Of course, digitizing everything was the goal. And considering what Google has in the bank, $125M is cheap to settle. The bad news is that it's a settlement, and doesn't make any difference in the law, but it does set a non-legal precedent.
Of course, I'm curious if OCLC's fledgling copyright information registry is partnering with Google; it would make sense not to duplicate effort, and crowdsourcing has made sense in other fields. It certainly hasn't hurt LC, with its Flickr experiment.
I'm not as concerned about Google replacing libraries. It's not like Google is taking the books away from libraries, stopping ILL, or burning them. It certainly has a lower barrier to entry than the aggregators, when an individual can pay for full access to only what they want. Certainly better than Corbis, who bought the photos and has locked them up.
That's not to say that it can't change, but the libraries have gotten their digital copies, presumably the Internet Archive will crawl the open collections, and the libraries will know what was actually used if it comes to them doing the work again.
What's the worst case scenario? Google goes out of business, all the digital files go away, and the libraries are no worse than before, and some publishers and authors have made some money they wouldn't have gotten under the first sale provision.
What's the upside? 20% instead of snippets, payment to authors (if they can be found), fewer dead trees, universal access.
I don't have any problems with that.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Friday, October 24, 2008
Socializiing 2.0
Facebook is fun, but low on content. OCLC's Web Junction had content, but was focused on public libraries.
Good news! WJ now has a section for academic libraries, for special libraries, and archives and museums. Now there's a chance for connections between different institutions for collaboration and just getting to know one another.
My Preservation Group is growing, and all are invited to join it. I'm slowly getting some links into the Archives Section, and will be adding to it. Right now there are links to preservation handouts, book repair videos, and disaster plans.
So if you want to meet other archivists and librarians online without the Facebook Fluff (R), check out WebJunction. The more of us who join, the more useful it will be! You do have to join, but it's free and spamless.
Good news! WJ now has a section for academic libraries, for special libraries, and archives and museums. Now there's a chance for connections between different institutions for collaboration and just getting to know one another.
My Preservation Group is growing, and all are invited to join it. I'm slowly getting some links into the Archives Section, and will be adding to it. Right now there are links to preservation handouts, book repair videos, and disaster plans.
So if you want to meet other archivists and librarians online without the Facebook Fluff (R), check out WebJunction. The more of us who join, the more useful it will be! You do have to join, but it's free and spamless.
Moving my wiki
Which will technically not be a wiki any more, though I'll be glad to add anyone as collaborator who wants to add sites or annotations! PBWiki was getting too weird, with hidden ads; the old wiki will remain, but I won't be adding to it.
The new site is a Google Site, at
http://sites.google.com/site/humanitiesforlibrarians/
The new site is a Google Site, at
http://sites.google.com/site/humanitiesforlibrarians/
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Out of Context
It's a phrase we hear a lot during the political season - you took my remark out of context. But do archival collections always have context to remove an item from? Is it always bad to scan just part of a collection?
Take photographic studio collection. They were never meant to be documentary, they get a job, they shoot it, they don't know where it'll be used the next day. There may be some context in that shoot, that series of five street shots of downtown, but they have nothing to do with the passport photo before it or the product shots after, unless you're the odd duck studying the business model of studios. And that's fine.
But most patrons want a portrait of their uncle, not the street shot. Or their house, and don't care about the other thousand. Or a particular building for an article. The context is in the image itself.
Or the family papers, four generations of paper - but only the eyewitness letter about Pearl Harbor has any relevance outside the family. The sons baby pictures have no relevance to that event, or the wedding pictures.
So where's the sin in digitizing what's useful, what's interesting, and just telling people there's more? Or, like LC, posting photos on Flickr and letting people identify them for you?
Let's think about what we're doing, and why we're doing it, and not follow dogmatic policies. The odds are that if a patron looks at the whole collection, they're still going to want that one picture they're looking for. When they post it online or publish it in an article, it's going to be out of context again, just like it was for the studio.
We can keep context in the collection, but we can't send it out into the world with the item. Let's do our job and let the patrons do theirs.
Take photographic studio collection. They were never meant to be documentary, they get a job, they shoot it, they don't know where it'll be used the next day. There may be some context in that shoot, that series of five street shots of downtown, but they have nothing to do with the passport photo before it or the product shots after, unless you're the odd duck studying the business model of studios. And that's fine.
But most patrons want a portrait of their uncle, not the street shot. Or their house, and don't care about the other thousand. Or a particular building for an article. The context is in the image itself.
Or the family papers, four generations of paper - but only the eyewitness letter about Pearl Harbor has any relevance outside the family. The sons baby pictures have no relevance to that event, or the wedding pictures.
So where's the sin in digitizing what's useful, what's interesting, and just telling people there's more? Or, like LC, posting photos on Flickr and letting people identify them for you?
Let's think about what we're doing, and why we're doing it, and not follow dogmatic policies. The odds are that if a patron looks at the whole collection, they're still going to want that one picture they're looking for. When they post it online or publish it in an article, it's going to be out of context again, just like it was for the studio.
We can keep context in the collection, but we can't send it out into the world with the item. Let's do our job and let the patrons do theirs.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Everything Old is New Again
We've had a little more excitement in Louisville - first the earthquake that struck while I was here at MAC talking about (what else?) disaster preparedness, then the first ever hurricane to hit town. We lost a couple of trees, a gutter and a downspout, my nerve (I was standing next to one tree, rescuing the downspout when it went), and ten days of electricity.
The good part is that the spoiled food in garbage cans lining the alley were a raccoon buffet, I met a nice neighbor with a chainsaw, and I caught up with some reading by candlelight.
The best was from The Primary Source, by Chatham Ewing, about using NUCMUC to catch up on collection level cataloging of special collections.
You remember collection level work, don't you? The big kickoff from ARL at LC in 2003? We all said, yea, in our spare time, right.
You remember NUCMUC, don't you? Well, maybe not. But it will help libraries and archives without the time and expertise create those records and get them into OPACs.
I recommend checking it out. Unless you have too many catalogers and too much time on your hands.
The good part is that the spoiled food in garbage cans lining the alley were a raccoon buffet, I met a nice neighbor with a chainsaw, and I caught up with some reading by candlelight.
The best was from The Primary Source, by Chatham Ewing, about using NUCMUC to catch up on collection level cataloging of special collections.
You remember collection level work, don't you? The big kickoff from ARL at LC in 2003? We all said, yea, in our spare time, right.
You remember NUCMUC, don't you? Well, maybe not. But it will help libraries and archives without the time and expertise create those records and get them into OPACs.
I recommend checking it out. Unless you have too many catalogers and too much time on your hands.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
What can we afford to lose?
Even when the economy is booming, there’s never enough time, money, or people to do everything that needs to be done. We’ve always had to prioritize and make decisions, we just have to make harder decisions now. Today we have two fronts for both knowledge and preservation – traditional paper that lasts for centuries if we care for it, and popular electronic that can be gone in 60 seconds.
We have an obligation to use our resources – cash and people – wisely. We also have an obligation to scholars to preserve both the cultural heritage and new research for future generations. The decisions we make now will determine whether tomorrow’s students and faculty study here, or at a school that thought in the long term.
What's the problem with commercial online journals? Everyone loves them - they're fast, easy to search, printable, you can access them from home, and more than one person can use the same issue. Yea, they're expensive but so are the print issues, and isn't this better to buy? But we don't buy them - we just rent them, for hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And we rent them by the package, so often we pay for four or five copies of the same online journal - more than we would buy if it were paper. The more we spend on onlne resources, the less we have for permanent ones and preservation.
We can expect even the most acid paper to last a few decades, and good paper to last centuries, even if it’s slowly decaying. But digital can be gone in a nanosecond, if you don’t pay the rent. Even if you do, things can change – journals disappear, or like newspapers, the content can disappear. After the Tassini decision on licensing rights, papers just took all their back issues offline, rather than renegotiate rights. That can happen with back issues of anything.
Why don’t we just do it ourselves? We’re forbidden by the license agreement to print out hard copies from the online version. We can’t digitize them ourselves, because of copyright; we could license directly from the journals to do it, but their license with the big aggregators – the businesses who run the big databases – forbids them.
We could buy and preserve a lot of print journals and books for a million dollars. What we can’t do is make them easily accessible by our scholars – they would have to come here and use them, or use ILL, or microform. Those options aren’t nearly as sexy – and not as easy for distant learners and other non-traditional users.
Preservation vs. access is the classic conflict of librarians. You can keep your Edsel or Pinto in great shape – as long as you don’t take them out of the garage and use them for what they were meant for. Books get checked out and have all kinds of adventures – they go to MacDonalds for lunch, they meet dogs, they take baths. Educating users can help, but we can’t turn back the clock a century and close the stacks. The culture of research has changed, and is changing again.
Preservation isn’t just about saving books, it’s about saving the cultural record. We’ve seen revolutionaries destroy national libraries. The photos taken by the FSA were ordered destroyed – who wants to remember the Depression! We don’t know what will be important to future scholars? Small press books, ephemera, wartime editions? These are “medium rare” books – ones that aren’t unique for the contents, but for the design and marketing. They were the paperbacks of their day. Today they’re studied, 25 years ago I bought them for a dime each.
The idea of books is the distribution of knowledge, so one disaster can’t destroy all the copies. But we’re an ARL library because of our unique resources, the special collections and archives. When all our eggs are in one basket – we better take care of that basket!! Security, climate control, insect control, education are all part of preservation.
Can we microfilm? Sure, but grant money for microfilm has dried up in favor of digitization. Can we digitize? Sure, we just need a few hundred manYEARS, a few million dollars, a couple of thousand gigabytes of server space – and the software, and scanners, and technical expertise to keep it all running. And that’s just to scan the title pages! In the meantime, we need to save the originals for the long term. Like the medium rare books, they have value for their form, as well as their content.
Don’t the big online aggregators, the guys who buy the rights to put them online, have to do the same thing? Nope – they get the files in digital form, and just index them. In fact, most books and journals want their incoming material in digital form, so they don’t have that expense. And that’s why so few journals have back issues online, because the works weren’t submitted digitally.
What will it cost to preserve the paper version? That depends. Think of preservation as insurance – costs determine care. Will a band-aid suffice, or do you need a specialist? Is the money better spent on a few important patients, or on community health – preserving by controlling the environment? Lowering the temperature and humidity helps avoid mold and decay – and the patrons happen to like it, too. But the books don’t leave on spring break, and the air conditioning or heat has to stay on, no matter how hard that is to explain to engineers.
We’ve made a start. What we haven’t looked at is how to preserve digital information – across campus, in all disciplines.
Money for microfilming may have dried up, but the model is a good one. We need a central registry for who’s doing what, whether that’s digitization or preservation photocopying. Co-operation will give us the best return for our money. We may only be able to save a few books, but we can prolong the lives of many. We can have a central registry of who is doing what and who has the designated preservation copy – the one that will be saved physically and not used.
Don’t we have brittle books licked? Haven’t we been working on them a long time? Well, most of the world’s publishing was done on acid paper, in the last 150 years; and we’ve only been working on it for the last 20 – and acidic paper is still being used for printing new journals.
What can we do?
We can get input from scholars on what’s vital, what’s important, and what may be useful. We can make educated guesses, but the more input we have, the better our choices.
We can co-operate with other libraries and archives, to maximize the impact of our efforts.
We can invest in preservation. Books – and knowledge – are capitol assets, not sunk ones. We have plumbers, electricians, groundskeepers to maintain buildings. But not a single part-time preservation officer for seven libraries and 2 million books. That’s just over 100 million dollars of contents – more than the cost of the building, and not counting irreplaceable unique collections of millions of items. Are we good stewards if we let them disappear though neglect?
We can teach faculty the implications of digital information – not just using it, but the effects of the software and forms they use to create new papers influences the way they are accessed – or not accessed - from then on.
We can insist that online journals archives their files somewhere safe. It worked with giant Elsevier, it can work with others. And it must, or we’re throwing money away.
We can discuss our options. Everyone is involved in this, not just librarians. Scholars, administrators, and students need to know why prices for journals, costs for tuition, and research costs are going up, not just that they are.
Most importantly – we can do something. Now. Our preservation work has doubled – now we are responsible for the paper copies and the digital ones. There is no time to lose – and millions of books to lose. Even if Google digitizes twenty million volumes, that leaves millions more in our care.
Let us lead the way.
We have an obligation to use our resources – cash and people – wisely. We also have an obligation to scholars to preserve both the cultural heritage and new research for future generations. The decisions we make now will determine whether tomorrow’s students and faculty study here, or at a school that thought in the long term.
What's the problem with commercial online journals? Everyone loves them - they're fast, easy to search, printable, you can access them from home, and more than one person can use the same issue. Yea, they're expensive but so are the print issues, and isn't this better to buy? But we don't buy them - we just rent them, for hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And we rent them by the package, so often we pay for four or five copies of the same online journal - more than we would buy if it were paper. The more we spend on onlne resources, the less we have for permanent ones and preservation.
We can expect even the most acid paper to last a few decades, and good paper to last centuries, even if it’s slowly decaying. But digital can be gone in a nanosecond, if you don’t pay the rent. Even if you do, things can change – journals disappear, or like newspapers, the content can disappear. After the Tassini decision on licensing rights, papers just took all their back issues offline, rather than renegotiate rights. That can happen with back issues of anything.
Why don’t we just do it ourselves? We’re forbidden by the license agreement to print out hard copies from the online version. We can’t digitize them ourselves, because of copyright; we could license directly from the journals to do it, but their license with the big aggregators – the businesses who run the big databases – forbids them.
We could buy and preserve a lot of print journals and books for a million dollars. What we can’t do is make them easily accessible by our scholars – they would have to come here and use them, or use ILL, or microform. Those options aren’t nearly as sexy – and not as easy for distant learners and other non-traditional users.
Preservation vs. access is the classic conflict of librarians. You can keep your Edsel or Pinto in great shape – as long as you don’t take them out of the garage and use them for what they were meant for. Books get checked out and have all kinds of adventures – they go to MacDonalds for lunch, they meet dogs, they take baths. Educating users can help, but we can’t turn back the clock a century and close the stacks. The culture of research has changed, and is changing again.
Preservation isn’t just about saving books, it’s about saving the cultural record. We’ve seen revolutionaries destroy national libraries. The photos taken by the FSA were ordered destroyed – who wants to remember the Depression! We don’t know what will be important to future scholars? Small press books, ephemera, wartime editions? These are “medium rare” books – ones that aren’t unique for the contents, but for the design and marketing. They were the paperbacks of their day. Today they’re studied, 25 years ago I bought them for a dime each.
The idea of books is the distribution of knowledge, so one disaster can’t destroy all the copies. But we’re an ARL library because of our unique resources, the special collections and archives. When all our eggs are in one basket – we better take care of that basket!! Security, climate control, insect control, education are all part of preservation.
Can we microfilm? Sure, but grant money for microfilm has dried up in favor of digitization. Can we digitize? Sure, we just need a few hundred manYEARS, a few million dollars, a couple of thousand gigabytes of server space – and the software, and scanners, and technical expertise to keep it all running. And that’s just to scan the title pages! In the meantime, we need to save the originals for the long term. Like the medium rare books, they have value for their form, as well as their content.
Don’t the big online aggregators, the guys who buy the rights to put them online, have to do the same thing? Nope – they get the files in digital form, and just index them. In fact, most books and journals want their incoming material in digital form, so they don’t have that expense. And that’s why so few journals have back issues online, because the works weren’t submitted digitally.
What will it cost to preserve the paper version? That depends. Think of preservation as insurance – costs determine care. Will a band-aid suffice, or do you need a specialist? Is the money better spent on a few important patients, or on community health – preserving by controlling the environment? Lowering the temperature and humidity helps avoid mold and decay – and the patrons happen to like it, too. But the books don’t leave on spring break, and the air conditioning or heat has to stay on, no matter how hard that is to explain to engineers.
We’ve made a start. What we haven’t looked at is how to preserve digital information – across campus, in all disciplines.
Money for microfilming may have dried up, but the model is a good one. We need a central registry for who’s doing what, whether that’s digitization or preservation photocopying. Co-operation will give us the best return for our money. We may only be able to save a few books, but we can prolong the lives of many. We can have a central registry of who is doing what and who has the designated preservation copy – the one that will be saved physically and not used.
Don’t we have brittle books licked? Haven’t we been working on them a long time? Well, most of the world’s publishing was done on acid paper, in the last 150 years; and we’ve only been working on it for the last 20 – and acidic paper is still being used for printing new journals.
What can we do?
We can get input from scholars on what’s vital, what’s important, and what may be useful. We can make educated guesses, but the more input we have, the better our choices.
We can co-operate with other libraries and archives, to maximize the impact of our efforts.
We can invest in preservation. Books – and knowledge – are capitol assets, not sunk ones. We have plumbers, electricians, groundskeepers to maintain buildings. But not a single part-time preservation officer for seven libraries and 2 million books. That’s just over 100 million dollars of contents – more than the cost of the building, and not counting irreplaceable unique collections of millions of items. Are we good stewards if we let them disappear though neglect?
We can teach faculty the implications of digital information – not just using it, but the effects of the software and forms they use to create new papers influences the way they are accessed – or not accessed - from then on.
We can insist that online journals archives their files somewhere safe. It worked with giant Elsevier, it can work with others. And it must, or we’re throwing money away.
We can discuss our options. Everyone is involved in this, not just librarians. Scholars, administrators, and students need to know why prices for journals, costs for tuition, and research costs are going up, not just that they are.
Most importantly – we can do something. Now. Our preservation work has doubled – now we are responsible for the paper copies and the digital ones. There is no time to lose – and millions of books to lose. Even if Google digitizes twenty million volumes, that leaves millions more in our care.
Let us lead the way.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
The new WebJunction
Public librarians know WebJunction well, but academic and special librarians haven't, and archivists have no clue. It's no surprise, we all have plenty to do and read as it is. WJ is like Facebook without the annoying pokes and such.
WJ has just added sections to broaden its appeal and widen its usage. There are now sections for all of the above. To get the ball rolling, I've started a preservation group. I've posted a few book repair manuals and just now, a link to three short book repair videos created by Rachel Hoff's students at UNC.
I encourage you to use this. It's a great place for getting special/archives/museums together to talk and share - which may lead to grants, since that's a new focus for federal grants!
There's also a discussion list where we can get together.
WJ has just added sections to broaden its appeal and widen its usage. There are now sections for all of the above. To get the ball rolling, I've started a preservation group. I've posted a few book repair manuals and just now, a link to three short book repair videos created by Rachel Hoff's students at UNC.
I encourage you to use this. It's a great place for getting special/archives/museums together to talk and share - which may lead to grants, since that's a new focus for federal grants!
There's also a discussion list where we can get together.
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