http://www.molecular-cancer.com/content/5/1/58/

I will restrain myself from pointing out the deftness with which the author presents the topic, the lyrical quality of the prose, etc…

— from Caveat Lector

As techie types, it’s sometimes easy to get wrapped up in selecting a system, tweaking the plumbing, optimizing queries until tomorrow, etc. Meanwhile, our users (like folks looking for their Great-Uncle’s obituary) just want to get to the data. As I’ve argued earlier, we are going to need to do more and more for ourselves instead of waiting for library vendors to solve all our problems for us. A big part of this approach is using, whenever possible, lightweight, existing tools instead of reinventing the wheel each time.

So it’s in this spirit that I haven’t worried too much about the notion of circulating digitial audio files. However, a couple of days ago, NPR’s Morning Edition had a piece about digital music players that contained one very interesting fact:

The Consumer Electronics Association, the industry’s main trade group, says sales of digital-music players tripled last year, with the value of shipments of digital-music players totaling $3.7 billion versus just $1.2 billion for traditional home stereos.

I think this indicates that a tipping point has been reached. Indeed, I’m starting to think that if you’ve already got a circulating CD collection, there’s certainly no philosophical reason you shouldn’t be offering an mp3 collection as well, because that’s where your patrons are starting to move to.

But of course philosophy is one thing, physical reality another. The current reality of digital music is that there are a host of concerns. Dealing with copyright is one — what does it mean to “lend” a digital file when the first sale doctrine doesn’t apply? Not to mention that the Digital Rights Management tools that “protect” most digital files frequently make it impossible for many of our patrons to use them at all.

However, just because it’s not yet clear how best to provide digital files to our patrons doesn’t mean we can put our heads in the sand until it’s all sorted out. The time to start planning for these new services is now.

Like many Open Access critics, Frank quotes worst-case numbers for the potential costs of an OA model — numbers that have been cast into doubt other places. In addition, he seems to have a special animus towards the National Institutes of Health’s new Public Access policy. He hints darkly:

The ready availability of content on PubMed Central could lead to subscription cancellations and accelerate the transition to an author-pays publishing model, the economic implications of which are not adequately evaluated by Willinsky.

While such concerns may be understandable, experience with the arXiv e-print repository suggests that conventional publishing and freely available content can indeed co-exist. At any rate, subscription cancellations are already a seemingly permanent part of the library landscape. Spiraling costs have pushed the current system of scholarly communication towards the brink of unsustainability.

Frank’s final point bears close examination, particularly since this is exactly where the strongest argument for Open Access resides:

At a time of shrinking budgets for biomedical research, does it make sense to spend scarce dollars on publication costs instead of on research to develop treatments and cures for disease?

To which one could just as easily reply, “Does it make sense to spend scarce dollars on research, only to consign the results to a place where they might never be seen by the people that could build upon them?”

Anecdotal evidence suggests that our faculty are becoming much like our undergraduates: if they can’t open the full-text directly from a citation, they often don’t bother with an article. Leveraging limited resources and ensuring the widest possible use of research is precisely why Open Access is not just a librarian’s issue, but one of critical importance to scholarship as a whole.

It’s too bad that more librarians can’t spend the kind of time with some of the senior people at Elsevier that I was able to this week. It’s tough to demonize people when you’ve had food and drink with them and have talked passionately about what you believe to be the social importance of what you’re doing. And make no mistake — the people I talked with do believe passionately in the role they play in the whole knowledge creation chain. They believe they are doing good things. I was very impressed with their openness, their eagerness to listen to what I had to say, and their very thoughtful questions and discussion.

I’m sure that’s true to a great extent, and there’s certainly no point in demonizing people who, after all, are just trying to make a honest living.

But the fundamental economic structure of the situation does not change, regardless of whether we think these folks are on the side of good or evil. Elsevier’s primary responsibility is not to researchers, not to librarians, but to its investors. These investors are now used to (and rather like) seeing 30% margins from STM publishing. It’s difficult to see how any management team, whatever its good intentions, would act to disturb those margins. If they did, they would arguably be in breach of their fiscal duties.

But until that 30% margin does change, Libraries are always going to be in a terrible bind insofar as they try to actually pay for the journals their users demand. And that, more than misunderstanding or ill will, is what makes a true partnership between libraries and for-profit publishers hard to imagine.

Modern science is growing ever more data-intensive — a researcher using a DNA microarray is often looking at expression changes for hundreds of genes at once. Getting the data is the easier part of the equation: testing it, normalizing it and figuring out what it all means in the context of the literature is the fun bit.

So where do libraries fit in all this? It’s interesting to note that one of the main areas of caBIG research involves the question of vocabularies and ontologies, an area where we can claim some expertise. The University of Illinois School of Library and Information Science is now offering a Concentration in Bioinformatics. Closer to home, the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School recently reorganized, placing bioinformatics at the forefront of its efforts.

I realize that a lot of this falls outside of our comfort zone. After all, our focus has always been more on the dissemination of digested knowledge than that of raw data. But if our fundamental job is to to support the efforts of our researchers (and I mean the term in its broadest sense, from report-writing fifth graders to high-energy physicists), then this is a area we need to explore.

Most librarians don’t know much about programming, and this lack has contributed to an online user experience that is a lot less interactive and useful than it should be.

And I think in many ways this is right on target.

Of course, a lot of the blame rests on the systems that we have to work with. Most ILSs have no API at all, much less a good one. Some of the online resources we lease access to come with Z39.50/SRW/something else interfaces, but even professional metasearch developers are often forced to use screen-scraping to get what they need.

Many vendors mean well, and there is certainly a chance that given enough time (and enough market pressure from the people who sign the invoices), things will begin to change for the better.

In the meantime, we have to work with what we have right now. Opportunities exist to use the data that we do have access to, and a lot more could be done to leverage our existing investments in web technologies.

So what to do?

One solution would be for libraries to hire staff who already code. Really large libraries have often hired non-MLS IT support people to pull the ethernet cables and tend the servers, and they often have room for programmer/developers as well. There might be some opportunity to go after the women who are being driven out of comp sci departments. And certainly there’s anecdotal evidence of IT folks who tire of patching broken code or reinstalling printer drivers and seek a second career in librarianship. But I don’t think that this adds up to enough people. Given the realities of the market (librarian salaries aren’t the same as programmer salaries), I don’t think it ever will.

So we have to grow our own.

“But I’m not a programmer!” So? I’m not saying that we all need to start writing Linux device drivers from scratch. You don’t even have to call it programming. That’s just a word that scares people, especially the sort of humanities-oriented, mildly math-phobic people (like me) who end up going to library school.

A lot of the work that needs to be done is really less about hard core programming than it is tweaking, modifying and generally (to use Dorothea Salo’s great phrase) “beating on things with rocks until they work”. Again, there’s a lot we can do with relatively little effort, but we have to start doing it. All those shiny new Library 2.0 tools aren’t going to build themselves.

Trying to take the time to really learn a programming language would be fantastic. But there’s also a lot to be said for installing Perl or PHP on an extra machine, firing up a text editor, and seeing if you can get the little bugger to say “Hello World!”

<plug>
If you’re in the New England neighborhood, you might think about taking a NELINET class or two to jump-start the process. I’m teaching one called “Exploding Your OPAC” that deals with a lot of these issues.
</plug>

Why? Because faculty don’t feel the pinch. When they want e-access to an article, it’s usually there, and if it isn’t, they can comfortably attribute its absence to those darn libraries, when are they going to digitize everything already? (Never mind that we mostly aren’t in the article-digitization business. Faculty don’t know that.) Faculty don’t see the firewalls. They don’t realize how easy it is for a database provider to yank access. And all this wonderful e-access has happened with zero additional effort or expense from faculty; journals, database providers, and libraries have Just Done It. So why should faculty bother investigating the supply-chain?

Oh why, oh why is the scholarly publishing market so very broken? And must it always remain so? It’s possible that if publishers really do make the lives of faculty miserable enough, then those same faculty will well and truly wake up this time. But our hopes have been dashed before… (sniffle)