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.

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.

Moving on

I moved back to Louisville last week. I loved Ohio U and Athens, but major changes in the Ohio university system (a unified state system, centralized processing) meant that my position was eliminated. Best of luck to all my Ohio friends in the reorganization.

Everything changes. Evolution works.

I'll be job hunting, and teaching again, and looking at outsourcing myself - independent workshops and consulting, grantwriting and preservation, mostly. I'll be spending a lot of time updating my wiki of humanities resources for the class, Humanities for Librarians

Take a look and contribute. Why a wiki? I can use a linkchecker, which I can't on a closed PHP silo. Plus it's a lot more fun for students (I hope).

Look for more when I get a chance to read my email again, and my RSS feed. It's not quite an intelligent agent, but it'll do for now. I'm old enough to LOL when I read text messages - I wonder how many people realize that they are the venerable IRC chat abbreviations c. 1995?

Microsoft's out of this picture

Microsoft has dropped out of the Open Content Alliance. I can't say I'm surprised, and not for the reason you think - since they (or more accurately, Gates) have gotten into philanthropy, they have a real point. Since they focus on global health, their considerable money is probably better spent there. After all, the dead can't read online books (or, the cynic in me says, buy MS products).

But in any case, they were gracious enough to leave their equipment and not lock up their content. Good for them!

What will this mean for the OCA? One less partner, less money, neither of which is good. Will it stop the OCA? I doubt it. There are too many well-endowed partners with too wide a base of support, plus considerable technical knowledge.

Will it ever be a rival to Google? Yes. It does have its niche, as does Project Gutenberg; they appeal to open source fans and people with slow connection rates, and they're serious about access. No silo here.

What is seriously threatened are the silos of online books - NetLibrary and its ilk. While Google may not make all public domain works available and only show snippets of copyrighted works, at least they're findable. What good is full text, if you don't know it's there?

Business models will not be the only thing to change in the next few years, merely the early victims. Libraries are in line, as are publishers. Who else? Who knows? Brave new world!

Copyright considered as a standup routine

As I was looking over the many permutations of copyright terms and requirements, ending with the current morass, I suddenly was reminded of Bill Cosby's old routines. Remember "No one will ever touch anybody ever again!" in the car ride with children?

That's what the current scheme is like. Like among all the clamoring voices arguing about whose term is longer and who has to renew, frustrated Papa Congress said "Okay, everything will be copyrighted forever, now SHUT UP!!!!"

And we have. And we shouldn't.

In reality, only a few people even care about copyright. Those that hold it on commercially viable works do, since they produce income. They should, that's what copyright is for, although the phrases limited terms and public good seem to have been forgotten.

The other people who care are librarians and archivists. We should, our profession depends on the intellectual property of others, and both legally and ethically we should respect it.

But we shouldn't fear it. And we do. Millions of archival items and books languish because people, mostly administrators, fear a lawsuit if they digitize or even just copy. Despite Lolly Gasaway's infinitely useful chart, they don't understand the law and they don't understand risk assessment.

Does it matter that no one has produced the documentation to prove that great-great-great grandad wrote that letter? Let alone got all 187 heirs to agree on who owns what portion of the hypothetical copyright? Would they then be able to agree how to split the 187th of a dollar they earned from the copyright?

In reality, most heirs are just glad to find a digital copy of their ancestor's letter, which they didn't know existed. They understand that they would spend more to research and defend a hypothetical copyright than they would ever earn.

Why don't administrators?

I researched a collection of some academic interest and maybe even a little financial one. The possible corporate owner (after many mergers) has no interest in the rights. There is documentation that they freely gave away the images without restrictions. They were then published in the 40s and 50s without copyright notice. They have been reproduced since they have been in an archive these last 30 years without anyone claiming copyright. Heirs who were contacted say they don't have any rights to them, because they were works for hire. I researched at the Copyright Office and found no records.

Where's the risk here, or in the hundreds of other lesser known collections?

Still, administrators there say they can't be digitized until any possible copyright expires. These are people so risk aversive that when they sneeze they say "Hand me a Kleenex, a trademarked name duly registered and enforced".

ARL is heading up a slow and painful study of the proposed Orphan Works Act, while the Google Guys forge ahead and Brewster Kahle fights on the legal battleground. Meanwhile, millions of people post copyrighted work (perhaps unknowing that it is) online in Flickr and YouTube and blogs and Facebook.

Except adminstrators and congressmen from the last century. Let's all write them letters and put stamps on them and see if the Pony Express can reach them.

Where are we going?

That's a collective "we" - what's going to happen to academic libraries - and librarians - in the next five years?

I see us becoming archivists, as the physical book loses importance. We may be the caretakers for the copy of record. And I use "the" advisedly. Will we spend the money to have two copies in the library - or even in the state? Or will distributed copies suffice?

Maybe we'll be responsible for printing a physical copy of electronic books and theses. Why even do that? Because electronic documents have two prime characteristics - they are mutable and they are fugitive. You can change them when you want: something we don't want for official documents like laws and vital records. And while paper copies can and do burn or decay, they are longer lasting than bytes, which can be gone in nanoseconds.

Perhaps we'll be teachers and not caretakers or collection builders. As more information is out there, it takes more skills to locate it and evaluate it. We are good at that, and we have two options (or at least two obvious ones): we can do it as a pro-bono service subsidized by our school, or freelance in a just-in-time pay-as-you-go system. Either way, we are information brokers and not warehouse managers, labeling and stamping books. That's been a waste of our skills for a long time.

We may also be information creators. We've done that for a long time, too. We've indexed and cataloged, in ways that are outdated now, but what about new ways? Can we not build KM systems to synthesize the sources we manage? To build recommender systems? People say that IT folks can do all that, but they can't. They're really good at the software and the hardware, but don't care about the content. We do.

This is just step one in my trying to think ahead of the curve. This week maybe I'll think about how other fields have outrun us in our own field - or what we thought was our field, and synergy with other fields.

Or maybe I'll relax and enjoy the holiday. Naw....

Getting rid of originals?

I was reading the notes of the digitization meeting at RBMS, and thought - WHO thought of the "digitize, then dispose" comment? Some very young person? The first digitization project I worked on followed the LC standards of the time - 150 dpi. What were we thinking? Well, we weren't thinking ahead, we weren't thinking in economic terms that mass production means cheaper, we weren't thinking of the future.

What if we had thought of scan&toss then? What would we make the better scans from? Other than deteriorating nitrate and acetate negatives, which can spontaneously combust or can suddenly turn to dust, what would be good enough to scan but not good enough to keep?

I was shocked that this came from RBMS people - what books would we have left if we tossed the shabby used ones? I hope this isn't an offshoot of the googlescan mindset of administrators, or maybe I hope it is and isn't from the librarians and archivists!

I know that archivists are reputed to be packrats, but are RB librarians conspicuous consumers?