Here’s the summary from a new Pew Internet & American Life survey of 6,224 Americans 16 years and older:

Some 90% of Americans ages 16 and older said that the closing of their local public library would have an impact on their community, with 63% saying it would have a “major” impact. Asked about the personal impact of a public library closing, two-thirds (67%) of Americans said it would affect them and their families, including 29% who said it would have a major impact. Moreover, the vast majority of Americans ages 16 and older say that public libraries play an important role in their communities:

• 95% of Americans ages 16 and older agree that the materials and resources available at public libraries play an important role in giving everyone a chance to succeed;

• 95% say that public libraries are important because they promote literacy and a love of reading;

• 94% say that having a public library improves the quality of life in a community;

• 81% say that public libraries provide many services people would have a hard time finding elsewhere.

I find it encouraging that while only 54% of Americans have used a public library in the past 12 months, 95% think libraries play an important social role. The half of Americans who don’t use public libraries still see the importance of maintaining them. The Pew report confirms that “Libraries are also particularly valued by those who are unemployed, retired, or searching for a job, as well as those living with a disability and internet users who lack home internet access.”

The full report is available online for free because Pew.

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The Luis Ángel Arango Library and the National Library of Colombia have been bringing in speakers this year to talk about the future of libraries, the relation of digital and cultural worlds, and library innovation, partially sponsored by the U.S. State Dept. through our local embassy. Friday was my turn. What a privilege!

And I mean privilege. After spending the morning wandering around a section of Bogota that we really enjoyed — so interesting and lively, and people wer so kind to us — but we were later told we should have avoided, my wife and I met with Alexis de Greiff [twitter: ahdegreiffa] the director of the Luis Ángel Arango Library (web site here). He and I had had lunch this summer when he was touring library innovation labs in the US. Alexis has the opportunity to re-do some of the space in the National Library. It was a fascinating to hear the sorts of possibilities he’s considering, including creating an innovation lab somewhat along the lines of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab; we talked about the wisdom of including researchers in the mix, something we’d love to do here at our Lab.

Alexis has a huge opportunity because the Library is such an important part of the life of the city and of the country. It has well over a million books, making it the largest library in Latin America. And it gets an astonishing 5,000 visitors a day, making it more used than the New York Public Library. Many of the patrons are university students, so the Library has elements of both a research library (including the most complete collection in the world of materials about Colombian heritage) and a public library. It is physically located in the midst of an amazing cultural complex that includes an absolutely stunning concert hall and art museums. If you think there’s value in having art, culture, education, and knowledge intersect, come to the Luis Ángel Arango Library Library.

The Luis Ángel Arango Library, and the church up the street.

We got a tour of the Library from top to bottom, led by Diana Restrepo Torres, the director of technology (collections development and cataloguing), and Juan Pablo Siza Ramírez, the coordinator of digital resources. The current building was created in the 1950s and still exhibits that era’s openness and cleanliness of line. Significant additions and modifications have been made over the years. It all feels light, airy, and inviting.

About 20% of the works are on open stacks. The rest are in the basement and are fetched via a conveyor system. (The works are shelved according to the Dewey Decimal System, but have a color stripe on the spine to indicate the rough area in which they are shelved, a quick way to get works to their first stop.)

Books in basement, with conveyor upwards

The Library includes sound-proofed rooms where people can practice playing musical instruments, a room for playing board games (with a balcony overlooking Mount Monserrate), lots of computers (but only designated areas with wifi), a rare books room, cafes, and much more. It is a big library.

Game Room

Mt. Monserrate from the game room window

And it is a library completely committed to serving its community however it can.

The Library is funded by the Central Bank (like our Federal Reserve). The Bank spends about a third of its budget supporting Colombian culture, and for this reason the Library is able to purchase cultural items that otherwise might slip out of Colombian hands. For example, Diana and Juan Pablo should us a set of volumes from the 1880s that were simply astonishingly. They are part of a ten volume set the Library recently purchased, hand-written and illustrated by José María Gutierrez de Alba, a Spanish spy who traveled through Colombia for about 13 years. The Library is going to digitize the volumes and post them online in its Virtual Library under an Open Access license. The thought that everyone will be able to see these pages makes me happy.

Juan Pablo tells me that the Spanish equivalent to "awesome!" is "grandiose!" This is a grandiose library.

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I’m at the Engaging Data 2013conference where Noam Chomsky and Pulitzer Prize winner (twice!) Barton Gellman are going to talk about Big Data in the Snowden Age, moderated by Ludwig Siegele of the Economist. (Gellman is one of the three people Snowden vouchsafed his documents with.) The conference aims at having us rethink how we use Big Data and how it’s used.

LS: Prof. Chomsky, what’s your next book about?

NC: Philosophy of mind and language. I’ve been writing articles that are pretty skeptical about Big Data. [Please read the orange disclaimer: I’m paraphrasing and making errors of every sort.]

LS: You’ve said that Big Data is for people who want to do the easy stuff. But shouldn’t you be thrilled as a linguist?

NC: When I got to MIT at 1955, I was hired to work on a machine translation program. But I refused to work on it. “The only way to deal with machine translation at the current stage of understanding was by brute force, which after 30-40 years is how it’s being done.” A principled understanding based on human cognition is far off. Machine translation is useful but you learn precisely nothing about human thought, cognition, language, anything else from it. I use the Internet. Glad to have it. It’s easier to push some buttons on your desk than to walk across the street to use the library. But the transition from no libraries to libraries was vastly greater than the transition from librarites to Internet. [Cool idea and great phrase! But I think I disagree. It depends.] We can find lots of data; the problem is understanding it. And a lot of data around us go through a filter so it doesn’t reach us. E.g., the foreign press reports that Wikileaks released a chapter about the secret TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership). It was front page news in Australia and Europe. You can learn about it on the Net but it’s not news. The chapter was on Intellectual Property rights, which means higher prices for less access to pharmaceuticals, and rams through what SOPA tried to do, restricting use of the Net and access to data.

LS: For you Big Data is useless?

NC: Big data is very useful. If you want to find out about biology, e.g. But why no news about TPP? As Sam Huntington said, power remains strongest in the dark. [approximate] We should be aware of the long history of surveillance.

LS: Bart, as a journalist what do you make of Big Data?

BG: It’s extraordinarily valuable, especially in combination with shoe-leather, person-to-person reporting. E.g., a colleague used traditional reporting skills to get the entire data set of applicants for presidential pardons. Took a sample. More reporting. Used standard analytics techniques to find that white people are 4x more likely to get pardons, that campaign contributors are also more likely. It would be likely in urban planning [which is Senseable City Labs’ remit]. But all this leads to more surveillance. E.g., I could make the case that if I had full data about everyone’s calls, I could do some significant reporting, but that wouldn’t justify it. We’ve failed to have the debate we need because of the claim of secrecy by the institutions in power. We become more transparent to the gov’t and to commercial entities while they become more opaque to us.

LS: Does the availability of Big Data and the Internet automatically mean we’ll get surveillance? Were you surprised by the Snowden revelations>

NC: I was surprised at the scale, but it’s been going on for 100 years. We need to read history. E.g., the counter-insurgency “pacification” of the Philippines by the US. See the book by McCoy [maybe this. The operation used the most sophisticated tech at the time to get info about the population to control and undermine them. That tech was immediately used by the US and Britain to control their own populations, .g., Woodrow Wilson’s Red Scare. Any system of power — the state, Google, Amazon — will use the best available tech to control, dominate, and maximize their power. And they’ll want to do it in secret. Assange, Snowden and Manning, and Ellsberg before them, are doing the duty of citizens.

BG: I’m surprised how far you can get into this discussion without assuming bad faith on the part of the government. For the most part what’s happening is that these security institutions genuinely believe most of the time that what they’re doing is protecting us from big threats that we don’t understand. The opposition comes when they don’t want you to know what they’re doing because they’re afraid you’d call it off if you knew. Keith Alexander said that he wishes that he could bring all Americans into this huddle, but then all the bad guys would know. True, but he’s also worried that we won’t like the plays he’s calling.

LS: Bruce Schneier says that the NSA is copying what Google and Yahoo, etc. are doing. If the tech leads to snooping, what can we do about it?

NC: Govts have been doing this for a century, using the best tech they had. I’m sure Gen. Alexander believes what he’s saying, but if you interviewed the Stasi, they would have said the same thing. Russian archives show that these monstrous thugs were talking very passionately to one another about defending democracy in Eastern Europe from the fascist threat coming from the West. Forty years ago, RAND released Japanese docs about the invasion of China, showing that the Japanese had heavenly intentions. They believed everything they were saying. I believe these are universals. We’d probably find it for Genghis Khan as well. I have yet to find any system of power that thought it was doing the wrong thing. They justify what they’re doing for the noblest of objectives, and they believe it. The CEOs of corporations as well. People find ways of justifying things. That’s why you should be extremely cautious when you hear an appeal to security. It literally carries no information, even in the technical sense: it’s completely predictable and thus carries no info. I don’t doubt that the US security folks believe it, but it is without meaning. The Nazis had their own internal justifications.

BG: The capacity to rationalize may be universal, but you’ll take the conversation off track if you compare what’s happening here to the Stasi. The Stasi were blackmailing people, jailing them, preventing dissent. As a journalist I’d be very happy to find that our govt is spying on NGOs or using this power for corrupt self-enriching purposes.

NC: I completely agree with that, but that’s not the point: The same appeal is made in the most monstrous of circumstances. The freedom we’ve won sharply restricts state power to control and dominate, but they’ll do whatever they can, and they’ll use the same appeals that monstrous systems do.

LS: Aren’t we all complicit? We use the same tech. E.g., Prof. Chomsky, you’re the father of natural language processing, which is used by the NSA.

NC: We’re more complicit because we let them do it. In this country we’re very free, so we have more responsibility to try to control our govt. If we do not expose the plea of security and separate out the parts that might be valid from the vast amount that’s not valid, then we’re complicit because we have the oppty and the freedom.

LS: Does it bug you that the NSA uses your research?

NC: To some extent, but you can’t control that. Systems of power will use whatever is available to them. E.g., they use the Internet, much of which was developed right here at MIT by scientists who wanted to communicate freely. You can’t prevent the powers from using it for bad goals.

BG: Yes, if you use a free online service, you’re the product. But if you use a for-pay service, you’re still the product. My phone tracks me and my social network. I’m paying Verizon about $1,000/year for the service, and VZ is now collecting and selling my info. The NSA couldn’t do its job as well if the commercial entities weren’t collecting and selling personal data. The NSA has been tapping into the links between their data centers. Google is racing to fix this, but a cynical way of putting this is that Google is saying “No one gets to spy on our customers except us.”

LS: Is there a way to solve this?

BG: I have great faith that transparency will enable the development of good policy. The more we know, the more we can design policies to keep power in place. Before this, you couldn’t shop for privacy. Now a free market for privacy is developing as the providers now are telling us more about what they’re doing. Transparency allows legislation and regulation to be debated. The House Repubs came within 8 votes of prohibiting call data collection, which would have been unthinkable before Snowden. And there’s hope in the judiciary.

NC: We can do much more than transparency. We can make use of the available info to prevent surveillance. E.g., we can demand the defeat of TPP. And now hardware in computers is being designed to detect your every keystroke, leading some Americans to be wary of Chinese-made computers, but the US manufacturers are probably doing it better. And manufacturers for years have been trying to dsign fly-sized drones to collect info; that’ll be around soon. Drones are a perfect device for terrorists. We can learn about this and do something about it. We don’t have to wait until it’s exposed by Wikileaks. It’s right there in mainstream journals.

LS: Are you calling for a political movement?

NC: Yes. We’re going to need mass action.

BG: A few months ago I noticed a small gray box with an EPA logo on it outside my apartment in NYC. It monitors energy usage, useful to preventing brown outs. But it measures down to the apartment level, which could be useful to the police trying to establish your personal patterns. There’s no legislation or judicial review of the use of this data. We can’t turn back the clock. We can try to draw boundaries, and then have sufficient openness so that we can tell if they’ve crossed those boundaries.

LS: Bart, how do you manage the flow of info from Snowden?

BG: Snowden does not manage the release of the data. He gave it to three journalists and asked us to use your best judgment — he asked us to correct for his bias about what the most important stories are — and to avoid direct damage to security. The documents are difficult. They’re often incomplete and can be hard to interpret.

Q&A

Q: What would be a first step in forming a popular movement?

NC: Same as always. E.g., the women’s movement began in the 1960s (at least in the modern movement) with consciousness-raising groups.

Q: Where do we draw the line between transparency and privacy, given that we have real enemies?

BG: First you have to acknowledge that there is a line. There are dangerous people who want to do dangerous things, and some of these tools are helpful in preventing that. I’ve been looking for stories that elucidate big policy decisions without giving away specifics that would harm legitimate action.

Q: Have you changed the tools you use?

BG: Yes. I keep notes encrypted. I’ve learn to use the tools for anonymous communication. But I can’t go off the grid and be a journalist, so I’ve accepted certain trade-offs. I’m working much less efficiently than I used to. E.g., I sometimes use computers that have never touched the Net.

Q: In the women’s movement, at least 50% of the population stood to benefit. But probably a large majority of today’s population would exchange their freedom for convenience.

NC: The trade-off is presented as being for security. But if you read the documents, the security issue is how to keep the govt secure from its citizens. E.g., Ellsberg kept a volume of the Pentagon Papers secret to avoid affecting the Vietnam negotiations, although I thought the volume really only would have embarrassed the govt. Security is in fact not a high priority for govts. The US govt is now involved in the greatest global terrorist campaign that has ever been carried out: the drone campaign. Large regions of the world are now being terrorized. If you don’t know if the guy across the street is about to be blown away, along with everyone around, you’re terrorized. Every time you kill an Al Qaeda terrorist, you create 40 more. It’s just not a concern to the govt. In 1950, the US had incomparable security; there was only one potential threat: the creation of ICBM’s with nuclear warheads. We could have entered into a treaty with Russia to ban them. See McGeorge Bundy’s history. It says that he was unable to find a single paper, even a draft, suggesting that we do something to try to ban this threat of total instantaneous destruction. E.g., Reagan tested Russian nuclear defenses that could have led to horrible consequences. Those are the real security threats. And it’s true not just of the United States.

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Marshall Breeding gave a talk today to the Harvard Library system as part of its Discoverability Day. Marshall is an expert in discovery systems, i.e., technology that enables library users to find what they need and what they didn’t know they needed, across every medium and metadata boundary.

It’s a stupendously difficult problem, not least because the various providers of the metadata about non-catalog items — journal articles, etc. — don’t cooperate. On top of that, there’s a demand for “single searchbox solutions,” so that you can not only search everything the Googley way, but the results that come back will magically sort themselves in the order of what’s most useful to you. To bring us closer to that result, Marshall said that systems are beginning to use personal profiles and usage data. The personal profile lets the search engine know that you’re an astronomer, so that when you search for “mercury” you’re probably not looking for information about the chemical, the outboard motor company, or Queen. The usage data will let the engine sort based on what your community has voted on with its checkouts, recommendations, etc.

Marshall was careful to stipulate that using profiles or usage data will require user consent. I’m very interested in this because the Library Innovation Lab where I work has created an online library browser — StackLife — that sorts results based on a variety of measures of Harvard community usage. StackLife computes a “stackscore” based on a simple calculation of the number of checkouts by faculty, grad students or undergrads, how many copies are in Harvard’s 73 libraries, and potentially other metrics such as how often it’s put on reserve or called back early. The stackscores are based on 10-year aggregates without any personal identifiers, and with no knowledge of which books were checked out together. And our Awesome Box project, now in more than 40 libraries, provides a returns box into which users can deposit books that they thought were “awesome,” generating particularly delicious user-based (but completely anonymized) data.

Marshall is right: usage data is insanely useful for a community, and I’d love for us to be able to get our hands on more of it. But, I got into a Twitter discussion about the danger of re-identification with Mark Ockerbloom [twitter:jmarkockerbloom] and John Wilbanks [twitter:wilbanks], two people I greatly respect, and I agree that a simple opt-in isn’t enough, because people may not fully recognize the possibility that their info may be made public. So, I had an idea.

Suppose you are not allowed to do a “soft” opt-in, by which I mean an opt-in that requires you to read some terms and ticking a box that permits the sharing of information about what you check out from the library. Instead, you would be clearly told that you are opting-in to publishing your check-outs. Not to letting your checkouts be made public if someone figures out how to get them, or even to making your checkouts public to anyone who asks for them. No, you’d be agreeing to having a public page with your name on it that lists your checkouts. This is a service a lot of people want anyway, but the point would be to make it completely clear to you that ticking the checkbox means that, yes, your checkouts are so visible that they get their own page. And if you want to agree to the “soft” opt-in, but don’t want that public page posted, you can’t.

Presumably the library checkout system would allow you to exempt particular checkouts, but by default they all get posted. That would, I think, drive home what the legal language expressed in the “soft” version really entails.

Here are a couple of articles by Marshall Breeding: 1. Infotoday 2. Digital Shift

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I was unable to go to our local Aaron Swartz Hackathon, one of twenty around the world, because I’d committed (very happily) to give the after dinner talk at the University of Rhode Island Graduate Library and Information Studies 50th anniversary gala last night.

The event brought together an amazing set of people, including Senator Jack Reed, the current and most recent presidents of the American Library Association, Joan Ress Reeves, 50 particularly distinguished alumni (out of the three thousand (!) who have been graduated), and many, many more. These are heroes of libraries. (My cousin’s daughter, Alison Courchesne, also got an award. Yay, Alison!)

Although I’d worked hard on my talk, I decided to open it differently. I won’t try to reproduce what I actually said because the adrenalin of speaking in front of a crowd, especially one as awesome as last night’s, wipes out whatever short term memory remains. But it went very roughly something like this:

It’s awesome to be in a room with teachers, professors, researchers, a provost, deans, and librarians: people who work to make the world better…not to mention the three thousand alumni who are too busy do-ing to be able to be here tonight.

But it makes me remember another do-er: Aaron Swartz, the champion of open access, open data, open metadata, open government, open everything. Maybe I’m thinking about Aaron tonight because today is his birthday.

When we talk about the future of libaries, I usually promote the idea of libraries as platforms — platforms that make openly available everything that libraries know: all the data, all the metadata, what the community is making of what they get from the library (privacy accommodated, of course), all the guidance and wisdom of librarians, all the content especially if we can ever fix the insane copyright laws. Everything. All accessible to anyone who wants to write an application that puts it to use.

And the reason for that is because in my heart I don’t think librarians are going to invent the future of libraries. It’s too big a job for any one group. It will take the world to invent the future of libraries. It will take 14 year olds like Aaron to invent the future of libraries. We need supply them with platforms that enable them.

I should add that I co-direct a Library Innovation Lab where we do work that I’m very proud of. So, of course libraries will participate in the invention of their future. But it’ll take the world — a world that contains people with the brilliance and commitment of an Aaron Swartz — to invent that future fully.

Here are wise words delivered at an Aaron Hackathon last night by Carl Malamud: Hacking Authority. For me, Carl is reminding us that the concept of hacking over-promises when the changes threaten large institutions that represent long-held values and assumptions. Change often requires the persistence and patience that Aaron exhibited, even as he hacked.

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Dan Cohen has some announcements in his welcome to the DPLAfest.

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.

The collection now has 5M items. These come from partner hubs (large institutions) and service hubs (aggregations of smaller providers). Three new hubs have joined, bringing the total to nine, from NY, North Carolina, and Texas. Dan stresses the diversity of contributors.

The DPLA sends visitors back to the contributing organizations. E.g., Minnesota Reflections is up 55% in visitors and 62% in unique visitors over the year since it joined the DPLA.

He also announces the DPLA Bookshelf, which is a contribution from the Harvard Library Innovation Lab that I co-direct. It’s an embedded version of the Stacklife browser, which you can see by going to DP.LA and searching for a book. (You can use the Harvard version here.

Dan announces a $1M grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to help local libraries curate material in the DPLA and start scanning in local collections. Also, an anonymous donor gave $450,000. [I don’t want to say who it was, but, well, you’re welcome.] Dan Cohen suggests we become a sponsor athttp://www.dp.la/donate. T-shirts and, yes, tote bags.

There have been 1,7M uses of the DPLA API as of September 2013. Examples of work already done:

• Culture Collage

• Open Pics (a mobile app that uses the geocoding of items that the DPLA does)

• Serendip-o-automatic (from NEH): paste in some text and it will show you related material.

Dan talks about DPA Local, and idea that would enable local communities to use the services the DPLA provides.

Dan says that all of the sessions have Google Docs already set up for collaborative note-taking [an approach I’m very fond of].

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The Emily Dickinson archive went online today. It’s a big deal not only because of the richness of the collection, and the excellent technical work by the Berkman Center, but also because it is a good sign for Open Access. Amherst, one of the major contributors, had open accessed its Dickinson material earlier, and now the Harvard University Press has open accessed some of its most valuable material. Well done!

The collection makes available in one place the great Dickinson collections held by Amherst, Harvard, and others. The metadata for the items is (inevitably) inconsistent in terms of its quantity, but the system has been tuned so that items with less metadata are not systematically overwhelmed by its search engine.

The Berkman folks tell me that they’re going to develop an open API. That will be extra special cool.

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On Friday I had the pleasure and honor of attending a symposium about libraries as part of the inaugural festivities welcoming Temple University’s new president, Neil Theobald.

The event, put together by Joe Lucia, the Dean of Temple U. Library, featured an amazing set of library folks. It was awesome to have some time to hang out with such an accomplished group of people who not only share values, but share values that are so core to our culture.

I liveblogged the talks, with my usual unreliable haphazardness and cavalier attitude toward accuracy and comprehension. Here are the links, in chronological order (which of course is the reverse of blogological order):

1. James Neal: 26 truths about libraries

2. Siobhan Reardon: Renewing Philadelphia’s public libraries

3. Nancy Kranich: Engaging the academic community

4. Rachel Frick: Innovation outward

5. Anne Kenney: Cornell’s hiphop collection

6. Bryn Geffert: Libraries as publishers

7. Charles Watkinson: Univ. press partnerships

8. Craig Dykers: Architecting libraries

I led off the session with a talk about why the networking of knowledge and ideas, especially in college communities, should encourage libraries to develop themselves as platforms in addition to being portals.

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At Temple University’s symposium in honor of the inauguration of the University’s new president, on Oct. 18, 2013.

Charles Watkinson is Director, Purdue Univ. Press. He says he wishes everyone were like Bryn [see prior post]. But univ. presses generally only receive 15% of their income from the university. So, Bryn’s model isn’t generally applicable.

His toddlers watch Dinosaur Train. “I know you perceive university presses as dinosaurs” but as in the show, some dinosaurs are different from others.

John Thompson in Books in the Digital Age talks about “publishing fields.” He says it’s complex but not without order. We’re seeing the emergence of several different mission-driven publishers: university presses, scholarly societies, library presses. He will talk about univ and library presses. (He points to Envisioning Emancipation as a univ. press at its best.) He goes through some of the similarities and differences between the two presses.

He takes as a case study the Purdue U Press and Purdue Scholarly Publishing Services as an example of how these types of presses can be complementary. (He mentions Anne Kenney’s partnering of Cornell Library with DukePurdue U Press on Project Euclid.)

The aim, Charles says, is to meet the full spectrum of needs, ranging from pre-print to published books. He points to the differences in brand styles of the two and how they can be merged.

So, “What can we do together that we couldn’t do apart?”

“We can serve campus needs better.” He points to the Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research, which combines library skills (instruction, assessment, institutional outreach) with publisher skills (solicitation for content, project management, editing, design).

Also, together they can support disciplines. E.g., Habri Central Library skills: bibliographic research, taxonomy, metadata, licensing, preservation. Publisher skills: financial management, acquisition of original content, marketing.

Also, solve issues in the system. E.g., the underlying data behind tech reports, e.g., JTRP. Library skills: digitization, metadata, online hosting, linked data, preservation. Publisher skills: peer review administration, process redesign, project management.

Questions for these merged entities: What disciplines can best be served together? How to build credibility? How to turn projects into programs? What is the future role of earned revenues? Will all products be Open Access? What is the sustainability plan for OA?

Maybe libraries should turn to university presses for advice and help with engagement since “that’s what university presses do.”

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At Temple University’s symposium in honor of the inauguration of the University’s new president, on Oct. 18, 2013.

Bryn Geffert is College Librarian at Amherst.

Imagine a biologist at Amherst who writes a science article. Who paid for her to write that article? Amherst. But who paid Amherst? Students. Alumni and donors. US funds.

Now it’s accepted by Elsevier. The biologist gives it to Elsevier as a gift, in effect. Elsevier charges Amherst $24,000/year for a subscription to this particular journal. It’s Looney Tunes, Bryn says. There isn’t a worse imaginable model.

Since 1986, serial [= journal] prices have increased 400%. Why? Because a few publishers have a monopoly: Wiley, Elsevier, Springer. With increasing prices for serials, libraries have less money for books. In 1986, academic libraries spent 46% of budgets on books. Now it’s down to 22%. And the effect on book publishers is even worse: when they can’t sell books to libraries, they shut down publishing in entire disciplinary fields. The average sales per academic book is now 200 copies. Since 1993, 5 disciplines have lost presses. E.g., the number of presses sserving British Lit have dropped by about half. More and more academic works are going to bad commercial presses — bad in that they don’t improve what they get.

These these are just the problems of wealthy institutions. How about the effect on developing countries? He gives three examples of work of direct relevance to local cultures where the local culture cannot afford to buy the work.

University presses are dying. Money to purchase anything except journals is dying. Academic presses are dying. And we’re paying no attention to the world around us.

Why does Amherst care? Their motto is “terras irradient”: light the world. But nothing in this model supports that model.

What do we have to do? He goes through these quickly because, he says, we are familiar with them:

1. Open Access policies
2. Legislation that mandates that federally supported research be Open Access
3. Go after the monopolies that are violating anti-trust
4. Libraries have to boycott offenders.

But even so, we need to design a new system.

Amherst is asking what the mission of a university press is. Part of it: make good work even better and make it as widely available as possible.

What is the mission of the academic libraries? Make good info as widely available as possible.

So, combine forces. U of Mich put its press under the library. This inspired Amherst. But Amherst doesn’t have a press. So, they’re creating one.

• Everything will be online, Open Access (Creative Commons)

• They will hustle to get manuscripts

• All will be peer reviewed and rigorously edited

But how will they pay for it? Amherst’s Frost Library is giving two positions to the press. In return, those editors will solicit manuscripts. The President will raise money to endow a chair of the editor of the press. They’ll take some money from the Library to pay freelancers for copy-editing. Some other units at Amherst are kicking in other services, including design and building an online platform.

People say this is too small to make a difference. But other schools are starting to do similar things. This means that Amherst is a recipient of free content from them. Bryn can imagine a time when there’s so much OA content that the savings realized offset the costs of publishing OA content.

The goal is to move away from individual presses looking out for their own interests to one in which there’s free sharing. “I want to see a world in which the students at a university in Nairobi have access to the same information as students at Columbia.”

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