Ithaka released “Faculty Survey 2009,” the “fourth in a series of surveys conducted over the past decade examined faculty attitudes and behaviors on key issues.” The findings are detailed in a three-part report, covering “Discovery and the Evolving Role of the Library,” “The Formation Transition for Scholarly Works,” and “Scholarly Communications.”
View the report: http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research/faculty-surveys-2000-2009/faculty-survey-2009
Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic & Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
For the past 29 years, academic librarians and academic publishers have gathered in Charleston, SC, in early November to discuss common “Issues in Book and Serials Acquisition.” In 1980, it was an informal group of 20 sharing problems and brainstorming solutions—now, the Charleston Conference hosts more than 1,000 attendees every year. This past November, while the hallways seemed less crowded than in 2007 (before the current economic decline had taken hold), plenary sessions were still filled to capacity and the program was overstuffed with interesting topics. Despite its growth, the conference maintains its reputation for collegial professionalism between publishers and academics—and still puts the emphasis on practical knowledge sharing over visionary set pieces.
One particularly well-conceived panel of interest to AAUP members was a session on the e-Duke Books project subtitled “What have we learned?” The session featured Michael McCullough, Sales Manager at Duke University Press; Lois Schultz, the Duke librarian handling cataloging and MARC record creation for the e-book collection; a Georgia State University librarian who acquired the collection; and a representative of collection vendor YBP. The session was a frank discussion from all sides of how an innovative e-book experiment was developed, and the real challenges they met.
Other AAUP members spoke at sessions on how the economy affects editorial programs and on advising librarians on best practices in publishing. Doug Armato, University of Minnesota Press Director, and Kevin Guthrie, Ithaka President, spoke at the annual “I Hear the Train A Comin’” plenary, focused on what’s around the bend in scholarly communications. Many of the plenary sessions were recorded and are being made available, after editing, at http://www.katina.info/conference/video.php.
The official 2009 Charleston tagline was “Necessity is the mother of invention,” but another, one-word theme seemed prevalent in many sessions and informal conversations: “usage.” In the journals world, usage statistics have long been an important component of pricing and licensing discussions. A detailed presentation on how the Institute of Physics develops journals digital pricing made clear how key the “cost-per-access” data point is (as did several tough questions from purchasing librarians in the audience). As monograph-length scholarship begins to ford the book-journal digital divide, usage statistics are going to have an increasing impact on value perceptions in the book world. Indeed, the GSU librarian mentioned that e-Duke Books’ offering of COUNTER-compliant usage data was a point in its favor.
There are “usage stats” in the print world, too, of course, though they are often more anecdotal and based on the only partial picture of circulation studies. Highly specialized monographs in small fields can be reasonably assumed to have low circulation (or usage). While it is reasonably argued that increased discoverability of e-books may increase even the most esoteric title’s usage, the expectations, standards, and patterns of usage will always be different for books and articles.
The most primal of a book’s “usage stats” is at the base of one of Charleston’s hot topics this year: patron-driven acquisitions. Under this model, books (in whatever media) are not purchased until requested by a library patron. The University of Denver shared details of their demand-driven acquisitions pilot project. Blackwell Book Services maintains the Denver library’s approval plan, and is paid for metadata and profiling work. While certain collections remain on an automatic approval basis (not waiting for a patron request), other books are simply exposed through library systems until a user requests the title. Books are sourced through whatever means will be the appropriate mix of fastest and cheapest, and patrons are given the choice of print and/or e-books when possible. Denver selectors continue to do their usual job of selecting library acquisitions up to the point of purchase. At the end of the pilot, selectors’ choices will be compared to user requests and general collection needs to see if this model will continue.
While the Denver librarians talked of this experiment, their hometown was host to another relevant conference, Educause. There, the overlapping ideas of e-books and library-catalog-as-storefront were implicated in Syracuse University librarian Suzanne Thorin’s bombshell statement that “the library, as a place, is dead.” The basic research tool of browsing the stacks may be taken out of the toolbox, with online search and discovery serving as a substitute (though not a replacement). Days later, Thorin faced an uprising of scholars on her own campus protesting the plans to move part of the Syracuse print collection to a storage facility more than 200 miles away. The bits and bytes and algorithms are thriving, but the stacks have life in them yet. Back in Charleston, publishers and librarians strive each year to bring some harmony to the resulting clamor of scholarly communications.
Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic and Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
Half a million. That is the number of additional records per year major book wholesalers Baker & Taylor and Ingram estimate they are processing in these days of digitization format proliferation: half a million records on top of the approximately 200,000 new books each year1. That is a lot of metadata, and it is more important than ever at every step of the book supply chain. Book metadata often needs to contain much more than title, author, ISBN, and price to make the leap from warehouse to reader—or database to device. Tables of contents, cover images, detailed subject headings, reading level, available formats, and reviews: all help consumers, retailers, and librarians discover and procure new (and old but relevant) books. The trick, for everyone in the book world, is creating and sharing accurate metadata for all of those millions of records.
The burgeoning challenge of book metadata was the subject of a recent symposium and white paper sponsored by OCLC Online Computer Library Center. In March 2009, they gathered experts and interested parties from the publishing, library, and standards worlds in Dublin, OH, to discuss common problems and potential solutions. Judy Luther was at that time completing research for the paper “Streamlining Book Metadata Workflow,” commissioned by OCLC and the National information Standards Organization (NISO).
While clearly an “interested party” rather than an expert, I was invited to speak to the group about the general experience of university presses dealing with metadata. Of course, in a community that ranges from presses publishing less than 20 to more than 2000 titles per year, and where the term “metadata” has not yet been fully adopted to describe bibliographic and marketing information, a general picture is not so easily taken. Before trotting off to Dublin, I spoke with several members, including Johns Hopkins University Press, a member with large book and journal publishing programs, and two presses who fall near the AAUP average: Cornell University Press, producing up to 140 new titles per year, and the University of Georgia Press, publisher of about 80 new titles per year. Not unexpectedly, the processes of metadata creation and management differed considerably. Johns Hopkins’ in-house database has an ONIX component and pushes data to both the press web site and trading partners (via either ONIX or spreadsheet). Both Cornell and Georgia were at the time researching ONIX solutions, including off-the-shelf software and service providers such as NetRead or Firebrand, and were providing data via spreadsheets or online interfaces to key sales channels.
Despite their differences, all three presses mentioned the same difficulty with providing ONIX. “The standard just isn’t standard enough,” I said to the OCLC audience. That choice of phrasing raised some eyebrows (and maybe a few hackles), but we cleared up the vocabulary. There are so many flavors of ONIX being requested from publishers—almost every channel has its own requirements as to which ONIX elements and tag variations are preferred (if they even accept ONIX). For example, while the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) recommends best practices, and will certify the quality of publishers’ ONIX feeds on 30 core elements, Barnes & Noble requires tailored compliance on half-again as many data elements to be classified as a top-grade ONIX supplier2.
But these retail-chain ONIX issues were only one small part of what was discussed in Dublin. The real crux of the symposium was the misalignment between the standards that have grown up separately in the library and publishing communities. MARC records (Machine Readable Cataloging) serve libraries’ needs from ordering to online catalogs. In many cases, librarians require at least basic MARC records in advance of purchase, and more and more expect MARC records to be provided with purchased titles (particularly with e-book collections). Even subject classification schemes differ between these two sides of our community. From the publishers’ end, BISAC codes are heavily weighted to trade books and were designed to help with store placement rather than broad consumer discoverability. Library of Congress (LC) subject headings are highly detailed, but provide much greater authority control.
Though these classifications and standards were designed to serve different needs, each side of the market has an even greater need for the metadata created on the other. The authority-controlled subject and author data from LC and MARC records can only help digital discovery and sales of publishers’ works. The book marketing information provided through ONIX to the retail supply chain is now just as important for library patrons, and in the growing adoption of purchase-on-request policies, library collections specialists. Crosswalks between MARC and ONIX for Books will be needed to combine this data into effective and sharable information flows. OCLC is particularly interested in that concept, and recently undertook a pilot project to experiment with ingesting publishers’ ONIX records, matching and enhancing the data with existing WorldCat records, and feeding back optimized metadata. That project has led to a new suite of metadata services for publishers. A second symposium, to move not just the conversation, but also the possible, forward, is planned for next year. Broadening representation, and easing metadata reuse and collaboration will be goals for the next meeting.
In the meantime, standards continue to change and evolve to serve the book communities’ needs. In April of 2009, ONIX for Books 3.0 was released, and is not backwards compatible with previous versions. The ISTC or International Standard Text Code, is being promulgated as “a global identification system for textual works”—that is, to identify a text rather than a product or format, as the ISBN is used. Progress is being made on the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) to help in the correct identification of authors, a task that is required not just for better discovery but also in royalties and rights systems (such as the proposed Book Rights Registry from the Google settlement). In July 2009, CrossRef announced it had registered 1.7 million DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) for book chapters and references. While the complexity of metadata standards is growing, so too are the support systems for producing and sharing accurate metadata. In the coming months, AAUP is planning to survey its membership about shared problems and needs in this area.
Resources:
OCLC Publisher and Librarian Symposium Reports
Metadata White Paper: Streamlining Book Metadata Workflow
BISG Product Metadata Information and Best Practices
ONIX
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Laments on the plight of the monograph abound of late, but Duke University Press is attempting to shake things up with its new program, the e-Duke Books Scholarly Collection. Modeled on the pricing structure of the e-Duke Journals Scholarly Collection, e-Duke Books offers online access to at least 100 new titles per year to subscribing libraries, in addition to access to many of the press’s backlist titles.
Michael McCullough, sales manager for the press, explained that director Steve Cohn “has been a driving force behind this for a number of years,” and had long been seeking to address “two separate but complementary problems,” that is, the decline in sales to academic libraries, and the challenge of finding the best way to make the press’s books available in digital form. As Cohn saw these two issues converging, he and his staff began to look into ways to address them, while “control[ling] our content as much as possible,” and without using multiple aggregators.
The e-Duke Books collection will include at least 100 new electronic books published by the press each year. The press typically publishes 115-120 new titles in a given year, and plans to include the great majority of these titles in the collection, excluding only “titles of regional or popular interest or titles to which Duke does not hold electronic rights.”
The press launched a pilot version of the program in 2008, with the participation of 19 US and Canadian libraries. Following a successful run with the pilot program, the press launched a full version in 2009. Collection prices are based on institutions’ 2005 Basic Carnegie Classifications, and range from $500 to $6,000 per year.
By ordering, libraries also receive access to the over 900 Duke University Press backlist books which are currently available in digital form. As the program continues, this backlist will grow in two ways. The 100+ new books that are included in the collection in a given year will become part of the backlist in subsequent years. Additionally, Duke expects to continue the work of digitizing older titles, further increasing the scope of their available backlist.
Offering such a large swath of its backlist as part of the collection required a substantial amount of digitization work. Some of the press’s titles had already been digitized through BiblioVault, funded by a grant which offered free or low-cost digitization services to university presses. That provided a head start for the press, although the remaining titles have required “fair amount of staff time” from the production department. The digitization efforts will also allow Duke to offer a single-title purchase model of e-books to libraries beginning this summer.
The press’s files are currently digitized as web-ready PDFs, with some of the conversion being handled by their partner, ebrary. The ebrary platform also allows full-text searching, and ensures that Duke’s content is cross-searchable with all ebrary content to which a library has access.
One particularly interesting aspect of Duke’s program is the option to purchase a $500 “print add-on option,” which will include cloth editions of all titles in the current year’s collection. Kimberly Steinle, Duke’s Library Relations Manager, indicated that this has been a very popular option among subscribers, with an uptake rate of more than 75%. She noted that the press wanted to ensure this was an optional add-on, rather than a requirement, as some smaller- to medium-sized libraries may not have the space for all of the books. Not requiring libraries to purchase the add-on also helps ensure that the electronic collection is as inexpensive as possible.
The option also fits well with the way the press envisions users accessing the titles. McCullough said he feels “students still don’t really want to read 40 pages at a time on screen,” and that he anticipates library patrons will more likely “discover the book online, and if they want to read more, we want to make that as easy as possible.” Having a cloth edition of the book available on the shelf facilitates this sort of fluidity.
Piracy issues have been a major concern for university presses of late, particularly with the advent of new e-publishing projects. While acknowledging that they are concerned with piracy in the same way as other university presses, McCullough explained that Duke feels the technology they are using successfully avoids any major risks. Ebrary’s printing and downloading restrictions were attributes that made the company a particularly attractive partner for Duke. With the ebrary technology, users are streaming the content, rather than downloading the material to their own computer. Additionally, ebrary limits the number of pages a user is able to print.
The e-Duke Books FAQ section has a comprehensive delineation of the various user policies of the site license, including interlibrary loan, course packs, electronic reserves, printing, and downloading. Steinle explained that these guidelines were developed in conjunction with ebrary, first looking at ebrary’s guidelines and then tailoring them to best meet the needs of the press’s content. Regarding the printing restrictions for example, she said, “our goal was to try to come as close as possible to how many pages would be in a [typical] chapter.”
Another risk for the press is how this sort of accessibility might affect course adoptions, such a mainstay of many university presses. McCullough said that this is an area in which time will tell how the subscription model affects these sales, but he again pointed to what he had spoken about earlier, that assumption most students still do not want to read book-length material online. Additionally, he pointed out that traditional library sales have not been in competition with paperback course adoptions.
As is the case with so many successful e-publishing initiatives, the press enlisted the help of the university library to provide subscribers to the program with enhanced MARC (MAchine-Readable Cataloging) records. McCullough explained that the press wanted to offer the highest level of metadata available, and thus enlisted the help of the catalogers from the Duke University Perkins/Bostock Library. With the MARC records, the cataloging happens on a chapter level – which results in a “real advantage” for both librarians and patrons. Attesting to the invaluable assistance of the library in this aspect of the project, he said, “we certainly could not be creating them [the MARC records] on our own.” Feedback from librarians was also valuable in making procedural changes to the pilot program, to best tailor the program and its offerings to the needs of libraries.
While hesitant to make any sweeping assessments at this early point in the program’s development, McCullough said the press is “very happy with the way it has gone so far.” He noted that the ability to work with colleagues who have managed the similar e-Duke Journals program has been a great help: “They’ve been through this process before.”
There are of course differences between the two programs, and unique challenges that the e-Duke Books staff is still tackling. While the majority of librarians and patrons are now accustomed to accessing journals electronically, McCullough feels that there is still some need to “sell them on the idea” of accessing books in the same manner. He also noted that librarians may be less likely to take a chance on unfamiliar models in “this challenging economic climate.”
McCullough thinks it is possible that other presses may adopt similar models in the near future, and anticipates that they will each vary them to reflect their press’s particular capacities and strengths. He pointed out that this type of model was particularly well suited to Duke’s publishing program. As their list is reasonably small, they were able to include all of their new titles, while maintaining a workable size for the press and a “cost that would not be prohibitive to libraries.” While some presses may choose to implement similar collections composed of titles in a particular subject area, the interdisciplinary nature of many of Duke’s books made this all-encompassing program a preferable option, as there was no need to fit books into neat categorizations. Duke’s well-known editorial profile as a publisher of interdisciplinary and innovative scholarship seems to have lent itself particularly well to this new model.
New Resource Center for Campus-Based Publishing Partnerships
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Libraries and university presses have always been inextricably bound up in each other’s success. While at its best this relationship can provide extensive benefits to the whole of scholarly communication, too often a lack of common understanding has led to conflicting interests. With the advent of digital publishing and the demand for new methods of scholarly communication, the need for the two institutions to share their strengths and resources is increasingly evident.
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition’s (SPARC) new Campus-Based Publishing Partnerships Resource Center is designed to help institutions meet that need. SPARC Senior Consultant Raym Crow explained that the idea for the guide and resource center came from “a meeting on library-press collaborations in June 2007, sponsored by the libraries and presses of the University of California and the University of Michigan.” Crow said that participants at the meeting, all actively involved in collaborative publishing initiatives, were “describ[ing] a common set of issues that they needed to address,” and it became clear that there was “a great deal of duplicative effort being expended as new partnerships wrestled with the same issues.”
It was this convergence of concerns that led Crow to create the “Guide to Critical Issues.” The guide is a five-part, comprehensive overview of what form these partnerships might take and practical considerations of how they might work.
Out of the guide grew the web resource center, which expands on issues covered therein, and keeps the information in the guide dynamic and relevant. Among the resources available are case studies, a bibliography, and LIBPRESS, an email list devoted to discussion of publishing partnerships. The resource is unique in that it gathered perspectives from librarians, press staff, and some who are straddling the divide (such as Monica McCormick, Program Officer for Digital Scholarly Publishing at New York University).
The guide and case studies are focused specifically on library-press collaborations, but the guide’s introduction indicates that “most of the discussion applies as well to other academic units that may participate in campus-based publishing partnerships.”
The accompanying resources have been compiled by the editorial board, which was formed after the completion of the guide to direct and support the web resource. Crow emphasized the collaborative and interactive nature of the resource center, explaining that it is “designed to grow based on user feedback and participation.” Presses are encouraged both to submit sample planning documents and resources, and to submit suggestions on topics that they feel should be added or expanded to make the resources practically useful. The direction and experience of the editorial board has been particularly valuable in developing these resources, says Crow: “These are people who know what’s relevant, what’s current, and what’s needed by participants on both the press and library sides of a partnership.”
Laura Cerruti, Director of Digital Content Development at the University of California Press, and Catherine Mitchell, Director of the California Digital Library’s e-Scholarship Publishing Program at the University of California, are both editorial board members who bring to the table their experience of collaboration on University of California Publishing Services (UCPubS). Mitchell described how the two organizations had been “unofficially collaborating in an episodic or opportunistic way,” and eventually came to the realization that they lacked “any kind of ongoing formal relationship that took into account the formal structure of the collaboration.” It was at this point that they decided to work with Crow, as they “decided one-off projects were not going to be sustainable in the long-run,” and establish a more formal collaboration that takes into account “sustainability and scalability.”
UCPubS combines the open access expertise of the library with the production, print-on-demand, marketing, and distribution strengths of the press to serve the wider University of California community. Cerruti commented that it was a “reality check” for both the press and the library when Crow helped them put numbers to things and be realistic about the financial picture for their projects. The hope is that more partnerships will benefit from this sort of practical approach, and undertake the “explicit planning” Crow advocates.
Cerruti said she sees the partnerships as particularly important for presses in that they allow them to “take steps forward towards some of the new business models that are out there – especially open access.” She believes presses know that open access is becoming increasingly important, but may not always be sure how to implement it. Both Cerruti and Mitchell agree that partnering with libraries, many of which are already working on open access, can facilitate a press’s move toward open access models.
On the flip side, as libraries are increasingly called upon by their universities to take on publishing roles, it is important for them to take advantage of the valuable experience and expertise of presses. Mitchell explained that these partnerships also benefit content providers who “feel strongly about open access, but also want to provide print publication,” emphasizing the importance of providing all of these options in a way that is not detrimental to a press’s business model.
Both Cerruti and Mitchell highlighted the fact that partnerships strengthen the case for university support of a press, as they demonstrate the institutional service provided. Cerruti pointed out that the practical nature of the guide makes it very easy for presses to make a case to their university about the relevance of university presses.
In terms of early feedback from presses and libraries, Crow noted that a survey of LIBPRESS participants indicated that the practical examples have been the most valuable. The editorial board now “intend[s] to increase the number of case studies, sample plans, and financial templates, as well as the networking support available through the site.”
Once the resource center is completely populated, Mitchell envisions it “enabling people to get a picture of the different models of what this kind of collaboration can be,” and that this will assist in getting partners to a point where “libraries and presses speak the same language, or at least a compatible language.” Crow hopes that the resources may encourage presses to “take the lead in creating publishing partnerships.”
Cerruti described the resource center as “one-stop shopping for resources and papers published every week,” facilitating easier access to curated content for users who may not have the time to devote on their own. Her hope is that the guide and resources will “reduce some of the duplicative experiments going on so that we can learn from each other.”
A more in-depth look at the guide and resource center is well worth it to anyone interested in campus-based publishing partnerships and their associated issues.
Those interested in joining LIBPRESS, the online discussion forum on issues of “collaborative digital publishing projects and models,” may do so here: http://listserv.ucop.edu/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A0=LIBPRESS-L.
Hear more about press collaborations at the AAUP Annual Meeting!
Friday, June 19: 1:45-3:00 pm
Plenary 2: Interpress Collaborations and Cross-Marketing Partnerships: Future Visions of Scholarly Communication (Panelists include Raym Crow and Laura Cerruti)
Saturday, June 20: 3:30-4:45
Library-Press Cooperation
(Moderator: Patrick Alexander, member of SPARC editorial board)
By Shaun Manning, Communications Coordinator, AAUP
While the opportunities and challenges of digital publishing remain hot button topics in the scholarly publishing community, the Romance Studies series from Penn State University Press represents a concrete example of how online and print-on-demand publishing can sustain projects that would otherwise not be possible. Originally titled Penn State Studies in Romance Literatures when it debuted in the early 1990s and discontinued early in the new century, the more broadly-based Romance Studies series allowed Penn State to continue publishing “first book” monographs in this field by taking advantage of new digital technologies.
“Penn State Romance Studies in large measure responded to the need to support an area of scholarship that was underserved, expanded its editorial focus to move beyond simply ‘literature’ to include film, theatre, translations, and other foreign language-related titles,” said Patrick H. Alexander, Co-Director of Penn State’s Office Digital Scholarly Publishing (ODSP), which oversees Romance Studies, and Associate Director/Editor-in-Chief of Penn State University Press. In addition to the four books currently available on the Romance Studies site, Penn State plans to release future titles at a rate of about three per year.
“This development coincided with the university’s press and libraries creating the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing (ODSP), under the leadership of Editor-in-Chief Peter Potter (now editor-in-chief at Cornell University Press) and Bonnie MacEwan (now dean of libraries at Auburn University),” Alexander explained. “Now co-directed by Michael J. Furlough, assistant dean of the libraries at Penn State, and myself, ODSP brings to bear the strengths of both library and press to experiment with making the volumes available–––at least initially–––both digitally and in a traditional, but ‘on-demand,’ print format.” He added that the press handles traditional publishing concerns, including peer review, copy editing, and design, while the library creates and hosts the online version using DPubS software, a platform originally developed for Cornell’s Project Euclid.
Given that the Romance Studies titles are available for sale in a print format as well as having significant portions available for free online, there was, at Penn State as with other presses exploring digital models, some concern as to whether the availability of these free chapters would ultimately hurt sales of the print volume. “Indeed there were concerns, and the jury’s still out,” Alexander said. “We wrestled with the conflict of interest between an Open Access online version and a printed edition. If the volume were available online, who would buy the print?” He added that the press’s partnership with the library alleviated many costs associated with digital publishing and distribution, but that print sales were still very important to offset the editorial, production, and other overhead costs of publishing.
“We weighed various options: no access, partial access, degraded print access, and full access,” Alexander said. ODSP’s solution was to offer all of books’ content available as chapter-by-chapter downloadable PDFs, but only around 50% of each book will be printable from these files. “It’s possible that some potential readers of Romance Studies titles will be happier to get a single chapter or do a short check online, rather than buy a book. But the online reading experience will not replicate the in-print experience, nor will printing out a whole book on the laser printer really replace the book.” He noted that the open access model presents an opportunity for greater dissemination of scholarship, but that questions remain as to how a majority of users will interact with the material in digital and print formats. For example, are the PDFs read on screen or printed out? What would each case indicate as to how Penn State should offer the Romance Studies books? Are users likely to print out an entire book, if all chapters were available, rather than simply purchasing a bound copy? “The problem is that we won’t be able to definitely prove these assumptions unless we can discover what motivates our readers’ behavior,” Alexander said.
Regardless of the challenges, though, the Romance Studies list from Penn State Press and the university’s Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing represents an important step for the press as it navigates the changing landscape of scholarly communication. “We recognize that standing still is not an option when the flow of knowledge and information and the demand of users for digital content are so great,” Alexander said. “ODSP has become a sort of Petrie dish that permits us to experiment in ways that as simply a ‘press’ we would not be able to do. In a noncompetitive environment, it allows the press to learn more about its own strengths and weaknesses and how to bring those to bear in fulfilling the university’s overall mission to disseminate knowledge and information.
“The Penn State Romance Studies series also represents a commitment to experimenting with ‘open access’ to book content that was emphasized as an imperative in AAUP’s Statement on Open Access drafted by our director, Sanford Thatcher, so as to help bridge the growing ‘digital divide’ between book and journal content in the OA world.”
Recommendations of the Section 108 Study Group
Peter Givler
Executive Director, Association of American University Presses
The full Report of the Section 108 Study Group has been released and is now available at http://www.section108.gov/. Introduced in 1976, Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act specifies what are known as “the library exemptions,” the conditions under and purposes for which qualifying libraries and archives can make copies of copyrighted works without infringing. These library exemptions were framed in terms of the analogue technologies of reproduction then common. Though there have been several modifications to the Section since then, none have addressed the new capabilities, and challenges, of digital technologies.
To address these issues, the National Digital Information Infrastructure Program (NDIIP) of the Library of Congress convened the Section 108 Study Group. I was a member of this Study Group, which met fifteen times between April 2005 and January 2008. The group’s charge was to recommend to the Librarian of Congress possible alterations to the law that would accommodate new technologies.
Seeking to ensure that the group’s recommendations would reflect the balance required by the national interest between the concerns of libraries and archives on the one hand and rights holders on the other, the nineteen members were drawn from a variety of institutions and enterprises: public, university, and national libraries and archives; museums; commercial and nonprofit publishers; the film, music, and television industries; and photography.
Our report represents a consensus reached among nineteen people with overlapping but never identical interests after nearly three years of discussion and debate. It specifies where we were able to agree and make recommendations, although sometimes those recommendations are made with the stipulation that agreement is contingent on certain underlying conditions being met, or problems resolved. It also specifies where we could not agree and were not able to make a recommendation, and why.
The report now goes to the Librarian of Congress, James Billington, and from him to the senior U.S. official concerned with copyright law and its administration, the Register of Copyrights, MaryBeth Peters. She will decide how to implement the recommendations and begin the process of translating them into law through an amendment to the Copyright Act. That process will require its own round of public comment, discussion, and debate.
Section 108 currently says that a library or archive that is open to the public or to qualified researchers, is making copies “without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage,” and affixes a notice that the copy is being made under the provisions of this section, can copy:
• an unpublished work for preservation or for deposit in another library,
• a published work to replace a damaged or stolen copy if an unused replacement copy can’t be acquired,
• a portion of a work for a user, including a user at another requesting library,
• and an entire work for a user, including users at other requesting libraries, if the library has determined that a copy can’t be obtained at a “fair price.”
Since the current Section 108 is one of the most confusingly organized and least transparent sections of the Copyright Act, the Study Group recommends that this section of the statute be reorganized using these more logical categories: eligibility, preservation and replacement, copies for users, and miscellaneous provisions. The Study Group’s recommendations are described below, but please note that these are abbreviated statements. For a full statement of the recommendations, please refer to the report itself.
Among the recommended revisions to 108 in the Eligibility category, the group suggested that:
• museums be granted the protections afforded to libraries and archives;
• functional requirements, such as a public service mission and trained library or archives staff, be used to determine the status of a “library” or “archive,” to help define qualifying institutions in an age when the Internet has blurred these definitions;
• and libraries and archives be allowed to outsource certain tasks permitted by Section 108, if the expertise or equipment required lies beyond the resources of libraries, archives, and their employees.
Recommended exceptions for Preservation and Replacement include permitting the creation of a limited number of copies of any at-risk materials, whether published or unpublished. The current exemption for unique unpublished works such as letters, diaries, manuscripts, and the like, for which the loss of the original is the loss of the work, is similar to today’s increasing number of “born digital” published works, which do not exhibit warning signs of deterioration before they become inaccessible and are technically at risk of loss from the moment they are acquired. The group recommends exceptions for the preservation of publicly disseminated works and of publicly disseminated online content. Rights holders would be able to opt-out of having their works preserved in this way. In addition, the group recommended “that criteria be established to determine eligibility for this exception,” and that these criteria would be based upon an institution’s technological suitability to carrying out the preservation and maintaining the integrity of the resulting digital files.
Section 108 permits libraries and archives to make single copies for users, both directly and through interlibrary loan, under certain conditions. Currently, delivery of electronic copies to users is permitted only within the library or archive’s physical premises. Amendments proposed under the Copies for Users Exceptions heading would address the question of whether to lift this restriction to permit the delivery of electronic copies to users off-premises. This was one of the most complicated and difficult questions the Study Group faced, due to the conflicting interests of libraries and archives to provide services to patrons via the internet as weighed against rights-holders’ concerns about the potential for unauthorized and unregulated distribution. The group recommend that “the single-copy restriction on copying … should be replaced with a flexible standard more appropriate to the nature of digital materials,” adding that digital copies must carry adequate protections against unauthorized use.
Section 108 permits libraries and archives to copy television news programs off the air and lend the copies to users, but at present there are no guidelines as to whether this exception permits them to provide access by means other than the lending of physical copies. The group recommended an amendment that would permit electronic distribution of view-only copies of television news programs, provided that a reasonable amount of time has passed since the original broadcast and that the material was not made available for download.
As has already been mentioned, the Study Group has recommended reorganizing Section 108’s provisions to make them more easily understood. Other recommendations for the Miscellaneous Issues category include an exception from liability for a patron’s use of reproducing equipment such as handheld scanners or cameras, providing that the library or archive posts a visible notice that such copies are subject to copyright law.
The group also discussed a variety of other issues. On some of them the group decided changes to the law might be necessary and came to certain conclusions, but made no recommendation. On others, the group was either unable to reach a consensus, or agreed that no legislative action was appropriate at this time.
It should certainly come as no surprise that the road to reconciling the interests of rights holders and libraries has its share of potholes and speedbumps, and even a few dead ends. What is much more important, I think, is that with patience and persistence the road does go through. It took us almost three years to get here, but in the end this group of nineteen people with very diverse interests did agree upon several significant enhancements to the library and archives privileges under Section 108.
The American Library Association has selected nearly five hundred university press titles for its annual catalog, The University Press Books Selected for Public and Secondary School Libraries. The books are rated according to audience, such as G for general reader, S for specialists, and RG or RS for Regional-General and Regional-Specialist. There is also a mark of O for outstanding titles. The catalog lists books in Dewey Decimal order to aid librarians in locating titles they may like to order.
Twenty-five of these books were highlighted at a “Best of the Best” presentation at ALA’s annual conference in Anaheim, CA, on June 29. This program was broadcast live on C-Span’s BookTV.
For more information, including a complete list of selected titles, visit http://aaupnet.org/librarybooks/
By Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic & Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
Long lauded for bringing librarian and publisher partners together to work through common “Issues in Book and Serials Acquisition,” as the subtitle goes, the Charleston Conference has grown in its 27 years from an intimate group of 24 colleagues to a sprawling gathering of more than 1000. Librarians, publishers, and vendors crowded the historic city of Charleston, South Carolina, making their ways to more than 140 sessions in 5 locations. Session topics ranged from presentations of case studies of approval plans to conceptual discussions of “structured serendipity” in content management and everything in between.
E-books were a hot topic at the 2007 conference. It seems as though the matter of e-books is finally coming to a boil; which sales models work for libraries and publishers, how patrons use e-books, and how expanding e-book collections affect print book acquisition are now all matters that can be discussed from experience. Andrew Albanese, reporting for Library Journal Academic Newswire, wrote an interesting summary of this side of Charleston: http://www.libraryjournal.com/info/CA6501604.html?nid=2673#news4
While e-books are now plainly a technology of today, a fascinating look at tomorrow came up in sessions about the problems of authority in online and networked scholarly communications. Michael Jensen’s concept of “Authority 3.0” , how the measure of scholarly authority may be computed in the future, was at the base of sessions titled “Authoritative? What’s That? And Who Says?” and “Who Shall Review the Reviewer?” In the former, Laura Cohen, Web Support Librarian at the University at Albany, and Leigh Dodds, Chief Technology Officer for Ingenta, took a close look at how traditional processes of peer review and new forms of user-generated content and approval might be adapted to each other. (See http://del.icio.us/ldodds/charleston-2007-11 for background reading to Dodds’ talk, and http://www.slideshare.net/lcohen/the-promise-of-authority-in-social-scholarship/ for Cohen’s presentation slides.)
Dodds was joined by Geoffrey Bilder, Director of Strategic Initiatives at CrossRef, for the latter session, where they proposed several ideas for laying the foundations of an “Authority 3.0” version of scholarly communications. Bilder labeled one such idea an “author DOI.” Like the DOI (digital object identifiers) that can permanently track a chunk of content (be it book, article, chapter, graph, etc.), a similar author ID would trace an individual scholar across all of his or her work—be it as a primary author of a text, a peer reviewer, or an authoritative commenter. Dodds presented the concept of an overlay “kitemark” to track “Versions of Record” in a world where digital pre-print, post-print, revised, copied, and re-published versions abound. The kitemark (named for the UK’s British Standards Institution certification schemes for indicating quality and adherence to standards) could contain metadata ranging from what type of peer review an article underwent, to whether any citations in the article have been retracted or revised. (For more information of the Author ID project, see http://www.crossref.org/CrossTech/2007/02/crossref_author_id_meeting.html.)
A striking aspect of the Charleston Conference was the relatively small number of university press representatives attending and presenting. While university presses, particularly those with journals programs, were a noticeable and successful presence at the pre-conference vendors showcase, the majority of presenting (and thus conversation-defining) publishers came from the commercial sector. There is plainly room for more active non-profit and university press participation—issues that the AAUP community deals with on a daily basis are of central interest to the many other librarian and vendor attendees.
While the Charleston Conference may be losing its identity as an intimate gathering of colleagues, it remains one of the best magnets for knowledgeable people who care about working through the problems facing scholarly communications. The 2008 Conference will be held November 5-8, so there is plenty of time for the AAUP community to plan to attend and even get involved. Despite Charleston’s growth, the conference directors maintain an open welcome for suggestions for session topics and panelists. Go to http://www.katina.info/conference/ for more information about contacting the conference organizers and complete 2007 program details
Executive Order 13233, which includes provisions to allow former and current U.S. presidents to withhold federal records from the public and extends certain executive privileges to the vice president, continues to face challenges in the courts and in Congress. On October 1, a federal judge struck down the section of the order that allows a former president to indefinitely delay the release of his records. The Bush administration has decided not to appeal.
Legislation (H.R. 1255) to overturn Executive Order 13233 overwhelmingly passed the House by a vote of 333-93 in March. Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) had placed a hold on bringing the bill to the Senate floor in September, but relented without comment in mid-December. However, now an unnamed senator has placed a new hold on advancing the bill. President Bush has vowed to veto the bill if it comes to his desk.
More information on the federal court’s decision is available at the National Coalition for History’s web site here, with the follow-up regarding Sen. Bunning’s dropping his objections here.