The LJ Academic Newswire Newsmaker Interview: Georgia Harper

Andrew Albanese -- Library Journal, 11/06/2008

As Duke scholarly communication officer Kevin Smith blogged last week, that fact that a deal was cooking between Google and its (now) partners wasn’t exactly the best-kept secret. After all, we now know there was no shortage of people involved in the deal, working under non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), over a period of many months, even years. This included librarians and university staff from (but not limited to) the University of Michigan, the University of California, Stanford, Harvard, the University of Virginia, and the University of Texas. As critical perspectives on the Google deal mount in the coming months, it’s worth noting that the public benefit aspects included in the deal did not just happen. Rather, they are the result of serious effort on the part of librarians and university staff, who, not party to any of the suits, didn’t exactly have the strongest positions at the bargaining table.
 
“I know firsthand that it was extremely difficult for the libraries who put tremendous effort into making the deal better reflect the public interest,” University of Texas Libraries scholarly communications advisor Georgia Harper wrote in her blog, indicating she was but a small player in a “grueling” process for the last ten months. “I frankly don’t think it is possible to fairly critique [libraries’] efforts without knowing what they were up against, how tirelessly they worked, how little the publishers and authors ever appeared to appreciate how critical their collections are to the dollars publishers and authors now expect to make.”
 
Last week, Harper blogged her initial thoughts on the deal, ranging from “relief” to “exhilaration.” The LJ Academic Newswire caught up with Harper for more insights and personal observations regarding the lengthy process behind the settlement—including, the idea of public institutions working under the infamous Google NDA. 

LJAN: No doubt you’ve seen discussion about what libraries did or did not get out of this deal. Realistically, what position did libraries have to bargain from?
GH: Libraries that choose to be involved with Google Book Search try to get the best deal they can and, in the end, they decide whether the benefits, however they define that, outweigh the costs. Each library has its own ideas about where the line must be drawn. We don’t all have the same deals with Google. We don’t all value equally the things some fought to achieve. Each of us had to decide at the end of the day if it was still worth it to us, given the failure to get things we wanted but couldn’t get.

In your opinion, could libraries, reasonably, have said no to Google? 
All of the libraries were able to say no at any time along the way, or at the end. No one was compelled to accept even the results of their own negotiations at the end. But realistically, if a negotiator is not prepared to walk away, leverage is significantly undermined. Of course, there are many reasons beyond what ends up written on the pages for choosing to do a deal rather than walk away from it—forces like local and national politics, budgets, priorities, commitments, alignment or misalignment with mission, sunk costs, even space considerations can affect whether the final offer, on balance, is good enough, even though it’s not what you really wanted. Clearly, every library has a different set of criteria for a deal it will accept or reject.

Does anything particularly excite and/or concern you about what may—or, may not be possible for libraries under this agreement?
I’m excited about the potential of the deal to improve public access to orphan works and ultimately generate information about which works are, in fact, orphans. Another exciting aspect of the deal to me is Google’s ability to demonstrate to publishers and authors that more access to digital copies, and lower prices, can produce more revenues for copyright owners. Data is Google’s stock in trade. The data that this undertaking will yield has the potential to help the publishing industry, maybe not too late, find its way in the digital networked environment. The other potential, actually, is the unknown—once these books are widely, and more freely accessible, people will start thinking of neat things to do with them that we can’t even imagine right now—an explosion of business ideas built on a widely available corpus of great literature, freed from the shelves of private or even public, but relatively inaccessible, places.
 
You suggested on your blog that you chafed at working under the non-disclosure agreement (NDA). If you could have spoken out, what would you have said? 
There are aspects to the secrecy that are painful. The first is sort of personal: if I could have discussed the deal, I would have been able to explain to my colleagues at the University of Texas iSchool why I wanted to focus my research efforts where I was indicating I wanted to focus. I knew these developments were “coming soon,” and I could envision potential research projects enabled by the data that the deal would produce, but what I wanted to propose as research didn’t make much sense without the underlying information about the deal. That was very frustrating.

Brewster Kahle has chastised public libraries for working with Google under a cloak of secrecy. Can libraries realistically refuse NDAs?
I think Kahle’s point, and others raise this point too, is more about the deleterious effects of secrecy on the negotiation process itself. Secrecy tends to be isolating. If you don’t consult with your colleagues at other institutions, your leverage may be diminished. Of course, a library could also hire a business and/or legal consultant to help, and bind the consultant to the NDA. Yes, Kahle has identified a very thorny problem, but it’s one we can ameliorate. I don’t think it’s workable simply not to do business with companies whose assets are ideas and information just because they feel compelled to protect them through secrecy. Either way, consultation does increase information, and information is power—in fact, the power of information is also the source of the [NDA] problem in the first place.

How so? 
Even revealing the very existence of discussions can be treated as information conveying a competitive advantage. Some companies’ commercial edge is completely tied up with product development, being the first to market and innovation. I’ve been involved with those sectors my entire legal career. I don’t really believe we have an option to say we want to do business with a company like Google but we refuse to accept that our discussions will be secret if that’s what Google believes its business success requires.

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