Washington, D.C.—Don’t de-accession those print materials yet. The digital research library is not quite ready for prime time, according to Lisa Spiro, director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University, and Geneva Henry, executive director of Rice’s Center for Digital Scholarship.
At a session of the membership meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information, held here yesterday and today, Ms. Spiro and Ms. Henry talked about research they have done into how close we are to all-digital (or even mostly digital) research libraries. To find out, they did case studies of several libraries founded since 2000, including facilities at the University of California at Merced, Olin College, Soka University of America, California State University-Channel Islands, and New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus.
Signs of the digital shift are everywhere. E-resources expenditures “are only going up,” Ms. Henry said. In 2008, research libraries spent a median of 53 percent of their acquisitions budgets on e-resources. However, as demonstrated by a recent flap at Syracuse University over plans to move some books to off-site storage, not everybody’s ready to pull the plug on print.
“Given the needs of the humanities in particular, it just wouldn’t be feasible at the present moment” for libraries to go all-digital, Ms. Henry said. But she warned that many of the decisions about going digital would be driven by economics, especially as scholars and librarians get more comfortable with digital materials. “The greatest risk is not budgeting for it,” she said.
The conversations Ms. Spiro and Ms. Henry had with librarians also revealed how the culture of librarianship is evolving. They found evidence of a “container-neutral approach,” in which it doesn’t really matter how information is packaged, as long as it can easily be found by or delivered to users. There’s less emphasis on “just-in-case collections,” which keep copies of everything, and more on “just-in-time collections” that keep up with user demand. Outsourcing plays a bigger role. For instance, some institutions now purchase shelf-ready books that are already cataloged and security-tagged. “Ultimately what matters is the service that’s provided,” Ms. Henry said.
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8 Responses to The All-Digital Library? Not Quite Yet
timlincoln - December 16, 2009 at 8:59 am
My comment is based on working with humanities types in a small professional school library, where we continue to purchase books and will do so for the foreseeable future.Some book-loving conservatives argue that books are good because the reader-book interaction is aesthetically pleasing (they like the feel of the book in the hand and the way that pages turn) and intellectually useful (reading a book–not key word searching–slows you down and you thus have a dialogue instead of merely mining the book for your next footnote, etc.).In my experience, even these conservatives will admit that they read journal articles from PDF files. That seems to be okay because an article is a small amount of intellectual nourishment, but a book is (or should be) an intellectual feast.It is not clear to me that younger scholars will continue to argue for printed books on phenomenological grounds.My concern as an academic librarian is that ebooks and ejournals place the library in the uncertain situation of renting materials instead of owning them. We need to find an economic model for scholarly information that balances profit with the preservation and distribution of knowledge. (And better ebook reading devices.)
jwickens - December 16, 2009 at 10:21 am
I agree with timlincoln’s concerns about leasing vs owning collections. Providing information to users on a “just in time” basis may be fine as long as budgets remain solid (if you can’t pay the rent you’re on the street, so to speak) and the “supply lines” on which delivery and access depends stay open. The fact that both of these elements have been stable for so long has lulled most of us into a false sense of security that we will live to regret one day. Surely the events of the last year or so should have made us a little bit more aware of the fragility of the economic and technological structures on which our society currently depends. Libraries are not businesses. They are first and foremost cultural organizations given the immensely important task of collecting, preserving and making available the intellectual creations of humankind.
procrustes - December 16, 2009 at 11:26 am
4 and 5 both dance around the fact that the scholarly communication model is broken in multiple ways that are format independent. There is too much information (much of dubious quality) chasing too few interested readers. As our educational and cultural institutions are less willing or able to subsidize (through purchase at inflated prices or through subsidized publication) research that is not economically viable, this will only get worse. Who will pay to preserve this stuff and how they will do it is the 64 billion dollar question. Perhaps we need to revisit Ortega y Gasset on the mission of the librarian (and expand it to scholarly publishing in general).
dblobaum - December 16, 2009 at 9:40 pm
Will the long form argument survive the demise of the printed book? Will people still think and write in arguments that require a book-length exposition? That’s what’s at stake.
rickman - December 16, 2009 at 11:54 pm
What’s a “diretor”?
jenhoward - December 17, 2009 at 11:48 am
Thanks for catching that typo, Rickman. I will fix it and repost.
dudleykn - December 17, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Personally, one of my big concerns is that “just in time” is often not deemed fast enough by faculty & students, and they instead settle for “just good enough.” What does this do to scholarship?
mbelvadi - December 18, 2009 at 11:35 am
Timlincoln, it is not inherent to the medium of ebooks and ejournals that you are renting rather than owning anything. That’s a matter of purchase/license agreements, not technology. I’m also an academic librarian, and we have purchased, not rented, many e-resources. Canada has done a much better job than the US in coordinating academic consortial licenses to ensure perpetual access/ownership rights contracts with teeth.