Follies of 2009 | Peer to Peer Review

Barbara Fister thinks back on a year of hashtag-worthy highlights

Barbara Fister -- Library Journal, 01/08/2010

As we wrap up 2009, lots of “best” lists and predictions are being made. I thought I’d simply recall some of the things that raised my blood pressure over the past year.

Open access—or access denied?

On the plus side, there seems to be serious momentum in the Open Access movement. Among liberal arts colleges, Trinity and Oberlin faculties passed mandates, and open access advocate Peter Suber predicts there will be an “avalanche” of granting agencies requiring open access to funded research in coming months. FRPAA has been reintroduced in Congress and the Obama administration has been gathering comments in a public forum on open access to publicly-funded research. (It’s not too late to put in your two cents’ worth.)

Some not-so-positive developments: the gap between what technology enables you do with cultural materials and what you are legally allowed to do seems to be growing. The United States, in concert with other industrialized nations, is negotiating a trade agreement shrouded in secrecy that may erode privacy and extend corporate control over cultural materials. Siva Vaidhyanathan has warned that corporations are capitalizing on the perceived failures of higher education by providing “free” research tools, email services, productivity software, and access to scholarship (though typically not the actual scholarship itself—just a handy link to purchase it or see if a library has purchased it for you).

Dennis Baron has written about the risks we run as information access becomes a valuable commodity. As libraries and higher education in general absorb the shock of the financial crisis, it’s easy to lose sight of what Richard Heinberg calls “the awesome duty of librarians” to preserve our culture. However, given that the majority of our shrinking budgets is already going toward renting temporary access to the stuff our own scholars create and hand over to corporations, could it be too late?

Let’s hope not. As Suber points out, in the year ahead we’ll probably have less money to experiment with alternative models, but we have a stronger argument that we need change. I’ve suggested a few times in the past year that we rethink publishing and libraries in a fairly radical way. I know this is a shift that might be about as muddled and frustrating as passing a health care reform bill that might actually include a shrunken bit of reform tucked in among the pork. But hey, a librarian can dream.

In the meanwhile, we’ve finally gone from “the OPAC sucks” to “why are we paying so much money for OPACS that suck?” This isn’t a new development, but the heated and immediate response to Stephen Abram’s report that suggested open source ILS solutions suck was one of the hashtag highlights of the year.

Digitization—dream or dystopia?

The chum hit the water with the launch of the Kindle and there’s been a feeding frenzy ever since. Ebook sales, while still a modest share of print sales, are growing fast, and a dizzying number of reading devices has hit the market, with Apple’s tablet soon to join the throng.

News reports suggest Kindle owners are buying and reading more books than they did before. Amazon announced breathlessly that new Kindle owners were loading up their gadgets on Christmas Day with more books than were being ordered in print (which, when you think of it, is hardly surprising; would lots of people interrupt the festivities to sit at the computer to order print books? I doubt it, whereas giving the new toy a whirl would be irresistible.) The Cushing Academy made man-bites-dog news by replacing all the books in their (apparently neglected) library with Kindles and bragging about it.

Publishers, meanwhile, are dithering on the high board, not quite sure how to dive in. While they warn backlist rights-holders that contracts written before e-rights were spelled out include digital editions, so don’t get any ideas, they’re delaying ebook releases to preserve the calendar of desire, making readers who want instant gratification to pay a premium for hardcover while showing Amazon who’s in charge. (Meanwhile, impatient customers go online and snatch up used copies three weeks after publication.) I still remember hearing Richard Bernstein, book critic for the New York Times, ask at a panel on ebooks back in 2000, just as a previous ebook fever was breaking, “what’s in it for the reader?”—a question that still requires an answer.

I haven’t even mentioned the far-from settled Google settlement that will keep lawyers and ethicists busy for years to come. Google’s potential control of a vast book orphanage—in the absence of orphan works legislation—could have an enormous impact.

While the market shakes out and lawyers exchange lawsuits, it’s worth remembering a couple of moments from the Follies of 2009: a sudden and startling delisting of books on GLBT topics from Amazon (known by twitterers as “#amazonfail” and by Amazon as “a metadata error”) and the disappearance of George Orwell’s 1984 from people’s Kindles after Amazon discovered it had accidentally sold an unauthorized edition.

Though both of these events can be interpreted as the fall-on-your-butt moments any toddler technology has to go through, the ironies—1984!—were too good to pass up. But the implications remain sobering. We’ve never had a situation where two vast corporations could alter the contents of so many personal libraries at the flick of a switch or make whole categories of books disappear from view. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has recently outlined the threats to reader privacy embedded in various ebook products. It’s pretty scary.

As Dennis Baron has warned, information is a hot commodity—and our information-seeking patterns are enormously valuable as corporations read over our shoulders. We also stand a lot to lose if those corporations decide there are things we shouldn’t read.

Last but not least . . .

I can’t resist recalling three more issues that have taxed my outrage-o-meter™ this year:

·     Yale University Press set a new standard for cowardice when it decided to remove images, contemporary and historical, from a scholarly examination of the controversy over cartoons of Muhammad commissioned by a Danish newspaper. As far as I’m concerned, Yale’s reputation for quality and integrity has been severely tarnished by this bone-headed move.

·     I don’t think librarians have given enough thought to the implications of the collapse of print journalism. Keep an eye out for the next edition of the State of the News Media due out in March for a full autopsy. This stuff matters—a lot.

·     And, as if having revisions to two major style manuals published in the same year wasn’t enough provocation, discovering one had seven pages of “nonsignificant” errors that we were supposed to update by hand was the last straw. True, the American Psychological Association (APA) finally conceded defeat and replaced the faulty copies, but it did call into question the amount of blood, sweat, and tears shed by teachers, undergraduates, and the librarians who try to help them as they try to cite sources according to rules that will never keep up with new formats and are beginning to seem arbitrary and pointless. You say MLA, I say APA . . . let’s call the whole thing off.

Here’s wishing us all a happy new year! If nothing else, it’s bound to be interesting.

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 this year.