When You're Drowning: Making Libraries Matter in an Age of Abundance | Peer to Peer Review

Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library Journal, 08/06/2009

A post by Hugh McGuire at the Book Oven Blog, parsing what happened to a feature story by Ian Shapira in the Washington Post, got me thinking. The issue: Gawker extracted the good bits and used them in a blog post. Shapira was grateful his story excited interest, but felt ripped off. After all, his news organization put a lot of resources into that story. Why should Gawker take a fraction of the time it took Shapira to report the story to rework it and benefit from his labor?

After exploring the ways some news organizations are trying to restrict reuse of their content, Shapira concludes with a more modest proposal: "I still want a fluid blogosphere, but one where aggregators—newspapers included—are more transparent about whom they're heavily excerpting. They should mention the original source immediately. And if bloggers want to excerpt at length, a fee would be the nice, ethical gesture."

McGuire's take on this issue raises a completely different issue. Why did the Washington Post invest that much of its scarce resources to report a story that is "a fluff piece"? Isn't this kind of article—a profile of an executive coach who gives seminars on marketing to generations—something that bloggers can handle without special journalistic super-powers?

McGuire concludes, "newspapers have to come to terms with an info marketplace where the value of fluff is approaching zero, while unique, good reporting has a value greater than zero." When it comes to putting a market price on information he asks, "how much is a glass of water worth when you are drowning?"

What is our unique value?
This is where I began to think about academic libraries and the value of our information. We sometimes want to scold students for taking the easy route, for unconsciously adhering to one of Ranganathan's laws, "saving the time of the user." We want them to appreciate that library information is better, that quality matters, and that they should be willing to work for it.

But that assumes that library information is better. Sometimes it isn't. Sometimes the books on our shelves are out of date and are full of information that is simply wrong. Sometimes scholarly articles are the academic version of "fluff pieces," unimportant analyses of a trivial topics produced to pad out a CV. The reward system in higher education is a highly-evolved fluff-generator, and the fluff even lacks entertainment value.

Sometimes the information we purchase for our users is corrupted by corporate interests. A New York Times investigation reveals that review articles published in prestigious medical journals were not only funded by a pharmaceutical company (without disclosure), but that the articles were ghostwritten by a company that was paid by the pharmaceutical. The "author" merely signed off on it. This appalling breach of ethics was uncovered in court documents, presumably related to a suit against the company because its hormone replacement drugs were found to put large numbers of people at risk.

The infinite library
So we can't simply say "our information is better." Some of it is. Much of that good stuff is unavailable except through the library (or by purchase, not an option attractive to most students). But we're encouraging scholars to set their research free, and if we succeed we'll be dancing in the quads, but we won't have that "we paid for it; it's better" argument to fall back on.

Is it our curatorial function, the fact that we hand-pick what's in our libraries that adds value? Given so much of our budget is spent on subscriptions to bundles of information that we haven't selected, and we therefore resort to interlibrary loan to fill in gaps in our book collection, that value has degraded.

Many libraries have taken to purchasing Science Direct articles one by one for individual users because subscribing to everything is too costly. That's not curation, that's just footing the bill for disposable information. It provides information people need, but it's not for a collection. In an age of ubiquitous access, when people expect to be able to get their hands on the information they need, not just what's locally available, the curated library is just a part of the picture.

So what exactly is it that libraries have to offer to those who are drowning in information? I'd be interested in your thoughts if you care to leave a comment. I'll continue to mull this question over next week.

Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her next mystery, Through the Cracks, will be published by Minotaur Books in 2010.

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