Companies Find Academic Libraries a Key Target and a Tough Sell

By GOLDIE BLUMENSTYK

Want to get a rise out of your favorite librarian?

Suggest that the college use some of its acquisitions budget to buy e-books from

ALSO SEE: Are We Headed Toward the Bookless Campus?

netLibrary. Or propose that the administration use library funds to buy students and faculty members subscriptions to Questia.

Then brace yourself for an earful about the flaws in the Questia online-searching tool, the patchwork nature of the netLibrary collection, and the many wrongheaded assumptions that these two high-profile e-library companies, among others, are making about the role of college libraries.

The rise of e-libraries presents challenges for college professors, who worry that the services will make it easier for students to plagiarize, or simply to write papers filled with material that the students have searched for and pasted in, but don't necessarily understand.

Meanwhile, the spotty nature of the library companies' collections -- and the possibility that the companies themselves may go under -- leaves academic librarians uneasy about using them.

NetLibrary, which calls itself "the world's premier provider of electronic books," markets its digitized books primarily through academic, public, and corporate libraries. The three-year-old company, based in Boulder, Colo., has a collection of about 33,000 full-text books, including front-list titles covering a gamut of subjects, and about 5,000 books no longer in copyright. Not all subscribing libraries buy access to the entire collection. Library patrons can "check out" a book for 48 hours via the Web as long as their library (or a consortium including their library) has bought that particular e-book and no other patron under the same subscription is using it at the time. NetLibrary texts can't be saved to a user's own computer.

Questia, which went live in January with an offer to help undergraduates "write better papers, easier and faster," features a database of about 35,000 full-text books and journal articles, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. The company, based in Houston, sells subscriptions by the week ($9.95), month ($19.95), and year ($149.95), and provides each subscriber complete access to its collection, no matter who else may be using the material at the time.

Though the company started up with irreverent pitches that angered many academics, it is now trying to woo college deans, too, by offering bulk subscriptions for students and professors.

Other companies, like XanEdu and Jones e-global Library, also sell digital-library services, but they have not invested in creating full-text editions of books, instead providing only digitized articles and journals.

While both netLibrary and Questia have teams of librarians assembling their respective collections, some academic librarians say their catalogs lack coherence.

NetLibrary is just "a hodgepodge of things that publishers would make available," says Mark Sandler, a librarian at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, who sometimes calls the company "NotLibrary."

Questia isn't much better, other librarians say. "One of the myths that Questia has bought into is that small-college library collections are the same," says Thomas Kirk, at Earlham College. In reality, he says, "each library develops its collection in response to the needs of its curriculum." Earlham, for example, emphasizes Japanese studies.

Questia also lacks in mainstream titles, says Thomas McFadden, librarian at Union College, in Schenectady, N.Y. When he did an author search for Descartes in March, he says, only five titles turned up, "none of which are important or even selected editions of Descartes's primary works." One held just a three-page selection; another was a book about Descartes's dream argument.

The companies say they are adding content as they grow.

Industry observers, like E. Yegin Chen, of Eduventures.com, predict that academic librarians could actually benefit from some of the companies. "If the e-libraries did it properly," he explains, many librarians could spend a lot less time worrying about things like electronic storage and more of their time doing what they're trained to do, helping students. Mr. Chen, an analyst and director of the Boston-based research company, wrote a report on e-library ventures that was issued in February.

At many colleges, libraries are already responding to the companies' upping of the ante, adding conveniences like 24-7 reference desks, book advice via online chats, and the lending of e-book reading devices loaded with selections chosen by librarians.

Still, e-book companies won't be major players in college libraries until the collections get a lot more sophisticated, says Karen Coyle, a digital-library specialist with the California Virtual Library. "There's nothing that you can study today that you can study entirely digitally," says Ms. Coyle, who is director of the American Library Association's e-book task force.

Nor, in most cases, are e-books likely to save libraries money or solve their storage and shelving issues. Most librarians say they can't risk buying a needed book solely in e-book form, for fear that it might someday be removed from the online collection by the e-book company or the publisher. So they buy the print book, too. That's a lesson they've learned the hard way in buying digital journals over the past few years. Companies supplying them with journals have sometimes decided to drop titles from their databases, leaving the libraries without access to journals for which they had no print backups.

What's more, as Mr. Kirk notes, "there is no guarantee that netLibrary or Questia is going to be around tomorrow." Librarians note that at least one other digital-library company, IT Knowledge, has gone out of business.

NetLibrary, which is privately held, has been mum about its finances since mid-December, when it canceled plans to seek $82-million in an initial public offering. The company is also said to have gone through a round of layoffs in the past few months.

Marge Gammon, a company spokeswoman, would not comment on the layoffs, saying in an e-mail message that it was "a matter of policy" not to disclose financial information. She adds that netLibrary is being used by more than 5,000 libraries, of all types. The company's chief executive officer, Robert W. Kaufman, did not respond to e-mail and voice-mail messages from The Chronicle.

Questia, which impressed business and academic leaders by raising $135-million in venture financing last year, is nonetheless also a question mark. Last week, the company announced that it was slowing down its pace of digitizing books, to cut costs, and has laid off about half of its 300 workers. Moreover, not only is Questia's book total of 35,000 far smaller than the 50,000 it said it would have by February, but it also has apparently not managed to attract very many paying customers, despite a media blitz. Tens of thousands of people have subscriptions, of which some are free and some are paid, the company says. Questia is seeking another $75-million in financing.

What may be most remarkable about Questia, however, is the way in which it has managed to annoy and alienate so many librarians, deans, and professors, mostly with its self-promotion (it calls its service a 21st-century parallel to Gutenberg's printing press) and the tone of its marketing. The company's advertisements and Web site depict a college student perspiring in fear of a looming deadline for a paper, and present Questia as the solution to his woes.

The company has also offered a $14.95, 48-hour subscription that Keemo Rosenthal, associate dean for undergraduate education at Union College, says "panders to students' worst instincts." The 48-hour option isn't available now, but Questia officials say it may be offered again.

At Franklin & Marshall College, the company's ads in the student newspaper so annoyed the college librarian, Pamela Snelson, that she wrote a tart letter to the editor criticizing the service and reminding students that most of the Questia collection duplicates library holdings that they have already paid for with their tuition dollars. The marketing "trivializes what we're doing," she says.

Questia officials say they're still committed to the student-oriented focus, including "Sweaty Guy," their own nickname for the character pictured in the ad. Convenience is a compelling draw for students, says Carol Ann Hughes, director of the collection. "We speak to that. It's a human need." And "Sweaty Guy" gets results, adds Helen Y. Wilson, Questia's director of marketing, as evidenced by an increase in traffic on the Web site right after the commercial is aired.

But the company is now also trying to demonstrate the academic legitimacy of its service. For the past month, a half-dozen representatives have been calling on deans and department heads at institutions as diverse as the Johns Hopkins University, Prince George's Community College, and a campus of the for-profit Strayer University to demonstrate Questia and offer bulk subscriptions.

Questia also began offering free two- and three-month subscriptions to dean's-list students at dozens of colleges, and to students at the four institutions that made it to the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Final Four basketball tournament.

The visits and free trials have led to mixed success. Many officials have been noncommittal, and some -- including the dean at Amherst College -- refused to see the Questia representative at all. But others have expressed interest.

Elmhurst College, for example, says it is considering buying subscriptions for about 20 percent of its 2,300 students, primarily those taking courses in humanities and social sciences. This even though a marketing company hired by Questia had plastered yellow sticky notes on library computers urging students to "Try Questia next time, it's faster."

"It has a lot of potential if it's targeted to the right courses," Susan Steffan, the Elmhurst librarian, says of Questia's service. But "I certainly wouldn't want it to be the only library our students have access to."

The cost of the bulk subscriptions is not set, but the college would probably pay about $50 to $60 per student per semester, Ms. Steffan says. "A student doesn't need Questia for all four years," she argues, because the company's collection isn't large enough to help them through a full undergraduate curriculum.

For many academics and librarians, however, the ready availability of full-text e-books is creating concerns about how students will use the material in research papers -- and, of course, new concerns about plagiarism. Many undergraduates already are too dependent on electronic resources, says Fred M. Heath, director of libraries at Texas A&M University at College Station. "If it's not in electronic formats, it probably doesn't exist" as far as most freshmen and sophomores are concerned, he says.

Worse, says Mr. McFadden, the Union College librarian, the educational value of writing papers may be undermined by the functions of these library services. With Questia, students can search for a section on their topic, cut and paste a paragraph, and automatically create footnotes with just a few clicks of a mouse. "You could easily do a well-documented paper without reading anything," he says. He subscribed to Questia early on and has shared his criticisms of its search engine and collection with a number of other librarians.

Barbara Doyle-Wilch, the librarian at Skidmore College, is a member of Questia's unpaid library advisory board. She acknowledges that it is easier for users of electronic resources to look only at pieces they turn up in their search, losing the full context of what they're reading. But that's not an insurmountable problem, she says.

"The onus is on the educational process. The rigor has to come in the classroom," from professors who won't settle for papers that fail to demonstrate an understanding of the works that students have cited.

For now, though, the concerns are largely theoretical. College students don't appear to be using Questia nor netLibrary very heavily. The University System of Georgia, for example, bought netLibrary through its statewide Galileo library project, but only about 800 people have opened netLibrary accounts. Others may have browsed through books for as long as 15 minutes -- a brief visit for which an account is not required. Galileo is available to hundreds of thousands of patrons at academic and public libraries, most of which have not fully integrated netLibrary e-books into their online catalogs.

At the University of California at Berkeley, where the library bought 835 social-science books from netLibrary to assess patrons' interest, surveys show that the books have limited appeal. Students liked being able to look things up at 2 a.m. when they were studying, says Milton G. Ternberg, director of the business-and-economics library. But "we just didn't see anybody beating down the doors."

Library users, he says, like being able to look online to see what an e-book offers. But many apparently looked only long enough to decide if it was worth walking to the library to do what students and professors have traditionally done -- check out a good, old-fashioned book.

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