Peter McCracken: Librarian as Entrepreneur

Rapidly emerging Serials Solutions, which offers librarians a reliable way to track full-text, electronic-format journals, was the buzz of the show floor at the American Library Association (ALA) annual conference in June.

Founded last year, Serials Solutions has grown quickly, with ten full-time employees, plus part-timers. During that time the company has hit some impressive targets: it has no debt, with its expansion financed out of revenues—in the neighborhood of $60,000 a month and growing; it has forged relationships with most of the main aggregators; and it now counts some 162 libraries as customers. However, perhaps most surprising is that the company's entrepreneurial cofounder, Peter McCracken, has a full-time job as a reference librarian at the University of Washington's (UW) Odegaard Undergraduate Library in Seattle.

McCracken acknowledges that not too many librarians have become entrepreneurs. "I think we see faculty in the sciences doing this much more often than those in the humanities. And librarians generally come from a humanities background. I think we should be doing more of it. There's clearly a demand.

"The position of the librarian-as-entrepreneur is an important one because librarians know best what librarians need. The great thing about our product is it takes two to three minutes to explain to people what we do, and they say, 'Absolutely, we need that.' "

"As a librarian and as a vendor I really insist that we do things in ways I as a librarian would like me as a vendor to do them," notes McCracken, citing company policies on posting prices and allowing libraries to make unlimited copies of materials once they have subscribed. However, he acknowledges that at times it is a challenge to keep the two roles separate. "I was on [an electronic discussion list] that somebody said was '100 percent vendor free.' I kept my mouth completely shut. But it was difficult...."

In college at Oberlin, McCracken majored in English and wanted to be an audio engineer. He delayed graduating to spend a semester at Williams College/Mystic Seaport Program in American Maritime Studies, an interest he traces to his rearing in seaport Seattle.

After college, working as a file clerk at a law firm, McCracken started thinking about what might suit his interests. His father, a professor at UW, helped connect him to library school faculty there for advice. McCracken then chose library school at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill. "They had an excellent balance of traditional librarianship and cutting-edge technology."

Now at UW, he says, "I love being a librarian. I do not see myself quitting my job. I really love reference work, I like helping people figure out how they can find their own information. I like showing people everything that UW libraries have to offer."

He calls his current situation "a balancing act." He puts in 15–20 hours a week at Serials Solutions and is glad the company has grown enough to hire other people to work on improving the product. "I don't have to worry about sales, for example."

Then again, he says, "Someday I might explore working in a maritime museum. I like the generality of an undergraduate reference desk, but the possibility of a specialized maritime museum fascinates me." He has created the web site Maritime History (www.ils.unc.edu/maritime/home.shtml), a research guide hosted at UNC. His work at Serials Solutions hasn't cut into his job at UW but, he says, has forced him to sacrifice some of the time he formerly spent updating that site.

Jill McKinstry, head of Odegaard Undergraduate Library, praises McCracken for being "very careful and very explicit in separating working here at Odegaard and interests he had outside." She calls him driven and productive both as a reference librarian and as a writer. "Peter has a very strong scholarship background, and he's very committed to excellent public service and research and reference."

She adds that many new generation librarians at UW "share with Peter a sense of can-do, of creativeness, of wanting to solve problems, being very open to different ways to solve them." Of McCracken, she says, "Right off the bat, he took over scheduling the reference desk," noting that he was the first to track usage patterns. She says he's helped reduce and improve the reference collection and may even work on collection development.

At UW libraries, McCracken is part of a digital reference committee, a strategic planning committee, and ad hoc committees looking at database content. "I'm able to contribute a lot from my Serials Solutions experience—to see if we may need to cancel some and if so, which ones." And on the reference desk, he can offer "a greater understanding of how these databases work and how we can get the most out of them." At the same time, he says, "It's so rewarding to have a librarian come by and say, 'We love your product.'"

In 1999, McCracken returned home from his job as a reference librarian at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC, for spring break. He went out for a beer with his brothers Steve, who had been working in marketing, and Mike, a programmer. They began talking about what kind of company might succeed in the dot-com world. "I said I knew what would work," recalls McCracken, "but I didn't have the resources." He had long been frustrated at not knowing which journals were accessible at a particular library—a consequence of no fixed standards and communications gaps between library system vendors and aggregators.

It turned out, fortunately, that the triumvirate recognized they did have the resources. Over a six- to eight-month stretch, the brothers did preliminary work. A friend of Steve's was initially slated to be their head of sales. Instead, he dove into the challenge of working with the data from various aggregators and became one of the five cofounders. While Peter McCracken is the company's only librarian, he says others should soon be hired. "We need more librarian expertise, in serials cataloging, for example."

Software development took time, as there were many kinks to be ironed out. For example, different libraries may access the same product using URLs that are unique to each institution. In other cases, such as with JSTOR, there's one general URL. Moreover, some subscriptions give users access to only certain journals, so each report must be customized for each customer.

The company incorporated in March 2000, and the product debuted at the Washington Library Association conference in May 2000. Now, Serials Solutions has relationships with many aggregators and publishers, including EBSCOhost , Emerald, and JSTOR (see sidebar, below).

"Almost all [the aggregators] like us," says McCracken, "because we're promoting their product. They recognize the value that our service brings to their product, so they want us to have the most accurate info possible." Information for the database is collected continuously, and the database is updated monthly for reporting purposes.

Still, he knows that the product can get better. "We ultimately aim to get it into the catalog. It's going to take work, but we know how to get there. The vendors would like that—it's in their interest, but we need to work differently with each library system vendor." At the ALA conference in San Francisco, McCracken met with several OPAC vendors. "That's a high priority for us. We anticipate having something in the next few months."

"We're looking at a variety of ways [the integration into the catalog] might work," he says, noting that could depend on whether libraries want records with electronic and print holdings or not. "Also, we need to make sure it works for each of the OPAC vendors."

The company has hired a new employee from OCLC to work on integrating the product with library system vendors. While that's the main goal, McCracken says he hopes to incorporate other utilities into the service, like usage tracking statistics.

There are competing products, as well as the free program jake (Jointly Administered Knowledge Environment [jake.sourceforge.net]), developed by open source expert Dan Chudnov, which McCracken notes is not as current nor as customized.

In fact, since Serials Solutions launched, two new competitors—Journal WebCite and TDNet—have emerged. "They push us to create better stuff quicker," McCracken says, noting that the company is now working on a search script that would allow customers to search for a specific title instead of scrolling or clicking on the first letter of a journal name. "Because we put all our information on our web page, others may be taking our ideas, and we just accept that." The web site answers librarians' questions, explains pricing, and provides examples of the data. What it doesn't show, of course, is how Serials Solutions does it.

McCracken acknowledges that he couldn't have founded the company without his brothers. "The tech side, first of all, is a challenge. And the business side, too. I'm not much of a businessperson, so Steve's business abilities have made a big difference."

Still, he advises other would-be librarian entrepreneurs to pursue worthy projects. "One of the nice things about being a librarian is that you know where to find information—the [Small Business Administration] or books on writing business plans." Then again, he acknowledges, "I think you really do need a good crew to run a company, and finding a crew to do that is one of the toughest things."

McCracken's brother Steve, who formerly worked in dot-com startups, says he likes working with libraries but had to adjust to the pace. "Decision times are a little slower, partly because the product cuts across a lot of areas. That sort of drove us crazy when we were really new. Now we can accommodate a slower decision cycle."

John Ganly, assistant director for collections at New York Public Library's Science, Industry, and Business Library, signed up with Serials Solutions early on. "We tried [to track journals] in-house, using existing staff and technology, to monitor the number of databases and titles," he recalls. "It was an enormous project. We never really felt we did it at the level of accuracy we wanted and couldn't keep it up." Ganly says, "From my end the pleasure of [working] with this company is that it's easier dealing with someone with a library background."

McCracken's home library still hasn't bought Serials Solutions. The university, says UW's McKinstry, has a long tradition of doing work in-house and so far has relied on a homegrown serials management project. But McCracken is optimistic. "One administrator said we should talk. But I will probably stay out of that myself."