For three years, I have been serving in a reference librarian capacity in various academic settings, both small and large. During this time, I have seen numerous examples of licensed material, both e-book and article database, causing patrons no end of problems. The problems stem from user restrictions, difficult to understand interfaces, and in general, the expectation of the patron not meeting the reality of the source. So, when I read Professor Kristen Eschenfelder's articles "Every library's nightmare? Digital rights management, use restrictions, and licensed scholarly digital resources" and "Social construction of authorized users in the digital age" (co-written with Xiahua Zhu), I recognized many of the problems these articles discuss. Eschenfelder and Zhu hit problems facing patrons today right on the nose, and it was wonderful to see them treated with such seriousness, in an academic fashion.
When I talk about "frustrations" I am mainly thinking of two different problems. The first ones result from what Eschenfelder calls "soft restrictions", technological limitations on use imposed by a licensed source that can be worked around but make performing certain tasks annoying. Examples would be only allowing a patron to print an article through clicking on a special, quite hidden, button or disabling right click and ctr+c copying. These are things, either by choice or bad design (probably a combination of the two in my opinion) that make the user jump through hoops to perform functions allowed in the license. They are very common, in my experience, and, as Eschenfelder rightly points out, a problem that many librarians, including me, feel powerless to solve.
The other type of frustrations come from who counts as an authorized user and the authorization methods used to control access. Zhu and Eschenfelder explain (and this was totally new to me!) that what is now an authorized user has gone through a great deal of change, as publishers and librarians have fought and forced language change through the introduction of negotiating licenses, a practice that didn't start until the 1990s. Problems began when, due to resources transitioning towards being electronic, the public could no longer just come in and use material off the shelf. Publishers used this to fact to restrict who could access their materials, and charge more for more access. When electronic resources were first introduced, libraries first put them only on certain password protected computers for which the librarians gave out the correct information. Then, as technology changed, and people could connect to the libraries resource remotely, campus IDs connected to a main campus IP address became the primary way to determine who was an authorized user of the material or not. As such, walks ins today have to follow by these rules, limiting their use to a few special library computers or being forced to ask the librarians for special guest passwords. Even with all of the password protection and other efforts made by librarians to limit use, some publishers still are not satisfied with campus passwords, and make users register specifically for their products. This whole process has left the public disenfranchised.
I recognized my patron's experiences reading about these problems, especially the walk-in public patrons I serve. It is not just an academic thought experiment to say these issues listed above might cause frustration. In the past few weeks, I have had a extremely confused professor approach me about a science database she was trying to use. She wanted to access the full text of an article from a citation, and I know for a fact we had this journal full text through this particular database. However, the database kept on informing her that she had to create an account to access any full text. She had almost bought the article from another source in desperation, because she truly believed she did not have access. What was actually going on was an example of a particular database not trusting the campus password system and making every member create their own (free) account. If this is confusing faculty, who actually care enough to approach the reference desk, think about how many students must either accidentally pay OR just leave the database and never get to use a source that they should have access to.
And it is not just extra passwords. Students, using JSTOR, believe themselves technically incompetent and come to the desk frustrated and mad at themselves for not being able to print more than a page at a time (JSTOR requires one to go into a separate page to print). Nursing students using the database Up to Date try and copy and paste, and find they cannot right click. They come up to me, in a bad mood, feeling defeated by their inability to perform what they consider a standard function. When I show them they have to use the edit function, they ask "why is it like that?" My general answer is "the database is stupid, its not you". But I cannot provide them with a good reason. Viewers of e-books in NetLibrary, unable to view more than one page at a time, say that it is not worth their time, and move onto articles or actual books. Some will even request the physical copy through ILL, adding up to a week onto their research process, due their anger at not being able to scan a chapter. These soft restrictions are causing serious technological frustrations. It makes the resources we have not be as friendly, causes users to doubt themselves and the library resources and in general is trouble. The only good thing about them is that they increase reference questions.
At the small library where I work, the public is allowed access, but only on eight computers. This causes many members of the public to not be able to get on the computers when all eight are taken up, which causes them to get quite cranky. At the large college where I also worked, public users had to get a special password from the librarians. This did not phase many, but quite a few clearly were shy about this, embarrassed they had to ask. Two even yelled at me for limiting access in this way. I tried to be as calm about it as I could, and help those embarrassed. But I felt wrong that they had to be signaled out this way, their past rights to be able to come in, anonymously and read a journal now stymied.
The point of these tales is this: these restrictions being placed on public use and the soft restrictions being implemented by the content owners do affect patron satisfaction and do increase frustration. Eschenfeldor and Zhu are right to draw attention to these concerns, which affect libaries every day but which are often ignored in the literature that I read. Many patrons are not tech savvy enough to know their way around the annoyances and hidden save and print buttons when they run up against them. And the public does indeed feel the crunch.
It feels wrong to point out the problems without offering solutions. Luckily, as Eschenfelder, Desai and Downey point out in their article " The Pre-Internet Downloading Controversy: The Evolution of Use Rights for Digital Intellectual and Cultural Works." the opinions and de facto needs of users combine with librarians being aggressive in their licensing has made significant changes to policy before. The ability to download search results was, in the 1980's, considered a topic of hot debate and often not allowed by database owners. Due to a resistance in library culture and users simply ignoring warnings forbidding downloading, the publishers eventually gave in and now the right to download is expected to appear in every good license.
We can follow this pattern in protesting against some of the problems that hurt our users, especially soft restrictions. We should not just shrug and tolerate extra passwords or inability to save documents easily. Instead, we should make noise; writing articles, complaining to the publishers, and asking customers to do the same. We need to let both the public and other librarians know these troubles are not just the facts of life, but can be changed. We can also refuse to license materials that use these tricks to make their material inaccessible and let them know the reason for the refusal to license. In many cases, libraries are the main form of income for these resources, and by both making noise with our voices and our actions, we can push back and let publishers know these practices are unacceptable, just like how libraries and users did for downloading in the 1990s.
No comments:
Post a Comment