transferred to SAL3 [high-density storage] until its cataloging has been updated and deepened when necessary, nor before its title page, table of contents, and index are scanned and fully searchable.

There is nothing wrong with this recommendation, and indeed it represents a nice expansion of the catalog as a research tool. It is lucky that Stanford is already in the mass scanning business, since for most research libraries, having to scan and mount this information for each book being transferred would create a severe case of constipation.

Non-Trivial Matters

The C-Lib subcommittee is not retrograde—despite my occasional poke at them. They recognize that digital resources are increasingly important, and in some fields are the predominant form of scholarly exchange. When they ask their readers to imagine a world without Google Book Search, they are not inviting a sojourn in the pre-Internet past, but looking forward to the many changes that will transpire in the years ahead. Will Google always be around, they ask? That question seems unthinkable to the average Netizen, but then, who would have thought that General Motors would sink like a stone?

What the subcommittee wants for Stanford is what we all want for our universities: an excellent digital library combined with an excellent paper-and-artifact library.

Not a problem. Except for one non-trivial item. It’s called money.

The estimated cost to fulfill the subcommittee’s recommendations is $200,000,000. That seems like a huge figure, but the committee notes that Stanford is prepared to raise $200M for new dorms, and $400M for a new business school. It also notes that the Provost was happy to include the latter two projects in his Capital Campaign priority list, but that “libraries were not on the list.” The cover memo for their report goes on to say that, “if Stanford is to imagine itself the top, or a top, university in the world, that ambition will remain no more than a fancy until library infrastructure matches that available in other areas of the university on the Provost’s list.”

And there’s the rub. Money. And in Stanford’s case, space—because the local municipality has placed severe restrictions on how much the University can construct on its campus. But, as the subcommittee notes, the University has managed to build other new facilities. It is all a matter of institutional will and “the determination of Stanford’s leaders.” Clearly this determination has been focused elsewhere, since “in our view, the libraries at Stanford have not been funded with the largesse and vision showered on the research laboratories of the scientists and engineers in our midst.” (My emphasis)

So the President and Provost at Stanford don’t care about the library. If so, they are not alone. Over the past 15 years, Research-1 universities have steadily given a smaller piece of their budget to their libraries. Year after year. Drip, drip, drip—like a Chinese water torture.

Meanwhile, the cost of academic materials has been going up each year; something like 6% per year. Further, a small group of publishers has gotten control of the core academic journals in Science, Technology, and Medicine. This semi-monopoly has allowed them to increase their rates by an average 10% a year.

So let’s look at the academic library in this light. Let’s anthropomorphisize and imagine the library is Mike Keller, or another one of the Directors of Research Libraries around the country. There he is, his forehead getting the drip, drip, drip of reduced resources, while his body is being squeezed in the vise by the big STM publishers, and the book-lovers among the faculty are pulling both arms, while the tech-lovers are pulling both legs as they ask for more licensed databases.

And is Keller supposed to also be taking a 10% salary cut while all this is happening? Geeessshhh!

I am going to stop here. The faculty-in-revolt have done us all a great favor. They have pointed out that the academic library is under-appreciated, under-funded, and overwhelmed with demands—including theirs.

Now what?

**************************************************************************

The report:

http://facultysenate.stanford.edu/2008_2009/reports/SenD6136_c_lib_dig_info.pdf

The Subcommittee’s Cover memo, which is quite pithy:

http://facultysenate.stanford.edu/2008_2009/reports/SenD6152_C_Lib_Cvr_Memo.pdf

The Faculty Senate Resolution:

http://facultysenate.stanford.edu/2008_2009/reports/SenD6160_c_lib_digital_it.pdf

Seven Questions About the GBS Deal

2008-12-08T13:35:00.000-08:00

GBS Questions for Librarians

By Adam Corson-Finnerty
December 8, 2008

I believe that, broadly speaking, the Google Book Settlement is a good thing.
However, I have some very specific questions that I have not seen addressed by the Library community.

1. The Book Rights Registry is a non-profit entity that plays a critical role in administering the agreement. The BRR is controlled by four author representatives and four publisher representatives, with five votes needed for decisions. Why aren’t there any library representatives on this board? Or “public” representatives.

2. This question is made more important by my reading of what happens if Google decides that the book-scanning business is a money sinkhole. We saw Microsoft bail out of the LiveSearch business, so this is not moot. If Google bails, then the BRR takes over the whole operation. All the more reason to have some “public” directors.

3. Here is something cool to think about. In-print books and public domain books appear to be the tip of the iceberg. The greatest number of titles are out-of-print but still in copyright. I have seen estimates of 20-30 million titles. In most cases, the rights to such works will have reverted to the author. Google is going to have a green light to scan these titles for inclusion in its database, and for selective display, and commercial use, unless the author formally objects. The author will get a cut of any revenue, through the distributive mechanism of the BRR. All well and good. But this also opens an interesting opportunity. Allowing your book to be in the GBS is non-exclusive. Therefore, authors could also give publication rights to a non-profit entity, perhaps their university library, perhaps to a coalition of libraries. Authors could sign a “creative commons” license for their out-of-print titles, thus adding immeasurably to the Open Access corpus. Shouldn’t we get organized and go after this opportunity?

4. I am really freaked by what is said about “mining” the GBS database. Only “non-consumptive” research will be permitted. That appears to mean that you can count words and analyze patterns, but you cannot see the words or phrases in context. This seems so outrageous that I hope that I am mis-interpreting. A simple example will suffice: Suppose you wanted to study how widely the term “fulsome praise” has transmuted from having a negative connotation to having a positive one. You would have to see the phrase in context. Google will allow the establishment of three research bases, all of which are restricted to “non-consumptive” research. OK, but will the “institutional subscription” then allow datamining *with* context? If not, this is a scandal and academic librarians should be shouting from the rooftops.

5. A different sort of question is this: If Google is successful, then virtually every book ever printed in English, and millions of titles in other languages, will be available to read, print out, and purchase through print-on-demand. So can most academic research libraries get out of the book storage business? You can see what I mean: save a few preservation master copies, and a dozen circulating copies for those who want to study the book as artifact, and dump the rest. For most of our patrons, if they want to read the book on paper, a printed facsimile should do just fine.

6. And yet, I have heard that Google’s scans are certainly not preservation quality, and perhaps not even print-on-demand quality. Does anyone know?

7. Finally, the Google Agreement is between the company and authors and publishers. Artists, photographers, and illustrators are not included. I have heard that this will mean the images in an in-copyright book will be blanked out. Is this true? Has anyone heard of Google pursuing a “deal” will these groups?

Fundraiser As Concierge

2008-04-02T17:44:00.000-07:00

You’ve Got a Friend

"The Inside View"
By Stephen X. Lawrence
(Stephen X. Lawrence is the nom de plume of a working development officer at a major not-for-profit institution.)

Occasionally I am enjoying social event and the following scene ensues:

Absolute stranger, extending hand: "Hey, I'm Lester Winsome. Haven't seen you before."

Me: "Steve Lawrence. Nice to meet you."

Lester: "What do you do, Steve?"

Me: "I'm a gift officer for VeryGoodCause."

Lester: "How 'bout that? A fund-raiser… Well…. Say, I believe my wife is calling me. Gotta go."

Actually, taking a powder is one of the more polite responses when I tell people what I do for a living. There's the awkward "Oh…" followed by a long silence. Or the especially witty, "A fund-raiser, huh? You must be good at picking pockets!"

Ha, Ha. But the joke is on the Lesters of the world. To paraphrase J.P Morgan, If you are worried about what a gift officer might cost you, then you can't afford one.

Seasoned philanthropists know that they have nothing to fear from a gift officer. Quite the opposite. The sole task of a fund-raiser is to make donors happy. The best analogy would be with the concierge of a first-class hotel. His job is to make sure you have a good experience while you are sojourning, and that you want to return.

A top fund-raiser is charming, polite, and accommodating. She has excellent social graces. She is a good listener, and is well-informed about the cause or program that you are considering for your investment of time and treasure. She respects the fact that you know how to manage your money (otherwise you wouldn't have any!). She knows that the decision to make a gift to her organization, or to another—or not at all--is completely in your hands. Her job is to let you know what you could accomplish by working through her institution. She wants you to be confident that your gift will be effective. Since that's what you want, you have an ally.

Don't get me wrong. I am not arguing that gift officers are selfless saints. Virtue is not the point. Functionality is the point. The function of a gift officer like me is the care and nurture of people like you. To put it simply: I am paid to work on your behalf.

Here are some examples, drawn from real life.

At International Relief Agency X, a major donor is interested in learning more about on-the-ground conditions in Laos. The development officer can obtain and clear raw field reports for review. When a member of the field staff returns to the U.S., a private briefing can be arranged for the donor. It is even possible to arrange a full-scale field visit, providing her with an opportunity to see and learn things about village life in Laos that would never be included in any tourist package.

At Prestigious University Y, a donor has endowed a professorship in Political Science. The concierge—oops, I mean development officer—can make sure that busy Professor Peabody writes to the donor at least once a year with details of what he has been up to. Or, how about lunch with Professor Peabody at the Faculty Club? And, while you are on campus, a meeting with the Dean to discuss the future of the Department or whatever is on your mind.

At Cancer Research Center Z, a donor family has underwritten the research of a very promising young doctor. In addition to reports on her work, the development officer may be able to provide personal access to other researchers, tours of the labs, and early information about new research plans. If the donor is seeking a cure for some form of cancer, the development officer can scan the literature and interview front-line researchers to bring the latest information about progress (or dead-ends).

Thus far, what I have described may sound like standard major donor operating procedure, and it is. The "concierge" aspect comes in when the donor realizes that the development officer can provide assistance in all of his interactions with the institution, even very small matters. For instance, parking in a convenient location while visiting. For instance, getting an interview for the daughter of a close friend at good old Y University. For instance, finding out what clinical trials are coming up at Cancer Center Z, and what the criteria are for admission into the test group. For instance, making sure that no other development officer from X knocks on your door.

I have introduced donors to people they want to meet. I have taken their college-age children out to lunch in faraway cities and then reported back to the anxious parent about how they are doing. I have tracked down books, obtained tickets, and advised them on donations to other institutions. I have petted their dog and made a fourth for bridge. It's all in a day's work.

But don't get carried away. There are limits, as one of my donors discovered a few years ago. He called one afternoon to ask if I would pen a few paragraphs for him on the relationship between Darcy and Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice. "You can just email it to me," he said, explaining that his daughter was practicing for a big tennis match and was behind in her homework. I declined the honor.

So, the next time you meet someone at a cocktail party, and he or she says that they work in development, shake their hand and ask them to tell you about their institution or their field of service, just as you might if you had met a cancer researcher or a college professor. Don't worry about having your pocket picked. This is not about loose change and folding money. This is about big bucks, and if you have them, then you are in the driver's seat. If you don't, well then, have another drink and enjoy the free food.

****************************************

Stephen X. Lawrence invites comments on his posts, and welcomes suggestions and tips for future "inside" looks at the art and practice of fundraising.

A Reflection on the Amazon Kindle

2007-12-29T06:54:00.000-08:00

By Adam Corson-Finnerty

In 1962 a taxi dropped me off at the men's dorm at Penn. I had a small trunk filled with clothes and a wallet. I did not have a laptop, a cell phone, an iPod, or an Amazon Kindle. I was a primitive.

I didn't know anybody. Fortunately, I had two social skills that came in handy. One was bridge, and the other was rugby. There was no rugby team at Penn, but a few Brits and a South African formed a rugby "club". The difference being that a club was unofficial, unregulated, and while I didn't get PE credit, I did manage to drink a lot of beer after each game in the company of mud-stained, bruised, funny-talking men.

One of those men was a fellow American who sold encyclopedias during the summer. During a long ride to Penn State, he regaled five of us squeezed into a Dodge with stories of salesmen's tricks. Here was one: you found a house in the suburbs that had children's toys in the yard. You knocked on the door and said that you really needed to go to the bathroom. Naturally (this was 1962, after all) they would let you in to use the facility. When you came out, you looked around with slight consternation and said that you didn't see an encyclopedia anywhere. Didn't they care about their children's education?

The key to selling encyclopedias was the notion that a good chunk of the world's knowledge was contained therein. Little Johnny may only be five years old, but soon he will enter first grade, and the next thing you know he will be reading. Don't you want him to get ahead of the other little johnnies? And with this, he sold aspiring families a set of 20 volumes that cost thousands in today's dollars. But wait; there's more. Lucky them, each year they would receive a Yearbook with the very, very latest knowledge—and at a modest additional cost.

The Amazon Kindle requires 399 of today's dollars. It comes with wireless access to Wikipedia as a door prize, a freebie, a sweetener for geeks like me who realize what utterly astonishing times we live in.

Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world. There are more than 75,000 active contributors working on some 9,000,000 articles in more than 250 languages. As of today [Dec 22, 2007], there are 2,139,791 articles in English; every day hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to enhance the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia. (Source: Wikipedia, of course)

The Kindle also comes pre-installed with the New Oxford Dictionary, and oh, btw, it allows you to search and navigate the entire Web.

Big deal, you say. My wireless laptop already allows me to search the web, with images and in color. My laptop streams movies and music. It sends email and allows instant chat. I can skype with my laptop. Can the Kindle do that? (To which the answer is no, not yet.)

So why would anyone who owns a laptop, or a desktop computer, or for that matter an iPhone—why would any such person want a Kindle? Amazon-dot-com hopes that the answer is obvious: to read a book.

The Book

We don't think of the book as a piece of sophisticated technology, yet it exactly that, evolved over twenty centuries. Our good friend Wikipedia reminds us that early writing appeared on clay tablets, migrated through parchment leaves and the vellum scroll, and ended up in the codex format (bound leaves), mass-printed, on paper of varying quality and durability. The modern book, with its table of contents, list of illustrations, index, bibliography, and footnote or endnote is efficient, portable, relatively lightweight, durable, and requires no power cord or battery. If we drop it on the floor, it doesn't break. If we leave it on the subway, we are not out 400 bucks.

So what "value added" can possibly make it worth purchasing a Kindle? If you are at my age and station in life, the answer is nothing, nada, zip, won't happen.

I have been completely acculturated to regard each book as a trophy. When I carry Shantaram on the train, I am showing the world what I am reading. It helps start conversations; even silent observers are likely to be impressed, or at least curious. I can casually perch it on my desk at work, or my coffee table, or the reading shelf next to the bed. And when I am done, I feel a sense of accomplishment. I have bagged my game, brought it home, digested it, and now I can display it on my bookshelf. Oh yes, I finished that, I say to the visitor who is lazily waiting for the film to arrive. And now I am into Becoming Madame Mao. Anchee Min is so critical to understanding the tortured Chinese mind, don't you think?

Similarly, I learn a lot about other people by perusing their bookshelves and magazine racks. Such displays are my generation's facebook.

But what about the newest generation? Are they ready to go post-paper? If so, the Kindle will be seen as a step in the right direction. Shantaram--the tale of an Australian prison escapee hiding out in Mumbai--is 933 pages long. It weighs about three pounds. It lists for $24.95 in hardback. The Kindle weighs ten ounces. A full download of Shantaram will take less than 30 seconds and will cost $9.99. The Kindle will hold more than one hundred books like this. And, frankly, the print on Shantaram is kind of small. On the Kindle I can choose six font sizes.

I haven't loaded Shantaram onto my Kindle. Score one for the old guard—it's not yet available. But 94,592 books are, including Eat, Pray, Love; Born Standing Up; and I am America. Here's what I have bagged so far: A Thousand Splendid Suns, The Black Swan, and Emma. The first two cost me $9.99, Amazon's top price. The latter, being out of copyright, cost me $1.49. I also have free trail subscriptions to the Nation, the Washington Post, and MIT Technology Review. If I keep the Washington Post, it will cost me $9.99 per month. Blog subs are also available (Huffington Post, The Onion) at $1.99 per month.

Groovey, man. I'm a pioneer, an early adopter. People interrupt me at Starbucks and ask "So what do you think?" (Notice that they don't say "So what are you reading?") To which the answer is: don't know yet. Sure, it's easy to acquire a "book," but will I ever read it?

Ask around. Has anyone in your circle ever read an entire book on a screen—any screen? I doubt it.

The fact is that people do not read books online. People don’t even read long articles online. The vast majority of people who come across something they want to read print it out. And they read it later, on the train or on the plane, or in the car, or on the can. Or they go and buy the book.

Virtually no one is going to read an online copy of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (freely available at literature.org, 502 pages). Viewers might read a passage, or search for a term, or even read a chapter, but they will not sit at a screen for hours reading page after page of text. They won’t even do this for Eat, Pray, Love or John Grisham’s latest novel. If they are truly interested in the entire work, they will borrow it from a library, or buy it, or print it out. Hewlett-Packard knows this. Its printer business is clipping right along, with the major source of growth being this: printing Web pages.

Of course a fistful of Web pages can be awkward to carry and difficult to store. How nice it would be if those Web pages were printed on two sides, reduced from 8.5 x 11 to a more manageable size, and bound for easy handling and storage. Face it: the book is a remarkably good piece of technology. It is easy to access, portable, durable, and relatively inexpensive. The book has not gone the way of the cracker barrel or the buggy whip. It still works just fine for conveying text and images.

So the codex can say, along with Mark Twain, that the rumors of its death are premature. But one should note that Mark Twain did eventually die.

The Death of Print

The Amazon Kindle is not going to kill the printed book, nor the printed magazine, nor the printed journal. They are already dead—if by dead we mean that they have lost their centrality to the transmission of information and culture. Radio started the process of undermining print, television accelerated it, and the Internet jumped up and down on the carcass.

If we want to find an era when books and newspapers were "electric" in their influence, we need look no further than the life of Benjamin Franklin, narrated in his Autobiography. Franklin educated and improved himself through books. By the age of 16, he had already established a small "fund" for purchases, wrestled from his meager apprentice wages. He borrowed books from friends and even had a friend "borrow" books from a gentleman's library which he would read overnight and have re-shelved by morning, lest they be missed. Pilgrim's Progress, Burton's Historical Collections, Plutarch's Lives—all these were devoured in his early teens. Coming across several books against Deism, he read them and decided he was a Deist. He developed his own writing style by modeling it against articles in The Spectator.

Franklin was famous for launching public projects to serve the common good. His first such project was to create a subscription library in Philadelphia, with the aid of fellow members of his reading and discussion group, the Junto:

…[T]his was the mother of all North American subscription libraries, now so numerous. It is become a great thing itself, and continually increasing. These libraries have improved the general conversations of the Americans, made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the stand so generally made throughout the colonies in defense of their privileges. (Source: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, taken from our home shelf, and contained in The Harvard Classics, "Deluxe Edition," copyright 1909. Page 67. )

Fast forward 280 years from the time of Franklin's youth. How "bookish" are today's teenagers? Not very, according to a study financed by the Kaiser Family Foundation. America's teens spend 16 hours and 34 minutes a week watching television; 7:26 listening to music; 5:46 in various computer activities and another 1:53 playing video games. They spend two hours and eight minutes in reading. (Summarized in "Watch and Listen", a clipping I saved from The Atlantic Monthly, April 2007, page 32.) Another study found that only 9% of teens read a daily newspaper. (Another saved clipping: "Young Adults Are Giving Newspapers Scant Notice," by Justin Jones, NYT, July 16, 2007.)

And it isn't just teens. Overall, America's newspapers have experienced steady declines in circulation for the past 20 years. In the first six months of 2007, the decline in daily circulation was 2.5%. Sunday circulation was down 3.5%. Newstand sales were down 5%. (See: Exclusive: FAS-FAX Preview -- Circ Declines, Some Steep, Continue, by Jennifer Saba, November 03, 2007. At www.editorandpublisher.com).

But we should not fixate on the delivery mechanism. Yes, in Franklin's time the printed book, the printed newspaper, and the handwritten letter were the best technology for transmitting information and ideas over both distance and time. Times change.

The Kindle won't replace the book, but we need to recognize that the book is becoming more like the candle each day: attractive, useful in many contexts, but not usually necessary for the purpose of interior or exterior lighting.

The book, the magazine, and the newspaper are already marginal. Television and the Internet have taken their place. But the story isn't over. The next big thing will be something very much like the Kindle. The main difference will be that the Kindle version 10 will give you everything: movies, TV shows, video games, news, magazines, blogs, YouTube, Facebook, text books, courseware, telephone, email, chat, GPS, music, audiobooks, crossword puzzles, instant translation, recipes, your photo album, your home movie collection, the latest in cancer research, your calendar, your scientific calculator, pornography, and the time in Sao Paulo.

If this sounds like a marriage of the wireless laptop, the iPhone, and the Kindle—well, you have cottoned on to the idea.

But you may not have grokked the idea. For those people unfamiliar with the verb "grok," it comes from the Martian language and was introduced to the earth by Robert A. Heinlein in his influential book Stranger in a Strange Land. To grok is to understand something. In Wikipedia we are told that:

The literal meaning of the word grok is "drink", an important focus for a desert planet where water is scarce. Philosophically, the Martians extended its meaning to absorption and blending, where the water becomes a part of you, and you part of the water. Things that once had separate realities become entangled in the same experiences, goals, history and purpose.

It is impossible to grok the Kindle, or the iPhone, or the PDA. Handheld devices are moving very quickly toward bundling every electronic service that we can imagine. But our imagination cannot grasp the place of this ultimate device in our culture. Its future is being written each day in the hands of millions of people, and no one knows where it will end up in the learning process, the entertainment business, the family, or the life of the individual.

Neil Stephenson has tried to imagine it, in his book The Diamond Age. This author, famous for bringing cutting-edge technology into his novels, posits the ultimate book. There is only one, and it incorporates the most advanced "educational" programming of its time. The "book" is in the hands of one little girl. With it, she masters all the known universe.

I shall say no more. Read the book. Available through the Amazon Kindle for $7.96. Or in paperback, used, at Amazon, for as little as $5.56 plus shipping. (Pssst, you could also try your local library.)