4. What does the
Academic Library do?
Supports scholarship
- Provides relevant information/materials
to students and faculty
- Provides reliable, stable, approximately
permanent access to the scholarly
record and associated source material.
Authentic and secure.
Used to go together, now not so much.
5. Publication and
Scholarship
Ideas must be conveyed to qualify as ideas
Books Polls
Experiments
Statistics
Articles
Reports
And without libraries, that which we know (knew)
gets lost
6. Progress
You can t make it or sustain it without a
library
In fact, you can t do much without a
library*
*I get to define do, much, and
library
9. What does this mean?
Cost for libraries:
relatively high
Cost for users:
relatively low - Building
- Infrastructure
- Time
- Maintenance
- Research
- Staff
- Travel
- Acquisitions
- And so on...
10. Public Goods
Samuelson on public goods:
Each individual s consumption of that good leads to
no subtraction from any other individual s consumption of
that good.
Jefferson on information:
Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the
less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He
who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself
without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine,
receives light without darkening me.
Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of
property.
16. The goal of copyright
promote the
Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for
limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive right
to their respective Writings and Discoveries . . .
United States Constitution, Article I
The original requirements for gaining copyright
protection (i.e., registration, publication, & limited scope
and endurance) were more consistent with learning
and promoting access than with promoting property.
18. The length of copyright
Copyright, the good old days:
14 years 14 years
And you had to register
Copyright today:
Life of the author +70 years
No registration required
(unless you want to sue)
19. Copyrights between 55 and 75 years
old that were still valuable in 1998
Data source:
Congressional Research Service, Copyright Term Extension: Estimating the Economic Values
20. The street value of copyright
Out of print = 95%
Plausibly in copyright: 66.6% Public Domain: 28.4%
Unknown: 5%
UM s print collection: 7.3 million volumes
21. Once upon a time, copying
(aka printing) was
expensive
Now copying is cheap
22. Distributing copies was
expensive
Now, also cheap
The business model no longer
fits the business(es).
23. Cheap copying ought to help
Publication facilitates collaboration,
standing on the shoulders of both giants
and the vertically challenged, which is the
fundamental method
And new information technology greatly
reduces the cost of publication, improving
access across time and space . . . .
26. Google Settlement
Access for our Campus
Public Benefits
- Print Disabilities
- Public Library Kiosks
- Browsing in the Bookstore
Research Corpus
Collection Management
27. Google Settlement
Controversy
Monopoly
Orphan Works
Pipe Dreams of Various Flavors
- Nonprofits should & would have done it
- Should have been public policy
Current state of play
29. What s in HathiTrust?
10,110,821 total volumes
5,372,802 book titles
266,547 serial titles
3,538,787,350 pages
453 terabytes
120 miles
8,215 tons
2,803,202 volumes (~28% of total) in the public domain
33. Challenges
Intellectual property environment
Technology and Scale
Rising journal prices, especially in Science,
Technology and Medicine
Problem of preservation and future access with
licensing
New Responsibilities
- Large data sets
- Web 2.0 (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr,
YouTube)
34. Opportunities
Scholarship benefits from easy sharing
We are the information experts in the
Information Age, and hard problems require
expertise
If we can organize to cover costs, the sky is
the limit
No matter what, Michigan will be a leader
35. What to Do
Revise the rights environment to exploit the technology
Revise individual libraries missions to exploit the
technology
- Sharing and scale
- Local layers on top
- (cataloging as poster child)
Digitize wherever possible, and use digital copies
wherever appropriate and legal
- Information to Artifact continuum
Preserve and curate the old and the new
(Display the treasures)
Create Institutions to Support Collaboration