More on the Revised Google Book Deal

Couple of more comments on the Amended Settlement Agreement (ASA for the cognoscenti.)

http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/news/11252009/library-groups-release-guide-revised-google-books-settlement

Revised Google Book deal disappoints many

Wayne Wiegand at Rollins

Wayne is the F. William Summers Professor of Library and Information Studies and Professor of American Studies at Florida State University and currently a resident scholar in the Winter Park Institute.

More importantly he is the dean of American library history and we are really lucky to have him with us here at Rollins. This semester he has been teaching a class on censorship and part of a book discussion group that has been discussing the issues raised by Sven Birkerts' Gutenberg Elegies: the fate of reading in an electronic age. At the moment a couple of our librarians are working with him to organize a seminar/workshop/discussion group next semester for librarians and others on a topic of interest -- more on that later. What I want to let everyone know now is that he will be giving a public lecture on Wednesday November 18th on “Main Street Public Library; Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Heartland, 1865-1965” at 7pm in the Suntrust Auditorium in the Crummer School on Rollins campus.

If you are at all interested in libraries, community spaces, reading and are anywhere near central Florida on the 18th I hope you will consider coming. It is free and open to the public.

Open Access Week

Did you know this week is Open Access Week? We are not making a particularly big deal about it here at Rollins because it comes just a bit too early in an effort on campus to pass an Open Access Policy concerning A&S faculty publications.

If you are not even sure what open access is, take a look at this great little video.

Open Access 101, from SPARC from Karen Rustad on Vimeo.

Why does college tuition continue to rise?

This is a big question and lots of people have weighed in on it. Many agree that one contributing factor is that the costs of higher education rise more quickly than the CPI. One small part of those costs are library collection costs -- particularly continued journal price inflation. Recently we saw a particularly egregious example of this when the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) raised institutional subscription prices on their new acquisition, Scientific American from $39.95 per year, to an amazing $299 per year. Three hundred bucks is not such a big figure in comparison with the hundreds of thousands of dollars we spend each year on library materials but a single order of magnitude increase does get my attention.

So this time we did not just roll over and take it.

I organized my Oberlin Group colleagues to sign a joint letter to NPG and publicized the letter with the media. Our ultimate hope is that NPG will reconsider this decision and revoke this price increase. If the letter doesn't achieve this, then I expect the marketplace will. Rollins, along with a number of other college libraries, have already cancelled their subscriptions.

20th Anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall

Professor Nancy Decker's German students are organizing a party to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall in October 1989. They have erected a huge polystyrene version of a section of the wall and placed it outside the library in the atrium. As you can see from the pictures it is certainly dramatic. The top photo is the east side (plain except for the names of people who died trying to cross the wall.) The bottom on is decorated with graffiti, like the west side of the original. On October 3, they will move it to Mills Lawn, the symbolic heart of campus and destroy it during a party.

The opening of the wall, the reunification of Germany and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, was one of the most significant periods of my life. They were events that I had grown up never expecting to see. Most of our incoming class were not even born when the wall came down.

I Think You Are Really Going To Like R-Search

The holy grail of academic libraries for the last few years has been a search engine that rivals Google in attracting our students. Even pre-Google we knew we had to find some way of making searching, and more importantly finding, the good stuff in libraries easier.

Originally we thought dumping everything into our catalog or into our Integrated Library System (in our case, Sirsi) might be the answer, but those systems were designed to retrieve records of books and harked back to the old card catalog.

Then we thought we might be able to develop a "scholar's workstation" in some form, but that never really panned out.

Recently we thought federated searching might do the job, but lowest common denominator searching and the need to connect to multiple databases in real time led to slow and inappropriately displayed results that frustrated users and (even more) reference librarians.

I am over holy grails, but R-search, our name for Serial Solutions Summon service, is really cool. No more choosing databases, clean single search box, fulltext just one click away, intuitive limits and refining of search results, and nice previews. I think students are going to love this.

Let me know what you think.

WorldCat Local quick start

Here at Rollins we have been playing with OCLC's Quick Start for WorldCat Local. Playing being the operative word. It is really easy to set this up and it has some interesting potential.

Could this replace our OPAC? With the interesting reframing of our collection within the larger WorldCat collection (once again de-centering our catalog.)

The interface is clean, and includes the nice link to electronic content, and to ILL. I also like the limiting features that are all the rage in library databases these days.

But what is the relationship between this and WorldCat.org? When I search Google I come across WorldCat records. When I click on a record I go to the generic WorldCat record, not the WorldCat Local record. What would OCLC have to do to change that? Because that is true web scale discovery: web search and local retrieval.

Teaching RCC

I have been kinda quiet this summer, working on my garden and preparing to teach RCC this Fall. The latter has given me a new understanding of teaching faculty. This is a lot of work! particularly since this is new prep for me and I haven't been able to find a good textbook for the course (there are reasonable ones on the invention of writing and the proliferation of media since the nineteenth century, but not one that does both) an introduction to the history of recorded information. Here is the course description:

"Why do almost all humans learn to speak and understand language as infants, but we don't all learn to read and write, and if we do it is difficult and we do it much later? The answer is that writing is a technology rather than an innate part of being human. This course will be an introduction to the history of recorded information focusing on the moments of technological change: from orality to literacy, from scroll to codex, from manuscript to print, and the one we are currently living through, i.e., from print to digital. We will see examples of some of these technologies in the Library's Special Collections. We will participate in weekly field trips to an Elementary School in Orlando to help students there learn to read. We will also visit the Orlando Sentinel office as the employees of that newspaper go through this digital revolution. This course will help you better understand what we can and cannot learn from history, what is happening around you as some daily newspapers go out of business and books can be read on your iPhone, and your role as agents of change."

Here is a list of all the books (there are a bunch of articles and blog entries as well, but these are the books) from which I selected readings for this course and how to locate them at Rollins and beyond.

Casson, Lionel. Libraries in the Ancient World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: Cambridge University Press, 1983. (see also her The Printing Press as an Agent of Change."

Hessler, Peter. Oracle Bones: A Journey between China's Past and Present. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.

Houston, Stephen D. The First Writing: Script Invention As History and Process. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. New York: Viking, 1996.

McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is the Massage. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.

McNeely, Ian F., and Lisa Wolverton. Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.

O'Donnell, James Joseph. Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.

Plato and William S. Cobb. The Symposium: and, The Phaedrus ; Plato's Erotic Dialogues. SUNY Series in Ancient Greek philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.

Roberts, Colin H., and T. C. Skeat. The Birth of the Codex. London: Published for the British Academy by the Oxford University Press, 1983.

Stephens, Mitchell. A History of News: From the Drum to the Satellite. New York: Penguin Books, 1989.

Trithemius, Johannes. In Praise of Scribes. De Laude Scriptorum. Lawrence, Kan: Coronado Press, 1974.

There are a huge number of readings I could have chosen from, if you have any suggestions, let me know.

Good News In interlibrary loan.

When a user asks how long it takes to get a book or article via ILL, or we mention it during an instruction session, we usually say, "plan on two weeks."

Well Melanie just gave me the report for the last academic year and she has shaved a considerable amount of time off those two weeks. On average, for articles, it takes less than 10 days from the user placing the request to them being notified that the item is available for them to view or print, and less than seven days for books. Overall, on average it takes nine days. That includes weekends and holidays.

Even better, she managed to do this while ILL borrowing increased from 1731 in 2007-08 to 3150 in 2008-09. Even better, she has a couple of things in the works (ILL Direct for books and RapidILL for articles) that should shave even more time off those numbers.

Congratulations Melanie, you get a pickle!

What are people saying about your library?

There has been this really interesting discussion in the ALA group at LinkedIn recently about how to monitor the reputation of your library in "cyberspace." People use the following tools:

Technorati
Delicious
Dogpile -- which captures the ones above and MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter
Yelp
SocialMention
LinkedIn application called Company Buzz.

Emily InLow-Hood mentioned that Beth Kanter had some good ideas about this as well. can you think of any others?

Recycling the Shelflist

Part of the R2 project means the shelflist is redundant. We should have probably done this many years ago, but better late than never. We decided to make quite a big deal out of retiring the beast as a way of making our community more aware of our move from print to digital.
At the end of May we offered individual cards to faculty and staff and a lot of people took us up on the offer to get a card for the books they wrote, or favorite titles. Last week the cabinets were offered to the highest bidder (the big ones went for $200 and the small ones for $120. Amazing.)
On Friday the staff recycled the remaining cards. It took 125 years to build the list and just 35 minutes to recycle it.

Multimedia Online

The issue of how to provide access to audio and video content for our users will appear in our strategic plan as we update it this summer. Since the advent of CDs and then DVDs we have been relatively stable in this area. We buy quite a few DVDs and have a small collection of CDs. The DVDs are still heavily used, the CDs not so much.

We have already subscribed to the Naxos Music Library and Classical Music Library services that stream audio to authorized users. We have options to subscribe to more music services, and of course our students are accessing far more via services like iTunes.

Video is coming up close behind. Obviously on the open web services like YouTube are making video content much more accessible than it used to be and Neilsen is reporting that, while traditional TV still dwarfs video viewed over the Internet, Internet viewing is growing fast.

The question facing libraries is how do we participate in this move to multimedia content over the Internet with the particular issues that face information providers like libraries? These include:

• We provide content free to authorized end users.
• Instructors rely on the library to make scheduling of content for classroom use convenient.
• The content we want to distribute includes far more high-value content (professional films, movies, documentaries, etc. ) than the open web. Content that is usually subject to copyright and access restrictions.
• We are very concerned about the cost structures (annual subscriptions, purchase, etc.) and how sustainable these are.
• We are very concerned about preservation over the very long term and the corollary: migration of previously collected content to new formats and platforms.
• We are concerned about description, discovery, and retrieval of content.

All these makes video content over the web from your library a tough nut to crack. But there are beginning to be services out there that are interesting.

Open Access to my dissertation

Yeah, OK, this is just yet another shameless plug for my dissertation. How long is he going to milk this PhD? You may ask.

But honestly, I have a much higher purpose. For the last few years the University of Pittsburgh, my alma mater, has required that dissertations be submitted in digital form. They are then made accessible via the university's ETD site. This is another example of an institutional repository (IR.) In this case a repository for a specific type of document; theses and dissertations. But it could serve up any kind of document or file. Other common IR's store and provide access to student work, organizational documents, scholarly articles, and archival materials. We are currently exploring how to create one here at Rollins around the products of our faculty/student research program. More on that to come.

If you are brave enough to dip into my dissertation, take a look at page iii, the copyright statement. I have agreed to allow access under a Creative Commons attribution share alike license so that, even if you access the document via ProQuest's Digital Dissertations, it is clear that you have more rights to use it that they might ordinarily allow you.

Wolfram Alpha

This is the latest search engine (is that even the right phrase? Wolfram Alpha themselves call it a "computational knowledge engine") that is sweeping the web this month

It isn't even live yet, but the high digirati have seen demos and are very excited. If you were at the FLA Conference you heard Richard Maddaus mention it.

It sounds as though it could be good for data and number crunching questions, but I always remember one of my ultimate reference questions, "How long was Christ's ministry?" I will enjoy seeingwhat it does with that.

Twitter at Olin

Dorothy has set up a Twitter account for Olin. Take a look and let me know what you think.
By the way, I was adding txt message tweats today from the FLA Conference from my mobile phone, TR was doing the same from his iPhone, and this blog post is also being written on my phone.
Mobile is not only about consuming information, but also creating it.

Our first video!

Congrats to TR Parker and Nadia Johnson for producing this great video that you can now find on our homepage. Hopefully the first of many.

The Google Book Search Settlement

I have been thinking about the impact of the impending Google Book Search settlement on libraries like Rollins.

There have been a number of good summaries of the settlement including Jonathan Band's for the ARL. Also good commentary from Robert Darton (and Paul Courant response), Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Mike Madison (who has links to others.) The ALA et al. have also decided to submit comments to the court. But here is a really short summary of the 200 page plus settlement. I would be delighted to hear any comments and corrections.

1. The settlement will end the class action suit brought by the publishers and authors for copyright infringement of their rights in copyrighted works digitized by Google. It does not affect those materials digitized by Google that are in the public domain.
2. Google will continue to digitize in-copyright books and will enable users to search the entire contents of these digitized books.
3. Google will generate revenue from advertising and by selling the ability to see the fulltext of digitized books.
4. Rightsholders can set the price of books,if they do not Google will set the price in a range between $1.99 and $29.99. 51%will be priced in $5.99. These prices can be changed based on sales data. the pricing structure will be renegotiated at regular intervals.
5. A Book Rights Registry (BRR) will be created to distribute payments from Google to rightsholders when Google displays more than the "snippets" it currently displays for works in copyright.
6. Google will retain 37% of the revenue, 63% will go to the BRR. Initially Google will pay $45,000,000 to the BRR for copyrighted materials scanned before January 2009.
7. The settlement excludes periodicals, musical notation and lyrics, unpublished papers, books published in the U.S. that are not registered with the Copyright Office, and books published after January 5th, 2009.
8. The settlement is organized in terms of three groups of books: those in the public domain, those in copyright but not commercially (out of print) and those in copyright and commercially available (in print.)
9. Rightsholders can opt out of the settlement, can remove specific books from the Google system, or vary the basic rules of the settlement for specific titles. Band for one expects that publishers will do this for their titles that are in print and therefore the settlement will basically cover out of print, in copyright books. Google estimates this at about 70% of published works. However, the University of Michigan has received for an IMLS grant that aims to clarify the copyright status of books published after 1923 and before 1963 because they think a large proportion of these works are orphan works, or have fallen out of copyright because rights holders did not complete all the necessary formalities to ensure or renew copyright.
   
10. Rightsholders of inserts (forewords, essays, tables, illustrations, etc.) in other works can choose not to have those displayed,though they cannot choose to have the whole book removed from the Google Book Project.
11. The settlement is also organized in terms of three user groups: all users, public libraries and universities, and institutions.
12. The settlement recognizes various types of libraries that have contributed books from their collection to the project: fully participating libraries, cooperating libraries,public domain libraries, and other libraries. Since Rollins has not contributed any books to the project none of these apply to us.
13. The settlement also includes some non-exclusivity terms that mean that libraries and rights holders (publishers) can continue to digitize outside of the Google Book Project.
14. The fully participating libraries will also be allowed to create two centers that will host the "research corpus." The Research Corpus is the entire contents of the Google Book Project and can be used -- on and off0site - for non-consumptive research (image analysis and text extraction, textual or linguistic analysis, and research on automated translation, indexing and search. Basically research that does not involve understanding the intellectual content of the text.
15. Finally, Google has agreed to provide free search,the permitted displays,the Public Access Services (PAS) to public and academic libraries and and institutional subscriptions for 85% of the in copyright, but out of print digitized books in the project within five years.if not, the fully participating libraries or the BRR can find someone else to do it.

For details of what various users will be able to do and under what circumstances see this table. Many people are interested in research libraries, the libraries that have provided the copies of the books google is scanning, but what does this mean for Rollins and liberal arts college libraries like us if this settlement goes through?

There will be one PAS terminal in the Olin Library. If the price is right, which is by no means certain, we will be able to subscribe so that students, faculty, and staff can access the fulltext of the books in the database on-campus. The price is likely to be somewhat similar to the price of other large scale e-book vendors' collections like NetLibrary, ebrary, etc. but since the collection will be so much larger, it might well be totally unreasonable. We will know this before December 2009. But it is not at all clear whether we would be able to offer remote access. If we are able to subscribe, it is unlikely that we will simply load the records of such books into our OPAC because these millions of titles would overwhelm our collection of about 300,000 books. But we might well index the Google Book Search titles in a meta discovery tool like the upcoming Summon (from SerialsSolutions) so that users can easily find titles in Google Books while searching a wide array of sources. It will have a radical impact on interlibrary loan of books, aiding discovery in some cases and thus increasing interlibrary loan, and enabling some users to get what they need from a book without interlibrary loaning it, and thus decreasing interlibrary loan in others. But I don't think we will be able to ILL books from Google to users elsewhere. There will some ability to link to titles form Blackboard. It will also probably be an aid for us in weeding the collection, increasing the cases in which a little used book can be withdrawn because we can rely for a low level of use on the digitized copy in the Book Project. It probably will not have too much impact on new book purchases since digital access to in copyright and in print books will be severely limited. It could be a great opportunity for statewide cooperation. I wonder if Google would be prepared (or be able to persuade publishers) to negotiate access to every academic library in Florida or better yet every resident of Florida via the State Library? Publishers have shown a distinct lack of foresight in this regard so far, so I am not sure that is going to happen.

I have to end on a note of caution. I am glad to see the non-exclusivity terms of the agreement. This means that other digitization projects can continue. But this 800lbs gorilla in the room will definitely dampen others' enthusiasm to embark on mass digitization projects. But as David Courant of Michigan has pointed out, those haven't got too far anyway. If this agreement goes through, Google will have established a very strong market position as an early entrant; that, combined with its dominance of search, will make it tough to beat in the oh-so-unprofitable world of book distribution. There's the rub: we have created a monopoly player that will dominate one of the most important expressions of our cultural heritage and knowledge base -- books.

Imagine if we created just one library that had almost every book published before 2009 and that library was a publicly traded company that made money through advertising to its users and selling services associated with its collections. Well, we just did.

The immediate impacts on our work described above are just the beginning. I think this settlement and Google Book Search in general will have huge, long term, and tough to imagine effects on libraries and publishing.

NITLE Summit Meeting

I am in Philadelphia at the 2009 NITLE Summit.

• Some good posters last night. Including ones on students using video blogs to reflect on their learning experiences at Emory & Henry College, the DELI initiative from Connecticut College in wich they support courses with digital technologies like a video iPod for each student in a language course, and Project Bamboo.
• This morning I was at a session on Ithaka's focus group study of undergraduate research by Sambrina Manville.
• Cheap video at sites like YouTube and JayCut. QuickTime Pro (but that costs about $30.) Placestories. Here is an example from Jay Cut, done in real time using video (the bad, dark red one) from my phone. If I can do it, so can you.

Collection Development and Resource Sharing Conference, Tallahassee

Roy Ziegler of FSU organized a really good conference to discuss the Janus Challenges. I went as part of an effort I am involved in to help academic libraries escape their public/private college/university silos and cooperate a bit better than they have in the past. I was part of a panel of library directors that spoke at the end of the conference.

There is a real chance that we can make some significant progress in expanding cooperation over the next few years. This is good because the future for a stand alone college library is not good. I am not sure the model, particularly in terms of collections, is sustainable over the long term.

Pope Works to Improve Information Literacy of Curia

I love this.

“I have been told that consulting the information available on the Internet would have made it possible to perceive the problem early on,” Benedict wrote. “I have learned the lesson that in the future in the Holy See we will have to pay greater attention to that source of news.”

As the ACRL Information Literacy Guidelines put it:

• Determine the extent of information needed
• Access the needed information effectively and efficiently
• Evaluate information and its sources critically
• Incorporate selected information into one’s knowledge base
• Use information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose
• Understand the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information, and access and use information ethically and legally