Ipswich, Mass. — June 2, 2011 — EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) and The H.W. Wilson Company (Wilson) have merged in what is being viewed by the companies as an ideal match. This combination of organizations will allow the strengths of each to benefit existing and forthcoming products & services.

Instructions to libraries:

1. Put all your eggs in one basket.
2. Put all your money in that same basket.
3. That probably wasn’t all your money, was it? Put more money in the basket.
4. Realize that maybe you are interested in other things besides those eggs in that basket.
5. Realize that you can’t afford new eggs if all the money plus most of the rest of the money is already in the basket.
6. Realize that they aren’t your eggs anymore, if they ever were.

But that can be a dangerous argument to make. Twenty-six circulations is unacceptable, but you say some books can go for a hundred circulations? So it should be fine if HarperCollins sets a 100 checkout limit, right? Honestly, this is not the conversation we want to have. The problem is not that the number of circulations set by the publisher is too small; the problem is that no publisher should be able to control these aspects–really any aspects–of the library’s workings.

Many librarians say they want the library to own the ebook, not simply lease or license it from the publisher. If we are to do this, we need to recognize that it’s hard to own something that lives on a for-profit corporation’s servers, whether that corporation be the publisher or Overdrive or some other vendor. Yes, there are publishers who currently sell ebook or ejournal content outright, but how many of us host those books on our own servers? If those companies went under, how long would it take us to get access for our users up and running again? Libraries cannot afford to enter into licenses that leave publishers and vendors holding all the cards. How many books in an average library are out of print, or printed by publishers that no longer exist? We believe that the publisher should publish, and the library should own, lend, and preserve.

We also understand that most libraries aren’t interested in creating their own digital “stacks” to hold all the files that make up their ebook collections. For those libraries–probably most libraries–ebook files could be hosted by a trusted not-for-profit service. The important thing is that the books would be hosted by the library or by a site or service that is working for the library, not for a publisher or vendor.

Neither of us love the current state of copyright in the United States. We believe that copyright lasts too long, protects the rights of the creator way out of proportion to the rights of the user, and leads people to limit their uses of copyrighted material far more than necessary. The solution, however, is not even more restrictive licenses. We envision a system, like the one under which paper books are bought and sold today, that does not depend on licenses. Instead, publishers would have recourse to the same protection they have had for years: copyright.

Lastly, we think that publishers have a right and a reason to be scared that libraries lending ebooks will lead to rampant and uncontrolled unauthorized copying. (And even if we didn’t believe it, it seems that they are, and it seems that we need to address that.) Accordingly, we think there is a place for digital rights management technology (DRM) to keep users from casually making unauthorized copies of ebooks. However, this, too, we believe needs to be under the control of libraries. Libraries will be likely to use the least DRM necessary to accomplish the goal of preventing unauthorized copies–in fact, it wouldn’t “manage” “digital rights,” it would simply be copy protection. Patrons could trust that there would be no library “rootkits” on library-loaned ebooks. The current state of DRM for library loans is incoherent and confusing for librarians and patrons alike. Imagine having separate loan and photocopying policies for the different print books in a library’s collection.

Phew.

Those are our main ideas. The result is a plan for libraries to buy, lend, and preserve ebooks which looks like this:

• Libraries will purchase e books from publishers or other sources. Libraries will not license ebooks.
• Licenses are not necessary. The entire process will be based on copyright. The publishers’ control over the ebook ends the moment it is sold to the library. This does not mean that the publisher loses the same rights it has today to sue for copyright infringement and damages.
• Most libraries will employ a third party to be responsible for both access to and preservation of ebooks. Some libraries–probably very large public libraries or research libraries–may prefer to go it alone rather than contracting with such a service. In either case, the entity that actually keeps the files, the loan policies, the patron information, and so on, is either the library or a group working only for the library, and not for a publisher or vendor.
• Most libraries will choose to add DRM to ebooks in the form of copy protection in order to satisfy publishers’ desires not to see unauthorized copies proliferate. Copy protection that is acceptable to libraries will be largely invisible, platform-independent, and will serve only to prevent the creation of additional complete unauthorized copies.
• Copy protection must not interfere with readers’ rights to fair use.
• Copy protection will never be applied by the publisher, but by the library, or by a third party hosting the ebooks under contract from the library. When dealing with paper books, we don’t allow each publisher to determine different check-out and photocopying policies for each book. We set a single policy to encourage copyright compliance for all books in the collection.

We can’t pretend this is the final word on ebooks; we aren’t even sure we are the first to propose such an idea. We know that embracing copy protection–however limited, however under library control–will be unacceptable to some librarians and activists. While we have tried to look at things from the publishers’ point of view, we realize they might find a plan such as this to be laughable.

This plan isn’t perfect. But we think it’s progress.

[Thanks to Marianne Aldrich for suggesting that it is “copy protection” rather than “digital rights management” that we are talking about.]

Yes, I don’t disagree with anything that anyone says here about how it [ILL of digital documents] works now. But I would still LOVE to explain this to a confident, thoughtful student. “So wait. It’s not OK if I click the download link. And it’s not OK if you click the download link. But if we send a little request to this other person at this other library and she clicks the link and emails us the EXACT SAME ARTICLE that we are not allowed to get–THAT’S OK? Am I getting this right?”

Within about a half hour of making that comment, I had the following telephone conversation at the reference desk of my library. (Actually, the conversation wasn’t quite like this, as I gave him some bad information, so I’m editing this to be accurate as to how things really work.)

Him: Hi, I’d like to know about using an ebook that your college has which I found in Prospector [our statewide union catalog/expedited ILL system].

Me: OK. You aren’t part of Colorado College?

Him: No I use Boulder Public Library and want to get something through Prospector that you have as an ebook.

Me: Ah, OK.

Him: But when I click the “view online” link, I don’t get the book, I get a login screen for your college.

Me: Right. I’m sorry about that, but the license agreements we have with publishers dictate that only our students, faculty, and staff can use that.

Him: Well, I understand, but is there a way for me to get that ebook?

Me: Actually, yes. This is published by Springer, and they allow us to do interlibrary loans. You can click the “Request this book” link in Prospector and we will get you an electronic copy.

Him: But I still will need a login from your college?

Me: No. Someone at our library or one of the others who owns the book will download all the chapters one-by-one in PDF. We will then electronically transmit those chapters to a filesharing site and notify a person at your library, who will notify you that they are available and tell you how to get to them.

Him: So I have to get them from the public library, not from you?

Me: Yep.

As my colleague, Marianne, points out, this is actually a non-trivial pain for staff, and not something that Springer (as nice as their ebook platform is and as “generous” as their ILL contract provisions are) has any incentive to make easier. We do it with only a little grumbling because it is valuable for readers to get access to those books and we value access for readers over convenience for library staff.

In other words, it seems that the only reason ebook ILL works for some publishers is because it’s almost broken for libraries.

Thanks to a link from Andy Woodworth, I recently read an August post from Jason Griffey on Ebook Sanity. Griffy has good things to say on the topic, but it’s really Tim Spalding’s remarks in the comments that get me.

I could quote the whole thing, but I’ll stick with this lengthy excerpt for now:

Put simply, libraries do not exist merely to socialize book-reading costs; they exist to lower them dramatically. From the social libraries of the 18th century to today, the principle is the same: a library buys a book once, but gets seven, ten, twenty or more uses from it–effectively turning every community dollar spent into seven, ten or twenty dollars of community value. That situation is now at an end. Digital distribution has ended it, and libraries have lost the power. Publishers–and authors–have no incentive to give libraries the deal they had before. Instead, libraries are going to find themselves paying close to market value for every “rental” they facilitate. This will turn libraries from a magical engine of value creation into a thin subsidy layer between patrons and publishers. Libraries won’t be multiplying value for a town; they will just be socializing it. Add patron-driven acquisition and libraryland’s mad rush to embrace ebook technologies that eviscerate reader privacy and the traditional library value-adds will decline still further. We can dream all we want about libraries repositioning and reimagining, but the simple fact is that libraries are not in control of their destiny in a digital world. Only contracts matter, and libraries–especially public libraries–have little power to write the contracts.

I was mulling this over on its own merits earlier this week, and was thinking about it again just now after reading Iris’s lastest post Shooting ourselves in the foot? Again? Thinking most about journals, it seems, Iris is concerned that we as a profession are so willing to “bend over” for publisher and that “we haven’t made more of a stink about the non-lendable nature of the digital collections we’re all building with abandon.”

But really, what kind of a stink are we going to make? Why would a publisher allow ILL in the first place if they didn’t have to?

I started to think about the mechanics of an ILL of an electronic article, and this is where my brain really broke. Let’s break it down:

1. A patron at Library A wants an article that her library doesn’t own in any format.
2. She fills out an ILL request online.
3. ILL staff at Library A get the request, process it, and find that Library Z should have the article. They request a copy from Library Z.
4. ILL staff at Library Z process the request, download the article from a database that allows ILL, and send it to Library A electronically.
5. Library A recieves the electronic copy of the article and process it.
6. Library A sends the copy to the patron, or otherwise notifies her that her electronic document is ready for her to use.

This makes no sense to anyone but a librarian.

Why not do it this way:

1. A patron at Library A wants an article that her library doesn’t own in any format.
2. Patron is directed to another database that does contain the article where she downloads it own damn self.
3. Libraries pay the publisher for the download.

ILL makes sense in a world where collections are separated by physical space and articles must be copied and sent by hand. Once we are dealing with stuff that is online, the whole idea of ILL becomes absurd.

Henry Fuseli’s Odysseus Between Scylla and Charybdis

1. Cory Doctorow says you shouldn’t buy an iPad if you care about your mom and freedom and stuff. This idea should have at least some resonance for librarians who historically have been interested in free access to and dissemination of information.

2. People who buy an iPad and jailbreak it will be part of the problem and not the solution. People who buy an iPad and then complain about the closed environment are delusional and easily distracted. Collection development librarians are caught between the Scylla of powerful patron needs and desires and the Charybdis of vendor pricing, bundling, licensing, and so forth.

3. As a rule, academic patrons (faculty and staff) are very interested in access to the literature and very disinterested in the relationship between authors, journals, publishers, databases, vendors, and libraries. It is this disconnect between what is wanted (instant access to a particular work) and what we have to license (access to big bundles of “content”) that is the crux of the problem.

4. I don’t really think Apple or EBSCO or any of these companies are doing anything “unethical” when they bundle content or create unfriendly licenses, or negotiate exclusive deals. I think that their business interests conflict with the interests of some of their customers, and these controversies make those disconnects plain. Libraries and vendors do not have the same goal.

5. I do think calling a person’s supervisor because of a blog post she wrote is sleazy, hostile, and wrong. Send me the names of those reps and I will call them (not their supervisors) myself to tell them so. EDIT: No need to send me his name, because Sam Brooks, the Senior VP of Sales and Marketing for EBSCO, called me himself today. He’s the guy who called Meredith’s boss, and he says he did so because he wanted to talk to the library’s EBSCO contact (i.e., Meredith’s boss) about their options for getting the journal they wanted with just one database subscription, instead of two, as Meredith had thought. I think he is sincere. So I’ll scratch “sleazy” and “hostile” and say “ill-advised” and “undiplomatic.” He should have called Meredith first, pled his case, then let her know that he’d be calling the library’s official contact next.

6. Libraries are hindered in any negotiations with “content providers,” because we aren’t their real customers. Library patrons are their customers and we write the checks.

7. Meredith wants to see libraries band together and use our collective weight. Others remind us that mass boycotts might run afoul of racketeering laws. I wonder if a better approach than boycotts and protests would be a way to encourage good behavior. How about an agreement among libraries that certain contract provisions or corporate actions are unconscionable and we will no longer sign contracts containing those provisions? How about a list of practices that we prefer, which would give a vendor an edge in competition if they adhered to those practices? And how about the biggest groups in the library world (I’m thinking of ARL for academic libraries) getting behind such an act?

8. Really though, why should libraries worry about solving this issue? Can’t we just make the best decisions we can with the money we have, and let the chips fall where they may? When you lose access to something important because a Big Vendor signs an exclusive deal with a single journal, shouldn’t you direct complaints from patrons to the journal? The less we work around these problems the better. Let the journal feel the pain of fewer readers and citations. Let the researchers feel the pain of waiting for ILL. Refuse to apologize or mitigate crises that you did not create.

9. Some “content” (look, I’m sorry for the scare quotes, I just hate the word “content”) is big enough that it can always take its ball and go home. Notice how the Beatles still aren’t on iTunes? Nature and Science will always be able to do whatever damn fool thing they want.

10. If I were the head of EBSCO, I’d likely be following the same business strategy which they are right now. I’m not sure why I should care much if librarians start to hate my company and a few bloggers make some noise about it, as long as the people in charge felt that they couldn’t cancel their subscriptions. I’d be responsible to my employees and my board and owners, and I could live with librarians saying “we hate you” as long as the renewals kept rolling in. Librarians need a more compelling story than “we hate you.” We need “as soon as this [very likely and very immanent] thing happens, we will all scrape you off our shoes and never look back.”

This is the kind of thing I can’t stand.

A senior student sent Iris Jastram at Pegasus Librarian an email suggesting that she buy Sergio Rivera-Ayala’s new book, El discurso colonial en textos novohispanos: espacio, cuerpo y poder. That’s a pretty normal thing for librarians at institutions like Iris’s and mine. I tell students working on theses to let me know if they come across books we should own.

But this email was strange enough to ring some warning bells for Iris. She tends to know the seniors in her subject areas, and they call their senior projects “comps,” not “thesis.” So she called the registrar and found no student by that name registered.

So the message was spam. Sleezy spam. From the publisher, Tamesis? From the author Sergio Rivera-Ayala? It’s impossible to tell, and Iris is wise enough not to speculate.

So that was a little kerfuffle, but it cooled right down. Until the comments tonight.

Someone using the name “Verga Parati” makes a comment wondering why she wouldn’t just buy the book anyway. I mean, besides the lying fraud, it’s probably a good book anyway? The commenter ends with “Jesus, what kind of librarians are you?”

I wondered what kind of commenter this was, so I googled the name to find out that “verga para ti” is Spanish for “cock for you.” Boy, I’d hate my parents if they somehow accidentally gave me a name that was a Spanish obscenity. Then every time I showed up in someone’s blog comments to give them a hard time about not adding a Spanish-language book to the collection, they wouldn’t take me seriously and would assume I was trying to send a veiled sexually hostile message to the librarian. Man, that would be a drag.

Then another comment comment from Mr./Ms Cock came in, trying to be a little nicer, but still implying that Iris should buy the book. Iris’s last reply makes it clear that she knows where the cock person is posting from and that this information is perhaps incriminating to some degree.

I’m sorry that this post is mostly a play-by-play rehash of something on Pegasus Librarian. But this is the kind of thing I simply hate: people using the anonymity of the net to try and lie and defraud and intimidate. I’ll be contacting the author, Sergio Rivera-Ayala, and the publisher, Tamesis, tomorrow to be sure they know that someone is doing this. If I were Sergio Rivera-Ayala, I’d be most distressed that someone was griefing librarians about my book and I would make every effort to find the real emailer and commenter and make them apologize publicly.

(This also reminds me that I need to make a comment policy. Basically, anyone who uses a pseudonym or otherwise falsely identifies themselves in my comments gives up all right to privacy. Try and pull any crap like this with me and I will publish your IP address and everything I know about you.)

Via boingboing I found this blog post Before the blog – zines from the 80s…. The blogger has scans of zine covers from the late 1980s from his collection–a collection which apparently has spent the last 20 years or so in Jugoslovenski Aerotransport carry-on. (Are those archival? Because it’s way cooler than a Hollinger box.)

He has also created a flickr group called The Piran Café zine repository for cover scans of zines that are no longer published (i.e., just about all of them). Perhaps when I have a spare moment, I’ll pull some of my mid-1990s zines out of the boxes under my desk and shoot a few covers for the pool.

In other zine-related news, I expect to attend the Denver Zine Festival, a week from Saturday, where I hope to buy some zines for the Colorado College Zine Collection and meet up with one of my heroes, John Porcellino, author of the self-published comic King-Cat Comics and Stories. While we go around celebrating our blogs’ first or second birthdays, Porcellino has been self-publishing King-Cat since 1989.

My own zine from the mid-1990s, Fiasco, lasted two issues (which I think is the median for zine longevity), though I’m thinking of dusting off the imprint for a special issue this summer. We’ll see.

Bound volumes of journals covered by JSTOR online.

There is a very interesting article in the September 1 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled Library Renovation Leads to Soul Searching at Cal Poly (note: that link will self-destruct after five days. Chronicle subscribers can always use this permalink to the article).

It would seem that a library renovation and addition at Cal Poly Pomona will result in less space for printed volumes, and the dean of libraries, Harold B. Schleifer, has overseen an aggressive weeding plan which has shrunk the collection by 43,000 volumes.

One of the most contentious issues has been what to do with printed volumes of journals that the library also has in digital form via JSTOR. The librarians under Schleifer apparently were not comfortable with the plan to discard these volumes, but the plan went ahead. Judging from the responses of the faculty interviewed for the Chronicle article, the faculty weren’t consulted on the decision:

When Ms. Bricker, the architectural historian, heard that JSTOR journals were sent to the trash and that books were going to storage, she was dismayed.

. . .

But [professor Zuoyue Wang] did not know that the library had completely discarded the old paper versions of journals archived on JSTOR.

. . .

Like many professors on the campus, [Jane Ollenburger] did not know that the library had thrown out paper journals to make room for such study spaces. “The academic part of me is appalled,” she says.

At CC we have just finished a JSTOR withdrawal project that took all of last academic year to prepare for and all of this summer to complete. We tried to be sure that faculty knew exactly what we were planning, and that they had final say over what was being withdrawn. So I hope that we will avoid many of the problems that seem to be cropping up for Cal Poly. But only time will tell if we did the right thing. (I have already had a new tenure-track faculty member say to me “I can’t believe you threw out all those journals!”)

But that’s not really what I want to talk about; I’m interested in something that the aforementioned professor Wang said: “As a historian, I’m concerned…. When you discard journals, students lose the ability to browse. That’s something I would regret. I can see why the library would take that step, but I wish they would have let us know.”

Now, I think I know what he means: it is easier to flip through a printed volume and take in very quickly a lot of things about the publication that aren’t as obvious when looking at an electronic journal. Articles may catch your eye due to chance adjacencies, illustrations may jump out at you, etc.

But whether a library pitches the JSTOR volumes or not, the fact remains that browsing the physical stacks of a library is going to give a scholar a less and less complete picture of the available scholarship.

I remember arguing several years ago that it was something of a disservice to faculty to put out the week’s new print copies of journals at UCSD’s Science & Engineering Library, since it represented such a small percentage of what was actually published and available that week. At the time it made sense to continue to display those journals since they tended to represent the best, most prestigious, and most expensive stuff we had to offer. but I think that will decreasingly be the case.

Rather than saying online = no browsing, I’d rather see faculty and librarians get together to think about what browsing (or serendipity or whatever) means in the online environment. After all, you can browse TOCs in JSTOR quite easily. And what about the browsing of a keyword search results list?

In an ideal world, browsing online would be better than browsing paper volumes because of hyperlinking. Once you found something interesting, the citations in the bibliography would be hyperlinked to fulltext copies, the author names would be hyperlinked to the author’s entire output, etc. We are a long way from such a linktopia, but what we have still beats the hell out of an entirely printed collection for satisfying the “I want to see that now” urge.

I have linked to this before, in my post on Lurving Wikipedia, but there is a strong case to be made for the Web as a serendipitous browser’s paradise.

Are there browsing skills for the online world that we can teach? And will they get any traction with students who seem to always want to cut to the chase? In my experience, undergraduates on a deadline aren’t a very “browsy” bunch.

And are there ways to better build online collections for browsing? Anyone doing a good job right now?

I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it, but the Denver Zine Library and others are sponsoring the Denver Zine Fest on Saturday March 11 from 10-6 at More Matters Studios, 2132 Market St., Denver. Exact time and location are still to be announced.

We have a small zine collection at Tutt Library; I hope we’ll be able to buy a lot of Colorado zines at the zine fest to start growing the collection. At the very least we plan to send a flyer letting zinesters know that we are looking to buy their stuff for the collection.

If you aren’t familiar with zines, the Wikipedia entry for zine is as good a place as any to start. If you kids are good, someday I’ll tell you how I was a zinester long before I was a blogger.

Tags: library, zines, denver

Jessy has pointed me to a wonderful blog that I hadn’t seen before: Hyde Collection Catablog, “The world’s greatest Samuel Johnson collection, one book at a time.”

In my experience, this is a unique idea for a blog. Cataloger John Overholt of Harvard’s Houghton Library is cataloging the Donald and Mary Hyde Collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson. As he encounters interesting books or Johnson anecdotes, he writes them up on the blog.

You need not be a Johnson expert or enthusiast to enjoy this blog. Overholt’s tone is fairly light and informal; I submit the entirety of the post What did you say your name was again? as exhibit A (the blog has a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, so I feel OK reposting it here):

This copy of Rasselas has what looks exactly like the signature of a previous owner, except that the name is “Steadfast Bunny”. Our index lists several people with the last name of Bunny, so I guess it’s not impossible, but still I feel strange putting “Bunny, Steadfast, former owner” in my record. That’s not a name, it’s the title of a children’s book!

“..and so, the Steadfast Bunny returned to his warren, having learned a very important lesson about the value of friendship.”

Overholt also gives a great feeling for the thrill of holding and examining 18th century books in all their various states (I think it was Michael Winship I first heard say that every manuscript is pretty much the same, but every copy of a book is different), as in the post Time travel: now in book form!

My only complaint? No pictures! Show us the goods, John!

Tags: library, harvard, special_collections, samuel_johnson