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January 16, 2004
The Twilight of Digitalization?
This article was linked in a post on LISNews and while I'm sure that all three of you reading this have already seen it there. And you saw that I commented on it there, as well. So why drag it over here? I couldn't resist, exactly.
I'm hesitant to call the author's argument wrong-headed, although a lot of people may do just that (and they wouldn't necessarily be wrong). Thomas Hecker makes a number of arguments and assumptions ... and some of them are pretty familiar, actually:
- Paper is a superior form for long-term archival storage and access
- To some extent, librarians and archivists aren't in full control of efforts to preserve electronic journal content -- it is, and indeed should be, a cooperative effort with journal publishers and content generators (i.e. authors), but truthfully ... given the state of copyright and the scholarly communications landscape, the preservation community is not in the driver's seat and it's taking a considerable amount of time and effort to 1) get the cooperation of all the other actors and 2) work out all of the details to make our efforts as much of a win-win situation as we can
- Redundancy in preservation efforts (physical or digitally oriented) is not wasted effort; in fact, it's our best bet for making sure that things survive because ... well, stuff happens -- at the digital end, this principle is the key premise of Stanford University LOCKSS initiative: Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe
Setting aside all of the arguments regarding global material resources management and sustainability ... his conclusions at the end of the article give me cause to practice my Spock impression (that is, raise one eyebrow):
Academic libraries that commit wholeheartedly to digital books and journals are opting to serve only the present without an eye to the future. Academic libraries that maintain a robust physical archive will not only be serving the present but will be preserving the past and the present for the future.
Are academic libraries taking a major risk in shifting towards electronic-only material as a substantial basis for their collections and practices? Yup. Are we doing this blindly out of naive, misplaced technophilia? Maybe some are, but I would suspect that most aren't. There are supply and demand issues with electronic vs. print formats that libraries must contend with, and we must do that in under the pressure of stagnant or dwindling capital resources. I tend to check myself when I hear about academic libraries who decide to go all-digital for their journal collections (Drexel, I'm looking at you ... you too, Princeton), but 1) not everyone is going that route and 2) it's worth a shot. I suppose my point (and I do have one, in addition to the one on the top of my head) is librarians aren't thinking that one format, one medium, one standard practice will save us from the decline of civilization. Starting from that premise is so counterproductive that it's distracting.
And yes, I was serious in my comment on LISNews: I kept on flashing to Isaac Asimov's Nightfall while reading the article and I wanted to giggle. Unfair of me, but then again, I'm pretty sure that "Nightfall" was the first sci-fi literature I was exposed to -- at the tender age of 8 (same year I started drinking coffee ... coincidence?).
My $0.02, YMMV, etc. Comments, corrections, reinterpretations and clarifications welcome. So are coupons for Peet's coffee, which is neither here nor there.
Posted by misseli at January 16, 2004 05:44 PM
Comments
Hey Miss Eli,
Apologies for a completely off-topic comment, but I know no other way of contacting you. I wanted to suggest making your RSS feed full-text (although there are merits to partial-post feeds, they are typically commercial in nature). It's an easy change. Go into your RSS 1.0 (index.rdf) template and change MTEntryExcerpt to MTEntryBody. Save and rebuild. That's it. Your adoring subscribed fans will be very appreciative. Thanks for your consideration.
Posted by: Greg at January 16, 2004 08:35 PM
While I tended to agree with Hecker in principle, my attitudes change a bit after entering grad school. Accessible journals are a vital part of producing good research, and it's often easier to google-search information than it is to plough through all the journals to see what you can find. The paid services are nice... if you can access them and afford them (or the connection from the school works Just Right for you.)
So I find myself in an awkward middle phase, needing the research and wanting to preserve copyright integrity and author royalties. And I don't know what to suggest.
Posted by: wordslinger at January 16, 2004 10:08 PM
My take on this is that some of the concerns are a bit embedded in a old way of doing things. I feel strongly that the current model of digital storage of information (localized, file-folder paradigm) is going the way of the dodo, and that distributed, heavily meta-data'd information is going to change the way in which we think about digital "repositories." Instead of repositories, we'll have networks, and the content will be invisibly embedded in such (much like a P2P system with increased data efficiency).
Then again, I also believe that our traditional models of property are useless bits of archaic law when compared to the possibilities of digital information. There's no hope for traditional copyright models in the future..new models must be arrived at and agreed upon.
Posted by: Jason Griffey at January 17, 2004 06:43 AM
Useless bits of archaic law? Do tell.
Hecker is pretty much trying to stuff several genies back into a bottle, one of which would definitely be the copyright situation with digital material. But do you really think that copyright is circling the drain?
Posted by: misseli at January 17, 2004 09:52 PM
Indeed, I do. At least our traditional notions of it. Traditional understanding of property is exclusionary...one person can own what another cannot (a TV, a chair, a coffee mug) and this ownership allowed control. Even in cases of joint ownership of, for example, land...the point of assigning the label or property of "ownership" is to control usage.
Over the last 30 years or so, there have been a few "attacks" on this model when it has been applied to intellectual property (Xerox and the photocopier, Sony and the Betamax). These failed to force a significant change in property laws because the supply chain of intellectual property was analog in nature (books are naturally analog, as are videotapes). However, with the rise of broadband (and only getting broader) and the digitization of the supply chain, traditional understanding of intellectual property is becoming a vestigal organ in the body politic.
This is not to say that we don't need some types of protection on informational content (I'm not sure that the word property is even valid at this point). But the protection needs to be something OTHER than traditional understandings of copyright (which, as far as I can tell with the general populace, is an oximoronic phrase to begin with).
Posted by: Jason at January 18, 2004 06:53 AM
Hmm. I think we are likely to actually run out of fossil fuels before our legal and economic system gives up on the notion of intellectual property and its controls.
Would you (or do you) cheer on the work of Lessig and others in trying to reverse the current pendulum of copyright legislation in hopes that the pendulum will continue to swing farther in the direction that you want it to? Or do you think cases like Eldred v. Ashcroft are like re-arranging deck chairs on the Lusitania?
Posted by: misseli at January 19, 2004 12:48 AM
Decided to take this to TrackBack instead of staying in the comments...should have done that earlier. :-)
Posted by: Jason at January 19, 2004 08:30 AM