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.]

That’s how I felt when I read Xiaotian Chen’s article “Google Scholar’s Dramatic Coverage Improvement Five Years after Debut,” which appears in the December Serials Review. (It is not freely available online but can be found at DOI 10.1016/j.serrev.2010.08.002 for those with Science Direct subscriptions.) The article demonstrates that Google Scholar is providing 98 to 100 percent coverage of the databases it is allowed to crawl, either because those databases are freely available, or because Google has an agreement with that database publisher.

I first learned of Chen’s article through Peter Murray’s post to the Library Society of the World. Early in that discussion, John Dupuis called attention to the last line of the article: “The conclusion cannot be clearer: libraries can seriously consider cancelling a large number of subscription-based abstracts and indexes since their unique contents and value are rapidly evaporating.”

It’s possible that I’m missing an important piece of information that would change my mind, but I really don’t think that conclusion is clear at all.

Google Scholar doesn’t provide the full text of anything. So if libraries want readers to be able to get past the citation at JSTOR or other subscription-based databases, we can’t drop those subscriptions.

So the logical databases to drop would be the ones that provide indexing and abstracting, but not full text. But there are two problems I can see with that. One, I doubt that those databases would let Google crawl them, so they wouldn’t be duplicated in the Google Scholar database. Second, and more important, the non-full-text abstracting and indexing databases that I’m famliar with in the humanities and social sciences tend to index a lot of works that are not journal articles. And as Chen says in the article, Google Scholar doesn’t do so well with those citations:

It is always possible that a gap exists between Google Scholar and a database that does not allow Google Scholar to crawl. In the 2005 Neuhaus et al. study, databases such as ABI/INFORM, CINAHL, and Historical Abstracts all had low coverage by Google Scholar. Part of the reason was that these databases include some records that Google Scholar does not or cannot index: non-journal records and some records from journals that have ceased publication. Non-journal records include records of newspapers, magazines, trade journals, book chapters, pamphlets, reports, conference proceedings, theses and dissertations. Ceased journals may not have publicly accessible tables of contents on the Web for Google Scholar to index.

So. If we can’t cancel JSTOR and Science Direct and so on because that’s where the full text comes from, and we can’t cancel ABI/INFORM, CINAHL, and Historical Abstracts (and MLA Interntional Bibliography and Philosopher’s Index and ATLAS and so on), what is left to cut? Just the databases that do nothing but index articles that are already held in those full-text archives? I don’t know that we subscribe to anything like that.

So I can’t agree with Chen that the impact of Google Scholar on abstracting and indexing databases “cannot be clearer.” I doubt that Google Scholar is a specialty database killer. It almost certainly is a federated search killer. If a library has already decided that they are interested in sacrificing precise, predictable searching for simple searching and broad results, I’d think they’d be much better off if they foregrounded links to Google Scholar and came up with a coordinated approach to teaching it to students, rather than sinking time into customizing a vendor’s product and money into paying a vendor’s fees.

But Google Scholar as a replacement for subject-specific A&I databases doesn’t make sense to me.

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.”

Edited at 3:50 MDT: Clinical Reader has changed their site, and blamed the legal threat on a junior employee. I think the only thing missing is a brief public apology to Nikki. The below is still an interesting case study on how overreacting in social media can come back to bite you very quickly.

Original post:

The great and terrible thing about Twitter is the way it makes it so easy for an organization to shoot itself in the foot. About an hour ago, I had never heard of Clinical Reader. Now, I would never use, trust or recommend them, and am happy to share my opinion with you, dear reader.

And it’s not because of what Nikki Dettmar wrote on her Eagle Dawg Blog entry, Starry ethics fail about how Clinical Reader seems to be misrepresenting themselves as recipients of awards and recommendations that don’t exist. I might not have even seen that post, and if I did, I might have been inclined to give Clinical Reader the benefit of the doubt and assumed it was a minor lapse in judgement that they would soon rectify. Hanlon’s Razor and all that.

But when they respond to that blog post not with an apology or explanation (or even silence), but with bogus legal threats, they immedately move from the “possibly clueless” category in my brain to the “toxic and dangerous” category. (Also: love the “too” and the way they say they are “kindly” threatening someone. I feel warm and fuzzy.) And I’m not the only one.

Way to shut up your critics, Clinical Reader.

Edited at 2:02 MDT: It just gets better! Quit while you are behind, Clinical Reader!

I hope you’ll read Ross’s full post, but here is the quick recap of what happened next. According to Ross, the photo was taken in 1881 and published as a postcard around 1908, meaning that there is no controversy as to whether the image is in the public domain. In addition to charging a reproduction fee, the Huntington asked about Ross’s intended use and quoted further fees based on what the use might be. When Ross pointed out they can’t do that with a public domain image, the library said, in effect, “all libraries do this,” to which Ross replied something along the lines of “so what?” It is, he says, a crime called copyfraud.

It’s my understanding that Sage Ross is entirely correct about this. If it’s a photograph of a public domain image, the decision in Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. applies, and the new photograph is also in the public domain. If anyone can show that his take on the situation is incorrect, I would love to hear about that. I am, god knows, not a lawyer.

I went to library school intending to be a special collections librarian, so this isn’t really news to me. Special collections libraries seem to have these kinds of policies as matters of course. It’s not because special collections librarians are evil snobs. (A few are, most aren’t, but either way it’s beside the point here.) I don’t want to be an apologist for these policies–my sympathies are entirely with Ross–but I think I understand how this comes about.

As Ross says, libraries can charge whatever fees they wish to make the copy and send it to you. Researchers can’t force the library to copy anything, or dictate the price. But why do libraries fail to separate that fact from their authority over the use? I think there are several reasons.

Special collections libraries deal with unpublished collections that are still protected by a very long copyright duration. For manuscript collections, the library may own the copyright as part of the deed of gift, or the library may be the intermediary between the copyright holder (typically the subject’s estate) and the researcher. So in many cases, there are legitimate copyright concerns and the library is justified in asking questions about use and granting or withholding certain rights.

Also, copyright is confusing. Fair use is confusing. It can be difficult for a non-lawyer to keep straight the difference between section 107 and section 108 of Title 17 of the United States Code. Unpublished works and orphan works and foreign publications confuse things even further. It can be hard to tell if something is in the public domain, though tables like Cornell’s Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States certainly help.

But it’s not like we do ourselves any favors when it comes to understanding these nuances. It didn’t surprise me a bit that the Huntington fell back on “everybody does this. Go ask Yale!” In libraries, we have a culture of surveying our peers rather than consulting experts. When you start a new service or adjust a policy, is your library more likely to consult to a lawyer to check into the legality of your move, or to conduct a quick survey of what similar libraries are doing?

There is also an interesting mix of the cash economy and the reputation economy at work here. Reproduction fees are one of the few direct revenue streams available to research libraries, so it’s possible that a library could depend on that revenue more than they care to admit. But money aside, libraries also want credit and respectability. The Huntington’s permission to publish policy leads off with restricting use to those “which support the Huntington’s mission of the advancement of learning through research and the production of scholarly works; or for Huntington-approved commercial purposes.” They also expect you to meet “standards of appropriateness established by the Huntington,” and to credit the source properly. This is all to maintain the image of the library. Your special collection isn’t so special when images from your library get cropped, collaged, used for non-approved “inappropriate” commercial purposes. The problem, of course, is that you can’t assert those rights in cases where you don’t have them to begin with.

Lastly, owning the book or photograph or other item feels like it should come with copyrights. After all the library bought the book (or other item) or held complex negotiations with a donor to get it, described and cataloged it, made it findable, kept it at the right temperature and relative humidity and in the best possible condition. Were it not for that research library, it’s possible that the thing you want wouldn’t have survived at all, let alone be available for you to copy. And now you want to waltz in, pay your twenty five bucks for a high resolution scan, and then publish the thing all over the Internet? In the words of Max Fischer, they saved Latin; what did you ever do?

I hope libraries get this straightened out soon. People are becoming more and more aware of their rights to use public domain materials, in part because libraries and cultural institutions are leading the way in making those materials visible on sites like the Flickr Commons. I hope libraries can continue to be leaders in making things available and put behind us customary policies that are regressive (and possibly illegal).

I’m also thankful for the Library of Congress, Flickr, and the Flickr Commons. While searching for something else, I came across these photos of “Thanksgiving maskers,” children in about 1910 putting on funny clothes and masks to go door-to-door begging for coins and fruit.

Tumblr is a pretty slick platform, but I stopped using it for my own linkblog, Bevedog, because it all felt so locked up. I still haven’t been able to export all my stuff from the Tumblr blog.

But I still check in on the blogs I’m following on Tumblr every now and then, and I enjoyed this moment of JSTOR love that I found today. One of the features of Tumblr is “reblogging” where you can easily do a “me too” and blog the same quote or photo or video that you friends have blogged, choosing to add a comment of your own or not, and you get a unique view of all the reblogs if you see it through your Tumblr feed. It’s fun to see people geek out over JSTOR on a non-academic site.

From Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog comes the announcement of the public beta of Omeka, software designed to host digital collections and to show them to their advantage as online exhibitions. In a nutshell, Cohen describes it as “WordPress for your exhibits and collections.”

This comes to us from the ass-kickers (sorry, I can’t think of a better term for them) over at the Center for History and New Media. I think Zotero shows that these folks know how to put together a project, roll it out, establish a user base, and keep improving it.

I downloaded Omeka and installed it on my MacBook under the MAMP environment. It was no more difficult to install than WordPress, though things aren’t working exactly right quite yet because I can’t get it to find my install of ImageMagick. (Help?)

I’m obviously in no position to review or recommend Omeka yet, but I find the project very exciting and full of possibilities. I have been working on and off with OCLC’s ContentDM (or however they want me to capitalize it) and have found it a frustrating and expensive experience. I have long wanted an easy-to-set-up, free open source digital collection management tool, and it looks like Omeka fits that bill. It also takes into account the importance of user-contributed objects and metadata, and comes with what should be no-brainers like RSS feeds and easily switched and customized themes.

The Omeka developers realize that libraries and museums who put up digital collections don’t just want to throw their visitors to a search box or a “browse everything in accession number order” screen. We want to create exhibitions that guide people through carefully curated selections of the objects in the database. Omeka builds this in as a standard feature.

Whether it will be the right combination of powerful and elegant and easy to use, I don’t know, but looking at the featured sites in the Omeka showcase makes me hopeful. I can’t wait to see what people do with it, and hope to get my own glitches out soon so I can play with it more myself.

• Cell phones: Mine is cheap as can be and kept alive via periodic infusions of minutes rather than a monthly plan.
• Computer hardware: Like Laura, I am a lifelong Mac user, and never learned to care about things like video cards, processor speeds, etc., and in fact feel slightly superior to those people who do seem to obsess over such matters. (That completely unwarranted sense of superiority is included with the purchase price of every Macintosh, btw.)
• Programming and scripting: I can cut and paste just like everyone else, but I still have yet to sit down and really understand PHP or JavaScript or the like.
• Databases: I can’t tell if I have trouble with relational databases because it is really pretty simple and self-evident and I’m overthinking it, or if something fundamental continues to escape me.

So why are we interested in compiling such lists? It’s fun to “come clean,” to demonstrate to others and ourselves that everyone has blind spots and tin ears for some technology. But what does it matter if we can’t program a VCR or play a videogame? I think this memelet says something interesting about library bloggers.

We are prone to conflate various interests, tendencies, and proficiencies into one big “techie” category. But we are really talking about at least two different things.

Are we talking about being able to create and maintain interesting and useful technology for digital libraries? Or are we talking about being down with what we think our user population is doing? In other words, would anyone care if it were to come out that John Blyberg didn’t own a cell phone or planet code4lib doesn’t have a World of Warcraft guild? They are too busy actually trying to build useful stuff, right?

Or, on the flip side, would it really matter if Jenny Levine couldn’t use regular expressions or if Stephen Abram was perplexed by phpMyAdmin? These folks don’t set themselves up as hands-on creators of technology, but as popularizers and surveyors of what users are doing and expecting.

I guess part of the anxiety around this subject is that many of us feel caught in between, falling behind on one end of this discussion or the other. For my part, I couldn’t care less about my first two tech-nos on my list. The second two are things I’d like very much to change, if I can find the time and the right project.

• Digital Scholarship in the Humanities is a fairly new blog by Lisa Spiro. She kicked off the year with a three-part roundup on the subject of Digital Humanities in 2007 (part 1, part 2, part 3). Many of the links below are in those three posts, though I heard about some of them from other sources.
• Dan Cohen and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason seem to have interesting new announcements every week. These are the folks behind the citation tool Zotero and a platform for online media collections called Omeka that I’m eager to get my hands on. Plus there is their latest project…
• THAT Podcast, or The Humanities and Technology Podcast. The first episode featured an interview with Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress.
• Dorothea Salo points us to the Bamboo project, a proposal to the Mellon Foundation to fund the development of a shared technology platform to support arts and humanities research. At least I think that’s what it is; the report is in my “printed but not actually read” pile for now. (They might think of getting the History and New Media guys to come up with a new name for the project, as “Bamboo” is gonna be a royal pain to google.)
• The relatively new DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, which bills itself as “an open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities.”
• Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives by Ed Folsom appeared in PMLA 122 (5), Oct. 2007. The link, I’m sorry to say will only help you if your institution subscribes to PMLA. The article is a very interesting look at how the database can be seen as a literary genre unto itself, based on the author’s work as co-editor of the Walt Whitman Archive. I plan to write more about this article, once I have read the responses that were published in the same issue.