Collecting the Invisible
By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist
Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for November 2003
I was in my office working on a journal article a while back, and needed a few publications for the literature review. I happily plunked around in a few databases, and found a couple of recent interesting-looking things—even more happily, available in full text—so I printed them out.
Nothing stunning about that scenario, to be sure, even though only a few scant years ago I would have had to go to the library to get the articles; before that I would have had to go do the searching myself. (Okay, I probably would have sent my research assistant; but you know what I mean.) The peculiar—and truly slothful—aspect of my little exercise was that the articles I wanted were in journals I subscribe to. . . and were sitting four feet away from me on my bookshelf. I think in one case, I had a copy or two of the article already lying around somewhere, but I couldn’t be bothered to look for it.
And why should I, with ready access right there at my fingertips? It’s unlikely that I’m alone in my indolence, and this kind of behavior has been magnificently enabled by the massive increase in accessibility of all kinds of resources traditionally found in libraries.
However, while I owned the articles in my office, I didn’t own the ones I printed out—until I printed them out. Still with me? The “access vs. ownership” conundrum, passionately discussed over the last decade or so, is now at least familiar, if not resolved.
We all know it’s a trade-off: To provide this enhanced access, we have in many cases given up ownership in favor of licensing resources on a subscription basis or buying them by the drink. With traditional subscriptions, if you choose to stop subscribing, you get to keep whatever you got. Typically, under a licensing agreement, once the party’s over, there’s nothing to show for it other than printouts and happy memories.
Potential for frustration
There’s a lot of potential for frustration in this domain: vendors or services that evaporate (not a “divine” thought at all), license agreements that change or quintuple their price or are just plain evil, service interruptions, and so on.
It occurs to me there might lurk here another more subtle and insidious source of frustration. With few exceptions, what we conceive of as our library collections today really aren’t “ours” in the way we’re used to thinking of them. Oh, sure, we’ve paid for them, and made some initial decisions, and tend them as best we can.
But honestly, none of us really knows precisely what’s in there, since we have ceded important aspects of their control. In a sense, that’s been the case ever since we began collecting journals, magazines, newspapers, or any subscription; it’s impossible to know in advance what will appear in them (as opposed to being able to read a book before acquiring it). Add licensed resources—where decisions are often made by the people providing the access, remote from any particular library and community—and the locus of control recedes yet further. Not to mention the Internet.
This begs the question of whether these are really even “collections” any more. That depends on your definition of the term, and we don’t have one that’s universally accepted. In an article in volume 15, number 12 of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Hur-Li Lee analyzed the literature and practice of collections and developed a framework for thinking about them in a rigorous way. It makes interesting reading, and proposes that a collection requires the following: “a group of information resources, a defined user community, a collection development statement, and an integrated retrieval system.” Traditional concepts of collections, such as tangibility, format, physical collocation, and ownership, aren’t necessary in this analysis.
When we enter an unfamiliar library, I bet we all probably do the same thing—read the shelves to get a sense of the collection. Now that collection is both visible and invisible, and is much more difficult to comprehend or conceptualize, not only for us but also for our users. Is trading access for ownership a long-term win? Like some of our collections, that remains to be seen. . . but that’s another story.
A request
So let’s see just how funny and weird and stupid and annoying these agreements can be. Send me your favorite funky provisions, requirements, demands, threats, etc., and I’ll print the best in a future column for our mutual entertainment and commiseration. Names will of course be removed to save us all from libel.
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