From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]> Date: Sun, 9 Jun 2019 10:58:23 -0700 Subject: The future (and present) of print Because it's Harvard, it's big news, and 90 million is a big number, no question: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/06/harvard-library-joins-forces-to-bring-90-million-books-to-users/ The article is happytalk for an alumni magazine, so it leaves mainly to the side the interesting questions. (1) How efficiently can the institutions now share selection/acquisition so as to save money all around and still maintain broad coverage? That's proven to be hard work in the past for generations of attempts to do better cooperative collection development. (Ask a roomful of allied research library directors to think about CCD again and they mostly groan and turn away.) (2) How does this best scale past what is the most wealthy and privileged group of librarians in the history of the galaxy? How do we imagine next steps occurring: more affinity groups of about this size? Do the groups then ally with each other? Merge? Charge outsiders for services? (3) Harvard-style shelving repositories typically have a huge carbon footprint -- air-conditioned to a point where the staff who go into retrieve books keep down parkas handy year-round. That already makes less sense than it seemed to when the repositories were invented, but take the clock forward ten or twenty years. What will the traffic in and out of those buildings be like? What will Sarah Thomas's successor's successor's successor say when the provost's successor's successor's successor comments on the dollar and climate costs and expresses the hope that all 90 million of those print books -- in 2040 -- are getting a lot of use? Jim O'Donnell ASU