E-Resource licensing and negotiations

Summary of and reactions to "Licensing Electronic Resources and Contract Negotiation" by Ryan O. Weir, chapter four of "Managing Electronic Resources: A LITA Guide" edited by Ryan O. Weir.

Things to remember when acquiring electronic resources

Summary of and reactions to "Acquiring Electronic Resources" by Denise Pan, chapter three of "Managing Electronic Resources: A LITA Guide" edited by Ryan O. Weir.

Reader survey results and responses

Just read Reader survey results by Joseph Esposito (via a Scholarly Kitchen entry).

This is the summary of the results of a reader survey conducted by the author and Joe Wikert.  These are my own professional librarian take-aways:

1. So there are plenty of readers directly purchasing books from the publisher?  Perhaps, as libraries, with our role firmly between the publisher and our readers, we could facilitate those transactions.  I WANT my patrons to get the information/entertainment they want and it doesn't have to always be through something actually IN our collection.  If a student wants to buy the book, I'd like to help her get the right one.  Maybe we could even convince the publisher/provider to give them a discount since the library helped out.
2. It's suggested that while readers tend to like to purchase books online, they still like to browse in print.  Great!  The library is still purchasing plenty of print, so perhaps we should be showcasing it more/better?  More displays and sprinkled liberally around our buildings, not just at the front door.  Public library tend to do it better than academic, but we could all do it more.  Of course it has to be controlled better:  searching readers need to be able to find it, not just browsing readers.  We could also make our stacks a little more browser-friendly with labels, maps, signs, etc.
3. It's mixed as to what format is more popular:  print or electronic.  There are still big numbers on both sides and plenty of overlap.  This suggests that our collection development policy of collecting either or both as appropriate seems right on the money.  I'd like to have more firm data on what "appropriate" really is but lacking that, subject expertise like we tend to have in academic libraries will do.  Not much for libraries to really improve on.
4. Finally, the author seems to bemoan the decreasing value of certain traditional sources of book reviews and opinion information.  I'm not so sure.  This kind of information has always been useful and desired but limited to the "experts".  But reviews are more important as the provider is deemed more similar to the reader.  A doctor may say a certain book is great but a librarian saying the same thing will be more influential to me.  Therefore, the more open collections of reviews are, the more likely I'll find someone that has an opinion about the book I think I may want and who is "like me" enough for me to be moved by their opinion.  Also, the more opinion info there is out there, the more options the library has for obtaining this data and adding it to the collection to help OUR readers.  We're doing this more and more, but we have to keep going.

Anything I missed?

Ethics of Vendors Having Direct Communications with Patrons

I was sitting in a meeting with a sales rep from a library information resource vendor when he mentioned that his sales visits were quite different in the past.  He would spend all day on campus, talking with faculty, handing out brochures, giving demos of his products, etc.  He went on to say how he could help us with promoting his products within our institution, with premade emails with links, graphics, brochures, etc.

This made me think:  academic libraries, and particularly mine, I think, have a hard time "getting the word" out about the products that we add to our collection.  It always difficult to know which resources to promote and how exactly to do so.  We want them to know and appreciate the value of the collection but we don't want to overstep our bounds and become pushy sales staff in the minds of our faculty and students.  Even if we knew which and how, it's a question of time and staffing:  there are so many things that we all have to do, promotion tends to get put to the bottom.

But it's always in the best interest of the company that we acquired the products from that our patrons use them more.  We collection statistics and how and how often these resources are used and these numbers tend to inform our decisions on whether to renew, cancel or change our subscriptions, and even if we should get more products from the same vendor.  Why don't we allow vendors to provide training to our patrons?  Why don't we want vendors to communicate with faculty, pushing new and old products?  Why don't we let them take some of the work of letting our patrons know what we have and what we could have?

Some of the answers are obvious:  vendors are biased.  Librarians like to think that we're a little more objective when it comes to the various products that are available.  Allowing vendors to promote directly to the users would be the difference between deciding on a car by reading Consumer Reports or by watching car commercials.  Yes, the producers may know more about their products but they don't always say it all.  They will always fib a little.  But is this such a bad thing?  We all know salespeople lie, so maybe the value of the increased information would outweigh the hopefully slight misrepresentations.

Also, vendors want to sell new products.  This is fine and good when they are talking with the people who have control of the money that will be spent on them and are experienced in managing similar products.  But librarians find that when faculty know about new products, however they find out about them, they tend to pester us with requests for products that we can't afford, can't use, or are not going to be valuable to anyone else.  This wastes our time and harms our relationship with our patrons.  But again, maybe this shouldn't be the end of the discussion.  Perhaps by having to deal with these issues, faculty and other users on campus can learn more about the nature of acquisition of these resources, that immediately perceived use isn't the end of the analysis, and that things are much more complicated in the library than they may think.  And maybe "waste of time" is the price we pay to have a more involved faculty.

Finally, I think one of the reasons we don't let vendors train users directly is a bit of fear for our own jobs.  If a ProQuest-paid instructor can teach how to use ABI/INFORM Complete, what's left for the info lit librarian to do?  Well, actually I think we SHOULDN'T be teaching how to use interfaces, but rather general search strategies regardless of interface, judging quality of sources, etc.  Just as staff are short when it comes to promotion efforts, many libraries don't have enough instructors to teach all the students frequently enough. Why not let the vendors lighten the load where they can?  There is plenty of instruction to go around.

Perhaps there are other reasons why we should or should not allow vendors direct communicative access to our users.  What do you think?

Happy Open Access Week!

From "Open Access Week Preview," Information Today, October 15, 2012

Organizations around the world are gearing up to celebrate Open Access Week, officially held Oct. 22–28, 2012. For most institutions, Open Access Week is a way to increase the visibility of open access among scientists, researchers, librarians, university faculty members, and students. At the same time, it also provides opportunities for open access practitioners to exchange knowledge and share ideas. Open access means free, unrestricted access to and reuse rights for scholarly research, either through publication in open access journals or by posting copies of the peer-reviewed version of articles into open access repositories. This year’s theme for the week is Set the Default to Open Access, intending to make open access the norm in journal publishing rather than the exception. An increasing number of libraries, publishers, research funding agencies, NGOs, and other organizations are hosting workshops, speeches, and other types of events; launching advocacy campaigns; kicking off new initiatives; and participating in ongoing shows of support.

It should go without saying that I am in support of Open Access (OA) efforts.  There is one aspect of how OA is currently being spoken of that bothers me however.  It seems like most of the conversation about OA in my experience, at least in terms of viability and sustainability is how it will be paid for, and although I don't know the actual breakdown, it seems like most full or partial OA journals are funded by author (or author-related institution) paid fees.  IMHO, this is neither effective (leading to some unsavoury publishing efforts or putting up a barrier to new authors) nor necessary.  Just like much of academia, the funds required to get things done are paid indirectly:  people volunteering time, expertise or resources, or institutional support.

Enough of my complaining though...  Happy Open Access Week!  Spread the word and support OA yourself!

Canadian publishers want two paychecks

I would like to get a complete list of the publishers represented by Access Copyright.

It seems to me that, from my perspective as a collection development librarian, the take-away from the fact that there are so many publishers voluntarily working with Access Copyright (over 600) is that they want to get revenue every way they can.  This is only natural and I can hardly blame for-profit companies (or even non-profit society publishers and university presses who need to justify their existence to administration or membership) from trying to get an extra buck.  But on the other hand, they can't blame us for wanting to both pay less and to pay in a more straightforward way.  Getting paid directly for use via with often complex license agreements and then getting paid again for something that could have easily been negotiated through those original license agreements seems a little underhanded, particularly because the second payment has not typically come out of the library's budget (but certainly has an impact on it eventually).  This not only is like "double dipping" but undermines the library's reputation with university administration since it suggests that we are not capable of managing all resource use and cannot be trusted with copyright issues.

My recommendation is that we merely take this into consideration.  For those publishers that are affiliates of Access Copyright and therefore bring in revenue that way, such a relationship should be considered a negative when evaluating their resources.  Reputation and cooperation are considered and this is just an aspect of both.  It should not be an over-riding variable since there are plenty of other things to take into consideration but it must be a variable.

We can but we don't want to

Just read an old article about the publishing industry's problem with posting copyrighted text online from 2006 in which quotes Allan Adler, vice president for legal and governmental affairs for the Association of American Publishers as saying that "[Publishers] can't compete with free."  Oh really?

This is the exact opposite of the very argument publishers are currently using to argue that Open Access (OA) can never truly replace the traditional scholarly publishing process since it fails to sustainably provide all the competitive benefits that publishers have been providing for centuries, not to mention all the digital services available now.  If the publishing model that we are using now, i.e. anything in the industry except for OA, provides so much unique value (such as their contributions in editing, managing peer review, filtering, etc.) then how can you argue, at the same time, that a few professors posting longer-than-typical excepts online for free on functionless web pages are substantial competition?

I'm not arguing that we should all have the right to post whatever we want, however much we want.  It's just that the publishers' argument in this case is a little silly.  They don't need to make an argument for why it shouldn't be allowed.  The law already doesn't allow it.  And we all know why the law is there.  (Of course the issue involves the quantity allowed through US fair use which is a little vague but still, the point is that there IS a line that should not be crossed though it may be difficult to find the line.)

What's the big deal with the "Big Deal"?

Right now, in the Canadian academic library world (and beyond to some degree as well), there's an ongoing discussion regarding the value of the Big Deal.  What's the Big Deal?  It's basically bulk purchasing of electronic journals from a specific vendor which saves time, money (per title at least), and workload processing these resources.  The concern is whether this deal is actually such a deal in the end and when does it stop being so.

My opinion about this is that the problem rests not with the vendor or the deal but with both budget stagnation in academic libraries and with our failure to truly evaluate value on resources like ejournal packages.  The former issue seems primarily a problem with the thought on the part of university administration, government agencies and the public that, because "everything is online now", why should we be paying more for information?  We should be paying less, right?  That's not true obviously.  The latter issue comes from the complexity of assigning value to these resources individually by journal title say, or even moreso, as a huge package of thousands or tens of thousands of titles.  There are too many variables (list price, usage, differing usage style by subject discipline, non-transparency of past and future pricing, variable industry pricing, institution size, etc.) to be able to put it all together into one figure that can then be compared to the value figure for other resources/packages or even to be used to signal when (and why) to cancel, acquire, renew or resubscribe later on.

New life for MySpace?

From "Internet: How to make a small fortune in Web 2.0":

The Wall Street Journal has reported that MySpace has been unloaded to an internet advertising company for a mindboggling USD35 million in cash plus some unspecified number of shares (WSJ speculates it's less than 5%)..

As its social networking functions were taken over by Facebook, twitter and Linked-In, and dozens of clones of each variant, MySpace refocussed itself as an adjunct to the entertainments side of the Murdoch empire. This is, after all, a company which is one of a handful that dominates the global entertainment industry.

I'm quietly rooting for MySpace.  Although I don't really use my profile there, I like the idea that there is no big, obvious winner in any race.  It's good to have competition.  I like the idea that there could be one primary method to streamline our social identities for efficiency's sake, but there's always the "all your eggs in one basket" issue of there being only one for-profit company that does the streamlining.  And competition eggs on (Get it, "eggs"?) progress.  Not that I really see where the new MySpace is competing.  The article says YouTube but I don't see much connection except tangentially.  But whatever it is, it's still crawling along.  Go, MySpace!  You can do it!

Bubble 2.0, that's ok

Just read Here Comes Bubble 2.0, Which Is Just What The Economy Needs, another article about the second bubble since the Dot com bubble. But unlike most that I've read, this is relatively positive about the affair. It will stimulate the economy, if only in the U.S. Silicon Valley at first, but that should spread. And it won't be a bad when it pops. Hopefully the value it brings will last.

I'm not an expert in economics or business so I'm never sure what these "bubbles" are exactly beyond economic upswings. I guess large systems like economics are often seen as coming in cycles, even if the cycles aren't exactly cyclical, symmetrical, or predictable. But it interests me to see the acceptance of purely technological, and some would say frivolous, endeavours in the economy and in society in such a large scale. It suggests to me, perhaps obviously, that we are truly becoming an information-based society, at least in part. But how will this manifest itself? Will we learn to use information and the tools that we use to manage information better? More wisely? More effectively? Or will we simply play more games and transfer a lot of the stupid mindless things that we do over to the new techno-platform? I'm not saying games and whatnot are useless. I just wish that there was some sign that the general public was getting the idea that reading, learning, preserving, thinking, and creativity are all even more important in an information-filled world than ever before. Stop being sucked in by nicely packaged lies, stop jumping to conclusions because it's easier, and stop dismissing the exact things that are supposed to be helping us: schools, libraries, research, etc.

[ Inspired by Here Comes Bubble 2.0, Which Is Just What The Economy Needs from Forbes ]

The serials crisis is over, and other fairy tales

From "Not Looking for Sympathy", an interview With Derk Haank, CEO, Springer Science+Business Media, by Richard Poynder:

"...the serials crisis, which [Derk Haank] says was resolved in the 1990s, after publishers introduced the Big Deal. Librarians will surely disagree. Haank responds by pointing out that the number of papers published each year continues to grow at 6% to 7%. Consequently, he says prices must inevitably rise a little each year. And he is confident the research community will eventually agree, since "scientists have to have sufficient funding to keep abreast of new developments." As such, he says the current difficulties are cyclical, not structural. He adds that librarians' current fad for publicly berating publishers overpricing is simply a canny negotiating strategy intended to put pressure on publishers. While this makes life more difficult, he says he is not looking for sympathy. Here then is our conversation, which has been edited for style."

Problems:

1. As supply increases, price typically falls.  This is a pretty standard economic concept, but perhaps the economics of scholarly communication works in a completely different way.  It would have been great to have a little more exploration of this idea instead of it just being presented as obvious fact.
2. The "papers published" number is controlled by the publishers.  They are not at the mercy of this number.  So even if the increase in supply requires an increase in price, it is still artificial since the publishers do not have to publish more just because there are more submissions.
3. Scientists (or academics, researches, professionals) need to keep abreast of new developments.  But they are not able to take in 6-7% more content each year.  They have a limit.  And at some point in a mature academic's life, it certainly decreases each year.  Perhaps publishers need to do a better job of "culling the herd", of reducing the numbers of publications, to keep only the best work, to help academics be able to focus on what they need.
4. Librarians are not typically canny negotiators.  We have too much work to do, dealing with crappy budgets, changing technologies, and needy patrons.  lol  But honestly, "negotiating" with vendors is not as subtle as this suggests.  And besides, reading through the entire interview, this seems to be his response to anything that librarians (and others) state:  it's just a negotiating ploy.  Translation:  we're liars just trying to get a lower price.

When I first started reading this, I was hoping to get an entertaining and informative view of the issue from the other side (especially considering the glowing introduction in the article) but there was not that much information and, I suppose, the charm didn't translate into text.  Perhaps I did get a view from the other side but it appears to have been the biased, profit-oriented side that cynical librarians tend to see the publishers on.

But perhaps I'm a little biased myself...  I'm not NOT involved in all this.  What do you think?

Librarianship needs to solve the information overload crisis

Watched "No Time to Think" and Dr. Levy, the presenter, describes a series of crises and resolutions in the recent past:

1. The rise in business and size of organizations threatened with lack of management mechanisms, ergo the creation of the corporation and office management technologies.
2. The increase in production with the declining demand for products threatened over-production, but then led to the development of modern advertising and marketing practices.

He points out the current "information overload" and "lack of time to think" crisis that we are in and sees the Web and online technologies as at least part of the solution.  And of course, I think about how librarianship needs to be a part of that solution as well.

We, as librarians, need to consider how to help our patrons with these problems.  Sure, we provide access to the information and assist people in finding exactly what they need/want. We even work at helping in the management of that information.  But I don't think we're doing exactly what needs to be done to resolve the problem, particularly in the eye of our users (or those non-users that influence our funding).  We need to LOOK like we're helping.  We need to make our users FEEL like we are lifting a weight off their shoulders and make it obvious to non-users that that's what we're doing.

Here are some suggestions (inspired by the presentation's points):

1. Raise awareness:  Librarians are in a somewhat unique position to be authoritative on this topic.  Think about the issue yourself, and tell others about it.
2. Provide the space:  Honestly, I thought about this before Dr. Levy mentioned it, but libraries have typically been a place for this contemplative study time.  We need to promote it and nurture it.
3. Provide the tools:  We provide access to information tools to manage and access resources.  We need to do this more intentionally and widen the scope of these tools.

Anything else?

[ Discovered this video through Lifehacker's "David Levy on Having No Time to Think" ]

"2.0" from May 15, 2011

Mentions of 2.0 in the news from Sunday, May 15, 2011:

Decision 2.0 (from RUMOR: KEVIN DURANT WANTS THE DECISION 2.0?): I don't know much about basketball but as the article says, this "decision 2.0" is about his future, his career, his contract(s). Not sure what 2.0 has to do with it. Is it the second decision, the first being to sign the contract in the first place? Or is it the publicity of the decision? Dunno. Any ideas?

NeGP 2.0 (from Mobile governance and NeGP 2.0): NeGP stands for national e-governance plan, which is actually a division of the dept of information technology in India. 2.0 seems to refer to the "citizen engagement" in the projects in this "plan".

Snake Oil 2.0 (from Snake Oil 2.0): This is an article about social media experts and how it's all a scam. 2.0 is being used as synonymous with Web 2.0, although Andy, the author (and not a good one at that), uses the phrase "Social Media 2.0" which seems redundant to me. Perhaps I've missed a meeting.

Wait... Is Dilbert a documentary?

Given all the companies and institutions that have an online presence, the length of time we've all had to trial-and-error our way through attempt after attempt, and the extensive research and study into how people scan text, process information and solve problems, it actually is kinda surprising how many bad interfaces there are out there. Perhaps it's all intentional, just as the Pointy-Haired Boss prophesied!