While I was at the CNI 2007 Spring Task Force, I was interviewed by Gerry Bayne of Educause.

The premise was:

The collective expertise of digital libraries in making available the diverse literatures of science and artistic expression, in concert with the increasing sophistication of commercial partners and the development of distributed, interactive forms of publishing, require libraries to chart the engineering of new architectures for teaching, learning, and research. Digital Libraries must work to forge the new collaborations required to enable and build these services. Peter Brantley talks about the digital library landscape and the challenges that lie ahead.

Here's the podcast (about 19 minutes long):

Interview with Peter Brantley

At the DLF Spring Forum in Pasadena in late April 2007, I had a panel of three distinguished librarians debate one of the central issues that has arisen since the Google Book Search Library Partners program was established.

Google has tremendous intellectual capacity. Is it worthwhile for libraries to compete with their services? Or is it better to partner in their definition? Do we need to know how to do these things "just in case" for our own purposes should Google default on their provision? If that is the case, how can we build effective collaborative ventures as an alternative? Would these ventures permit the exploration of new vertical functionalities more speciific and valuable for the academy, not provided by Google?

I am honored by the participation of John Wilkin, from the University of Michigan; Mike Keller, of Stanford University; and Rick Luce, from Emory University. Their talks are below, as podcasts. They are distinct voices, and their chorus is well worth a listen.

The University of Michigan, John Wilkin. [podcast: 11'20]

Stanford University, Mike Keller. [podcast: 13'48] [slides: pdf]

Emory University , Rick Luce. [podcast: 7'44]

April 27, 2007

I asked Ben Vershbow, of the Institute for the Future of the Book and the if:book blog to come by the DLF Spring Forum to give a short talk on the work that his group has been doing in working through new models of the book, particularly in terms of construction and community participation.

Ben blogged about this invitation, and solicited comments on it.

His slides from the talk (26.8 MB) and the accompanying podcast [17'12].

I really enjoyed having Ben there, and I think a number of really interesting collaborations will come out of it.

(My apologies on the low sound volume of the podcast; I'll do better next time.)

Here is the podcast [17'34] and presentation [pdf] of my keynote at DLF.

It is an attempt to pull out some major themes for future direction in digital libraries.

One of the dialogues that resulted was with my colleague, Dale Flecker, who asked, paraphrasing, "Were you being extreme to better make the point, or because these are views that you hold?" We wound up having a slightly rambling conversation as a result (yes, over wine), in which Dale argued that the core function of libraries was to curate and collect content, and not to generate tools and services that would help consume that content: rather, that was the purview of the scholars and students working with the content. The value of libraries, as Dale represented, is the collection of the Old (even if old is not that old) and material at risk of being unwanted. It is the depth and breadth of the collection, in otherwords, that makes a great library, in both digital and analog.

I didn't disagree about the value of collections. In contrast to this argument, however, I do feel that the tools and services - up to a certain point - are what are vital for libraries in the future. I do not think it is the place of libraries to build applications that directly permit the sciences' domain consumption of content, but I do believe that libraries should develop services that allow our content riches to be discovered, manipulated, and recombined. I think, in otherwords, that we need to go up the stack, beyond the content, a bit more than we have in the past.

My analogy here is thus: when libraries were only and all about collecting books, they still had to build acquisition, circulation, and other systems to support the use of the books. Similarly, as we begin - and we must - engage ourselves in the curation and production of content in video formats, for devices that are mobile - we must build the tools and services which permit their use. And those are going to be vastly different types of engagements than we have had in the past.

[Footnote: In the presentation, I discuss shepherding (or quarantining) savings from necessary analyses of library staffing and workflow. I did not mean to imply that these savings should be hoarded; rather, I intended to suggest that they should be aggregated to enable collaborative action among libraries to achieve applications of scale that would not otherwise be possible. In other words, they would serve as a leveraging balance to spring forwards into a new way of forging services.]

I am at the DLF Spring forum , and I will be uploading some podcasts shortly, including my keynote, a presentation by Ben Vershbow of if:book, and a panel discussion among Stanford, Michigan, and Emory Univ. representatives on the responsibilities of libraries for applications and preservation involving Google Book Search for Libraries content. 

Stay tuned!

This last week, I gave a talk at the Coalition for Networked Information meeting.  I've uploaded the CNI presentation here.

This is a speculative talk, not as specific as an endorsed direction, musing about the desirability of creating an entirely new type of organization for libraries to represent current and future interests.  

I am grateful for the comments and feedback of (among several others) Rick Luce (Emory Univ.), Kevin Guthrie (JSTOR, Ithaka), Dale Flecker (Harvard Univ.), Katherine Kott (Aquifer Project), Linda Frueh (Internet Archive), and Gretchen Wagner (ARTStor).  

After the talk, Dale gave me the most poignant comment, "Why isn't what you are describing OCLC?"  (This comment may make more sense after a perusal of the slides).  I agreed, this could be OCLC, and arguably, it was historically OCLC.  And OCLC is doing some incredibly innovative and exciting work for their membership.  

I believe the best rejoinder is that OCLC is working within a bibliographic systems universe and they may not be as able as an entirely new organization to address cyber-infrastructure demands and visions.  I admit as several commentators pointed out that achieving cohesion over a specific development plan - defining and choosing an application - may range from difficult to insurmountable - what is the role of the library in this space, if any? 

As Dale concluded, if we are eventually able to isolate a desiderata, then we might think of this effort as choosing to replicate the success that OCLC achieved in a new forum.  

As always, comments welcome.  I am about to get lost in conceptual weeds, so I halt.   

This last week, I had the pleasure of doing a podcast with Jay Datema of Library Journal and Bookism, and Jessamyn West of Librarian.net (details to be announced soon).

Of course anytime I am asked about anything for more than 10 mins, I tend toward pontification on various points, and through the richness of dialogue, new thoughts emerge.

As we talked amongst ourselves about digital books and the problems of unequal access, it seemed to me that librarians and publishers should be talking about the same kind of initiative for digital books that many STM journal publishers have embraced for access to articles in the Third World. In a few years time, when most non-fiction works are born and maintained digital, and when the texts are far more portable and granular than they are now, we need to develop and take advantage of the new opportunities for access that digital provides.

Providing free or heavily subsidized access to digital texts in the Third World provides huge advantages: first and foremost to our global society. Lessening stratification is an imperative that should be addressed with urgency through all means at our disposal. Second, from a more commercial perspective, a large chunk of the world is very much a growth market for knowledge, reading, and books. Providing access now grows potential demand for the long term.

Book publishers might worry about loss of sales, pirate sites, and so forth. I think there are several rejoinders to this, the first being that journal publishers have evidently managed to figure this out satisfactorily. Perhaps Elsevier can provide some assistance to text publishers, if they have qualms. There is also the potential argument that there is more to lose - a whole book, vs. an article. Here again, I think there are fallacies: I think many people are interested in only parts of books, not whole ones, and access could be provided granularly. Further, there are ways of policing downloads and pirate sites to prevent loss of copyrighted material.

While this is not a simple or straightforward path, now is the best time for us to start thinking about these issues, at the time when so many of us in the industry are beginning to build digital repositories.

Today I had occasion to recall a passage in a book that I have always very much appreciated, Complex Organizations, by Chick Perrow, a sociologist from Yale University. Somewhere in the middle of the book, Chick pens a beautiful, stirring passage which raises the inquiry of what we, as a society, seek from our institutions – what should we value, and what should we consider just - from the organizations we build, sustain, and all too often have to endure.

For that passage particularly, and the book as a whole, I went looking for a copy of the book in Powell's. I was shocked to discover that the paperback version of the book would cost me at least $58.00. For a 30-year old, 320 page paperback with minimal illustrations (as I recall) and no photographs.

In my outrage, I queried a friend of mine who is well known in the publishing industry, and asked him how on earth it was possible that a publisher might think it acceptable to charge that amount of money for a work read largely by graduate students in sociology and students of organization in business schools. I took the high moral ground, considering the pricing nearly usurious. After a series of exchanges, my friend was able to convince me that it was unfair to judge the publishing industry on the basis of moral values distinct from other industry or commerce.

The remembrance that what I had sought from the book was primarily a single passage perhaps helped bring forth a slow fork in our correspondence to a broader and more speculative vein. With the permission of my colleague, I reproduce the later stage of our correspondence below, with a modest smoothing of the ruffled feathers of serendipitous correspondence, as we turned away from pricing and economics, and toward the future of publishing.

Peter:

Usury is an economic term, not just a moral. But economics generally, as a social science, is not devoid of morality, nor should it be. "Commerce" might be, but that is a different argument. And I think that if publishers want to claim any kind of special status in commerce as conveyors of ideas, then they are explicitly entering the domain of value, with implicit obligations to ensure, in my mind, that the pricing of those ideas is at a reasonable and responsible level.

Friend:

What "special status" in commerce did you think publishers have?

The fact is, most of them can't make their quarterly numbers. They either have a budget for charity and good works or they don't. But when they make pricing decisions, the only extent to which they take cognizance of "fairness" or avoid gouging is the degree to which they perceive a real market backlash. And they will NEVER perceive a market backlash on a 30-year-old low-demand book.

If I organized society myself, I might do this differently. But it wouldn't make the first 10 pages on my list. As it stands, I don't think publishers are much different in this regard than anybody else. Whatever nobility is in the work is inherent to the work, not the way it is practiced.

Peter:

OK, I will get off my value-of-ideas high horse then, and treat books as simple commodities, like so many bales of hay, from now on. I had always accorded them special status, I suppose, in commerce, but I guess that is rather foolish.

Friend:

In what "commercial" sense did you do that? I mean really, except for “Special 4th Class Book Rate,” what subsidy or support does book publishing get from ANYbody?

Peter:

Actually, in the light of market-realism, with my Google- Publisher- Academic tricorne hat on, this makes me somewhat less embracing of the Google-empowered vision of the "network of books" which is itself partially a romantic, academic notion that might actually be a distinctly net minus for publishers. Potentially great for academics and readers, but potentially deadly for publishers. As opposed to the simple first order advantage of having the books discoverable in the first place – but the extent to which books are mined, fragmented, and then inter-connected - that is an interesting and very difficult challenge for publishers.

Am I missing something...?

Friend:

If you mean, are book publishers as we know them doomed? Then the answer is "probably yes." But it isn't Google's connecting everything together that's doing it. If people still want books, all this promotion of discovery will obviously help. But if they want nuggets of information, it won't. Obviously, a big part of the market that book publishers have owned for 200 years want the nuggets, not a narrative. They're going, going, gone. The skills of a "publisher" -- developing content and connecting it to markets -- will have to be applied in different ways.

Peter:

I agree that it is not the mechanical act of interconnection that is to blame but the demand side preference for nuggests of texts. And the demand is probably extremely high, I agree.

The challenge you describe for publishers - analogous in its own way to that for libraries - is so fundamentally huge as to mystify the mind. In my own library domain, I find it hard to imagine profoundly differently enough to capture a glimpse of this future. We tinker with fabrics and dyes and stitches but have not yet imagined a whole new manner of clothing.

Friend:

Well, the aggregation and then parceling out of printed information has evolved since Gutenberg and is now quite sophisticated. Every aspect of how it is organized is pretty much entirely an anachronism. There's a lot of inertia to preserve current forms: most people aren't of a frame of mind to start assembling their own reading material and the tools aren't really there for it anyway.

Peter:

They will be there. Arguably, when you look at things like RSS and Yahoo Pipes and things like that - it's getting closer to what people need.

And really, it is not always about assembling pieces from many different places. I might just want the pieces, not the assemblage. That’s the big difference, it seems to me. That's what breaks the current picture.

Friend:

Yes, but those who DO want an assemblage will be able to create their own. And the other thing I think we're pointed at, but haven’t arrived at yet, is the ability of any people to simply collect by themselves whatever they like best in all available media. You like the Civil War? Well, by 2020, you'll have battle reenactments in virtual reality along with an unlimited number of bios of every character tied to the movies etc. etc. etc. I see a big intellectual change; a balkanization of society along lines of interest. A continuation of the breakdown of the 3-television network (CBS, NBC, ABC) social consensus.

Peter:

I do not know that I would describe it as a balkanization of society because people will fracture along different paths across many different vectors. I might work on advanced mathematical ontology derivatives but also be an avid student of the Normandy invasion or Guadalcanal (to continue to the military theme); my daughter might be interested in tempura and my wife in flamenco. All communities of interest, and all available to me in multi-media collage. I think that is great.

There are personal and cognitive challenges to how I spend my free time, and professional time, but they are enriching choices. The diversity of information resources may in fact solidify social understanding because information and opinion flows more readily and openly, unimpeded by monopolistic mediation. I suspect mediation and curation will be available, albeit with more options than is presently the case. I do not expect an empty tintinnabulation, devoid of value.

There are market and economic challenges in how we reshape the industries which produce, market, and evaluate content, and the topology of the firms that will evolve into this space is something that I cannot imagine yet.

Friend:

Absolutely mediation and curation will be available and absolutely with more options than now. And less power. And I think we're a less unified and homogenized society than we were 1950-1970 when we had three networks and a high commonality of entertainment exposure. I am not saying better or worse. I think 25 years from now there will be fewer common denominators amongst us, and more people will be in the position I'm in now, with almost total ignorance of topics of widespread interest (like American Idol, which I have never seen but probably a third or more of the people in the country have.)

Peter:

Less homogenized and unified in one-way, more in another. Think about the millions that TV was never able to reach in the 50s or 60s as a result of extreme poverty; think about the horrendous divides in our society. What does homogenization mean? In the city that I grew up in, San Antonio, it meant one world for people on the north side, another world for people in the south and west, and another for the folks on the east side; all these people of different color, culture, and nationality; with too much to say and too little shared understanding to speak beyond what they saw on Lawrence Welk.

Friend:

Actually, I think TV reached most of those millions, even in poverty ...

And obviously, the divides have always existed and, in a huge and multi-faceted society like ours, always will.

Walking by an astronomy lab on my floor on Evans Hall at Berkeley and overhearing a fragment of conversation -

"Well that generally works, except when we observe our galaxy we have to proceed differently."

Nothing like the jolt of a different perspective.