Comments on Collections in the Cloud?

• Posted by TechieLibrarian , Librarian on January 8, 2010 at 9:00am EST

• Cloud services, or as some like to note the rebirth of the mainframe and terminal from which PCs were supposed to free us bring with them as number of risks from the library's perspective.

  The largest of which are issues of privacy and ownership, both of which tie to our ability to serve as neutral long term repositories of knowledge.

  While most libraries make extensive use of online database collections, those are singularly unsuited to the role of a long term scholarly repository due to their subscription based payment.

  Libraries which wish to maintain a scholarly record need to know they own rather than rent the data and would need the ability to display and show it themselves if need be. For a scholarly record material cannot be DRMed and reliant on out of date servers or product keys that could go down (such as Wal-Mart's online music store) nor should they tied to a proprietary file format that can become difficult to read as software dies off. We're looking at a time-frame of decades or centuries when we discuss being a scholarly repository and as much as I love computer resources, there's a lot of upkeep involved in keeping any file stable and usable for years much less across decades.

  Most online books do not meet those requirements, and until they do they're not a reasonable alternative. Currently, faculty and students also hate them. Experiments with online books such as Princeton have shown some students and faculty taking a fairly dim view towards online books. (See http://tiny.cc/ivUmf)

  Library consortia are managing collections to try and allow different universities and colleges to serve as repositories for different ranges of collections, but there are logistical and political issues involved in their workings. They can do very well though, but setting them up isn't easy.

  Privacy is the other bug in our proverbial bonnet. Professionally, most librarians do not want any records of what our patrons are reading, watching, or doing. Many online services do an excellent job tracking and following a user to help them find material or show what they may be interested in. For some librarians this represents a problem in user privacy that we'd desperately like to find a way to avoid while still being able to offer useful material. If we offer online resources, our patrons should have the same level of privacy about their use of them as they would once they take a book out. I don't want to be able to know what they're doing, when they do it, or how. Most online service providers do want that, and there's a great deal of philosophical tension in that difference.

  I have to agree that many library catalogs tend to be pretty dumpy compared to Amazon or the like. They're made for power-users doing very specific things, not for your fairly clueless average user trying to "browse" electronically.

• Nothing new
• Posted by Karen on January 8, 2010 at 9:00am EST

• I just don't see how these ideas of yours are new. They are being debated and worked through on a daily basis in libraries.
  First, I would argue that you need one more leg in your proposition, that being library users.
  Second, the largest portion of most library budgets go to personnel, not books. Books are a very tiny portion of the budget. The real problem are astronomical prices for serials (which in fact are mostly electronic).
  Third, our library already "owns" over 10,000 electronic books, not to mention those that folks can get to through Google. Our library is also participating with Google to digitize many of the unique titles we have. We subscribe to over 30,000 electronic journal titles and over 800 research databases (many of them providing access to even more content). We are involved in statewide efforts to house overflow books in a coordinated manner and to reduce the size of our collections by working toward only one copy of little used items in the state. This is being worked on through a statewide consortium that has been in existence for 20 years now. (Each discard is seen as sacrilege and energy is spent on answering questions about our ability to do our jobs.) And to address your point of yesterday, we already are experimenting with on demand purchasing through our interlibrary loan service.

  We recently went through a major renovation of our central library on campus. The emphasis was put on more people space and less book space. We got flack right and left from the humanities faculty on that one but hung tough. Apparently housing 1 million volumes in this building was not enough. Now that the renovation is done and we are back in business folks love us, but we have had to develop a new specialization in hosting events. Not what our library degrees taught us to do. (We have had to turn down requests to host wedding receptions!)

  Amazon and BN work on a for profit model. They will not want to invest in housing, even electronically, little used items that don't bring revenue. They serve a lot of information needs of students and faculty , and many use their services. The libraries' role is to serve the needs not being met there. (Free access to those who can not afford the other, access to materials indefinitely, access to items that don't necessary generate profit for the private sector.)

  I'm not sure why you assume libraries are not grappling with these efforts. I think you should not underestimate the fact that not only are we dealing with the challenges of changing technology and tight budgets, but we also have a diversity of opinion amongst our constituents as to what we should be doing. We get a lot of lip service about how smart and invaluable we are on the one hand, but a lot of condescension on our handling of these issues with the other.

• on-screen vs. off-screen
• Posted by mritter on January 8, 2010 at 10:00am EST

• Research has been done regarding reading text on-screen versus from a page. There have been some significant studies that show very real differences. Before we begin dragging out the sledge hammers and clearing the shelves, we should first consider the long term effects our actions could have on cognitive development and how we learn and consume information. I fully support having large amounts of resource data in the cloud, it is both convenient and economical; however, there must be an appropriate balance.

• Next questions
• Posted by Kathym , Librarian on January 8, 2010 at 10:45am EST

• As a former academic director at three institutions with under 3000 students, you can expect that the largest (60% or more) portion of library budgets are linked to personnel (including benefits). The rest is used, in descending order, for serials (largest cost is electonic serials including aggregated databases of journal content), then books or AV depending on the institution. Purchase of visual materials--or the licenses for such materials, can be significant as those used in academe tend to be small market items (that would not be available via netflix!) My favorites were the $10-15,000 DVD sets for nursing instruction and review-updated every two years. If you looked at overall academic library budgets over the past 10 years, the portion of the budget expended exclusively on print books has probably declined dramtaicllay--I know it did for my three libraries.(p.s. the portion spent because of direct faculty requests was about 20% in all three institutions. Faculty come in contact wuith information about very specialized books and request those; the librarians select for the broader student audience and select those based on their knowledge of the curriculum, the students and the assignments. Holes are filled with ILL)

  As to building expenses, very few academic libraries in smaller colleges/universities budget for general maintenance or other building issues. This is done by a plant department of the institution. Same goes for renovation and/or furniture--you may make requests but it isn't in the library budget or under your control. And it is often in the capital, not operating budget. Even controlling the budget for computers isn't under the library's control. So the decision on the library building become a question of institutional priorities and resources: the library couldn't say "This year we won't buy any books (or databases or whatever) and fix the building. We fight with the dorms and atheletics and labs et al for precious capital money.
  At one institution where I worked, a library renovation was listed in two consecutive 5 year strategic plans. For 10 years over both plans, the library renovation was the second priority for capital funds each year--but the #1 was different every year, and only #1 got done. Such are the budget games we play......

• Posted by Barbara Fister on January 8, 2010 at 1:30pm EST

• The data on where library resources go is freely available - via the Association of Research Libraries (for big research collections) and the Dept. of Education (which gathers stats from all academic libraries regularly). Without examining them again, my recollection is that the percentage going to books has steeply declined in recent years. Licensed electronic resources are eating our budgets, which are shrinking anyway.

  There are two issues that complicate things (well, at least two): copyright and the nature of scholarly publishing. We can't share books in the cloud because publishers who depend on sales of items won't allow it. We've learned the hard way that electronic resources are not really cheaper for libraries than print ones, and there are layer within layers of copyright issues that would prevent sharing this way. Just look at the complexities of the Google Book settlement.

  Second, how can university presses survive? They are already dealing with a crisis in that a book that would have been bought by 2,000 libraries is now bought by 200 and shared via ILL. (It's legally easier to share a book until it falls apart, but we have limits on sharing articles.) It makes no sense to fund research, give it to publishers, then buy it back when we could realign things radically and make our research free to all by funding publication up front. This is harder than it looks.

  Scholars are partly to blame, too. Grad students are carefully schooled in how to advance their careers by publishing in the right places. They are much less often schooled in the ethos that research is for the public good and that they can make choices that support that concept.

  Libraries and some scholars have tried hard to make Open Access a real solution, but as long as scholars adhere to the current practice of giving their work away in exchange for prestige (and as long as tenure committees demand growing quantities of research publications that are often of no value to anyone other than a few like-minded scholars) libraries will continue to have less and less opportunity to provide information or preserve it. Not to mention hire staff or create better learning spaces for research.

• Posted by Michael , Academic Librarian on January 8, 2010 at 1:30pm EST

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  From a historical point of view, librarians are not the most important aspect of academic libraries—collections are. Libraries need staff, services, and space as well as staff, but it is the stuff that endures. Cloud computing may provide some services and solutions, but there are many unanswered questions about security and durability.

• Good questions for a library novice :-)
• Posted by Dr. Pepper , Academic-In-Training on January 8, 2010 at 3:00pm EST

• Before I started working in a Library I had some similar conceptions of digitizing and making all things electronic. Now that I've worked for a library for a while, I can say that I have a new appreciation for not going digital all the way. Many of the issues have been covered by others, but what it comes back to for me is "what is the mission of a library". If you look at an academic library's mission, if you look at the technology field, the copyright field, and all the other stakeholders in this process, going to the fully to a cloud based solution isn't viable right now for many reasons.
  What it boils down to is this awesome quote I heard on an Educause podcast this morning called the ebook conundrum (check it out here http://www.educause.edu/podcasts?redir ). One of the panelists said (and I am paraphrasing and expanding here) that we are expecting educational products (in the case of this blog post - academic research products) to be made by people who make entertainment products. There is a mismatch here. Entertainment has a whole different set of goals which drive pricing, availability, copyright and so on which are antithetical to the goals of an academic/research institution (in our case a library). Until this is solved, we won't be moving forward.

• Posted by Laura , Academic Librarian on January 8, 2010 at 4:15pm EST

• First, I wish to say thank you for your interest in learning more about what librarians consider and wrestle with when making decisions to best serve our users. I, and I'm sure many others reading this, really appreciate that you enjoy and respect libraries and the people who work in them. I've seen a couple of slightly contentious comments over the past couple of days, but I feel that if folks re-read your posts they would see that you have in no way implied that these are issues the library community hasn't considered. You have simply asked us to share the information, and I am pleased to see this conversation happening outside of our fairly insular library community.

  You've asked a lot of great questions that previous commenters have already addressed -- particularly regarding the instability of digital files, and the issue of owning versus leasing information and how that affects libraries' ability to serve as repositories in the long run. I wanted to address these comments:

  "I find it a better experience to browse for materials either on the Amazon or BN site... maybe the improvement in search/browse technologies such as we find at Amazon can offer an experience that is nearly as good without needing to have all these physical books on the shelves?"

  As many others have alluded, we're not at the point (yet?) where we can safely rely entirely on digital formats, or even assume that the majority of our users want to read books off of a screen. So, I don't agree with the notion of improving online searching experiences in order to drastically reduce the number of physical books available. However, I fervently agree that many search interfaces on commercial sites are much more user-friendly than many library catalogs, and that's something we should be striving for whether folks are searching for a digital item or the call number for a print item.

  The good news is that there are several library catalogs and search products that simulate the Amazon experience. In library world they're sometimes referred to as "next generation catalogs." One is called Endeca, and it's employed at several institutions, one of which is North Carolina State University: http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/catalog/. Another product is WorldCat Local, which is being used at a number of schools, too, including University of Washington: http://www.lib.washington.edu/.

  Both of these systems utilize "facets," which allow you to start with a simple search and then drill down by subject, format, location, etc. Some of these systems are quite expensive since they're fairly new, and in the case of Endeca, are designed for commercial companies that can purchase the product based on the assumption that it will make them more money in the long run. I hear some are fairly reasonable, though, and I have no doubt they will continue to grow in popularity. Hope this sheds a little bit of light on what might to come.

  Thanks again for asking these questions. Libraries really are complex places!

• Posted by Barbara Fister on January 8, 2010 at 6:45pm EST

• Just bumped into this interesting piece on "The Strange Case of Academic Libraries and E-Books that Nobody Reads" http://www.teleread.org/2010/01/07/the-strange-case-of-academic-libraries-and-e-books-nobody-reads/ This pretty much mirrors the experience at my library with NetLibrary books. Students are not interested in books they can't use except on screen. And if we get downloadable books, they'll be costly. (And 10 out of 10 students whom I've asked so far say they don't want to read books on their phones and don't see the point on spending money on a reading device that prevents them sharing books with others.) Whatever the solution turns out to be, I predict it will not be cheap....

• The cloud is where we're all headed anyway
• Posted by Karen G. Schneider on January 12, 2010 at 9:30am EST

• "What I'm wondering is why this archive needs to be physically housed in the main library space, or purchased by one academic library."

  It doesn't. Nor do we need to have a second, specially-groomed set of metadata specific to our institution. This is all academic onanism.

  As for eBooks, I can only go by our statistics. Our usage is now double that of print, and we do not even market the materials very well at this point. They may be awkward, reading on the screen is less than ideal, etc., and yet they are used. Remember Ranganathan? Books are for use.