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