Facepalm Moments of 2010 | Peer to Peer Review
Retailization of research or reallocation for openness? Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN Jan 6, 2011| Photo by Debora Miller |
When sitting down to write today's column, I thought I'd start the new year off by rounding up a few of the trends, topics, and pratfalls of the past year, but as I started to make a list, an interesting thing happened: it began to look oddly familiar. It took me a moment to place the tantalizing memory. It was a piece I had just read in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a satirical "autopsy" of the academic library performed by librarian-pathologist Brian T. Sullivan from the vantage point of the year 2050.
The autopsy found several causes of death: a severe decrease in the relevance of book collections after libraries allowed their contents to be digitized by others, a withering of key functions as IT departments and the faculty took over the technical and educational work once performed by librarians, and atrophy of reference and instruction as search tools grew more sophisticated. It didn't convince me that libraries will be dead within a few decades, but it made me think about trend lines that do concern me. And they tend to be trends we're eagerly embracing.
First, the bad news
Anthropologist and Savage Minds blogger Alex Golub wrote an essay in Inside Higher Ed last summer and used a phrase that has stuck with me. As he reviewed the academic uses of the shiny new iPad (worst product name of the year, but I digress), he wrote "the revolutionary thing about the iPad is not software for reading content, but for finding (and buying) it. The iPad represents the genuine retailization of academic content."
To replace the incredibly expensive Big Deals that are crippling libraries' budgets, Golub imagined a new way scholars could obtain research articles, using handy iTunes-like apps to download just what they wanted instead of paying for entire subscriptions. Of course the price would have to be much less than the $35 or so that journal publishers currently charge per article—he thought 25 cents would be a good price point. Better yet, since journal articles typically don't have DRM, scholars could reassemble and anthologize the contents of their personalized .pdf library with freedom.
Why am I filing this utopian vision under "bad news"? Because libraries are already working on making this happen, even though publishers know they can soak libraries for the much higher costs.
We're such chumps. We sign licenses in blood that restrict who we can invite to use our databases. Then vendors equip each article with a handy email function, allowing users to send articles wherever they want. We're the ones stuck enforcing rules that publishers and vendors insist on but do what they can to render invisible to the end user. (To faculty: want to share that article? No problem! To librarians: No way!) To avoid the unsupportable cost of the old-school Big Deals, we're becoming the scholar's iTunes, purchasing what people want as if we're handing out tissues to people who feel a sneeze coming on. Just wait. Any day now there will be a race to see which library can roll out the coolest app that makes it easy for scholars to pick what they want and have the invisible cost debited from the library's budget. We keep enabling a broken system.
One of our faculty members, growing alarmed at the number of articles he needed from an Elsevier journal we can't afford, asked for help finding out what it would cost him to take out a personal subscription. We found out that Elsevier no longer sells subscriptions to individuals for many of its journals. He would have to buy one article at a time, for the low-low price of $37.95. Or the library would have to do it for him.
He was shocked. He was willing to spring for a personal journal subscription, provided it was a lot less than the $17,000 institutional price that he knew we couldn't afford. But to pay that much for every single article? I think we just made another open access convert, or rather, Elsevier did.
Most scholars, however, never check the sticker price. Why would they? In our haste to provide information, we are switching from renting information, because we can't afford it anymore, to buying what people ask for, still paying absurd and unsupportable prices. If the library is ever going to wither away, it should be because we helped make open access a reality, not because we spent all of our resources on overpriced corporatized research while shielding our users from the ugly reality.
The ebook revolution
Ebooks were big news in 2010, but even though the sales of ebooks surged (from around 3% to 9% of the new book market—a fast-growing but still small piece of the pie), the values that libraries have fought for over the years are being forgotten in the rush to go digital. Trade publishers are reluctant to acknowledge the value of sharing, and Amazon won't let libraries provide downloads to their popular Kindle—but has, like Barnes & Noble, developed a means for short-term sharing, though most publishers won't actually allow it. While library circulations rise in inverse correlation to their budgets, they worry they'll be left behind in the digital revolution.
In academic libraries, providing a sales catalog of ebooks is the new rage. Just like the disposable article plucked by the user from the publisher's tree of overpriced knowledge, patron-driven acquisitions will let us avoid the messy business of trying to predict what our users will want. We'll let them choose, and pay the bill, an approval plan without the hassle of having to make decisions ourselves.
I don't doubt there's logic involved, any more than I can fault libraries for switching to buying articles on demand to replace subscriptions they can no longer afford. But why do we think the only way we can support research is to purchase the finished product? Why is the only way forward to cut costs while keeping them invisible? Can't we invest more in making the research open in the first place? Well, no, because that would require us to stick our necks out and take a stand. It would require that we say "no, we're not doing this anymore, it's killing us." It's so much easier to provide ways to satisfy our users without anyone knowing what we're all losing.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation reminds us of rights we lose with many ebooks, rights we used to defend. Some librarians in Connecticut stood up to the FBI to protect patron privacy and the freedom to read. For some strange reason we won't stand up to corporations to protect those very same rights.
When will there be good news?
There are some things to celebrate. Project Information Literacy published the results of its ground-breaking study, providing fascinating information for instruction librarians and faculty to mull over. (And no, I don't see signs that librarians will have done themselves out of an educational role any time soon.) Heather Morrison at the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics reports that 2010 was a bumper year for open access mandates, journals, and repositories. A judge ruling on two motions to dismiss in the Georgia State e-reserves case set aside some of the scarier arguments that could reduce our fair use rights, suggesting things might not go as badly as we thought. And the Berkman Center is launching an initiative to design a Digital Public Library of America outlined earlier in the year by Robert Darnton.
So there's reason for hope. The patient isn't dead yet. The trend toward finding new and slick ways to keep a broken publication system in place is worrying, but there are also moves afoot to take action for change. Rather than find new ways to spread our shrinking budgets thinner while keeping up appearances and calling it innovation, it's time to get serious and reallocate our energies and resources to support our mission and values.
Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), was published last year by Minotaur Books.
