Dead Library Lending

The University Library is a zombie, going through the motions and unaware it is dead.

You probably disagree. If you are willing to give me a few paragraphs, I think I can change your mind and convince you that digital technology has killed the institutional library.

To watch movies and television shows, digital consumers might use Amazon Prime Video or one of its competitors. These services each provide a basic video library, and they act as portals to pay-for-access channels and to pay-per-view movies. Users assemble their own video library tailored to their own specific tastes and budgets. Using similar services, digital consumers construct their own digital libraries for music, podcasts, games, and non-scholarly e-books and audio books.

For scholarly information, university libraries provide the same one-size-fits all service to the undergraduate pre-med student, the graduate student in geology, the postdoc in mathematics, and the professor of philosophy. When it comes to information needs, graduate students in mechanical engineering in Ohio have more in common with mechanical engineering researchers in Bangalore than with an Ethnic Studies professor with whom they share a campus.

Every university employs a team of librarians and web developers to build almost identical websites. They negotiate site licenses for content and software. They knit together the licensed software and content into a coherent and usable service. They manage catalogs, authentication services, journal databases, citation databases, institutional repositories, interlibrary loan services, etc. At every university, there are endless discussions and negotiations between librarians, faculty, and publishers, only to end up with strikingly similar collections of site licenses, software, and websites. The differences are local customizations, which are touted as a service to the local community. In reality, they are annoyances for scholars moving to a new institution or collaborating with colleagues at other institutions. Where they are similar, libraries are a duplication of effort. Where they are different, libraries waste time and energy on annoying customizations.

We came out of the paper era with tunnel vision, and we copied the paper-based library in the new digital reality. The institutional model belongs in the waste-paper basket of history. Individual scholars should make their own scholarly-communication purchase decisions for their own benefit. By eliminating the institutional digital-lending library, universities would eliminate the costs of purchasing and managing site licenses. These savings could reduce student tuition and raise researcher salaries with the understanding that, going forward, they are responsible to acquire the information resources they need.

This would end a system where scholarly information is bought with other people’s money. “Free” library services paid for by grants, charitable contributions, tuition, and endowment investment returns have distorted the scholarly-communication market into an unsustainable disaster. In a free market without middlemen, scholars would make their own cost-benefit analysis for each component of the scholarly-information system. This would not solve all problems and, undoubtedly, would create new ones. Nevertheless, the invisible hand has a proven track record of balancing cost, quality, and quantity of goods and services in most industries.

Librarians and academics have long been aware of the dysfunctional scholarly-information market. For the past 25 years, we have tried to get out of the library-site-license model. We tried various Open Access initiatives with the hope of nudging scholarly communication into a more sustainable model. None have succeeded. In fact, the Open Access movement has devolved into an expensive bureaucratic nightmare.

Librarians took charge of one particular Open Access model: Institutional Repositories that provide open access to the preprints of a university or a consortium of universities. Once upon a time, we hoped that these repositories would work together to provide worldwide open access to the latest research. However, effective federation of institutional repositories remained elusive. Local idiosyncrasies, introduced under pressure to conform to local demands and circumstances, made this impossible. After more than 25 years, only the most naive hold out hope for an effective worldwide interconnected repository network.

Other Open Access initiatives seek to eliminate the library-site-licensing model by having authors, universities, or funding agencies pay for the cost of publication up front. These initiatives have opened the floodgates for even more spending on more journals. Open-access journals are funded by so many organizations in direct and indirect ways that no one knows how much is spent on them. It is unlikely that some of these funding models should turn successful, sustainable, and become a dominant force in the scholarly-information market. However, if that should happen, it would kill the institutional library in the process, as it would eliminate the need to manage site licenses.

So, that is where we are. The conventional library-site-licensing model for scholarly communication is unsustainable and needs to be terminated. If open-access journals were to become the primary model, they would kill the institutional library. Institutional Repositories, the open-access model where libraries play any role, is infeasible. No matter the future of Open Access, the doors are closing for the institutional library. Meanwhile, the example of popular media is opening a window on personal libraries managed by individuals for their own benefit.

The University Library is a zombie, going through the motions and unaware it is dead.

Do you still disagree? If so, what is your rationale for continuing the institutional digital-lending library?