Robert Darnton The Library: Three Jeremiads from the NY Review of Books, Dec. 23, 2010

The Library: Three Jeremiads from the NY Review of Books, Dec. 23, 2010
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/dec/23/library-three-jeremiads/?pagination=false

Excellent piece on the crises in research libraries. It's all about money and the lack of it for research libraries.

3 Jeremiads, 3 problems

1st: Monographs and scholarship
" ... a vicious circle: the escalation in the price of periodicals forces libraries to cut back on their purchase of monographs; the drop in the demand for monographs makes university presses reduce their publication of them; and the difficulty in getting them published creates barriers to careers among graduate students."

"Another rule of thumb used to prevail among the better university presses. They could count on research libraries purchasing about eight hundred copies of any new monograph. By 2000 that figure had fallen to three or four hundred, often less, and not enough in most cases to cover production costs. Therefore, the presses abandoned subjects like colonial Latin America and Africa."

2nd: Journals
"A few years later, “sustainability” had become a buzz word, and the inflationary spiral of journal prices had continued unabated. In 2007 I became director of the Harvard University Library, a strategic position from which to take the full measure of the business constraints on academic life. Although economic conditions had worsened, the faculty’s understanding of them had not improved."

"How many professors in chemistry can give you even a ballpark estimate of the cost of a year’s subscription to Tetrahedron (currently $39,082)?"

"At Harvard we developed a new model. By a unanimous vote on February 12, 2008, professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences bound themselves to deposit all of their future scholarly articles in an open-access repository to be established by the library and also granted the university permission to distribute them."

3rd: Google Books
"The fundamental incompatibility of purpose between libraries and Google Book Search might be mitigated if Google could offer libraries access to its digitized database of books on reasonable terms. But the terms are embodied in a 368-page document known as the “settlement,” which is meant to resolve another conflict: the suit brought against Google by authors and publishers for alleged infringement of their copyrights."

"Despite its enormous complexity, the settlement comes down to an agreement about how to divide a pie—the profits to be produced by Google Book Search: 37 percent will go to Google, 63 percent to the authors and publishers. And the libraries? They are not partners to the agreement, but many of them have provided, free of charge, the books that Google has digitized. They are being asked to buy back access to those books along with those of their sister libraries, in digitized form, for an “institutional subscription” price, which could escalate as disastrously as the price of journals."

"... my happy ending: a National Digital Library—or a Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), as some prefer to call it."

The Harvard Report

Harvard's Report of the Task Force on University Libaries is now available. http://www.provost.harvard.edu/reports/Library_Task_Force_Report.pdf

Very thoughtful and appropriate to Yale University Library, too. The library there and here needs to align its resources to support access to scholarly resources rather than to amass and store collections.

New funding and operating models are needed to focus the library on services in an age of digital tools.

Its 5 recommendations (for "Harvard" read "Yale"):

1. Establish and implement a shared administrative infrastructure

The fragmented organization of the Harvard libraries represents the fossilization of contingent historical decisions, based on past circumstances and actors. This structure now impedes nimble, effective, and fiscally responsible responses to twenty-first century challenges. We recommend reforms focused on administrative services that, when unified, will provide better and more cost-effective service to faculty and students.

2. Rationalize and enhance information and technology systems

This focus on systems improvement will not succeed, however, unless paired with changes in the model for decision making and funding. A widely distributed “veto” and excesses of local customization have impeded the effective development of technology infrastructure both within and outside Harvard’s libraries. The Task Force believes that Harvard must develop a robust, shared information architecture to guide future development and to orient investments in innovative projects. Core systems must be standardized across Harvard libraries to enable the University to collaborate internally and externally more effectively than we do today.

3. Revamp the financial model for the Harvard libraries

The current system of financing library materials and services impedes efforts to collaborate across the different parts of Harvard University, and often establishes incentives for actions that aid one part of the library at the expense of the whole. This phenomenon is most clearly reflected when content costs are shifted from one unit to another.

4. Rationalize the system for acquiring, accessing and developing a “single university” collection.

The Harvard University Library system needs to rationalize the manner in which all parts of the University collect and provide access to materials, and orient its focus more clearly toward ensuring access, as opposed to the current default model of building collections by acquisition. This shift is already in prominent view in many disciplines of the natural and social sciences, where ownership of materials has given way to providing access to materials that may be housed on a publisher’s server, at other institutions, or in other countries. Many fields, including the humanities, will continue to depend on physical materials, but the emphasis on ensuring access in perpetuity to materials should nonetheless increasingly supplant acquisition in the case of widely available resources. The University’s efforts to build a single, shared collection must also be coordinated more effectively. A centralized purchasing and licensing office that negotiates with vendors should be empowered to speak to vendors with a single voice whenever possible. Longer-term efforts to reform the scholarly communications and publishing system, such as the University’s leadership in the open access movement, should continue to be emphasized and supported from within the library system.

5. Collaborate more ambitiously with peer institutions

Harvard should enhance its efforts to work with other libraries and cultural institutions to build a sustainable information ecosystem for the 21st century. In some cases, this collaboration will mean building upon existing efforts to work directly with partner institutions.

As described above, Harvard’s information technology systems must be improved to become more interoperable, internally and externally, in order to facilitate external collaborations with the goal of maximizing access to scholarly materials for our faculty and students. Throughout the library system, Harvard must be more ambitious in its efforts to work with external partners to share costs and resources to improve library collections and services to current and future users.