Op Ed — Sic Parvis Magna: Let’s Leave the Docks

By Daniel L. Huang (Resource Acquisitions Manager, Lehigh University, Class of 2007) <dlh4@lehigh.edu>

Way back in the day (note to self: stop reminding self about age) at a Charleston event I remember being struck by the UNC Charlotte’s Three Principles of Ebook Acquisition. Those guiding principles reflect in my mind what was an era of humble beginnings in librarianship where we completed part of the transition from print to widely accepted and utilized electronic resources. But is it a false victory where the Macedonian wept (we can agree to disagree why Alexander did so)? Are we out of horizons to explore?

My goal today is to challenge our profession to accept a new set of goals for librarianship in electronic books:

1. eBooks ought to utilize their digital nature to communicate information that would otherwise be restricted by the print format and facilitate different methods of learning, including facilitating coordination, collaboration, and communication of ideas.

2. Librarians should advocate for university level changes to Tenure & Promotion policies that validate the importance of OER, OA, and other such initiatives.

3. Monograph budgets should be reallocated to support these initiatives; in concert with a drawdown of standard eBook expenditures facilitated by patron-friendly and trust-enabled borrow/buy systems.

We pretend we are Francis Drake, yet the current landscape can and does restrict the user’s exploration. Furthermore, if we continue on the same trajectory, the very method by which we create and select books doom us to irrelevance as if we were aboard the Golden Hind and thousands of smaller ships left us in their wake.

eBooks by their very digital nature should communicate information that would otherwise be restricted by the print format. A print book cannot have a rotating three-dimensional model of a molecule yet the silent question asked by our clientele is “if you can do it on the rest of the Internet, why can’t you do it on a library eBook?” I want to call attention to the PKP, Fulcrum, and Pressbooks platforms in a previous issue of Against the Grain as examples of potential systems that can add innovative content to eBooks that leverage the digital format.

How can it be that Facebook, Xanga, TikTok, Reddit, Gaia Online, or others foster such immense user participation and cross-examination of the issues at hand? In The Stalemate I stated “In our futuristic era where supercomputers exist in our pockets… why does academia conceive of eBooks as a pure facsimile of the printed word?” The lack of interactive capability potentially hampers both scholar to scholar interaction or interaction with the general public.

If an undergraduate student could argue the finer points of “My Hero Academia” (a popular TV show) or why Sirius is the best black cat name on Reddit or Gaia Online but cannot discuss academic-level questions with other scholars on an academic platform, there is no interactive online environment where our eBooks live. Libraries need to create scholarly communication methods where any scholar (inclusive of student, professor, scientist, and general reader) can reliably create an eBook and also facilitate debate and discussion.

The outcome of that debate and discussion ought to generate changes and clarifications to an eBook. Such a system should facilitate “on the fly” commenting as scholarship changes because scholarship ought to be dynamic and continually evolving. These changes are already crystallized in the traditional concept of a book “edition.”

But why limit ourselves to the notion of a book as a completed work or a set of updates and editions? What I am proposing is that libraries should create a communication framework around existing eBooks that is openly accessible by the general public. Perhaps the actual eBook itself is behind a paywall but the discussion about the book ought to be freely accessible. Here’s some ideas on how that might work:

1. A user punches in an ISBN into this collaboration software platform and is taken to an online space where they can either write down their own thoughts about the book or read other users’ thoughts.

2. The book’s author(s) should be empowered to highlight worthwhile discussions in that online space.

3. Librarians should assist in the moderation and maintenance of this online space.

4. Students at their own individual universities should not have to reinvent the wheel. Discussion posts or useful ideas about a book that are currently locked behind their home institution’s online course systems could in theory be instead posted here.

5. Therefore there also ought to be some provision for students to self-identify that they are taking part in this online space for the purposes of their coursework.

6. This platform should be inclusive of readers outside of university systems. It is often said that the general public misunderstands what scholars write: let people post their questions.

7. If the original author wants to post a newsletterstyle brief to address those questions, this platform should facilitate identifying the book’s author and that this is a response to the discussion.

8. Lastly, the platform should be open access and be funded by memberships from library acquisition budgets. This should not be the bailiwick of a publisher or other for-profit organization (by all means they should help invest in the platform).

And who knows? My cynical side says that if there’s enough interesting arguments about a book, someone is eventually going to want to read what the fuss is all about. Internet dramatics and (even deliberately) bad- posting in theory should lead to increased readership. Well, if the eBook is behind a paywall, a publisher could put a purchasing API there for the academic librarians if someone hits a “buy this for me” button. Hint hint.

Our perspective as librarians on faculty often says that the professor is the one who wields the power on our campuses. Yet we know that some (but not all) faculty are exploited, including underrepresented groups, as part of the university system. In order for them to achieve tenure track positions, these professors are required to publish or perish with prestigious publishers. And even if they do, in order to gain promotions and salary increases according to tenure and promotion (T&P) rules, they must still publish with those same publishers.

If there is no career track advantage for faculty to publish in an open access format, there is little motivation to do so other than pure charitable or intellectual impulse (and many faculty do indeed do so). Also, consider that some faculty never achieve consistent (or any) levels of publication necessary to achieve tenure. There is an opportunity for open access publishing to accelerate its acceptance if the T&P rules included an allowance for OA publishing to “count towards” T&P. And T&P often includes these three factors (and I comment briefly on how OA could apply to these factors):

• Service (noteworthy contributions to the university and their respective professions; such as advancing the landscape through freedom of access to information)

• Teaching (the pedagogical role of the professor; which could include creating and distributing OA eBooks and other learning materials)

• Research (self-explanatory; but in a T&P assessment, a publication in a prestigious book “counts more” than an OA book, even after tenure is achieved)

This is not to say that librarians should be waving placards and pitchforks in front of the Provost’s office. Faculty are the core of a university’s mission: let faculty advocate for faculty. For example, let the faculty decide what to themselves is a good OA versus a bad OA. Another example is that deans and the faculty should debate among themselves (if they even find it appropriate) whether or not a good curricular model is facilitating OA creation as a course requirement and graduate students help with the text and quiz creation process.

However, we ought to prepare ourselves for the POTENTIAL that faculty could approach us for these very crucial conversations. This can include having pre-positioned OA engagement assets, prepared and updated environmental scans of the OA publishing landscape, continuing education and understanding of OA technologies and their potential, and so forth. Gain awareness of the importance and sometimes restrictive nature of T&P. Let them know that when the librarians are needed, we are allies for equity not only in access to information but also access to the technological tools for publishing to students and faculty of all ranks and statuses.

Monograph budgets should be reallocated to support these OA initiatives; in concert with a drawdown of standard eBook expenditures facilitated by patron-friendly and trust-enabled borrow/buy systems. As it stands right now, quite a few of our institutions have L’Embarras des richesses: too many eBooks that never get used and then requests we never anticipated and then the book does not make it to its reader and many print books are still requested via ILL.

Our profession makes a great fuss about who ought to read what and which collection suits what students, but, as far as I can see, this is much ado about nothing since everyone will read what is needed whether we like it or not (hopefully legally). The presumption that the patron is an antagonist with Augustus Gloop traits is unhelpful when we ought to have built our patron a golden ticket where every patron gets what they need and not a dollar more. A good example of this is the Project ReShare CDL project and its structural basis for expansion to other forms of rapid monograph acquisition, whether digital or physical, with the capability to route from interlibrary borrowing to buying and vice versa.

Equity presumes we trust that all patrons are capable of using a “borrow or buy” interface and we should presume that the logic behind those systems are sound. The major point here is why publishers have not fallen over themselves to monetize this stream of patron behavior: work with the librarian and go straight to the patron in an intelligent fashion that leverages both borrowing and buying budgets. With the cost savings and (partial) automation of collection development (now partially in the hands of the patron), what is a librarian to do with all this spare time (as if running a complex borrow and buy system is something done in an afternoon)?

When you have eliminated the possible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth: librarianship will become focused on the equitable creation of books and all the other maintenance and housekeeping we already do to books in a library on top of facilitating all the raucous online debates in yet to be seen collaboration platforms. The faculty will get on this on their own (such as the Bookdown.org platform) with or without us.

My modest proposal is that the publishers themselves need to partially rearrange their business model from a competitive model to a partnership model. Instead of constant competition of selling collections (in a technological sense, not the publication date), a reputable group such as a “Cambridge University Press” could set up the platforms of the OA world and conduct the vetting and support of the process. The cost model would be a not-minor fee with regards to the hosting and technical support and all sorts of add-on costs such as the training and onboarding of faculty onto these platforms.

A “Cambridge University Press” would then focus on selling the current crop of eBooks that directly support and are relevant to the eBooks being created in this OA process. To dream even bigger, I am certain that courseware (which costs money) and homework and quiz creation for these OA resources is something that could be outsourced to a publisher to be created centrally (hey another upcharge!). Do graduate students and postdocs write the followup material? Who trains them to write it?

I refuse to accept in any way that our profession has figuratively circumnavigated the world. We have perfected a very small narrow slice of our world but are still at humble beginnings. And greatness can come from small things: our steadfast commitment to a more equitable eBook world where everyone can access both the books AND the debate around the books. A world where the eBooks themselves transcend the surly bonds of the print facsimile.

How do we do this? We ought to form a collaborative organization that assists in funding the spread of this technology and its life cycle. A crack team of librarians who want to make brilliant debates happen on the Internet. A team of advocates who can make OA “worth it” to professors. And of course acquisitions persons and publishers all working collaboratively to sell electronic content in a more intelligent way. So let’s leave the docks!