Category Archives: Uncategorized

ALIA Votes 2013

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ALIA board elections are upon us for 2013. This year I decided to write to all nominees and ask three questions, noting that their answers would be published here. This was prompted by Alyson Dalby’s invitation on Twitter:

I replied to Alyson, but figured I really should ask the other nominees the same question, so I sent all nominees for board Director and Vice President positions the following email on 5 February using the addresses listed on the ALIA site:

Continue reading →

On relevance, standards and collaborative leadership

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Regular readers of this blog will have noticed an absence of posts over the last few months. After a recent promotion I’ve simply been so busy with work that I have neglected you all.

I would like to continue a conversation from the comments in my post on platform neutrality, A failure of imagination, where I suggested that librarians have a responsibility to ensure our communities have access to information in a ‘container’ or format that is user-friendly and flexible. Kathryn Greenhill argued that librarians should avoid trying to duplicate content providers like Facebook and Wikipedia and instead focus on providing access and understanding  of these tools. Kate Davis disagreed, writing that rather than librarians building our own software and online tools, we should partner with existing providers.

This exchange highlighted the complexity of these issues for libraries and librarians, and the difficulties the profession is experiencing in defining what we do and why we do it. Are we collectors, curators, or creators? How much of our role is about education, and should we hold particular ethical positions regarding what we provide or teach?

As increasingly shallow as the concept of ‘innovation’ seems to be, what is needed for librarianship to remain useful and relevant is a spurt of real innovation. Continue reading →

A failure of imagination – the problem with format neutrality

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I often hear librarians promoting their ‘modern librarian’ credentials by saying “it’s about the information, not the container”.  By this they tend to mean that librarians in a world of instantly downloadable ebooks, subscription journal databases and multiple other formats for audio, visual and written works should be format-neutral.  That we should not be concerned about in which formats information is available, as long as it is available somehow. But what if it is about the container? Continue reading →

We interrupt this transmission…

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This post is just for any regular readers.

My branch manager retired a couple of weeks ago, and I’m acting in the position until it is permanently filled.  Whilst in some ways this is quite exciting, the downside is that my job hasn’t been backfilled, so I’m basically filling two positions at the moment.  Thus I don’t have a lot of energy for blogging and my posts are likely to be a little irregular for the next few weeks.  Never fear, It’s not about the books is a long term project, but the next little while might be a bit sparse.

Of course, I’m exploring lots of exciting things, so eventually you’ll get to read about them :-)

For today’s post, I’m handing it over to you.  If you’d like me to explore any particular areas of library land, or have a burning question you’d like answered, pop them in the comments below and I’ll try to address them in future posts.

Why everyone is probably wrong about the DoJ ebooks case

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I didn’t mean to write a post about this, but I couldn’t help myself.  Some of you won’t like what I have to say.  I have been following the Department of Justice versus Apple and the Big Five case for a little while now.  Or rather, I have been following the commentary online.  Reading the posts and the comments, there seem to be two main themes – either what could be loosely summarised as “DoJ #FAIL” or “Amazon gives me cheap eBooks what’s the problem?”  Let’s take a moment to embrace the assumption that the legacy publishing industry will continue to exist and examine both arguments.

DoJ #FAIL

There appear to be many people who don’t actually understand what the US Department of Justice is alleging and what their job is.  The claim is that several major publishers and Apple colluded to fix eBook prices.  The Department of Justice is not empowered to pass judgement on Amazon’s business model, unless it breaches US law, and nobody appears to have any evidence that it does.  The Wall St Journal reports that Macmillan CEO John Sargent complained the decision will “have a very negative and long-term impact on those who sell books for a living” but this misses the point.  Jordan Weissman in the Atlantic also wanders into the irrelevant when he complains that “Amazon isn’t simply a garden variety retailer, or a helpless, well-meaning innovator.”  The Department of Justice is required to investigate when businesses appear to be colluding on price.  Whether their competitors are large and successful or not doesn’t matter.  Whether the people running the businesses believe colluding on price is the only way to maintain a profit is also of no import.  It is not the DoJ’s job to keep publishers’ and writers’ incomes high, but rather to keep the price consumers pay low.  The law states that you can’t collude to artificially hold up the price consumers pay.  Everything else is noise. If publishers can’t work out how to make money from $9.99 eBooks, then so be it.

Amazon gives me cheap eBooks what’s the problem?

The problem is that although it is not the Department of Justice’s job to make publishers’ lives easier, Amazon still currently holds what amounts to a virtual monopoly on the sale of eBooks.  Estimates I’ve seen range from 70% to 90% of the entire market which even at the lower end is still high enough to be overwhelming.  When you buy an Amazon ebook you will only ever be able to read it on a Kindle or within a Kindle app. When you buy a Kindle you will only ever be able to read books you bought from Amazon in AZK format or ebooks in PDF or ePub format that don’t have DRM restrictions.  So once Amazon has you it’s very difficult to escape, because your books can’t be transferred between devices.

The other issue is that, as Charles Stross has noted in his excellent overview of this issue, Amazon could be said to be engaging in predatory pricing.  By charging less than it costs publishers to produce an eBook, Amazon is ensuring that nobody else can charge less than them. Although Apple could in theory have spent some of its mountain of cash in a price war with Amazon, nobody else can afford to burn money like that.  Once the competition is gone, Amazon can increase prices again or simply use cheap ebooks as a way to sell something else, like expensive Kindle readers or simply other goods once they have hundreds of millions of customers.

A monopoly of the publishers’ own making

The complaint of many is that Amazon has a monopoly and it is therefore they who should be under investigation.  This argument may have a small amount of merit due to the factors above, but there are a few problems.  The main reason for Amazon’s stranglehold on ebook sales is the publishers’ own pig-headed insistence on a model that has already failed once before – Digital Rights Management.  By insisting on DRM, publishers have pushed out small independent online retailers and ensured Amazon maintains control over ebook sales through it’s domination of the ebook reader market.  Since Kindles don’t read non-DRM ebooks, publishers insisting on DRM cede their power to Amazon.  Basically, Amazon has a monopoly of the publishers’ own making.

If publishers want to survive, they need to end the use of DRM. One senior Hachette executive publicly stated that he thinks it is unnecessary just a few weeks ago – if Hachette’s board have any brains they’ll listen to him.  Removing DRM means suddenly Amazon loses some of the lock-in powers of the Kindle, whilst also making non-Amazon ebooks more valuable to customers because they are transferable to whichever device is most convenient.

Disaggregation and WordPress for eBooks

So far we haven’t covered anything not already commented upon.  But there has been something missing from most of the commentary I’ve seen.  In all the discussion around this case, there has been an implied assumption that an ebook market requires publishers to exist – in their current form if not the exact same companies.  I think this is profoundly flawed.

Amazon itself now has a system for authors to publish directly through Kindle Direct.  This is a first step, but it is simply a horizontal expansion of a retailer into production.  The real revolution will come when enough authors realise that publishers are no longer necessary.  In his recent book Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky writes about the origins of the publishing model.  The whole basis of the system is seventeenth century economics, whereby the owners of expensive printing presses needed to find new content to print.  Because each print run was a risk, those printing the books needed to ensure that the books they printed were high quality, well advertised and widely distributed.  Hence the integrated publishing house which combines editorial, typesetting, printing, marketing, distribution and sales.  Although some of these functions have been outsourced in recent years (notably physical printing, the whole basis of the original system), the concept of an integrated ‘publishing company’ is still alive and well.  The problem these companies have is that it will not be too much longer before authors realise that ebook publishing does not require publishers at all.

The real threat to publishers is not Amazon or even piracy, but disaggregation. There is no good reason for all the things publishers do to be done together by the same organisation.  What is needed to produce high quality ebooks and make money for authors is good writing, careful editing, clever marketing and an efficient distribution platform.  They can all work separately from each other.

Independent authors would keep their copyright, and may even choose a variation on Creative Commons licensing for particular uses (eg for students).  Editing might be a service authors pay editing agencies to perform for them, either through a direct cash payment or through a percentage of profits.  Marketing is now possible with a small investment of time by the author through social media, but may also be done by generalist or specialist marketing companies, depending on the means of the author and estimated potential readership.  Alternatively don’t discount the emergence of some kind of authors guild acting as a member-funded marketer.  Finally, the opportunity is there for a WordPress-style open source distribution platform to hit Amazon where it hurts.

The main reason Amazon has such a monopoly is the same reason Facebook has a ‘monopoly’ on social sharing – breadth.  Authors wanting to self-publish ebooks are told they have to be on Amazon, because that’s where everyone is.  Readers often only look on Amazon, either because they are locked into the Amazon-Kindle system or simply because experience shows them it has a huge range at the cheapest price. Because ebooks are fungable goods, (or arguably, fungable services) being sold in a frictionless and almost entirely transparent marketplace, whomever sells at the cheapest price is likely to get the vast majority of sales. At the moment authors have few choices about where they sell.  They can hand over 30% of their income to Amazon, hand over 30% of their income to Apple and hope the censor doesn’t block them, or hand over 40% of their income to Smashwords. It shouldn’t be particularly difficult for appropriately keen coders to develop an open source system along the lines of WordPress whereby authors or small cooperatives can maintain autonomy in publication, but utilise the benefits of a common searchable database.  Once that happens and reaches a large enough size, suddenly Amazon and Apple look very vulnerable.  When you can get the benefits of a large unified database and only pay 2.5% to PayPal to handle payments, why would you cop a 30% Amazon tax?  When you are selling your ebook for a 20% discount compared to Amazon or iBooks, why would I buy from them?

The best way to predict the future is to invent it

This is not a prediction.  I don’t know what is going to happen with ebooks.  Some, like Eli Neiberger, argue that ‘bits have no value’ and soon ebooks are likely to be virtually impossible to monetise.  I don’t subscribe to this view, but I think it’s more likely than the current model continuing.  What I do know is that the future of books is not the present of books. I know that if you concentrate on the legacy container instead of the contents you will go out of business.  And I know that librarians need to understand all of these things, and work out what they’re going to do to ensure they are still able to provide their communities with the information and cultural works they need and want.

Libraries as software – dematerialising, platforms and returning to first principles

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Ever since I read Marcus Westbury’s article about Renew Newcastle, Cities as software, last year I’ve been thinking about how the concepts he writes about can be applied to libraries.  For those who are less text-centric, Westbury also gave a talk at Tedx Newie.

Cities as software

The principle is fairly straighforward, but like many ‘disruptive’ ideas it is only obvious after someone has articulated it.  Westbury’s insight was to realise that the problems of stagnating, post-industrial Newcastle were not caused by the decaying buildings or ugly streetscapes – the ‘hardware’ of the city.  And since there was no hardware problem, building new office blocks or spending money on street beautification wasn’t going to work.  The problem with Newcastle was a ‘software’ problem – so many shops were boarded up, so many businesses struggling along, that it had become impossible for any new businesses to succeed.  What Newcastle needed was for someone to hack the planning, regulatory and real estate systems to make the place vibrant again, thus attracting new business and a new sense of civic pride.

Thinking about cities as a combination of ‘hardware’ (buildings, streets, parks) and ‘software’ (laws, rules, traditions, business models, cultural norms) is a useful conceptual model because it allows us to separate out things that are often conflated.  A heritage building, for example, is hardware, because it has physical form.  But it is also software, because it has cultural value and often a legal identity as having heritage value.  The software determines what can be done with the hardware.

Libraries as software

The software/hardware framework is a good way to think about what libraries are really about as we move further into a world of post-paper publishing.  What libraries have all too often focussed on in the past is hardware – buildings, books, journals and rooms.  Librarians get caught up in hardware questions continually – hardback or paperback, how many PCs, should we buy Blueray discs, lend Kindles, subscribe to downloadable talking books, throw out our cassette tapes….?  In this context, we can consider things like journal databases, ebooks and other downloadables as hardware as well – we treat these things as artifacts, things to be collected and stored.

Hardware is what decision-makers and funders think about – books, buildings and, if we’re lucky, computers. Hardware is easy to understand, easy to provide once-off grants for and usually offers a photo opportunity.  The problem with hardware, however, is that it’s useless without software. Marcus Westbury recognised this in Newcastle and if librarians are to fulfill their real purpose (and keep their jobs) they need to recognise it too.

The real value of libraries is not the hardware.  It has never been the hardware.  Your members don’t come to the library to find books, or magazines, journals, films or musical recordings.  They come to be informed, inspired, horrified, enchanted or amused.  They come to hide from reality or understand its true nature.  They come to find solace or excitement, companionship or solitude. They come for the software.

Dematerialising

Dematerialising could be the best thing that ever happened to libraries.  With the Open Access movement gathering steam, Open Source so entrenched that Red Hat made $1Billion annual revenue in the last year, and more options than ever before available to authors wanting to be published, we are at the beginning of a completely new era in the way information and art is disseminated.  If your business model relies on the idea that you provide access to otherwise restricted informational and cultural artifacts your business isn’t going to be viable for very much longer.  This applies whether you’re a publisher, bookseller, newspaper proprietor, television executive or librarian.

How we change the software – the services we provide, the way we make information findable, how we help people to make connections between things – will determine the future of libraries and the communities they serve.  This has a connection with the ideas I wrote about in Return to the coffeehouse - how to turn your library into an ideas factory, where we considered the importance of ‘platforms’ in building new ideas and services.  The dematerialised library – the library as software – provides a platform for the community to use in their quest to understand and enjoy our world and their place in it.  It becomes a true information and culture service rather than merely a technology for sharing and shipping informational and cultural artifacts.

What is a library?

Libraries are a technology for free, large scale inter-generational transfer of knowledge and culture. The fact that they have performed this purpose through the distribution of information technologies such as scrolls, codexes and newspapers for hundreds of years is merely a reflection of the technology available at the time. It’s time to reconsider our purpose.  Instead of processing, moving, accessioning and purchasing physical or digital items, librarians are better used to organise and share information and stories. Libraries run like this become creation engines.  They become more about creating and sharing a community’s ideas than providing access to the ideas of others.  Thinking about your library like this provides space for some innovative new approaches.

Consider Darien Library, which offers their community print-on-demand technology for both pubic domain works and self-publishing .  Or think of the academic libraries that publish works written by staff at their own university – a practice so widespread that Purdue University Press has published a book about successful library publishing strategies.   Now prepare for your brain to melt and read Nate Hill’s plan for world domination public libraries to become a local-publisher/Kickstarter/creators-&-writers-club mashup with not only completed works by local writers on their catalogue, but local works in progress on their catalogue.

Letting go of the desire to maintain ‘quality control’ and encouraging members to share their stories, like Darien has done and Hill proposes, can help libraries and the communities they serve reach their full potential.  Letting go of control allows libraries to encourage the development of innovative ways to create, store, retrieve and share stories and ideas.  In this model libraries cease to be a gatekeeper and become an enabler – helping our communities to share, learn and connect in ways that are otherwise not possible.

Platforms

With these sorts of ideas in mind, and inspired by the ‘Apps for Democracy’ project in Washington DC, in 2011 the State Library of Queensland ran a competition called Libraryhack and opened up library data to innovative web developers.  The National Library of Australia has been working for some years to integrate data from a number of collection databases both within the NLA and in other organisations.  They have released a number of APIs  and rumour has it they are soon to release a single API for ‘Trove’,  their flagship information portal.  This will allow others individuals or organisations to create their own interfaces and tools to use Trove data. Meanwhile, Jason Griffey has created something potentially more subversive by forking the PirateBox to create LibraryBox  - a tiny, portable and off-grid wireless distribution point for ebooks, downloadable audio and any other electronic content libraries care to distribute.

These sorts of projects are just a taste of the sort of thing librarians could be turning their minds towards.

Wasted on the desk

At VALA2012 Eli Neiberger talked about librarians being ‘wasted on the desk’. His view is that instead of hanging around waiting to help people read spine labels, librarians should be ‘out the back’ building amazing tools like Griffey’s Library Box or the Trove API. Renew Newcastle operated mostly as a negotiator and explainer – they worked through the contracts, laws and regulations to work out how people could do what they wanted to do.  Rather than just providing access to information, libraries should be more active in finding solutions to help people use information. With ‘Open Government’ initiatives gaining traction in many nations, notably in the US under the Obama administration, Craig Thomler recently wrote about government agencies feeling that it was a waste of their resources to be making their data more usable.  Freedom of Information for them begins and ends with making the data available, whether it can be easily understood or not.  This presents a great opportunity for National, State and local libraries to make government truly open by building tools and standards for usable data. This could be extended to enable the creation and useful application of other local information, data, stories, expression.

All of this means we need to think more on Neiberger’s observation that people are now starting to pay for convenience rather than access.  Libraries were once at the forefront of providing both access and convenience, with early OPAC technology at the leading edge of what was then possible.  The general state of libraries’ information delivery is now so far below what people expect that we are being told en masse that “your library website stinks and it’s your fault.” A good place to start afresh might be this article from Designing Better Libraries.

Allowing innovation to operate without capital

Marcus Westbury talks about Renew Newcastle a lot, and recently he followed up his Tedx talk with another one - this time talkling to architects and designers. Again, I was struck by something he said about what Renew Newcastle set out to do, because it applies just as equally to libraries.  Westbury’s comment was that Renew Newcastle set out to ‘enable innovation without the need for capital’.  If we combine the ideas of Westbury with Steven Johnson’s ideas about platforms we can envisage the library as a platform for enabling innovation, learning and cultural development to occur in our communities without the need for capital.  Isn’t that a lot more compelling than a place for lending books to people?

You need an R&D culture, not an R&D department

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A couple of weeks ago, a tweet popped up in my feed just begging for a click-through:

What Gilliian was so excited about was this post by Daniel Messer on the Letters to a Young Librarian blog.  The core of Messer’s arguments is this:

Libraries need their own R&D Departments. We have Circulation, Reference, Information Technology, and so on. We are sorely lacking in R&D.

I can see why some librarians were enthused by this proposal. It stands to reason that if something is important it should have its own department and funding.  There’s just a small problem – Messer’s solution is destined to fail.

The problem with an R&D department is that it will perpetuate exactly the problem Messer has identified.  Libraries already have R&D departments, it’s just that they are largely outsourced.  We outsource development of cataloguing classification systems to organisations like OCLC and the Library of Congress.  We outsource our ILS to software vendors.  We outsource our journal databases to other software vendors and publishers.  We outsource the development of hardware like PCs, microfilm readers and printing facilities. Some libraries outsource their physical processing to specialist companies.  Others outsource the selection of new material.  We do all these things because it is perceived to be easier, or more efficient, or higher quality.  Often it is.

As Messer has identified, however, there is a problem with outsourcing like this – the priorities of the organisation doing your research and development often has different priorities to your organisation.  As a Systems Librarian, I spend a lot of my time dealing with this reality.  The problem I have with Messer’s solution, however, is that it simply replicates this problem within the organisation.  If you bring all your R&D in-house by creating an organisation called ‘The R&D Department’, what happens when they realise their small team and small budget can’t solve every problem at the same time?  The have to prioritise. Somebody’s ‘top priority’ will be pushed down the list.  Pretty soon you’ll be writing blog posts bitching about the R&D department and suggesting libraries need to become more efficient by outsourcing their R&D to vendors.

What libraries – and other service organisations – need to do is not create an R&D department but rather create an R&D culture.  Given the whole point of libraries is to facilitate research, one would think we should have a head start! Organisations like Google and Gore don’t rely on R&D departments to do all their research and development – both famously offer/require staff 20% of their paid time for working on whatever R&D project takes their fancy.  Tim Harford writes about adaptive organisations like Google and Gore in Adapt: why success always starts with failure.  One of his main points is that (As Messer himself describes) those at the ‘front line’ are best placed to understand what is needed in terms of developing new strategies, procedures or tools.  R&D is not just about new tools – it’s about new processes, new services, and new concepts for delivering those services.

Messer himself gives us a perfect example – he developed a small program to get his ILS to print patron names on a receipt printer.  Messer didn’t work for ‘the R&D department’ when he did this – he was running Circulation. Messer’s role had a enough ‘slack’ in terms of how he spent his time to allow him to research what he needed to do and develop and test it.

The challenge for libraries then is not to build a new department, but to create the space and encouragement for staff to undertake research and development as simply part of their job.  Last week Rory Litwin wrote in a rather more controversial blog post that

In order to make a claim to professional autonomy, librarians need more than a set of admirable values to justify it. They need a body of professional expertise that is incontrovertible, made up of knowledge and skills that others recognize required extensive education to gain. They need to be able to make the case that what they offer as professionals is something that other people cannot do nearly as well. They need to show that what they do is not only interesting and admirable and important, but that doing it takes expertise, and that they possess that expertise.

Litwin goes on to say that the solution is for librarians to forget all about this newfangled blogging business and only share ideas about librarianship via scholarly journal papers and discussions based upon them.  Presumably by writing letters to each other on parchment using a feather quill.*

Whilst I think Litwin is profoundly wrong about how professional expertise should or should not be shared, he’s quite correct that for Librarianship to be taken seriously as a profession we need undeniable professional expertise, not just values (although we still need the values!).  How we develop, share and prove that knowledge is the matter of several different but equally robust opinions.

Tying these two demands together – better research and development for the tools we need to do our jobs, and a stronger focus on robust research within the profession – I see the need for two different types of research and development.  What Messer is asking for is really more support within libraries for R&D to solve the organisation’s own internal problems – whether it’s a bit of computer code, a better internal process, a new machine or a different way of organising rosters. That is, better production technologies.  What Litwin is asking for is a stronger commitment to R&D focussed on the needs of our patrons. That is, better products and services.

These R&D needs can not be left to an ‘R&D department’, because the willingness and indeed the responsibility to develop and share new ideas, processes and technologies is what makes librarianship a profession rather than just another service role.  What is needed is a new approach to library management.  When librarians and other library staff are removed from the silos of traditional departments; when they are given dedicated time and support to develop new tools, new processes and new services; when librarians are rewarded for experimenting and sharing their findings: that is when R&D in libraries will flourish, and librarianship will secure its place as a vibrant and respected profession.

*As Rory notes in the comments, my paraphrasing may be overly harsh.  You really should read the original post yourself.