Skip to content

Category: Libraries and Librarians

Licenses, e-Access… Are They Diminishing Information Distribution?

Published by Iris on Saturday, January 6th, 2007

Just before the new year, I was talking to one of the people on our copyright committee and he brought up a very interesting question. Is it possible that we will run into an information shortage as we move toward more and more e-access for everything from music to journal articles to books? Here is his reasoning.

First there’s the problem of disappearing fair use. E-access comes with license agreements which trump fair use, and it immediately flips the switch from copyright/fair use to DMCA, which radically reduces user rights. So what happens if a larger and larger portion of our collections are ebooks, ejournals, emusic, etc.? Will our faculty be able to employ these works in their instruction to the same extent? This is largely dependent on the licenses we sign, so as more and more of our collection is electronic we will have to be more and more careful what rights we sign away.

Secondly, what happens if the major, larger, richer libraries stop receiving print versions of books and journals and instead subscribe to e-access for those things? And what if their license agreements restrict those libraries’ abilities to lend via interlibrary loan? The smaller libraries that have benefited from interlibrary loan arrangements may not have access at all any more.

I’d never thought of this before. I love e-access to information, and it would be hard to serve our students without it (and we don’t even have a traditional distance education program, so I can’t imagine what a boon e-access is for those libraries). But I think we’ll have to be careful when balancing growing collections with static amounts of available space, or when we’re eager to give 24/7 access to patrons near and far. If we aren’t careful we may end up like stranded sailors dying of thirst in the middle of an ocean of water. We may end up having access to only our own subscription resources while wading through a flood of information flowing all around us, but denied to us.

It’s a thought to give me pause, and it reinforces that while libraries “aren’t just about books any more” we still need to be about books. It also reinforces that laws and license agreements need to change to the point that we can make use of e-versions of information in the same way that we can make use of analog versions.

2 Comments

Being a Library User

Published by Iris on Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007

Several people blogged recently about the irony of being a librarian but not liking to use their local public libraries. Meredith, Nicole, and Jennifer all point out that while we’ve been merrily complaining away about the state of the catalog, our physical holdings are still stuck within (often) less than ideal buildings and, just like in any business, it’s possible that the librarian on duty might be anything from wonderful to scary (though the optimist in me hopes that most librarians are at least helpful, if nothing else).

In my mind, it comes back to the basic foundation of all libraries. Libraries are not just repositories for books. They have to fill a function in their users’ lives, and this function varies from region to region, community to community, and person to person. For example, I have always been a library user. The first library I remember was our local public library in Dorchester, Massachusetts (not even remotely comparable to even a decent branch library, I’m sure, but what did my 5-year-old self know?). From then on, every time my family has moved one of the first things we’ve done is scope out the library. When I moved here, I knew and had used my public library long before I knew where the post office was, or city hall. None of the libraries I’ve frequented have been beautiful or perfectly laid out, and only one librarian stands out in my mind as being particularly wonderful. But then, only one librarian stands out as being particularly scary, so I guess it evens out.

But through it all, the libraries have served a basic function in my life. They have fed me the majority of information and entertainment in my life. (And since I was home schooled and relied heavily on the library to make that possible, I can say that last statement with confidence.) Even now, working as I do in a well-stocked academic library, I make at least one trip to my local public library every week to get movies, audio books, and even real paper books. These are not things that I could afford to buy if the library didn’t exist (or at least not in the quantities I consume them), nor could I justify shelling out that much cash for my daily entertainment or finding storage for it all once I’d finished with it even if I were rich beyond imagining.

But then, this is my life and my need. If I were less inclined to read fiction, listen to audio books in the car, or watch old movies and BBC sitcoms on the weekends, I’d be able to fill my needs at the library where I work, and then I’d never set foot in my public library because it is small and dark.

So, just to emphasize my favorite part of the arguments in the three blog posts above, it’s not about keeping up with the Joneses and it’s not about the looks. It’s about functioning in the lives of our users. And the lives of our users have changed in the past 25 or 50 years. Maybe some of what functioned before doesn’t any more, but then again maybe some of it still does. In our quest to serve our communities and yes, even compete with big box book stores, figuring out the difference between the good and the not so great habits we’ve developed, policies we’ve enacted, floor plans we’ve preferred, and services we’ve offered will be an ongoing but important struggle.

Not all that is old, small, or dark is bad. The trick is figuring out the difference. The challenge is acting on the difference to improve the roles we play in people’s lives.

2 Comments

Gould Goes Multi-Media

Published by Iris on Thursday, December 28th, 2006

At the very beginning of Fall term here at Carleton, two other librarians and I recorded our first podcast: an audio tour of the library. But then the term hit with such force that we didn’t have time to figure out the technicalities of putting it up on the library’s web site. Turns out, we had to get the college’s web team to turn on a media page type in our CMS and then everything worked great, but it takes a certain amount of futzing to figure out what we aren’t able to do and then ask to have that done. It only took the web team a matter of seconds to fix the problem, but what with one thing and another, it took us until this week to get things figured out.

You can go here to listen to a tour of our library (and follow along on the tour map found in the blue “Related Documents” box). I take you through the bottom two floors (First and Second), so for those of you dying to know what I sound like when I talk… have at it. I kind of hope that’s not what I sound like in real life, but I’m afraid it probably is.

We’ve also loaded our “Library Survival Guide” onto that page, as well as a video we made just before graduation last year. It’s a really big file, but there are some pretty funny bits.

2 Comments
eReserves: Blessing or Curse?

eReserves: Blessing or Curse?

Published by Iris on Tuesday, December 19th, 2006

Blessing. Definitely a blessing to our users and database vendors, but a blessing with a curse-ish aftertaste.

Everyone is familiar with the blessing part. Users get 24/7 access to their course readings, and database vendors get a more accurate picture of the amount of usage they’re getting for their license fees. (Without eReserves we’d have to print out a copy of an article and put it on paper reserve, where it would be read by a class of students, photocopied by most of them, etc. But there’d only be one hit on the vendor’s server.)

But on our campus eReserves is an easy target for all sorts of campus ills. For example, it’s common knowledge around campus that eReserves is the cause of our horrible printing problem, with reams and reams of paper filing through our printers every day. And I’m sure that classes that depend more and more on journal readings and less on text-book compilations do make for more use of eReserves and more printing. But what nobody seems to realize is that all the requests for electronic access to journals means that more and more of our journal collection is e-only. And even if we have electronic access and print access, guess which one will be used most often? And what do people do with journal articles they find online? They print them to mark up over lunch or a midnight snack.

Not only that, but there’s more and more good, authoritative, quality research available on the free web, and you can bet that students print these pages by the ream. This is especially true because printing is free on our campus, so everything from email to research to homework spills from the two printers in the reference area at the rate of 7.06 pages every minute the library is open. (The the two reference area printers account for more printing than every other printer on campus… combined.)

I’ve also seen more and more students lately who prefer to scan print journal articles slowly, page by page, and then convert the images into PDFs all so that they could print (for free) rather than photocopy (for a fee). In related news, the use of photocopiers in the library has dropped so much in recent years that our printing department is considering removing a few of the copiers from the library entirely.

So the upshot is that printing is a definite problem, but the answer isn’t as simple as, “Well, with the advent of eReserves printing went through the roof….” The information universe is changing, not just one section of it. All of it. eReserves, journal subscription, database licensing, online publishing, assignments and pedagogical approaches to information, everything.

Oh, and eReserves is also not a devious plot to keep professors from ordering text books or paying copyright fees or anything else like that. Moodle can do all that so much more easily. ;)

Technorati tags: , , , ,

2 Comments