A popular topic coming across my radar screen is the future of reading, and more specifically the role of libraries in the future of reading. Much of commentary seems to have been inspired by the announcement of the Apple iPad device, but it isn’t necessarily limited to that. Here are three exemplars, in no particular order, followed by some of my own comments.

Joshua Kim, senior learning technologist and an adjunct in sociology at Dartmouth College, posted a commentary called Popular Nonfiction, Academic Libraries, and Audiobooks at Inside Higher Ed. Joshua does an interesting comparison of the availability of “popular nonfiction” in paper and audio book format. He took his list of 197 audiobooks from Audible and cross-referenced them with availability of paper copies in his academic library. To his delight, he found that the library had paper copies of nearly three-quarters of them. It was his second question, though, that got me thinking: “Should academic libraries supply borrowers with the book format that matches their preferences and learning styles (paper, e-paper, or audio)?”

Josh Greenberg, Director of Digital Strategy and Scholarship at the New York Public Library, posted an entry on his blog late last month called Books, iTunes, and rental. At the top of his post, he is “wondering about the business model for books in the iTunes Store, and whether there will be an opening for circulating (particularly public) libraries or not.” He strikes a comparison between the ability to rent self-destructing movies from iTunes and how that can be a new business model for book publishers. To bring this into the realm of libraries, he suggests we “imagine an option for an institutional iTunes account, where a given user would add a library card number to their iTunes account and their library would pick up the tab when they “rent” books (or, plausibly, even other media).”

And finally, an article at CNN/Money has a series of interviews where 10 luminaries look ahead to the business of reading (via Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress and one of the people interviewed for the article). Although Matt’s response to the question of the future business of reading was interesting, I found the response from Paul LeClerc, president and CEO of the New York Public Library, even more fascinating¹ :

So we could buy x number of copies of Catcher in the Rye as books but also through a vendor we could buy y number of copies of Catcher in the Rye as e-books or e-audio books and then let’s say we buy 50 of each, 50 hardcopy and 50 e-books. It’s like having 100 copies of the book.

In each of these, the authors are struggling to reconceptualize the role of the library in the transition from a familiar print world² to a multi-format world of text-on-paper and text-on-screen (in all of its various incarnations) and text-as-audio. The latter is certainly a more complicated, uncertain world.

I think it is time to separate the cost of the content versus the cost of the container. From a bottom-up cost calculation, doing so would recognize that it takes a certain amount of effort — paying the author and editor, plus all of the overhead involved — to create a coherent chunk of text. That is a fixed cost that is independent of how the chunk of text is distributed. To this is added the cost of the format: paper/printing/binding/shipping for the physical version, bits-on-disk/infrastructure for the electronic version, and voice-talent/audio-engineer/distribution for the audio version. If one has paid for the content creation once, shouldn’t paying for the carrier of that content — paper, electronic, audio — simply be an incremental cost? In other words, if I buy the book in paper and find I want to have it read to me, shouldn’t I then just have to pay for the voice-talent/audio-engineer/distribution costs for that particular carrier?

In some respects, I think it then becomes easier to face the prospect of serving the disparate needs and desires of patrons for various formats. To reconceptualize Paul’s scenario: the library buys 100 copies of the intellectual work known as Catcher in the Rye and chooses 50 manifestations in the paper format and 50 manifestations in e-book format. The cost of switching, say, from a PDF e-book format to an ePub e-book format is just the cost of changing carriers — no “new” content has been purchased. Same thing would hold true if the library decided to convert 20 of its 50 paper carriers into audio book carriers.

I am struggling a bit with Josh Greenberg’s notion of a library barcode tied to an institutional iTunes account. Although I’ve advocated for “Just-In-Time” acquisitions policy/system of the kind that he is proposing, it was in the context of buying items in paper that the library would keep after the patron was done with it. In other words, there would be something owned at the end. An institutional subscription to limited-duration rentals of electronic content is quite different. The institution gets nothing in the end from subsidizing the reader’s access to the electronic library. I’m not so sure I’m in favor of that. It is certainly giving me something to think about.

Footnotes

1. This paragraph is excerpted as-is from the article. There are clearly some words missing, but I think the overall concepts are understandable.
2. I’m ignoring the role of formats such as microform here because they are, for the most part, a medium that is more identical to print than it isn’t.

I’m reading the notes from the Atlanta OLE Project regional workshop and right up at the top are these two statements that struck me as insightful. The first gets to the heart of how physical items in a library are different from digital items with respect to library service commitments:

With print items, we’re trying to give people access; with electronic trying to keep them out.

This stems, undoubtedly, from the first sale doctrine in copyright law; the library has purchased the item and chooses to lend it to others for a period of time. With electronic items, though, we typically agree to licenses, which — as contract law — trumps the rights given by copyright; those license are more restrictive in what we can and cannot do with the digital versions.

The second observation brings this difference into sharper focus by pointing out what we make users do in order to get access to that physical or that digital item:

Isn’t it interesting that users from other libraries have borrowed print books delivered to them, but must travel to another library to get access to their electronic items.

As we think about what is similar and what is different about workflows for physical and digital items, it is undoubtedly important to tease out these differences. Kudos to the staff attending the Atlanta OLE regional workshop for bringing this difference to the forefront.

The text was modified to remove a link to https://libshare.library.gatech.edu/clearspace/docs/DOC-2724 on February 11th, 2011.

The American Library Association annual conference is getting more social each year, and as a long-time member of ALA and often a critic of the, well, un-togetherness of ALA’s electronic capabilities, it is nice to see the trend continuing this year. Take, for instance, the Blogger’s Room. Initially just a LITA thing, it is now being promoted as an association-wide service. As I write this, that page has about two dozen entries for individual and group blogs that say they will be covering conference events.

Or take Brian Eisley‘s unofficial Twitter reflector. (Brian calls it a group; I’m calling it a reflector; it is something different than a Twitter Hashtag.) He has put up some instructions on how to get signed up to receive and how to sent messages to the reflector. There is also the Twitter hashtag #ala08. I’m a Twitter newb, so I don’t know the differences, advantages, and disadvantages of each. But I’m interested to learn…

Speaking of tags, the ALA Annual Wiki defines ala2008 as the official conference tag. That’s not such a stretch to assume — it is a logical choice — but the establishment of an “official tag” (as much as anything is official in the social tagging space) does help collocate meeting content in the blogosphere, in Flickr, and in del.icio.us. (What?!? …you say? That’s the function of subject analysis and description? Here in the unwashed folksonomy space? Blasphemy!)

Did I mention the Official ALA Annual Wiki? It is now getting prominent placement in the navigation area of the primary conference pages. The fifth link down — pretty impressive. And it is easy to see why. The Official Wiki holds a host of information not previously found in the American Libraries insert or even on-site. Links to policies and procedures, a Google map of area restaurants and hotels, an “Unofficial Events” page, and a Conference Presentation Materials site to put all of the PowerPoints and handouts from meetings.

It is nice to see ALA providing this space where grassroots organization and promotional efforts can be shepherded in on co-located space. There was a time that this was spread out over various hand-coded web pages, blogs and other web services. Way to go, ALA; and way to go ALA members!

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.brianeisley.com/TwitterALA2008/ on January 28th, 2011.

Waves of change are crashing on the shores of the library profession. New media, new tools, new techniques, and new expectations collide to cause excitement, anxiety, confusion, and concern. It may be difficult to determine where we are and where we are going. At our present crossroads, it is useful to view the pressures and effects of change on our services as a matrix of commercial versus local on one axis and physical versus digital on the other. Interesting observations about the nature of content and our reaction to it can be made at the intersections of commercial and local with physical and digital. This essay uses these intersections to examine the waves of content coming to the library and our ways of managing it.

The first wave

Also part of this first wave is the management of local, physical material. This is usually in the form of special archive materials – content produced by the institution and/or curated one-of-a-kind items such as author manuscripts, correspondence, and other ephemera. An entire profession – that of an archivist – is devoted to this kind of material.

The second wave

The third wave

Does the library have a role in managing local, digital material? Should the library have a role? The JISC/SCONUL Library Management Systems Study suggests it should. It described the impact of this new wave as “applying library expertise to new views of corporate intellectual assets, such as the long term management and ‘exposure’ of both research and undergraduate outputs, in a multimedia and collaborative world.”¹ David Lewis, Dean of the University Library at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis, says the transition from purchased to open access content “will do more to reshape what libraries will be and do in the future… but this has not yet been carefully considered or broadly discussed.”²

In some sense, the break between the second and third waves is the difference between the management of content that is “done”, versus the management of content as it is being created. In the first two waves, the library profession focused on the curation of knowledge published in a fixed form, usually by commercial publishers, in a reactionary manner towards the end of the content creation cycle. A focus on curating local, digital content, however, means that libraries can more directly insert their services at the point where content is being created.

One of the criticisms by authors of institutional repositories is the extra steps required to deposit their content into the library’s repository, after going through the effort of submitting it to a publisher.³ From their perspective, they are asking, “Why do I have to do this extra work for my published (‘done’) article?” What if, instead, the author stored their work-in-progress in a library service from the beginning? We could offer the promise of robust backups and versioning, collaborative writing tools, and access from anywhere. With the working draft on our servers, we could mine the text to suggest content from our curated stores, and even suggest potential collaborators based on similarities of works. And with the completed draft on our servers, “publishing” it in the institutional repository becomes a simple checkbox – “yes, make this public” – as we have already collected all of the necessary metadata that would go into the archive package in the repository.

Waves are crashing on the shores of our libraries. Waves of content that represent a fundamental shift from the physical to the digital, and the commercial to the local. Waves of change that form opportunities to evolve our services for library users by offering effective tools for the management of content, as it is created. Are you ready to ride the waves?

The text was modified to update a link from https://idea.iupui.edu/dspace/handle/1805/953 to https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/handle/1805/953 on January 28th, 2011.

Footnotes

1. Adamson, V., Bacsich, P., Chad, K., Kay, D., & Plenderleith, J. (2008). JISC & SCONUL Library Management Systems Study. p. 35. Retrieved April 17, 2008, from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/resourcediscovery/lmsstudy.pdf
2. Lewis, D. W. (2007). A Strategy for Academic Libraries in the First Quarter of the 21st Century. College & Research Libraries, 68(5), p. 425. Also available from the IUPUI Digital Archive.
3. For more on the difficulties research faculty see with institutional repositories, see Foster, N. F., & Gibbons, S. (2005). Understanding Faculty to Improve Content Recruitment for Institutional Repositories. D-Lib Magazine, 11(1). doi: 10.1045/january2005-foster.

In the course of putting together the JISC/SCONUL Library Management Systems Study, the authors interviewed the four major vendors of integrated library systems in higher education in the U.K.: Ex Libris, Innovative Interfaces, SirsiDynix and Talis. Among the “who are you” and “what do you do” questions were two that get to the heart of what many of us are clamoring for from our vendors:

• How do your products interoperate with products those from other LMS/ERM vendors?
• Do you have partnerships with other LMS/ERM vendors?

Since three of the four are also leading vendors in North America (and I’m betting the fourth would like to be one as well), I think it is instructive to look at how these four vendors answer these two questions.¹

Ex Libris

How do ExLibris products interoperate with products those from other LMS/ERM vendors?

We interoperate with our own products first (e.g. Primo and MetaLib) but all new products designed to interoperate more widely by means of standards

Does ExLibris have partnerships with other LMS/ERM vendors?

With Talis for Verde

Innovative Interfaces

How do Innovative products interoperate with those from other LMS/ERM
vendors?

Our history is rooted in providing products that interoperated with other products. This continues with ERM for example

Does Innovative have partnerships with other LMS/ERM vendors?

No. Our aim is to provide best of breed across the whole range of library needs. Of course we don’t stand in the way of libraries that wish for example to add Aquabrowser or Endeca. However we want to provide solutions that are better. To date, we haven’t seen a big groundswell for these types of products…for all of the press and interest it has gotten, products like Endeca haven’t made a major dent in the marketplace.

SirsiDynix

How do SirsiDynix products interoperate with those from other LMS/ERM
vendors?

Z39.50 and other, APIs (SD has been doing this API stuff for over 15 years). We work with other vendors through our certification programme — in particular for SIP2 and NCIP. All other ILS vendors are supported through Z39.50 as well as federated search programs.

Partnerships with other LMS/ERM vendors?

No genuine partnerships with LMS competitors (e.g. to cross sell products).

Deeper integration is available for resource sharing and ILL.

Talis

How do Talis products interoperate with those from other LMS/ERM vendors?

Talis List integrates with all LMSs and Talis Base does too (via Ztarget). Gateway (EDI) will interoperate but it not quite there yet. We work with other link resolvers, self-serve, and SRU/SRW services etc

Keystone is focussed on our own LMS for now but is designed to enable interoperability with other LMSs. Anything new we develop is standards based to work with other LMS and as appropriate with other external system

Partnerships with other LMS/ERM vendors

The only formal relationship is with ExLibris. Our Connexions programme includes working with ExLibris with Verde but there were some problems because Verde didn’t support 1Cate (now OCLC resolver), which the customer wanted to continue to use.

In section 4.41 of the report (“The staff perspective on the LMS”), the authors quote a passage from Carl Grant’s blog²: “These companies have become unresponsive to the collective goals of our profession and, like so much of our society these days, are no longer focused on the we but the me. It is a sad state of affairs and one that will not be tolerated.” There is a growing desire from the library community, particularly in the U.K. with the formal study of the JISC Information Environment for higher education institutions, to have systems interoperate in a clean, service-oriented architecture kind of way.

The vendor responses, on the other hand, would seem to be more akin to one-upmanship and isolationism: we look to interoperate with ourselves before others, we’ll interoperate if we’re at the center, you’re on your own if you want to try to integrate another product with ours, we’ll interoperate if others play by our rules. This isn’t what the customer is looking for.

Too harsh of an assessment? Let me know in the comments.

Footnotes

1. Adamson, V., Bacsich, P., Chad, K., Kay, D., & Plenderleith, J. (2008). JISC & SCONUL Library Management Systems Study. 156 p. Retrieved April 17, 2008, from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/resourcediscovery/lmsstudy.pdf.
2. Grant, Carl. (2007 Jul 4) A symphony out of tune: when companies go deaf. Care-Affiliates blog. Retrieved 13-Jun-2008 from http://www.care-affiliates.com/thoughts/archives/6.

As our profession re-examines itself and the services we provide to users, we seem to spend a great deal of time concerned about the way our “web front door” looks and operates. That is, we expect web users to come through the front page of our website and so we agonize over the features as well as the look-and-feel of our portal of information. A section of the JISC & SCONUL Library Management Systems Study¹ released last month suggests a different path for our information environment: one where the content is not bound to the confines of our web portals. This is the first in a series of posts over the next few days and/or weeks that explore this and other observations and commentary found in the JISC/SCONUL report.

The title of section 3.6 of the report is “Visions for Development (‘a place in both worlds?’)”. It spans pages 39 and 40 of the report and is a peek at a library content world unbounded by portals and websites that act and function only as backwater destination sites. I’ve pulled together and reordered various sentences from these two pages that, while I hope remain true to the authors’ original intent, summarize this critical shift in mindset that we should consider adopting:

Rather than creating their own online one-stop-shops using environments created by library system suppliers, libraries really need to surface their resources in the online environments already inhabited by their users. We cannot expect users to come to us, but should rather design systems that can go out to them. Such an approach implies a more open architecture using standards and protocols to be able to move structured information around so that it can be presented in other places. The result will be opportunity for fusion (perhaps synergy is a helpful alternative) — exploiting canonical data by re-purposing, remixing or mashing it up. Whilst the use of Google Maps is the most common mash-up example, it is no coincidence that remixes and mash-ups originate in the music industry, which passed ahead of others down the path of financial and intellectual deconstruction and reconstruction in the digital age. The challenge is whether academic libraries are well placed and agile enough to facilitate their users in exposing and re-mixing content.

It seems like quite a number of such reports have been released over the past year. (Lorcan Dempsey points to another one from the University of Wisconsin, Madison just earlier this month.) There is some U.K.-specific discussion in the JISC/SCONUL report, but there is also a lot that applies to libraries in North America as well. I highly recommend sitting down with a copy.

Footnotes

1. Adamson, V., Bacsich, P., Chad, K., Kay, D., & Plenderleith, J. (2008). JISC & SCONUL Library Management Systems Study. 156 p. Retrieved April 17, 2008, from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/resourcediscovery/lmsstudy.pdf.

This morning’s Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus blog has a story with the title “Should Colleges Sell Ads to Pay for New Technology?” that links to a blog posting by Martin Weller of the Open University in the U.K. As it happens, a colleague and I were talking about a strikingly similar topic at lunch yesterday: not just that advertisements could pay for new technology but that ads could pay for content in the libraries. I felt strangely uncomfortable with the concept, and I still do, so (in jester fashion) what better way to explore the discomfort than in a posting here on DLTJ.

The second paragraph of Martin’s blog posting is this:

I think we should be clear that any Vice Chancellor will already tell you that education is a business. Even if students don’t actually pay themselves and are funded by government, freedom of choice as to where they go, effectively creates a market. Lecturers, administrative staff and librarians don’t work for free and buildings don’t build themselves. Universities are therefore competing for students, and so will offer courses they think are attractive, facilities that are appealing and trade on a brand name. To this extent education is already ‘for sale’, and it is difficult to see how within current society it will change.

He goes on to describe the economic forces putting pressure on higher education in the U.K., and it is a list that will certainly be familiar to those here in Ohio, too. Martin arrives at the thesis that a “pragmatic response” is needed for these pressures — one where the term “business model” is not foreign to those of us in higher education.

The Wired Campus blog entry brings the concept even closer to home. It leads off with this paragraph: This might upset you: You log onto your university library Web site to research a history assignment, and alongside the literature citations there is an ad for Dell computers or Microsoft Office or several books from university presses. The colleague, who may wish to remain nameless or who may identify him-/herself, was thinking through the consequences of publishers paying libraries to promote content from disaggregated textbooks.

Let me back up — the concept of the “disaggregated textbook” assumes that a textbook can be broken up into discrete chunks of content. These chunks (sometimes referred to as “learning objects” when they take a digital form) represent a unit of knowledge that a student is seeking to understand. The chunks are tied to some learning objective or outcome, and as I understand the concept, chunks that target the same learning objective are somewhat interchangeable. The chunks may vary by learning style (visual, auditory, and tactile/kinesthetic), amount of detail, assumed level of background understanding. By breaking the textbook up into these chunks, it becomes possible to remix and substitute content to meet the particular learning objectives of a student or the style of an instructor. It also becomes easier to insert non-textbook content into the syllabus as learning objects. Content such as, say, a journal article or book chapter or video clip that a library has acquired through its traditional, non-textbook channels.

Which brings us to the discussion at lunch yesterday. What makes a plain-old-digital-object a learning object is tying it to learning objectives. In other words, adding a little bit of metadata to it that makes it discoverable by learning objective criteria. What if libraries remix their existing article, book, and multimedia content into learning objects and put it in the same search interface as the disaggregated textbook chunks? My colleague proposed that a textbook publisher (or “learning object publisher”) may want to pay the library to give preferential placement to its content. In fact, the business model might be such that the publisher of things formerly known as textbooks may want to “give away” the digital text form of the content with the expectation that money will be made by selling students other forms of the content — MP3 downloads, videos of instructors explaining the content, study guides, printed forms, etc.

All of this still leaves my vaguely uncomfortable, and I’m not yet sure why. (Writing it all down in this posting hasn’t helped.) It would be one thing if “preferential placement” meant “invisibly raising the relevance of such content” in the search results list. That clearly would seem to be out of bounds: invisible mucking with search results placement leads to distrust of the underlying service. Google has shown us, though, that it is possible to sell conspicuously marked advertisements on search results pages and make billions doing it. Could the same thing work for libraries selling conspicuously marked, relevant results that could lead users to an e-commerce transaction at a publisher site? Is the value libraries (and our users) could receive in exchange for such placement the free access to the digital form of the content?

The “about” page for this blog says, At times, ideas and concepts are offered as straw-men — to be ripped apart and dismissed as fantasy or a hoax. This is one of those times. What do you think?

The text was modified to update a link from http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3053/ to http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/should-colleges-sell-ads-to-pay-for-new-technology/3985 on January 20th, 2011.

I found this meme via Karen Schneider’s entry. Although I wasn’t explicitly tagged, I thought it was interesting enough to add an entry to the meme’s Flikr pool.

With all due respect to Karen — and I agree that a love of reading is important — but it is a sense of wonder that encourages a love of reading and all sorts of other critical character traits. This is a picture of my daughter when she was about three years old. She is on the back deck of our Connecticut house watching a caterpillar crawl up our gate. She loves to read (and now three years later is reading scores of books on horses and dolphins from the elementary school library), and as her father I hope the same sense of curiosity will sustain her love for reading, arts, sciences, and life.

Since I wasn’t tagged, I’m not inflicting the meme on anyone else.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.edsupport.cc/mguhlin/archives/2008/02/entry_6578.htm on January 28th, 2011.

Blake Carver (of LISNews and LISHost fame) announced two new projects yesterday: LISWire and LISEvents. In the same spirit that I would categorize open source, open access, and open knowledge, these services level the playing field for the publication of library-oriented press releases and announcements of events.

LISWire – The Librarian’s News Wire

LISEvents – The Librarian’s Events

Congratulations Blake and Robin, and thanks for trying to build these services for our community. If they take off, they will be a real, tangible benefit for us.

The text was modified to update a link from http://liswire.org/ to http://liswire.com/ on January 28th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://liswire.org/ to http://liswire.com/ on January 28th, 2011.