Panel 1: The future of the Library

by Lea Shaver | April 4, 2009 | Workshops & Symposia | 1 Comment

What does Library 2.0 refer to?

Blair Kauffman, moderator: Let me use the efforts of the Yale Law Library as an example. Our web catalog, the information discovery tool at Yale Law School’s library now harnesses the power of the network, allowing users to rank resources, tag resources. We are using Internet technologies to connect the library to users; twitter, mebo, etc. Become a fan of Yale Law Library on Facebook! We’re thinking about how to generate more user-generated content, using wiki tools for example.

What is the role of the library in the digital world – locating information resources – moving from print to digital environment. Now instead of purchasing materials, we are licensing; what does this mean for first sale doctrine and user access? Should we be concerned about digital rot and the risk that catastrophes like wars or hurricane Katrina pose to archival security? What is the library’s preservation responsibility? Preserve web pages produced by the institution or faculty members, like Balkinization? When I first met Jack Balkin, he asked me what the library was doing to preserve the email correspondence of Dean Koh.

Josh Greenberg is the technical guru at the New York Public Library. John Palfrey of the Harvard Law Library is the author of Born Digital. Ann Wolpert the director of the MIT University Press. Charles Cronin, my colleague from the Information Society Project.

We’ll have an opportunity for questions: and encourage you to frame them in 140 characters or less!

Josh Greenberg

I want to start with Jessica. Jessica is a reference librarian at the New York Public Library. Here is our traditional image of an NYPL reference librarian. They sit behind the desk and you can go up and ask them things. See the brass pneumatic tubes in this picture? This is how books are requested: paper shoots to the bottom of the stacks! But what is the right role for library staff in the digital environment? How do we “digitize” librarians?

I got a lot of pushback for asking this question. But here’s what we’ve come up with. There is live chat, live reference, etc. We started blogging at nypl.org/blog. It’s a way of externalizing knowledge in discrete chunks. It can be discovered, crawled, aggregated, searched. [Visual: tag cloud (most popular tages: hand-made, Fashion, history, Lion Clubs, Art, New York City, popular culture)] The blog will feature prominently in a website redesign coming soon.

Jessica started blogging about knitting, art, stamping. This was not in her official job description; she wasn’t hired for this expertise. [Visual: blog entry "Knitting with conviction"]. She developed an audience, which began to engage in the discussion. Grace Bonnie connected through the blog; she runs Design Sponge, which has 100,00 readers per month. Grace proposed a collaboration to Jessica. The result was a four-part web video series Design by the Book. We are total reality TV junkies! This was our inspiration.

So what are the themes we still need to think about?

1. Intellectual property. In our 2.0 efforts, we very much push people to public domain materials. We’re unclear about the boundaries of fair use and it has a chilling effect.

2. The changing nature of the libary. We are shifting from a world defined by scarcity of knowledge, to one of perceived ubiquity. The library can no longer sit on its haunches and wait for patrons to come to us. Library work is happening “out there.” We leave our building through third-party platforms like YouTube, Flickr, iTunes. I have a standing biweekly meeting with our contracts office to accomplish this!

3. The changing role of librarians themselves. Up until now, the voice has been focused on the institution. This doesn’t map well in the new landscape. We are now promoting more the diversity of voices of our librarians. We have 1000 professional librarians and curators at NYPL. What will it look like at this scale?

John Palfrey

So I will speak in the form of three anecdotes, drawing on my experience at Harvard Law Library, where our patrons are primarily current faculty and students, and the research for Digital Natives.

For Digital Natives, I spent the last 2 years doing focus groups and interview with teenagers and kids. In US, Europe, Bahrain, East Asia – to compare. We describe them as “digital natives” if they meet three criteria: 1) Born after 1980,
2) Have access to new technologies, 3) Have the skills to make use of them.

Anecdote #1. The first set of questions we asked kids was: “How would you come up with information on this topic?”
We used the Spanish-American War, and Lou Gherig’s Disease.

Result: 100 out of 100 kids said they would go to a computer and consult Google. Always Google, never another search engine. All said they would type in “Spanish-American War” the exact name of the subject as we had presented it. Most then look for the Wikipedia entry and go there first.

Only at this point is there significant variation in what they do next. Some say they’re done: cut and paste and turn in the assignment! These folks didn’t have much understanding of Wikipedia’s nature as a participatory network. At the other end of the spectrum, some kids are complete skeptics; think their classmates will have booby-trapped the entry with false information! A majority of students scroll down to the bottom of the page to look for other sources.

We also asked how many have edited a wikipedia entry: 1-2%. Who here has edited a wikipedia entry? [Hands go up: about 50% of our audience.] Who has made a substantive edit? [Hands go up: about 25% of our audience.] Well it turns out that none of our kids have made a substantive entry. Even this 1-2% are just changing semi-colons to periods.

Anecdote #2. We also asked the kids: How do you get up-to-date news and information? None of our digital natives subscribe to a paper newspaper, and then read the whole thing in the morning over coffee. They all “graze” during the day, mediated by a very social process. Friends recommend things on Facebook, etc. A minority do some deep-down research into a particular topic. A very small minority will contribute and participate by blogging, commenting, etc.

Anecdote #3. At HLS Library, we’ve introduced Meebo, etc. Many more people show up in person, rather than enter through Meebo. Even those who start on Meebo, end up coming in for face-to-face. So we are in the very early days of digital librarianship. We have to monitor and continually focus-group what is actually working. There is a split among the faculty. Some faculty are sad to see the books on the shelf going away. Others say we’re not moving fast enough to take advantage of the digital. They ask: Where are the international materials? Where is the raw data? This year we hired an empiricist to help patrons access quantitative data. She was overwhelmed with demand!

Closing thoughts: In addition to evolving norms, we have to think about the collection. What does it mean, where is it going? Librarians need to offer some vision here. What do we want it to look like 5-10 years from now?

We provide access to the public domain material in our fields. See e.g. the hacking of Pacer.

And then there are unique materials: Balkinization, the Dean’s correspondence. We need to render those available into the commons, digitize them.

And then we’re still going to buy monographs.  How do we collect collaboratively? Preserve digitally? This area needs a lot of work, in the access to knowledge frame. Many people think the HLS Library is collecting more than we are. We will buy many fewer things this year.

Library as service: cathedral versus the bazaar. Libraries are a hybrid environment. Temples to knowledge will still exist. But the faculty and students are increasingly operating in the bazaar. We are well prepared to the be the high priests in the temple. We need to learn to be fantastic guides in the bazaar.

=== Q & A ===

Q:  What is the future of the Harvard Law Library?

John Palfrey:

What is *Yale* doing?

But seriously:  What are the unique materials we have, and how are we making them accessible?  We need to digitize our materials on the Nuremberg Trials, and make them accessible.  Also, we’re pushing our journals to make everything Open Access.

Also, we ought to take on the archiving and preservation role of what we create.  But what about all the stuff that’s not in the Internet Archive?  Who’s keeping that?  We need to be non-exclusive, better collaborators; we’re not on the hook for buying everything; let’s create an ecosystem of buying and preserving.

Josh Greenberg:

Our users live in both physical and digital environments, modulating between them in very sophisticated ways.  We’re trying to form a community (e.g. 400 new people showing up in the physical library for the first time).

We need to talk more about Meetup.com — physical people engaging in physical spaces.

Q:  What budgetary challenges do you face at NYPL?

Josh Greenberg:

I joined the library 2 years ago, to retool it for a world where people interact differently.  More investment in digital information and engagement.  Since the fall, we’ve been trying to close a monster budget gap; trying not to jeopardize the digital project in the meantime.

Institutional challenges?  Tension between the individual voices of the staff and public versus the institutional voice of the library.  We don’t have total consensus.  I probe the edges, come up with pilots, where the institutional folks can see value and want to scale up.

Q:  What are some of the major hurdles we need to overcome with regard to open access?

John Palfrey:

Clearly a series of institutional hurdles on a local level, and more system-wide.

At HLS, the faculty had a vote, and forced the issue — unanimous vote to make our own scholarship open access.  Now it turns out to be a bit annoying to add a special IP clause to various publishing agreements.  Only a fraction of what we’re publishing right now is going into the repository.

We have to break the typical publishing cycle.  We pay the faculty to create the work.  We prop up the journals.  As libraries, we buy the stuff — in print, and back from Lexis and Westlaw!  At each of those levels, we need change:  Faculty needs to participate in the commons; journals need a different revenue stream; libraries need to make sure that people are preserving what’s being created.

An entire conference could be done on the challenges of Open Access.  We have to stand up and turn this into a collection action opportunity.

Q:  Can you talk more about public domain materials?

Josh Greenberg:

There’s a lot of institutional conservatism.  What’s a safe video to put online?  For “Design by the Book,” we made sure that there were no camera shots of copyrighted material, and got comprehensive releases from the artists.  We didn’t *have* to do this, but we wanted to avoid having the counsel’s office (who are great) bite our heads off.

John Palfrey:  I think we have to push the boundaries of fair use.  It’s a use-it-or-lose it statute.  If we don’t figure out what’s fair use, shame on us.

Greenberg:  We had a question from an artist in Brooklyn:  “Wait, if I go to the library, I can use material in my artwork?”  Yes!  That’s how the collection lives and breathes!  We later had an overattended workshop on fair use for artists.

Ann Wolpert

I want to consider the role of scholars in the world of Libraries 2.0.  Books are remarkably well suited to their task as genre providing a stable format for an extended argument. Whether formatted in hard copy on paper, or online in pdf. The problem is that John Palfrey’s students aren’t reading extended arguments anymore. Our values about different ways of thinking are changing in the digital age.

In the fall of 2008, a discussion began on the faculty of MIT to consider how faculty members should be disseminating their work, with particular attention to Open Access.  MIT faculty represent virtually every discipline, with the exception of law. After the faculties at Harvard passed Open Access resolutions, the faculty chairman at MIT got many requests from faculty members to consider it as well. So a 12-member interdepartmental faculty committee was convened, which I co-chaired.

The way in which faculty members view their research became very visible as a result of these discussions.

The prevailing mental model was a traditional one of producing books to be held on a research libraries’ shelves. They were not in the least bit confused by the fact that day-to-day, they operated in a very different environment: the digital one. Some were proud to announce they had not set foot in a library in years. But they still imagined that their work persisted in physical form in a library building.

Additionally, every member imagined that their discipline’s processes for creating new knowledge, committing it to a medium, and making it available to readers were standard across all disciplines. Of course that is not true: each discipline has very different disciplines and traditions.

In the course of conversations, five big themes emerged.

1) Faculty were increasingly concerned that copyright transfer agreements they were increasingly being asked to sign might prevent them from using their own work in their classrooms. Nevertheless, they did exactly as they wished in their own classrooms, with a “so sue me” attitude. But the problem appeared in OpenCourseWare. They very proudly contributed their substantive work to the site, but when they looked online, it was stripped down. OpenCourseWare couldn’t get permission from the publisher. Faculty members would complain to their publishers, but were reminded they no longer owned the rights to their work.

2) License agreements contained many provisions in conflict with the way that knowledge is actually used in a university setting. Authorized use for one department but not another, in an interdisciplinary environment. License prohibited access by administrative members, visiting scholars, certain laboratories etc. Faculty members were very upset to see that access to their work was being blocked in this way.

3) It turns out that Library 2.0 is a penthouse, but a penthouse for rent. When you stop paying the high prices, you get evicted. Researchers are increasingly realizing that when they leave the wonderful world of the university, they fall off the edge of the earth in terms of access to resources.

4) Faculty were amazed at the consolidation that has taken place in the journals market in the last decade. [Visual: slide shows consolidation from 8 key players in 1998 to 4 key players in 2008, with a huge red circle representing Elsevier at $9billion; other players are all below $2billion.] The faculty members started talking about this slide as “The Death Star Slide.”

5) Faculty members also realized that they had difficulty with data-mining, which was not authorized by the licenses; the kinds of research projects they wanted to do were illegal!  Note that the Google Book Settlement proposal specifies that Google retains total control over who gets to do datamining with the resources.

Out of these discussions came a really important realization. MIT faculty are pretty sophisticated about the book contracts they sign. But the journal area turned out to be riddled by termites; it did not work the way they expected it to. The system of journal publishing is out of balance. It pits ithe individual author against a publishing behemoth. The faculty do not stand a chance. They concluded that it would be better to think in terms of collective action… bring “Daddy MIT” to the table. MIT is a $2 billion enterprise. Still very small compared to Elsevier, but as other universities join, the balance of power will shift.

So the MIT Faculty passed an Open-Access Policy, which benefitted from lessons learned from the Harvard experience. Applies only to scholarly works written with no expectation of compensation. Gives the university the authority to make the materials available non-commercially. It is opt-out; someone writes to me with their reason for writing out (for data collection purposes) and a waiver is automatically granted. Each faculty member makes an electronic copy available… we can scrap them from the faculty members websites, which is what we plan to do. And there are a few items in this new archive already.

Charles Cronin

There is a quotation from Virginia Wolf, which distinguishes between researchers and readers:

A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.

There are two types of libraries that correspond to her dichotomy. Reading libraries and research libraries. Those with access to the latter can pivot between both roles. But those whose access is limited to the former have less flexibility to participate in both modes. So I want to talk about the public library, both past and present.

This is a picture of the public library I grew up attending, taken in 1928. When I showed it to my wife, she said “I didn’t know you grew up in Alabama!” But in fact, it’s located in DC, near Georgetown. Now the Discovery Creek Children’s Museum. But in the Johnson era when I knew it, it still looked like this: one room, with a librarian’s desk. It was a place you visited to borrow books that you would read elsewhere, a manifestation of the Carnegie vision, encouraging the public to read themselves to a better existence.

In the last decade or two, there has been an identity crisis to the public library. Struggling to adapt themselves to new technologies, and to the relatively new presumption that libraries will provide content for all of them. Of course, 100 years ago, camera rolls were very popular, but public libraries did not distribute these works, because they were considered works of entertainment. But today, with the exodus of middle-class families to the suburbs, declining tax revenues, urban public libraries are struggling. And they are compensating by trying to be all things to all people. In one such library, of 1 million transactions, 750,000 of them were for feature films.

I think this effort compromises the efficacy of the library as a place to encourage reading. If you go to a major public library today, it is teeming with people, like CostCo on the weekend. But no one is using the library as an information resource. Peeking over shoulders at the computer terminals, 9 out of 10 are being used for email or online shopping. The reading areas were being used by people to fill out tax returns or study for the real estate exam, a hangout for high schoolers, a sleeping space for the homeless.

This has diverted funds from the primary mission of promoting reading. Consider one library’s budget, which allocates $10 million to acquisitions, compared to $7 million on cultural programs. There is no access to JSTOR, the New World Dictionary of Music, or Lexis. The NYPL spends only 7-8% of its annual budget on acquisitions. And while there are electronic resources made available, patrons have to go to the library to use them, which largely defeats the purpose. Libraries should reallocate resources spent on programming to creation, acquisition and distribution of works in electronic form, and their literacy programs should focus on electronic literacy. This is the spirit of Andrew Carnegie’s vision in the digital age.

=== Q&A ===

Q: How difficult will it be for a young scholar to get a monograph published by MIT, say 10 years from now?

Ann Wolpert: We assume that money comes in to offset costs. Who will buy these books? Who will design them? Who will work with the authors, who all acknowledge that they need good editors? Places like the MIT Press are looking for ways to reduce these costs. We need to collectively support the cost of the enterprise; otherwise, there will be no way to produce these monographs. Even with electronic publishing, you still have significant up-front costs.

Q: Consider the goal of making more information available to citizens. What if the academic libraries could collaborate with governments and funding agencies — is that happening?

Ann Wolpert: Some states (until the current meltdown) took it as their responsibility — e.g. Georgia collaborated with libraries to license a set of electronic assets for everyone in the state. But the prices publishers charge for electronic resources are staggeringly high. To the extent that they’ll give a discount to a state like Georgia, it was a very interesting experiment.

Charles Cronin: Really a matter of reallocation of resources. Universities see a demand, and have decided to pay to fulfill it.

John Palfrey: We should have listened to you 5 years ago, and we should listen to you now. The Google Book settlement is the elephant in the room — does it preclude some of the collaborations you’re talking about?

Josh Greenberg: In one sense, we *are* that kind of arrangement. We serve the whole city, and have deep knowledge of the collections. The business model of institutional subscriptions is tailored to the university context, and a handful of corporations. That model breaks when you look at the broad public access mandate of a public library. You can get JSTOR in the building — but if you calculate the cost on an FTE basis for the entire city…!

Q: Consider the example of Delaware — if you have a public library card, you have access!

Q: What were the obstacles to Open Access?

Ann Wolpert: MIT addressed this issue across all the faculty, not just law. Obstacles were quite finite: (1) If you had a policy of this kind, and the publisher refused to publish the work of a junior faculty member, would you penalize that faculty member’s career? We want to know why publishers are asking for a waiver. (2) There are about 1,000 faculty at MIT, which means about 1,200 opinions. The opt-out was envisioned as a way for faculty to support small publishers.

John Palfrey: We did an FAQ on arguments for and against. It does cost money to implement this, in terms of staff and commitment. Also, the publishers demand a fee for open access. My fear is that no other law school has made a similar commitment; I’m worried that nobody will follow us. I’m delighted that MIT did this across the faculty. It’s mostly been hubris preventing us from collaborating; it’s dumb for us to compete on the basis of our collections; we need to compete on the basis of who’s the best collaborator.

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