[lit-ideas] books (for those who care)...
- From: "Steven G. Cameron" <stevecam@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 15:28:10 -0500
Viz.
TC,
/Steve Cameron, NJ
The Chronicle of Higher Ed, 10 December, 2004
OBSERVER
College Libraries: the Long Goodbye
By DENNIS DILLON
I was staring at the budget figures, trying to decide how much we could
afford to spend on library books, when a conversation from a couple of
weeks before came to mind.
I had been on the campus running trail when a familiar face appeared
alongside me. It was Bob G., a professor of management. He began
chatting about the university's overall financial situation and asked
how the library was adjusting to recent cuts. Then he asked me whether I
thought that my job would exist 10 years from now.
I gave him a blank look, trying to conceal my irritation.
"Are you still buying books?" he asked.
"Yes, but we're about to run out of space," I conceded.
"I thought you told me a couple of years ago that books were inefficient
-- that books were expensive to buy and store, and that they didn't get
enough use to justify their cost," said Bob.
I have had similar conversations hundreds of times over the years. The
usual sequence of comments is something like: The university has
financial problems, books are expensive, digital information is more
efficient, and therefore we don't need libraries or librarians. I asked
Bob if that was what he meant.
He nodded and came to a halt near a tree where we could talk. "Couldn't
you move your technology to Mumbai and hire some English-speaking Indian
librarians to catalog the books and answer reference questions over the
Web?"
I mumbled that that was possible. Then I added a bit defensively, "We
could also hire Indian faculty members to teach our students via
distance education, and save even more money."
The arguments for cutting library purchases of books and for outsourcing
operations are well meaning. And the uncomfortable facts are that
libraries are collections, publishers are distributors, and both
collecting and distributing could be done online if enough money,
organization, and expertise were put into the effort. But the arguments
against those moves include a wealth of legal, financial, practical,
political, pedagogical, and philosophical reasons.
I was all too familiar with the pitfalls of trying to maintain an
outsourced, electronic library because, to some extent, that is what
academic librarians have been doing for years. It was originally
somewhat entertaining to talk to contract specialists and lawyers about
Web-based journals and databases, but the glamour soon wore off as
renewal time came around and lawyers on both sides added incompatible
terms. Once publishers realized that it made no economic sense for them
to prepare individual contracts for thousands of libraries, they turned
to more standardized product lines and contract options. Unfortunately
each university is unique in its information needs, budget, and goals.
Having a fully outsourced, electronic library would mean giving up
control of the information available on your campus, and allowing
lawyers, accountants, and vendors' content specialists to make decisions
about access to published research -- much like HMO clerks deciding what
medical care your doctor can provide. Can innovation and excellence
flourish in that kind of environment? That is one of the questions that
keep librarians awake at night, but it is a large question -- a bit too
taxing for a tired librarian at the end of a three-mile run. In any case
Bob had asked about buying books.
As I limped back to the gym on an age-challenged ankle, I saw a beat-up
paperback copy of Plato's Republic in a trash can. Every college student
knows how to find Plato on the Web, and the book was no longer worth
carting around. Maybe Bob was right, and the university shouldn't be
spending quite so much money on library books.
For a librarian who has even a modest sense of either posterity or
professional responsibility, entertaining any thoughts about a decline
in the importance of books is painful. After all, books are how we speak
to one another across generations, and one of the ways we can subvert
the limitations of culture, class, gender, and personality.
But not all books are priceless additions to our heritage. Bad books
cascade off the world's presses in a torrent of never-ending
intellectual sewage. Amid the constant babble, the best books have
trouble attracting attention.
In the 1970s American publishers produced fewer than 40,000 new books a
year; today the figure is more than 120,000. It is harder to get a
handle on similar increases in the number of academic fields of study,
but at my institution degree programs have grown from 250 two decades
ago to more than 350 today. There are now more faculty members, working
in more fields and publishing more books, than ever before -- and no
academic library has enough money to buy all those books, which means
that scholarly publishers can no longer count on libraries for adequate
income.
Just as the number of scholarly books has increased, so has the number
of scholarly journals. Disciplines old and new are spawning journals
with abandon, to provide publishing outlets for the ever-increasing
numbers of professors working in ever-more-specialized fields.
The arrival of the digital age has also seen the birth of entirely new
formats of scholarly communication, like online databases, e-journals,
and e-books. The book on Milton that cost a library $4.95 in 1974 has
been replaced by literary multimedia databases that cost libraries
$20,000 a year. Unfortunately, library budgets have not kept pace with
those changes.
Over the last dozen years my university has added some 150 faculty
positions, while we have been unable to increase the number of books we
purchase, and we have had to reduce by several thousand the number of
journals we subscribe to. Of course, increases in the cost of journals
are partially to blame. But the information pie keeps getting bigger,
and the slice of that pie that any library can afford to buy keeps
getting smaller.
Without a pandemic of carpal-tunnel syndrome, it is unlikely that we
will ever see an end to the writing of books on academic topics.
However, it is entirely possible that increasing specialization and the
inexorably insensitive hand of economics will mean that the majority of
the next million books on academic themes will be digital rather than
corporeal.
So turn off your computer and take a stroll down to the campus library.
Walk through the stacks and begin saying your goodbyes to the shelves of
printed books. It may not be this year, this decade, or even before you
retire -- but drastic changes in the ways libraries and scholarly
publishers operate are coming, and their effects will extend throughout
the academy.
One day we may see book machines in every library or bookstore that can
print and bind any book you want, machines that will draw on a database
of millions of digital titles. Or every institution of higher education
might create an official online repository of its faculty members'
publications -- including books, articles, and multimedia works --
thereby replacing traditional journal publishers and university presses.
Or some future version of Amazon.com may allow you to purchase or rent
any book in the world, in whatever format you want, for as long as you want.
But all that is speculation. Here are the certainties: People will
continue to write books, people will continue to read books, and the
academic-publishing process needs to be reformed so that we can continue
to meet our goal of scholarly communication in an economically
sustainable way.
Dennis Dillon is associate director for research services at the
libraries of the University of Texas at Austin.
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