The
Matrix Reloaded:
New Ages in Collections Development
IFLA
Preconference
Is
Digital Different? New trends and
challenges in acquisition and collection development
Bayerische
StaatsBibliothek
PowerPoint
Presentation Linked Here
Ann
Okerson/Yale University
Ann.Okerson@yale.edu
Collections
librarians are more than a little like Neo, the hero of the blockbuster films
about The Matrix. We have lived
our quiet library lives, secure in knowing who we are and what our jobs are.
Suddenly,
however, we are disoriented, discovering that the difference between reality
and illusion is not what we thought, discovering that we may be pawns of great
forces beyond our imagining. To hear our
loudest critics (and our loudest friends -- who are sometimes hard to tell
apart from our critics), the drama in which we are cast is of colossal and
consequential proportions.
Is it all a bad
dream? A noisy film? Our task here is to explore a few of the
principal ways in which the world of collection development and management has
been altered in recent years; in which it is somewhat similar to our past and
in which it has been revealed to be very different from what we thought. On some level, I suspect that every
profession living today could hear a version of this same talk.
My remarks fall
into several categories:
o
First, a review of some long-held truisms about research libraries and their
collections, not so much to answer them, as to plant them in our consciousness
as we proceed here with our dialog.
o Next, a reflection upon the responsibilities of the
selectors of library collections. In
brief, how might they resemble, or not, our roles a decade or so ago?
o A quick comment about how today's content selection crosses
immediately over into issues of access, no longer a separate division of labor.
o At greater length, articulation of the concern at the heart
of all of our conversations:
preservation of the record of our civilization – in electronic format.
o On a related topic, we cannot neglect mention of a matter
that is so entwined with all of the topics above, that of resource, i.e., the
budget to support our activities.
o And finally, cooperation and community – areas to which, I
submit, we owe our greatest dedication.
We will try to do all of this in about half an hour!
THE
ETERNAL VERITIES (as
they have been):
SELECTING
COLLECTIONS (i.e., CONTENT):
In print,
library selection has had two key components:
1. Careful review of available materials,
and
2. The designation that certain materials
will be acquired and added to the permanent collection of the library.
Some selection
decisions (such as those for serials) involve continuing choices. Part and parcel of this "initial
selection," if we can call it that, has been a fair amount of
retrospective collection activity:
filling in missing volumes, purchasing earlier books by an author lately
of interest, adding subject areas to the library's collection, and the like.
What has been
most consistent about this process has been the discretionary intelligence of
the librarian, although its application had begun to change years ago. Still, in that "old" selection
model, every choice was ratified by a library subject specialist. Even when the university president insisted
that a book be bought, some library budget authority had to sign off in order
for resources to be allocated.
Once librarians
began, in the 1960s, to inhabit a world where the quantity of library-eligible
publications grew explosively, collections specialists began to surrender some
judgment. Where once upon a time, no
book arrived without being requested, the librarian began to trust others
(booksellers who have themselves automated the process) to deliver approval
plan books that fit local collecting profiles.
In such models, the librarian does not make a positive choice in
favor of every book that arrives, but rather makes an occasional negative
choice against a few of the books that arrive. An approval plan is regarded as functioning
well in the Yale Library if we return no more than 2-3% percent of titles under
that program. With the choices that led
to the creation of such programs, librarians had begun to outsource book-by-book
judgment in favor of speed and efficiency.
A recent,
electronic example of bulk collecting is seen in e-book or e-journal
"aggregations" or "packages." In such programs, librarians agree to
purchase access to a collection comprising titles of the aggregator's choice or
the publisher's journal list. Typically,
this means that the library has access to more titles it might want, but at
supposedly at a package price, more cheaply than the individual titles alone
would cost. Where this differs from
approval plan practice is:
1. Librarians cannot reject any individual
titles – publishers and libraries agree it is more bother than it's worth to
allow that degree of granular choice, and the price is calculated to reflect
that efficiency; and
2. More important, in fact, is that
"bulk buying" now affects journals, which previously have been an
annual title-by-title purchase.
And,
increasingly librarians offer users more and more direct choice over how we
spend at least a few of our precious euros or dollars. The most obvious case occurs when librarians
facilitate patron-initiated Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery. In many libraries, it is now possible for a
user to request materials directly from another library – with real costs
incurred to make that acquisition – and the library's resources are allocated
accordingly. Canny librarians then
observe the choices that users are making and may revise their own collecting
patterns accordingly. Of course, the
user who makes too much use of such choice may find there are limits to
individual right-to-choose. (Some
libraries solve that last problem by charging costs back to users.)
To speak in this
way is, on some level, to confine ourselves to a review of practices that have
changed surprisingly little in the new electronic-influenced environment. But some of our current activities are more
remarkable.
Nowadays, we
often choose resources that will never, in fact, become part of our own
collections. Here the traditional
distinction between "document delivery" and "acquisitions"
breaks down and new models emerge. We
may be making a contractual arrangement with an e-book or e-journal vendor, for
example, with a very large catalog of titles, perhaps one who prices to the
library customer not on the basis of the exact titles in the catalog, but on
the community's actual usage. That might
seem to be a model closer to document delivery than to acquisition. Have we then "acquired" those
titles? By traditional
rules, no. But do we enter them
into our online public access catalog?
Probably yes. So, we have spent
collections resources on acquisitions that reside nowhere on our property –
where we depend on others for the constant supply. Indeed, it is often an open question whether
such a purchase will involve access that continues indefinitely or whether it
will be on an annual subscription basis or whether access will disappear once
the subscription has ended.
Take this
example 10 years out, and the librarian's role may well be entirely different
from what it has been in the past: no
longer the selector and collector of possessions, more and more the deal-maker,
the signer of contracts for rental rather than purchase. At the moment, such activity still takes up a
relatively small part of the librarian's time, but the proportion is shifting
rapidly and will continue shift further
BLURRING
BOUNDARIES BETWEEN SELECTION AND ACCESS:
I include here a
very quick discussion of access to make the point that the media changes
through which we are living require librarians as selectors to think more
deeply about access, in a variety of ways.
First, it is
very often the case that librarians must now make a format choice for a given
resource. That choice
in turn may be determined by other choices already made (including systems and
standards to support our choices), and by knowing the needs of particular users
for a particular kind of material.
Nowadays, a librarian's choice, if hasty and ill-considered, may impose
high costs and even un-meetable demands for service, if the format is difficult
to support in a given community.
And the new
collections responsibilities run still deeper.
Interlibrary loan, as a public service, has been the traditional means
for bridging gaps between what subject specialists
predicted would be needed by users and what users actually wanted. But now, when making choices about selection
and acquisition that cross the line between outright ownership and remote
access, we are shifting both opportunities and burdens for users and for public
service librarians. Selectors' choices
now need calibration and validation from others: not only are we judged by what we have
chosen, but by the format in which users must access the information
content. We know most of what is
involved in using traditional book-based materials, but nowadays we need
instruction in the implications for use of newly available choices. The collections librarian's portfolio is
subtly changed by this new need.
PRESERVING
THE RECORD OF SOCIETY:
Collection of
traditional formats, particularly print, is usually directly correlated with
preservation. As long as librarians
heated, cooled, and secured the stacks (paying attention to the relative
humidity and general state of crowding and book-handling), the majority of paper
volumes could last on the shelves for decades and longer. Some books might need attention on arrival
(often binding), others would need attention many years later (through repair,
re-binding, or other treatment). Thus it
is that traditional materials can be preserved with a known and comparatively
modest amount of effort. At least for
now, many libraries still acquire and house the paper copies of the books and
journals in which we have an interest.
But, in a growing number of libraries, that practice is fading, at
perhaps some savings in cost for acquisition and for managing the physical
objects after arrival, but at an putting our future
users' needs irresponsibly in danger.
The biggest open
question of all for librarians of the future is: who is responsible for the digital
stacks? Traditional preservation also
depends heavily on securing the future of individual titles by securing the
production and dissemination of many copies of those titles. If a few hundred or a few thousand copies of
a book are published and distributed, then the ordinary preservation practice
described above could reasonably be expected to assure the survival of at least
enough copies of any individual title to secure the needs of future
generations. Only at the margins of time
and rarity (very old materials, very rare ones) did the library community see a
need to organize our profession to assure the preservation of individual items.
No
longer. We do not acquire copies of digital
information, let alone multiple copies of it – rarely do we possess and store
it as we do books. In fact, to preserve
the electronic artifact is to assure destruction of the information: that is, to hold on to a floppy disk or a CD
or a digital tape today, without paying attention to the preservation of the
equipment that reads such records, or without paying attention to the regular
migration of such information from old medium to new, virtually assures that
the information will be inaccessible in a few years or decades.
In his 1996
report on "Preservation in the Digital World," for the Council on
Library and Information Resources (see:
<http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/conway2/>), Paul Conway makes
the point that the newer the media, the shorter their lifespan. See particularly his chart called "The
Dilemma of Modern Media." Now even
the most desirable information has crossed into new media but with an
absolutely minimal assured life span.
Two questions
loom:
1. What must we to do to preserve
information? The two commonest models
are migration and emulation: that is,
converting material from one generation of medium to another (migration) or
creation of new devices that can read old media (emulation). Between the two are other less proven but
still worthy models, such as the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) model
being developed at Stanford University and advanced by a consortium of
colleagues in which the Yale Library participates. The point here is not to argue the merits of
any given strategy but to emphasize that today, twenty years after the
introduction of the personal computer and ten years after the introduction of
the World Wide Web, we do not yet have an agreed set of strategies for
preserving aging digital information. In
fact, in order to save money, libraries are dropping print journals in favor of
electronic only, believing that they are thereby foregoing collections
maintenance and preservation costs. They
do not seem to realize that preservation carries a high cost, or if they do,
they may not wish to share in that cost.
This is scary.
2. Who does the preserving? The LOCKSS model suggests that e-journal
preservation will, in terms of responsibilities, look much like print
preservation. But even the LOCKSS model requires
a new type of consciousness, cooperation, and expense beyond anything known in
the older information environment. That
is, LOCKSS depends on enough extant electronic copies in the world so that
these copies can check each other for accuracy.
Making sure that enough e-copies are saved and knowing who is committed
to them, requires a conscious cooperative act.
Now we need actively, up-front, to cooperate not only in
collecting but also in preservation strategy, with more complexity and more
detail of collaboration than ever.
Or perhaps all serious publishers will eternally preserve
the information they themselves publish?
(With what incentive once the useful life of information is
fading?) Will some third parties, committed
to the archiving business (such as JSTOR) emerge? My own view is
that there must be multiple preservation solutions, and I hope that we will
witness the emergence of electronic "libraries of record," trusted
repositories of information that such libraries undertake to preserve (on
financial and legal arrangement with the publishers) for the long term for the
benefit of the larger library community.
The relationship of the Royal Library of the Netherlands with Elsevier
Science for its journals is one example of the early emergence of such an
Electronic Library of Record.
BUDGETS:
Every library
and librarian is constrained by budgets.
Those budgets have emerged over time and have their roots in the
programmatic history of the institutions that supply the funds. The taxes of a local government have produced
a budget for the public library; the tuition and fees of a university support a
budget for an academic community. Over
time, users and librarians adjust their expectations to their current funding
levels. A good collections librarian
knows just about how much he or she can order in a given period, based on the
historical practice of the user community and the historical budget allocated
to its information. From year to year
the opportunity and the limits on that opportunity for such a librarian are
known and familiar.
Those days are
almost gone. Given the uncertainties of
medium, given the skyrocketing output of information and the abundance of
choices, there is absolutely nothing to suggest that any given library's needs
will be satisfied by any sum within an order of magnitude (up or down) of the
traditional budget. Provosts and mayors
will not be happy to hear of this instability.
It cannot be shirked.
Furthermore, as previously noted, issues of preservation are large,
open, and destabilizing for the library profession: budgetary issues will drive us ever more crazy.
It may seem
obvious that the costs of acquiring materials can escalate beyond our
control. Is there any chance that they
could shrink? Let me suggest one
possible scenario for shrinkage: the
Google-ification of the planet.
It is undeniable
that some percentage of information formerly sought in libraries can now
be found quickly and freely on the Internet by anyone with a connection, a
browser, and <www.google.com>. We
all have our own stories of improbable access to information of high quality
found this way. If, for example, you
type into the Google search field the phrase "my cell phone fell into the
toilet," you will find in a matter of seconds authoritative information
(to say nothing of edifying and amusing anecdotes) that can resolve the
curiosity of the researcher (who probably has a very specific reason for
researching that particular topic) and spare some reference librarian a complex
and frustrating search. If you would
know the source of a quotation or a piece of music or seek a text, then perhaps
you need no more libraries. Or rather,
whatever library preserves that information has faded into the background – it
has become the invisible background to a foreground of free and ubiquitous
information.
How far can
Google go? In the end, that may be the
most de-stabilizing question of all. We
know we need to face questions of preservation and budget, and we will do so. But Google (or something like it, something
succeeding it even more powerfully) has the potential to change the
circumstances of the world in which we work in a way that would nullify much of
the traditional value and practice of our profession. What then?
COOPERATION:
We face the
obvious fact that there are few – or perhaps NO – local fixes for budget
pressures and increased access needs:
those problems can only be solved effectively by interdependence among
institutions. Traditional collections
librarianship has known many efforts at coordinated purchasing, but the effect
has not been as great as we might like.
One of my colleagues, who works in an institution that is part of a
consortium of regional libraries, one that does not include any one single
library of major proportions, reported to me that for all that the libraries in
his area cooperate and for all that they are serious academic libraries, the 5+
million books they own add up to a library much less extensive
and deep than any single library of 5 million volumes might
be. Much more aggressive movement on cooperative
issues seems necessary if we are to make real progress in building the
libraries of the future.
Some of that
interdependence is taking place already, in many ways:
o Increasing and increasingly efficient Interlibrary Loan and
other delivery services.
o The rise of consortia for information sharing, particularly
for licensing access to electronic databases, books, journals, and services.
o Consortia, in turn, lead to much broader awareness of
library needs across countries and nations.
Nowadays, we as collections librarians are not just pursuing the best
arrangements, at least in the electronic world, for our own libraries.
Consortially, we think about the structure of pricing for all those in the
consortium and consciously we prefer a structure that achieves the widest
access at the fairest price, with no absolute preference for getting the best
deal for our own particular library. And
when our consortial group thinks about proposing or accepting a new model, we
recognize that we could be setting precedents for others – where we feel those
precedents could be disadvantageous to a larger community of librarians and
users, we do not proceed down that path.
o
Cooperation by librarians in numerous projects such as were the subject of a
meeting in this same hall yesterday (the ARL German Resources Project) in which
I described Yale's coordination of a collaborative endeavor intended to have
global reach, the OACIS Middle East database project, in cooperation with
libraries in the United States and other countries.
o Cooperation by librarians and scholars in projects to
identify or save a literature. The
Library of Congress this summer is displaying treasures from an extraordinary
trove of Arabic manuscripts that survive in Timbuktu in the nation of
Mali. Had these treasures been
discovered a hundred years ago, preservation would have been part a matter of
buildings and shelves, part a matter of publishing printed books. Today there are many more options, but
ironically less certainty about what the best strategy will be.
Projects such as
the above are somewhat glamorous – they are funded, and in some cases they have
foundation and international advocates.
That is good, but we should ask, with so much to be done, why is
interdependence not taking place to the extent that it should? Why are we librarians still in a competitive,
or at least not enough of a collaborative "space?" The success of collections development is
still seen in bookshelves full to crowding.
Will they remain that way?
COMMUNITY:
Let me summarize
our puzzles so far. (1)
Selection; (2) Preservation, (3) Budget, (4) Google (that is to say, outside
competition), and (5) Cooperation.
In this concluding section, I want to bring these threads together
around the idea of community.
We as librarians
speak with pride of offering free access to our treasures, be they current
books or archival materials – and it is true that our fundamental model is
socialistic. For users with privileges
in my library, there are very few price tags for services. The rarest item is almost as accessible to
the researcher as today's newspaper.
This is a beautiful thing, but we should remember that it depends on a
very strict set of rules of participation.
Every library I know of that provides such a miracle of access, does so
for a quite clearly defined community of users.
Public libraries, academic libraries, special libraries: in every case, indeed, the body of users provides
the definition for the institution itself.
Users' needs and interests define what will be collected, how it will be
delivered, and what services added. In
the few cases where traditional libraries have tried to blur the boundary (I
think of a case in California where a university library and local public
library have been amalgamated – with a very rocky start),
there has been resistance and difficulty.
But budgetary
resources in particular are the reflection of the will and ability of defined
groups of people: citizens, scholars, or
corporate executives. We obtain our funding
from our own defined communities, who are often very proud of their
self-definition. But, this may not be
effective for libraries of the future, wherein the particular forms of
community may not adequately match our users' needs or even the services that
we have to offer. To re-engineer our
libraries is likely to mean re-engineering those communities. That will be hard, and librarians will have
to work hard to make it happen. We will
see a need our parent institutions may not feel at all.
For example: The emergence in some countries of national
site licenses for scientific journals shifts responsibility from local academic
libraries to national libraries or national consortia. Are today's traditional communities the right
groups of users to combine in creating the right libraries that can resolve
some of our toughest issues? Who can
make budgetary decisions affecting many different kinds of communities large
and small?
So, here the
lesson: Our efforts as librarians will
be most effective when we recognize that we cooperate together not merely as
seasoned professionals working together out of mutual respect to a common
good. We need to keep in mind that by
our collaboration we are effectively reshaping our many scattered communities
into a new virtual community. Ten years
ago, we used to speak of "the virtual library," but you hear that
phrase less often now. Instead, it is
time to recognize that the real power in library-building and library-keeping
of the future will come from constructing the right virtual communities for us
to serve. Those communities can and
should be in many places and nations, bound together by recognition of shared
interests and needs – and by smart, forward-looking librarians. We must be successful in helping our users
think about themselves and their needs, so that those needs can be expressed in
a way capable of being met.
At this point we return to the unstable
and shape-shifting world of The Matrix.
Those films are a lot like real life, in that it is often hard to tell
what is going on, where the plot is heading, or just how to use that latest
technological gadget. Deep beneath the
earth, a different kind of community seems to be forming (if I understood the
last film correctly). I am not sure that
subterranean humanity and cacophonous underground dance hall are the metaphors
for the future of librarianship that I would choose. And, as you know, the last episode of the
Matrix trilogy of films has not yet appeared.
It is not unreasonable to expect some great revelation, some astonishing
transformation. What if our own next episode is equally
suspenseful and exciting? What might a
dramatic future for collections librarians look like?
Perhaps we might get out of the
collecting activity entirely? In that
case the real function of broad and well-recognized social value would be the
service to information-seekers, who would be able to access information of
every kind from everywhere.
Alternatively, librarians might become net information producers,
publishing aggressively the electronic content created in their own research
institutions.
For my part, I do not believe there will
be such dramatic transformation within our lifetimes, but it IS important to
look out to those horizons, to see the possibilities they offer. If we do not influence the future, we will
not be players in how it unfolds.
We have come to
the end of our time together. Is digital
different? What do you think?