Every semester, I have the same cliched question: How did the end get here so fast? I have been working on this blog for 14 weeks now, and this is my last "class entry". But this blog is not going away, so never fear, my one or two possible readers! I have discovered that I love blogging, and I am not too shabby at it. In addition, I will be doing a volunteer internship at WiLS (Wisconsin Library Services) in their Electronic Resources department, so I will have plenty to talk about! Writing this blog, and being in this class has made me realize that I love the many facets of ERM, and want to explore it more. I look forward to sharing my future experiences with all of you.
When I began this class, I believed that it would be collections management for electronic resources; basically, we would be learning about how to select databases, how to analyze usage statistics for collections management decisions, how to purchase databases (so something about licensing) and maybe how to catalog/keep track of those databases in some way. From reading job descriptions for ERM librarians, I also was hopeful we would delve into a lot of the technologies that were discussed therein: SFX, openURL, link resolving. What I came to discover, from just looking at the syllabus and which was brought home throughout the class, was the Electronic Resource Management affects almost every level of librarianship. These resources are so much more complex, in terms of purchase, maintenance, federal legislation, user services and instruction, marketing, everything, than print and this means it takes a whole library working together to truly "manage" them. It also included things that I did not think of as ERM, like ILL and Electronic reserves. When I first saw these, especially ILL on the syllabus, I was excited (because I deal a lot with ILL at work, and think it is an essential service) but confused. What did ILL have to do with ERM, I wondered? But, by the time we got close to that section, I realized it had everything to do with it. Not only is ILL now facilitated online through programs like Illiad, but more and more libraries are requesting texts from databases or purely online journals. As such, the same dilemmas and issues that come with databases--concerns about licensing, technology protection measures, copyright and fair use--are tied up in ILL, in E-reserves. The breadth of issues that electronic resources touch is truly amazing, and makes this class by far one of the most important and informative I have taken at UW Madison.
What ties this whole class together for me is copyright law. I never would have thought that this was the core to understanding how to be an electronic resource librarian, but it really is. The technology is of course extremely important and helpful; one would have a hard time guiding patrons through all the material or even making them available to patrons without ER management systems, without creating easy access to changing links, without usage standards like COUNTER. But what is constantly at the back of it all, at the back of all the technology used to limit access, the skyrocketing price of journals, the incredibly detailed process of licensing, is copyright, and more specifically the fear copyright owners have of how easy it is to now make copies digitally.
This concept first really gelled in my mind when I was writing two blog posts, one from the 22nd of September ("Licensing is a Pit Trap Full of Spikes") and the one the week later ("Georgia on my Mind"). I think that the reason was because these blog posts were my first exposure to how fair use, the copyright law of 1976, CONFU, DMCA, and all the other issues surrounding electronic transmission concretely affect the library world. In the license post, I expressed my fear of licensing. Looking back, I now see that that fear derived out of a fear about not understanding copyright and all the legal language well enough. But that post was the start of my desire to understand the rules and the court cases and the issues as well as I possibly could. Georgia gave me a bit of hope. While we still (!) do not know the outcome, it looks like they were not able to take away most of Georgia's rights. Reading about this case and writing this blog post allowed me to believe that, sometimes, the law can be on our side, if we can back up our decisions from a place of knowledge. Due to these two blogs, which caused me to sort through my feelings and fears, I devoted myself to better understanding these issues not only throughout the rest of the class, but outside of it as well. I have investigated copyright policy at Edgewood, and am working with them to attempt to create a more flexible one. And I am trying to face my fear head on, by not only volunteering at WiLS, but also working with our ER librarian at Edgewood to create better licenses for our library, and even help with negotiation.
Finally, if anyone is reading this blog from the outside and is thinking about taking a class on ERM, do it. At my most recent job interview, earlier this week, I was asked about what I knew about scholarly communication, especially how researchers can maintain their rights in an electronic publishing world. I was able to discuss open access solutions, as well as the importance of negotiating contracts. I could bring up what rights authors had under copyright and explain what resources were available to the researchers to help them further understand their rights and assist them in reading contracts. This not being a library setting, but instead a research group, they were astounded that librarians knew so much about this, and could help. This is something that goes beyond libraries and into publishing and all forms of research. It opens up not only your own understanding, but employment doors. And in these economic times, that last phrase is the best endorsement I can give a class.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Thursday, December 1, 2011
YEP (Yet Another E-book Post).
In the article "Reading Books in the Digital Age subsequent to Amazon, Google, and the long tail", Terje Hillesund comments that he found over 500 articles written through 2007 that discussed e-books. At the Wisconsin Library Association's conference this fall, the keynote talk was about E-books. And when I opened up the December 2011 edition of American Libraries , one of the first articles I saw was entitled "A Guide to Buying E-books". They are on everyone's mind, and their market continues to grow. But what are they, really? Can they ever replace books or be used in a similar way? Do they even count as books or are they a completely different beast?
Many people have attempted to answer these questions, and in the next few paragraphs, I would like to make my own attempt to clarify what I think about the whole e-book thing. But I do not think there ever will be one answer to these questions for the simple reason that reading is a subjective personal activity, directed by individual needs, cultural background, and value systems. As such, my thoughts reflect my own background, that of a lover of reading, a person who has been in school for 19 years, a person raised by two professors, married to a PhD student and sister to another (basically surrounded by those of the intelligentsia), and also a person in love with technology and gadgets. With that caveat, lets talk e-books.
Both Hillesund's article and another article entitled "Disowning Commodities" by Ted Striphas take the view that e-books represent something fundamentally different from what we have seen before. Hillesund claims that they have, via separating the storage of the text from the reading of the text (storage in bits, reading in good old fashioned letters), broken the tradition of the book, in which the creation, storage, distribution and reading of knowledge are all contained within one unchangeable form. He quotes Roger Chartier, a prominent historian of reading, who says "Our current revolution is obviously more extensive than Gutenbergs". Another intellectual, Stephan Bickerts, discussed in Striphas, believes that e-books have destroyed "deep reading" of the past, a type of meditative engrossment in the words of another. Something,all agree, has changed.
There can be no argument that the medium has changed. Physically, the Kindle is very different from a paperback. However, through my own experience with my Kindle, I have found that the act of reading has fundamentally remained the same. For pleasure reading (a far too uncommon thing in my life at the moment) reading on the Kindle does not detract from my enjoyment of the story in anyway. Having Pride and Prejudice on Kindle does not change the fact that Austen writes with an incredible sense of character and societal analysis. The only problem is that it requires you to push a button to flip from page to page, which makes it hard to get back to a section, but, when reading for pleasure, this is not usually a huge issue. So when it comes to reading for fun, a Kindle or a paperback work just as well.
But what about for that "deep reading" or scholarly reading? Hillesund claims that the only reading people won't do electronically is for sustained, detailed reading of lengthy texts. In this I agree with Hillesund. I believe that this is truly where the book will continue to flourish, at least for the time being. Striphas believes that this is due to how the owning a physical book, in the 1930's became a status symbol of then new middle class. While this might have something to do with it, I actually do not think my dislike of using e-text for scholarship is a cultural phenomena. If anything, I believe that the middle class has embraced the e-reader like they did the displayed book in the 1930's, as symbols of their learning and ability to spend. The truth of the matter is that the functionality for serious scholarly reading is just not there. For myself, the lack of an easy way to write notes or highlight text in my Kindle, or quickly flip to a place I highlighted, seriously limits its use as a tool for research. Even if the e-reader improves on this, it still is much more expensive to lay out three e-readers to compare text than to spread out books on a table for cross comparison. Perhaps scholarship methods will change, but until that happens, a need for written text will remain for the scholar and the student
So, in my opinion, e-books are in fact just a new medium, not something brand new. In containing the same content one would find in a manuscript, in a codex, on a scroll, they fall into the category that these mediums do: the book. The fact that they are stored in a different way does not change their purpose, every books purpose, which is to share knowledge. However, they should and could not totally replace the older medium of the printed codex. Not only have they not reached a point in which they are truly useful for scholarly study, but they are simply not affordable for everyone. The digital divide still exists, people still come into their library because they have no computer at home. E-books are neat, and possibly might someday drive out the printed book. But today is not that day.
Many people have attempted to answer these questions, and in the next few paragraphs, I would like to make my own attempt to clarify what I think about the whole e-book thing. But I do not think there ever will be one answer to these questions for the simple reason that reading is a subjective personal activity, directed by individual needs, cultural background, and value systems. As such, my thoughts reflect my own background, that of a lover of reading, a person who has been in school for 19 years, a person raised by two professors, married to a PhD student and sister to another (basically surrounded by those of the intelligentsia), and also a person in love with technology and gadgets. With that caveat, lets talk e-books.
Both Hillesund's article and another article entitled "Disowning Commodities" by Ted Striphas take the view that e-books represent something fundamentally different from what we have seen before. Hillesund claims that they have, via separating the storage of the text from the reading of the text (storage in bits, reading in good old fashioned letters), broken the tradition of the book, in which the creation, storage, distribution and reading of knowledge are all contained within one unchangeable form. He quotes Roger Chartier, a prominent historian of reading, who says "Our current revolution is obviously more extensive than Gutenbergs". Another intellectual, Stephan Bickerts, discussed in Striphas, believes that e-books have destroyed "deep reading" of the past, a type of meditative engrossment in the words of another. Something,all agree, has changed.
There can be no argument that the medium has changed. Physically, the Kindle is very different from a paperback. However, through my own experience with my Kindle, I have found that the act of reading has fundamentally remained the same. For pleasure reading (a far too uncommon thing in my life at the moment) reading on the Kindle does not detract from my enjoyment of the story in anyway. Having Pride and Prejudice on Kindle does not change the fact that Austen writes with an incredible sense of character and societal analysis. The only problem is that it requires you to push a button to flip from page to page, which makes it hard to get back to a section, but, when reading for pleasure, this is not usually a huge issue. So when it comes to reading for fun, a Kindle or a paperback work just as well.
But what about for that "deep reading" or scholarly reading? Hillesund claims that the only reading people won't do electronically is for sustained, detailed reading of lengthy texts. In this I agree with Hillesund. I believe that this is truly where the book will continue to flourish, at least for the time being. Striphas believes that this is due to how the owning a physical book, in the 1930's became a status symbol of then new middle class. While this might have something to do with it, I actually do not think my dislike of using e-text for scholarship is a cultural phenomena. If anything, I believe that the middle class has embraced the e-reader like they did the displayed book in the 1930's, as symbols of their learning and ability to spend. The truth of the matter is that the functionality for serious scholarly reading is just not there. For myself, the lack of an easy way to write notes or highlight text in my Kindle, or quickly flip to a place I highlighted, seriously limits its use as a tool for research. Even if the e-reader improves on this, it still is much more expensive to lay out three e-readers to compare text than to spread out books on a table for cross comparison. Perhaps scholarship methods will change, but until that happens, a need for written text will remain for the scholar and the student
So, in my opinion, e-books are in fact just a new medium, not something brand new. In containing the same content one would find in a manuscript, in a codex, on a scroll, they fall into the category that these mediums do: the book. The fact that they are stored in a different way does not change their purpose, every books purpose, which is to share knowledge. However, they should and could not totally replace the older medium of the printed codex. Not only have they not reached a point in which they are truly useful for scholarly study, but they are simply not affordable for everyone. The digital divide still exists, people still come into their library because they have no computer at home. E-books are neat, and possibly might someday drive out the printed book. But today is not that day.
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