Skip to content

Tag: libraries

The sustainability problems for scholarly writing and publishing are very real, and remain nearly insoluable.
Published on

Darnton-1-122310_jpg_230x1010_q85 Robert Darnton's The Library: Three Jeremiads (New York Review of Books, December 23, 2010) is a wonderfully written, rather gentle set of Jeremiads --for those of us used to reading the real Jeremiah.  He finds research libraries (and by extension, the rest of us) facing three crises, but he ends with hope, not doom.  (In that sense, he more like the original Jeremiah than many would realize.)

Darnton's three jeremiads are, in compact phrases:

  • Hard times are inflicting serious damages on scholarly publishing.  Scholarly publishers can no longer count on selling 800 copies of a monograph, and so many university presses have stopped publishing in some smaller fields (colonial Africa) altogether.  The scholarly monograph is becoming too expensive to sustain, and this back up the entire line from graduate-student research to publish-and-perish for newer faculty.  The pipeline is very seriously clogged.
  • University journals have experienced excessive pricing as control of critical scientific journals have passed to private hands.  The average price of a annual journal subscription in physics is $3,368; the average price in language and literature is $275.  Publishers impose drastic cancellation feeds, written into "bundled" journal subscriptions (sometimes hundreds) over several years.  Publishers seek to keep the terms secret, although a recent case in Washington casts doubt on that ability.  Academics devote time to research, write up the results as articles, referee the articles, serve on editorial boards, and then buy back the product of their labors at ruinous prices.  In order to break the monopologies of price-gouging empires such as Elsevier, scholarship needs open-access journals which are truly self-sustaining.  The Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity attempts to create such a sustaining coalition of universities.
  • The Google books settlement offers some hope for breathing new life into monographic publishing, according to Darnton.  (I disagree -- see below.)  A Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) could succeed should Google fail, but the primary obstacles are not financial but legal.  Those works published between 1923 and 1964 are often in a copyright limbo called "orphaned works," because no one knows who actually holds copyright, if anyone.

Darnton's last Jeremiad offers hope, but is, I find, not a sustaining hope.  Recently I was helping my staff to shift part of our small collection because our shelving is at 100% of capacity and we do still desire to purchase some new monographs in print.  By chance I was shifting our modest collection of books on feminism and its development --but all the essential texts were there, starting with Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (English translation 1953).  All of these titles are in print; the subject remains of great interest to many in the university; all of this material remains in copyright, but much of it is now old enough that the identities of the rights-holders can become difficult to trace.  Given the legal problems, little of this material is likely to be digitized on a large scale any time soon.

There may come a time when the sheer need for digitized texts will overwhelm the vested rights of very numerous rights holders, and society will enforce an equitable arrangement --the Google Books proposal would assign 63% of profits to authors and publishers, to be held in escrow by a trust persuant to a Book Rights Registry.  This proposal cuts the Gordian knot: the Copyright Act granted a long-term license which the government in turn never attempted to track, insofar as enforcement was to be carried out by a (presumably aggrieved) rights-holder.  This promises, however, endless litigation, and by the time that is ended, interest in almost all texts from the 1923-1964 period (or even later) will have faded further.

The sustainability problems for scholarly writing and publishing are very real, and remain.  For a smaller, teaching-oriented University, the reality that these problems are first dealt with by the Class-1 research universities is little comfort: we all live with the results of the mess society and technology has made of rights, copyrights, and the ubiquitous threat of litigation.  Predatory journal pricing structures remain, and it is little comfort for a teaching university that the prices are so far out of the realm of the possible that only a few mourn the impossibility of major scientific journal subscriptions.  The only way forward, as I see it, is to offer support to organizations such as the Public Library of Science, SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition), and the evolving identities and offerings of JSTOR and ITHAKA.  But this is not an answer.  It merely joins Darnton's appeal to change the system.

Libraries do not have user aggregations: we serve students, faculty, and staff. We are necessarily and properly non-commercial in a culture where commerce rules all, and in that sense we unavoidably counter-cultural.
Published on

Are learning environments in higher education becoming commodified?  Who is in charge here?

The article The Open Ed Tech: never mind the edupunks; or, the great Web 2.0 swindle by Brian Lam and Jim Groom (Educause Review July August 2010) remembers the palmy days of "edupunks" --those Gen-Xers who wanted open educational environments fostered by open web technology.  Away with closed, tightly-controlled proprietary systems!

What happened?  The consolidation of Blackboard.  The rise of Google whatever: docs, alerts, talk, reader, YouTube, whatever.  Above all, the consolidation of cultural industries: ContentID.  Users such as Critical Commons and Lawrence Lessig --who used snippets of copyrighted works for their presentations to demonstrate examples of Fair Use-- were effectively silenced by corporate take-down orders without respect to any Fair Use guidelines.

Advertising is the point of the Google products, its YouTube, Facebook, and all their kin.  Steve Greenberg has written, "You are not Facebook's customer.  You are the product they sell to their real customers --advertisers.  Forget that at your peril."  This is the simple commercial point all the "free" capabilities.  When Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc. control educational and cultural spaces, advertising is the point.  Facebook's long-standing and fundamentally deceptive bait-and-switch privacy policies are a running case in point.  GoogleAnalytics tracks searches, retrievals, and every click.  Is this desirable in a cultural space such as an academic library?

The implications for privacy, for academic freedom, and for creative re-use of cultural "properties" (rather than "resources") are very serious.  Lam and Groom note, ". . . We can expect the values associated with educators and the public interest to be of secondary importance at best.  Proprietary needs will prevail, even if we can trust that these companies set ouf to 'do no evil.'"

(As a reader of Reinhold Niebuhr, I have to add "Don't be evil" as a corporate slogan is reflects a very shallow, California-lite superficiality that either intentionally hypocritical or incredibly stupid.  Of course corporate entities sometimes do evil: see Moral Man and Immoral Society or The Nature and Destiny of Man.  Evil is unavoidable; the question is how to plan for it and limit its effects.  Google's slogan reflects exactly who they are: technologically incredibly sophisticated but philosophical and moral dwarves.)

This is not simply an anti-corporate screed.  Obviously corporations exist to make money, and will do what is necessary.  Obviously, libraries buy or lease many corporate products. But why should libraries advertise corporate products to their users?  Already Wolters-Kluwer's OvidSP defaults to search all journals@Ovid --and offers pay-per-view to those articles not covered by a library's database contract.  Is this advertising or for the convenience of the user?

The question here is whether libraries see our users as aggregatations of data useful for advertisers.  Libraries do not have user aggregations: we serve students, faculty, and staff.  We are necessarily and properly non-commercial in a culture where commerce rules all, and in that sense we unavoidably counter-cultural.  In Lam and Groom's phrase, we provide a green space for public-minded, convivial exchange online and on-ground.  We serve people first,and corporate interests second.  (--no wonder libraries are both incredibly expensive and often poorly funded!)

Verlyn Klinkenborg's Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader, published in May 30, 2010 New York Times, correlates some interesting insights from librarians and academics.
Published on

Verlyn Klinkenborg's Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader, published in May 30, 2010 New York Times, correlates some interesting insights from librarians and academics.

Klinkenborg's first major point bears repeating: reading is a subtle thing.  For an intellectual activity, it does depend upon look-and-feel: book design.  The designers of books, using skills and concepts honed over decades and centuries, really do know what they're doing when they select a typeface, weight of paper, and other design elements.  "Glass and pixel's aren't the same."

His first example --that no matter the length of the book, the iPad's iBooks reader always shows six pages past and six pages ahead --correlates with the results of e-reader pilot projects summarized by the trade journal Campus Technology at three colleges: Northwest Missouri State University, Arizona State University, and Princeton University.

"Students need to be able to ... quickly skim through passages to refresh and compare information." (p. 28)  "Princeton participants, especially once finals arrived," [were frustrated by] "the inability to skim and flip through pages on the Kindle DX as quicly as they could with a traditional textbook." (p. 30)  Traditional printed book design allows quick skimming, review, and comparison, as well as easier note-taking and highlighting.

A 400-page textbook in biology or physics or economics allows a student a tactile sense of where in the book he or she is, and color-coding pages, page headers, footers, and margin colors allow quick retrieval when information or memory needs to be refreshed.  This is not a trivial requirement, and current e-book readers simply lack it.

Klinkenborg goes on to note how ugly e-book texts appear in comparison with their printed cousins.  The very ability e-reader manufacturers celebrate --you can change the font face, size, etc.-- allow us to  make "them resemble all the more our own word-processed manuscripts."  In other words, they can look simply ugly, and often do.  In the rush to promote e-books, e-publishers seem to have completely forgotten the important aesthetic and design considerations which go into a professionally-done, finished book.

The bigger problem, Klinkenborg notes, is that he grew up reading books, not texts.  A contemporary, well-done, professionally designed book, suggests an authority, intellectual and publishing market niche, and an affiliation: a book from Princeton University Press, Knopf, O'Reilly Publishing, and Alysson Publications each carries some sense of affiliation and intended audience --in crass terms, "brand." 

Many, many e-books are public-domain recycled texts that carry no sense of their own dates of publication, intended original audiences, or publishing origins.  Above all, they have no sense of place as editions --is a public-domain 19th-century translation of Dante better or worse than an in-copyright 20th-century translation?  The long and complex problem of publishing rights has high-jacked the cultural agenda of e-book purveyors, and no amount of legal muscle or sheer money from Apple, Google or Amazon is likely simply to make those problems disappear.

Finally, Klinkenborg notes that "most of the books I’ve ever read have come from lending libraries," even though he has a personal library (and probably, one guesses, extensive).  How e-books, once they have grown past their horrendous aesthetic problems and legal challenges, can interact in the common cultural "third space" known as a public or academic library really remains to be seen.

Klinkenborg's brief article --paired with the summary of e-book pilot projects in Campus Technology-- strongly suggest that when matters come to a head, e-books simply aren't there yet.  Someday they will have arrived, and libraries ignore e-books at their peril.  It behooves any academic library to build an e-book collection to anticipate this reality.  The present finding is hard to ignore, however -- currently e-books fail significantly even in their most non-aesthetic "hardest" use, the academic textbook. 

The sheer arrogance of e-book purveyors and promoters in ignoring the lessons learned by centuries of print publishers and authors will have to be mended before e-books will really move forward.

Two recent discussions --in very different venues-- take an interesting look at the role of reading, individual knowledge, and disciplined reflection in the Internet Age.
Published on

Two recent discussions --in very different venues-- take an interesting look at the role of reading, individual knowledge, and disciplined reflection in the Internet Age.

The first author is Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia, who has gone on to found a renowed public-interest wiki Citizendium.org and the directory of educational videos online, WatchKnow.org.  With a Ph.D. in Philosophy (Theory of Knowledge), Sanger is hardly one to down-play the role of the Internet in civil society, or to be accused of being a Luddite by the rhetorically inclined.

Sanger's article in Educause Review, Individual Knowledge in the Internet Age, can be found here (in .pdf here)

Sanger discusses in some detail the importance of individual knowledge, rooted in (but not exclusively):

  • memorization --how can you really know something that you don't remember?
  • individual learning (as differentiated from social knowledge learned in groups); and
  • books --complex, deep strands of thinking that require absorption and uninterrupted attention.

The second author is Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, a long-standing, mainstream Christian publishing empire famous for devotional literature and Bibles.  Far from special pleading from a print publisher, Thomas Nelson is in fact a leader in electronic publishing, and Hyatt has led the transformation.

Hyatt writes in defense of books, of the activity of reading as a way of viewing the world --you can read his blog-post here.

Beyond (or because of) his broad and deep commitment to digital publishing, Hyatt values serious readers' "ability to follow extended arguments and enroll their imagination in
the reading experience."  What Hyatt regards in peril is the ability to engage in extended conversation with its potential for transformative exchange, replaced instead by a media-driven amusement that  "will become the ultimate value against which everything else is measured."

Libraries, like Universities (and especially University Libraries!) have a cultural agenda: that the examined life is definitely worth living, that such examination requires reflection, conversation, and an openness to the experiences of people very different from contemporaries --people of the past.  Amusement, group knowledge socially constructed in networks heedless of group and individual memory --these things are no replacement for the examined life.  In fact, Plato might suggest that they are merely the shadows upon the wall of the cave in which most people live their lives, unaware of the light and the source of the light outside the cave.

Do I cavill with a straw man?  I hope so, but fear that I do not do so.  As contemporary Americans we pride ourselves on a world-wide cultural now built especially upon science, medicine, and technology --but we also prefer the disconnected amusement the some even disparage the "old" knowledge based upon remembering, individual reflection, and reading. 

Sanger and Hyatt, from very different perspectives and social and business locations, converge on similar points.  That convergence is worth pondering.