The University Library: Closing the Book

At the memorial service, the eulogies expressed deep sadness at the loss of a great institution, once a cornerstone of academia. Everyone blamed The Shelfless Revolution for this sad death. In fact, The University Library had been weak for a long time, and it could not survive any shock.

The Transition from Print to Digital

The transition from print to digital was swift, particularly for scholarly journals. In the 1990s, The University Library, publishers, and the middlemen of the supply chain ramped up their IT infrastructure and adapted their business relationships. The switch to digital was achieved quickly and with little interruption.

Print vs. Digital Lending

Lending books and journals, whether print or digital, is a high overhead enterprise. Since print and digital lending involve different kinds of work, it is obvious that their overheads are quantitatively different. It is less obvious and easily ignored that they are qualitatively different: Print overhead is an investment. Digital overhead is waste.

Consider print lending. The overhead builds a valuable collection housed in community-owned real estate. Barring disasters, the value of the collection and the infrastructure increases over time. The cumulative effect is most obvious in old libraries, which are showcases of accumulated treasure.

Contrast this with digital lending. Digital overhead pays for short-term operational expenses to acquire site licenses whose value is zero when they expire. Even infrastructure spending has only short-term benefits. Computing and networking hardware must be replaced every few years. Site-licensed software to manage the digital lending library, like site licenses for content, have zero value upon expiration.

The digital lending library never accumulates value. It does not contribute anything to future generations. It only provides services here and now. It just needs to perform current responsibilities in a cost effective manner. Evaluating The University Library as a digital lender boiled down to a few simple questions: Was The University Library a cost-effective negotiator and content provider? Did it provide a user friendly service? Could others do better?

The Ineffective Negotiator

While other publishers suffered years of disruption and catastrophic downsizing, scholarly publishers thrived throughout the digital revolution and afterwards. Their profit margins remained sky high. Their new business model was even better than the old. By selling site licenses, they retained control of the content forever. New content provided an immediate revenue stream, and accumulated old content ensured an ever increasing future revenue stream.

The University Library was a predictable customer with a budget that kept pace with inflation. Not satisfied with this, publishers increased their prices at a rate well above inflation. Every so often, The University Library and its funders pressed the panic button. This would start a round of negotiations. Librarians were caught between scholars who wanted to maximize content and administrators who wanted to reduce costs. They negotiated with publishers, each of whom had a monopoly over their island of the literature. Predictably, most negotiations ended with some performative cutbacks by The University Library and a few temporary price concessions by the publishers. Then, the cycle started all over again.

The Market Distorter

The University Library distorted the scholarly communication market, merely by being present in it. Normal economic forces did not apply.

To maintain quality, The University Library acquired content from publishers with a track record. The barriers against new unproven publishers created an oligarchy of publishers that kept prices artificially high.

The University Library also eliminated competition between established publishers. Imagine two competing journals, A and B. A survey among the relevant scholars reveals that 60% prefer A, 40% prefer B, and 20% adamantly insist that they need both A and B. The University Library had no choice but to license both journals for all scholars. By erasing individual preferences, it eliminated competition.

For most textbooks, publishers knew well in advance how many copies The University Library would buy. Given this information, publishers inflated their textbook prices to a level where library sales covered their production costs. All other sales were pure profit from a riskless enterprise.

Providing Access

Under the terms of the site licenses, only authorized users were allowed access, and systematic downloading was prohibited. It was the responsibility of The University Library to protect the content against inappropriate users and use. This work on behalf of publishers was a significant part of digital overhead paid for by The University Library.

Aside from being costly, access controls inconvenienced users. Links to content might stop working without notice because of miscommunication between publishers and library systems. When visiting another campus or when changing jobs, scholars had to adapt to new user interfaces. What had been an asset in the print era, a library built for a local community, had become a liability in the digital era.

Personal Digital Libraries

In their personal lives, scholars subscribed to online newspapers and magazines, to movie and music streaming services, and to various social networks where they posted and consumed content. They easily managed these personal subscriptions. What was so different about scholarly subscriptions? What exactly did The University Library do that they could not do themselves faster and more efficiently?

The University Library no longer accumulated long-term value. It was an ineffective negotiator unable to control costs. It blocked competition from new publishers. It eliminated competition between established publishers. It spent considerable overhead to control access on behalf of publishers while inconveniencing users.

The Shelfless Revolution changed all that. Overnight, scholars were in charge of acquiring their own information needs. During the initial period of chaos, scholars were forced to subscribe to each journal individually. Publishers quickly adapted by bundling books and journals into various packages. Third-party service providers, working with all publishers, offered custom personal libraries. The undergraduate pre-med student who loved mystery novels and the assistant professor in chemistry who hiked wilderness trails no longer shared the same library. Their competing interests no longer needed to be balanced.

Many journals did not survive the suddenly competitive market. With fewer journals, publishing a paper became more competitive. Over time, the typical scholar published fewer papers of higher quality. With fewer opportunities to publish in classical peer-reviewed journals, scholars had an incentive to create and/or try out new forms of scholarly communication.

Sticky Digital Lending

Looking back, it is difficult to grasp how controversial a step it was to switch to personal libraries.

Before The Shelfless Revolution, academic administrators would have committed career suicide if they proposed such an outrageous idea. The backlash would have been harsh and immediate. The opposition message would have written itself: They are outsourcing The University Library to the publishers who have been extorting the scholarly community for years. This slogan would have had the benefit of being true. The counterargument would have been the idea that publishers lose their price-setting power when scholars make their own individual purchasing decisions. While standard capitalist theory, the idea was untested in scholarly communication.

The unlikely university where the faculty approved the outrageous proposal would be mired in endless debate. How should the library subscription budget be divided? How much should go to undergraduate students? to graduate students? to postdocs? to faculty? Should they receive these funds in the form of tuition rebates and salary increases or in the form of university accounts? What would be allowable purchases on such accounts?

No single university could have implemented such a change on its own. Accreditation authorities would have expressed doubts or outright opposition. Publishers would not have changed their business models to accommodate one university. It would have required a large coalition of universities.

It took a catastrophic shock to the system, The Shelfless Revolution, to cut this Gordian knot.

Open Access

Many years before The Shelfless Revolution, a few academics started a project to kickstart a revolution in scholarly communication. As this grew into The Open Access Movement, The University Library was called upon to support some of the infrastructure. Many librarians considered this a promising opportunity for a digital future.

The Open Access Movement coalesced around three goals: Provide free access to scholarly works, Reduce the cost of scholarly communication, and Create innovative forms of scholarly communication.

The first goal was quite successful. Three mechanisms were developed to provide free access to scholarly works: institutional repositories, disciplinary repositories, and open access journals. The University Library was primarily responsible for institutional repositories, which contained author-formatted versions of conventionally published papers, unpublished technical reports, theses and dissertations, data sets, and other scholarly material. Several groups of scholars developed disciplinary repositories to collect works in specific areas of research and make them freely available. Finally, various entities created open access journals, which relied on alternative funding mechanisms and did not charge subscription fees.

The second goal, reducing the cost of scholarly communication, was an utter failure. The Open Access Movement had assumed that making a large part of the scholarly literature available for free would put downward pressure on the price of subscription journals. This assumption was proved wrong. Scholars continued to publish in the same journals. The familiar cycle of site license price increases and performative negotiations continued. Repositories were never a threat. Open-access journals were never competition.

Institutional repositories were particularly valuable for scholarly works that were previously hard to find, such as theses, technical reports, data, etc. For author-formatted papers, they evolved into a costly backup for conventional scholarly publishing. They provided a valuable service for those without access to journals. Most scholars would not risk their research by relying on pre-published unofficial versions, and they required the version of record. Besides, repositories were too cumbersome to use.

Disciplinary repositories were more user friendly, but they needed outside funding. Occasionally, the priorities of the funders would change, and the repository would have to find a new source for funding. Each funding crisis was an opportunity for publishers to buy the repository. To keep the repository under scholars’ control, an interested government agency or philanthropic organization had to step forward every time. To control the repository, publishers had to be lucky just once.

Open access journals just increased the number of scholarly journals. Subscription journals did not suddenly fail because of competing open access journals. At most, subscription journals responded by introducing an open access option. Authors could choose to pay a fee to put their papers outside of the paywall. These authors just trusted publishers not to include these open access papers in the calculation of subscription prices. The publisher’s promise was impossible to verify. This was the level of dysfunction of the scholarly communication market at that time.

The University Library paid ever increasing prices for site licenses and their maintenance. It also paid for the maintenance of institutional repositories. Government and philanthropic funding agencies paid for disciplinary repositories. Scholars used a combination of library funding, research accounts, departmental accounts, and personal resources to pay for open access charges. The scholarly community was spending more than ever on scholarly communication, and no one knew how much.

The Open Access Movement also failed to deliver on its third goal, innovations in scholarly communication. Early stage ventures were too risky for responsible organizations like The University Library. Most ideas failed or remained unexecuted. The Shelfless Revolution changed the environment. Individual scholars in charge of their own budget and confronted with the actual costs of scholarly communication were willing to fund risky but promising experiments.

The Fallout

The Shelfless Revolution killed the digital lending library. This started a chain reaction that affected every service offered by The University Library.

It was immediately obvious that archives had to survive. The print archive was scanned and stored in repositories. In spite of their limitations, repositories became the primary portal into the print archive. Print volumes became museum artifacts virtually untouched by humans. The digital archive mostly contains university-owned scholarly material. Copyright issues created too many obstacles to archive publisher-owned content. New legislative proposals would put the burden on publishers to preserve digital collections of significant cultural, scientific, and/or historical value. This is similar to how we treat protected historical buildings. Publishers will have to store such digital collections in audited standardized archives with government-backed protections against all kinds of calamity.

Print lending died out when most books contained multimedia illustrations and interactive components. Print material of historical importance was moved from the lending library to the nonlending print archive. This killed interlibrary loan services of printed material. Digital interlibrary loans all but disappeared with custom personal libraries.

After losing collection development staff, the reference desk could no longer cover a broad cross-section of scholarly disciplines. It got caught in a downward spiral of decreasing usefulness and declining use.

Long ago, librarians controlled what information was readily available. As technology advanced, their gatekeeping power evaporated. They still nudged publishers towards quality using the power of the purse. This too is now gone. The battle against disinformation seems lost. The profound political differences on where fighting disinformation ends and censorship begins are nowhere near being resolved.

After wreaking havoc on public school libraries, The University Library was braced against attempts at censorship. Before it could engage in that fight, The Shelfless Revolution happened. The switch to personal digital libraries reduced the political heat as universities no longer directly paid for controversial content. Censorship lost the battle, but The University Library lost the war.

Thousands of library projects got caught in the turmoil. Some survived by being moved to other organizations. Most did not. We will never know how much destruction was caused by The Shelfless Revolution.

Conclusion

The University Library made all the right moves. It embraced new technology. It executed the transition from print to digital without major disruption. It was open to new opportunities.

Yet, things went wrong. Open access repositories were supposed to be subversive weapons. Open access journals were supposed to be deadly competitors. Instead, they turned out to be paper tigers, powerless against the oligarchy of the scholarly communication market.

Publishers of newspapers, magazines, music, and video barely survived the disruptive transition to digital. As they rebuilt their businesses from the ruins, they developed business models for the new reality. In contrast, the smooth transition of the scholarly communication market protected existing organizations. It also perpetuated the flaws of old business models, and it let the distorted market grow more dysfunctional every day.

With the benefit of hindsight, the necessary changes could have been implemented more humanely. This was never a realistic option, however. The chaotic and disruptive change of The Shelfless Revolution was inevitable.





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