From: Sean Andrews <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:24:06 -0600

Thanks, Rick,

On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 6:10 PM, LIBLICENSE  wrote:

> From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
>
> Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2012 04:48:16 +0000
>
> For the Good of the Order, I'm going to <snip> right there so as not to
> create a ten-foot-long email string. And hopefully I can respond
> effectively by simply saying that I think you're trying to fit too much
> cargo into the very small boat of my argument. To (hopefully) clarify:

This reminds me of the metaphors you used to describe the scholarly
ecology at the ARL/CNI fall forum - Rivers, ponds, oceans.  It's kind
of funny that someone who lives in Utah uses so many maritime
metaphors.  I sense a longing there.

For those who weren't there, or who are so familiar with these ideas
they didn't need to take notes, here was generally what Rick said
there.  I review it merely to make a larger point: hopefully one that
is either useful or will incite some response that will teach me why
I'm wrong (or just being unrealistic).  In Rick's talk, he pointed to
the way the information ecosystem was changing - and the way we could
help change it. "The ground is soft," he said, "we can now move in
exciting new ways."

The new ways are probably obvious to most people here.  But to me, as
a faculty member on leave (I am currently a fellow at NITLE
http://www.nitle.org/about/) learning the ways of the library
community, the whole thing is a rather stark shift in perspective.
The library was previously organized as a sort of pond - a small, deep
repository of the life-giving fluid of scholarly information,
collected and carefully organized by local professionals who
understood the ecosystem well.  The pond was isolated and, in the end,
the primary resource for the faculty and students grazing in that
pasture (present company may appreciate this metaphoric comparison of
faculty to ruminants).

But, Rick said, we need to reconceive this ecosystem.  All the keepers
of these ponds, he says, must realize (and you probably have realized)
that there is no way to keep up with all the commercial content, much
less all the free content that is available.  We will still have
ponds, but there is no pond deep enough to keep this information:
thus, as he and Joe Esposito (and, I'm sure many others) have argued,
there should be a shift from acquisition to access.  This raging
torrent of information is better conceived of as a river: librarians
are standing on the bank and they are there to help patrons grab the
necessary information from the stream.  Likewise, librarians shouldn't
attempt to speculate what kind of information patrons will want.
Patron driven access is the key phrase.

But really, librarians are more like riverboat pilots - or at least
people who can shuttle their patron passengers not only through these
rapids, but to the big archival oceans into which they flow.  In his
talk, Rick mentioned EBSCO, Hathi and Google Books as entry points to
this archive of pre-existing documents that grows deeper every day.
Recognizing the incredible, even sublime, depth and expanse of this
resource is, or should be, enough to convince us that no single pond
guardian or riverboat captain could possibly manage access to this on
their own.  Collective action must be taken.

Most of this discussion, so far as I can tell, has dealt mostly with
books.  Growing local collections is folly when so few of the books
are ever used.  You no longer need the long tail present on your local
shelves because there are likely digital means to get the content if
you need it - and Espresso Book Machines for POD if a patron really
wants print (and the license allows for it.)  I wrote a post on this
in October:

http://breakingculture.tumblr.com/post/12169505396/devils-advocate-on-pda-libraries

In talking to Rick at the ALA midwinter, I see that one of my key
assumptions there was wrong - a library can acquire a digital book on
a permanent basis, depending on the licensing agreement - but in some
ways that doesn't change the basic situation: the ability to limit
access or charge for access is the primary bargaining chip of the
vendor, who becomes central not only to the year to year collection
strategy, but, in so far as deaccession decisions (or future
collection strategies) are made on the basis of access through private
digital vendors, to access to the collection as a whole.

In a sense this is what already exists in serials.  While I know many
of the larger libraries keep back (print) issues of serials - and
several of the vast print archives around the country are collecting
them for posterity - for the most part access to journal archives is
managed digitally.  As a faculty member, it is, indeed, important to
keep up with the latest journal articles, but as a researcher in the
humanities and social sciences - a researcher, like librarians,
concerned with the genealogy of knowledge - those oceans of journal
archives are invaluable.  Thus, to speak directly to some of the
comments in Rick's post (mostly at #2) I empathize (though don't
condone) with the entitled position of the library user facing the
pointy end of the budget scalpel.  It's not entirely their fault that
serials prices have gone through the roof, but they will increasingly
be the ones to feel the pinch.

Thus it makes me all the more anxious to see this possible interchange
taking place not only over books, but over books a library previously
held in a physical format and now simply provides access to the
digital version.  It seems to give more power to the people holding
the monopoly of access, i.e. all the vendors who were eagerly hawking
their e-book collections in the exhibit hall in Dallas last week.

Paying only for access in serials is equivalent to this and, while on
a year to year basis, it makes fiduciary sense, it is effectively
channeling more power to those gatekeepers and away from local
control.  Even on the question of paying for usage, much of it hinges
on whether the benevolent serial overlords will alter the framework to
accommodate this, rather than simply making per-article fees even
higher to keep the business in the subscription/big deal.  Even if the
current rates stay the same, I don't have the calculus background to
calculate how this would look projected into the future, but I'm
pretty sure a key part of the business model on the other end is to
make sure that, whichever choice libraries make, the vendors come out
ahead.  Or at least, that's what is in their short term interest (and,
in many cases, their responsibility to their shareholders.)

On a certain level, you're absolutely right: I'm loading too much
freight in your vessel.  Your perspective is that of a riverboat
captain, who knows these waters well and wants to guide your fellow
riverboat captains through the uncharted shallows of austerity and
depths of digital progress.   And, as a faculty member, it is very
educational to hear how this works.  But as a researcher in political
economy of media, I'm suspicious of any policy which might land on the
side of giving more control over culture to corporate interests.  I'm
surely mistaken about at least 50% of this, but hopefully something in
the other 50% is relevant.

My first take on the combination of these metaphors was that you were
being too humble about the implications of your approach.  That you
are speaking as if you are just a riverboat pilot, worried about the
day to day realities of rationing the budget.  But I know better than
this - and so do you.  It may look like you're a riverboat pilot, but
that is also your oceangoing vessel.  It is the way you will be
accessing the great ocean these rivers feed into - the ocean all
rivers have fed into since the advent of (documented?) human
consciousness.  Thus you are both a riverboat pilot and some avatar of
Poseidon. Or you could be.

We appear to be a long way from the ponds of yore, but as we trek down
this mythical, or magical-realist trajectory, they reappear in another
form.  In aggregate, if all librarians make this same choice - paying
for short term access to these resources - then the ponds will
reappear in a different form.  This is especially the case for
in-copyright works.  Here, the riverboat pilots will easily shuttle
patrons across the Atlantic (or Pacific or Indian if that's your
preference), but not because they have a hybrid boat: instead it is
because, despite the vast ocean of resources below, they are only able
to travel on a virtual platform of vendor-operated locks, locks which
allow only certain resources to trickle into the series of ponds
individual libraries pay to access each and every time they go
through.  Then the trepidation they might have felt when their little
pond back home seemed too shallow, or murky, or just in need of too
much expensive maintenance, is replaced by something possibly much
worse: the realization that, below this virtual platform is all the
information of human posterity, but unless they have money to pay each
and every time they want access, they might as well be sitting on dry
land.

I don't think I'm being hypothetical here - though maybe I am.  It is
through no individual fault, but a systemic effect of the model of
commodified culture that has reached both its pinnacle and its folly
in the digital age.  All media industries would like for the internet
to primarily function in this way: instead of ever buying anything,
you will simply perpetually rent it, over and over again.  And if you
do buy it, since it is digital, there are far more tools preventing
you from doing what people have done with media since media was
invented: when you're done with it, you can put it in the attic, lend
it to a friend, sell it on ebay or otherwise pass it on - or, more
accurately, legislators are more easily convinced that the world will
end without complete control of all information on the vendor side.
When media corporations see this vast reservoir of culture, most of it
built, created, and collected long before they were a glimmer in their
founders' eyes, they pick up their copyright bucket and start creating
their own virtual ponds, accessible only through their locks.

I realize now that there are strategies around this - such as buying
the digital book through a license that grants perpetual access.  I
also better understand the problems with the subscription model and
especially with the big deal - both of which make paying for usage
much more attractive.  The current business model was targeted towards
the practices of pond-builders: since they were collecting and
creating access locally to as much content as possible, offering
librarians bigger packages with full access to the oceans of data
below was a sure fire way to guarantee payment at your locks, even if
some of the fluid on offer was stagnant, turgid water no one would
dare drink.  The idea of being able to pick and choose what you access
and pay only for what you use sounds refreshing.

But this switch will only be refreshing if we can get publishers to
agree to it.  And the only way they will agree is if they look ahead
and decide that they can make more money that way.  The easiest way to
do that is to charge more per article and to limit the kinds of
ownership you will have over that particular article.  So long as they
remain the only place to get that particular article, they will have
no reason to lower the price.  If this model becomes the dominant
practice for libraries operating on an individual level, then they
will likely end up paying more for fewer resources.  It might
technically be more efficient, and it might save money over the short
term, but it will have at least two downside results, both of which
ultimately fail to take advantage of the opportunity that stands
before us.

First, as Rick and others on this list have pointed out several times,
it will likely discipline the publishing industry and, indirectly,
scholars, by encouraging (nay forcing) them to publish fewer things
(books, monographs, articles, etc.)  Several presses (U. of California
comes to mind) have already said this will be their strategy going
forward and ARL statistics show this is likely a reasonable approach:
libraries are already purchasing fewer monographs.  Maybe an ancillary
effect of this will be to channel the work that doesn't make it
through this funnel into open access publishing, but like all free
market solutions, the upside is always only an externality: meanwhile
a significant number of scholars for whom OA publishing venues are
less prestigious or frowned upon by their T&P committees will find
themselves unable to publish and thus, eventually, unable to work.
Though the titans of austerity assure us squeezing the excess is the
royal road to renewal, the creative destruction it demands is not
accomplished by a precise instrument.  The reassuring myth of all
laissez faire solutions is that the best and most valuable will
survive.  (Clifford Christensen's commonsense concept of disruption is
only its latest iteration).  In this case, the solution endangers all
but the most obviously fashionable scholarly pursuits (making my
article using Christensen's framework a sure bet.)   I feel like this
point has been aptly made by others.

But by the same token it endangers access to the breadth and depth of
the archive promised by the advance in technology.  As a scholar, I
have found myself astounded by not only the opportunity to explore
literature in my own field, but the way I am now able to snoop around
on JSTOR or another digital platform and discover entire continents of
research I had no idea existed (mixing metaphors here, sorry).  I can
explore critical conversations that existed in economics or sociology
or library science in the 1950s, some of which are still instrumental
to their field, others long forgotten - but whose obscurity is itself
an important fact: why did people in field X stop talking about topic
Y when it was so fundamental to the field for so long?  If I have to
pay for access each time I want to read one of these articles - or if
I am firmly made aware that my casual snooping is costing everyone
money - then you are right that I might just stop and save the library
a buck.  But this is hardly an ideal arrangement and it could prevent
a scholar from discovering some unexplored vein of intellectual
significance whose exploration leads to a complete paradigm shift.
Moreover, it's a completely unnecessary situation: digital access to
these older resources is almost costless when taken in aggregate.

In a sense, it is this grand opportunity that I have loaded into your
little riverboat.  But your plan is actually a map for all other
riverboat pilots, telling them how to arrive at the ocean.
Altogether, if everyone follows that path, my fear is that when we
arrive there it won't look anything like an ocean and more like an
enormous and unnecessary canal stretching over 70% of the earth's
surface.  Before we shift to that, I think a more collective strategy
would help obviate that possibility.

The digital environment allows for exploration in new and
unprecedented ways.  I see how the big deal is unsustainable and maybe
even subscriptions are faulty in the current budget crunch.  But
moving to pay for usage seems to overlook not only the pitfalls above,
but the more systemic possibilities available for libraries - hinted
at by Heather Morrison earlier this week.  Call it the Poseidon
Option.

The Poseidon Option in general makes librarians, rather than vendors,
the gods of the ocean.  I am aware that many librarians are already
working on this in a certain way.  I was lucky enough to sit in on the
Shared Print discussion last week and was comforted by the thought of
hundreds of librarians diligently socking away print copies of
everything ever published in repositories around the country.  But
absent that discussion (though, I'm sure, not from the considerations
of the lawyers employed by these projects) was a nod to the issue of
copyright.  I suspect that is because the physical copy of the book
carries with it all sorts of implied licenses which make it harder for
the explicit license to alter its nature.  In other words, print can
be pooled and shared because no one in the author's guild can step in
and accuse you of some sort of illegal activity simply because of its
murky legal foundation (though it did occur to me, as people in the
room became interested in publicizing their efforts that it might
still inspire just that response.)  In any case, since I didn't know
much about these projects (or those of Portico and Clockss) until last
week, I'm likely speaking completely out of ignorance, regardless of
the months (though not years, like most on this list) I've spent
trying to figure out what's going on.

Since the entire discussion of digital acquisition and access is
actually about licenses, it seems that this is the space we're working
in.  Paying for usage makes sense, but if all libraries are paying to
use the same resource, and that resource could easily and almost
costlessly be shared with everyone if it was open access, the only
thing that would seem to be keeping that from happening is that
libraries are basically still operating on a pond by pond mentality
(which is understandable since that's the way the money works.)  But
if there isn't some sort of political movement to make more of these
resources open access through a form of legislation, if the market is
the only space through which changes can be made, then pooling money
and collectively paying to make those articles or monographs open
access (by paying fees to the publisher to release it and to a
repository to make it open access) seems a better long term approach
to a systemwide collection.

It doesn't change the short term problems of accessing the archive
that is slowly becoming available to us (and would likely forestall
fully opening the oceanic archive to the kind of snooping I've enjoyed
in this digital honeymoon) nor does it obviate the likely more
pressing issue of sustainable scholarly publishing, but over the long
term it is more likely to create an actual ocean of resources rather
than a perpetual tollbooth that exists primarily to milk excess profit
out of the system rather than simply provide access to resources.

There are likely many other ways to frame this, many better tactics,
but I am more interested in calling for more of them rather than in
having one I recommend adopted.  I committed, in other words, to the
Poseidon Option as a guiding principle, as a strategic concept, rather
than this particular tactic.  In this light, I think that paying for
usage, as I understand it, is a tactic that will have the opposite
effect in the long term, even if it seems expedient.  But I think you
are likely to agree with the Poseidon Option as a strategy so maybe
there is something I'm missing.  Since my e-mail is probably well past
ten-feet long, I don't know if anyone will be able to read it. If you
make it this far, I'd appreciate your feedback.

Sean Andrews