Paul Gandel, CIO at Syracuse University, just published an essay (in the strangely archaic PDF format) about the future of libraries.
I had a number of “clicks” during this essay. The part that went bing-bing-bing:
“It is no longer unusual to hear about people who prefer to buy a book online and have it delivered right to their door, instead of walking across campus to check out the same book from the campus library. Although these ‘Amazoners’ may still be the exception rather than the rule, in today’s world of expedited electronic tracking and worldwide delivery, it seems only natural that we should begin to expect direct delivery of print material from anywhere, to anywhere. Yet libraries have been slow to react to these changes. Cumbersome interlibrary loan procedures are still the norm.”
At Library A, I can pay $7.50 per every interlibrary loan and for this privilege hope I might see the item in two weeks. As a consumer, rather than do this, I exercise two other options: I use Library B in the next town, as it offers remote access to a two-state consortium with rapid delivery to a nearby library, or I use Amazon, where I can buy quality used copies of what I need usually for under $5 (and presumably sell them again if I don’t scribble in them).
If I lived in an area without a Library B option, Amazon would be my logical choice. I suspect that the more I used Amazon, the less affiliated I would feel with the local library.
That’s just one small example of how this essay hurts… so good.
Posted on this day, other years:
Sorry this isn’t to the main thrust of the topic, but why is PDF archaic as a format?
For a text-only article meant to be shared on the Web, the PDF format doesn’t add anything, makes it hard to quote from and discuss, and brings in all the special-document-handler issues. The format also doesn’t invite discussion; it’s old-school one-way information, not information as a conversation. It’s ironic that such a forward-thinking article had such a stodgy format.
It appears all articles from the Educause Review are in pdf only. Shame since it looks like they have some great stories. Would help to at least have some of the article online for findability reasons. You can view an html version on google though it doesn’t look the best.
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:bfz8rVp0Y2sJ:www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm05610.pdf+&hl=en
PDF is a big accessibility problem, not just archaic. And, before someone (who’s read Adobe’s marketing stuff) says “but it *is* accessible now!”, I ask “have you ever tried to do what Adobe says must be done?” I think it’s actually easier to mark it up into HTML.
However, most organisations are still wedded to the print metaphor, regarding web-delivery of their information as an add-on. Consequently, they use a print-oriented word processing structure and create the PDF as a after-thought.
The document referenced is a classic example – 3 columns of small text. Try selecting 1 paragraph from 1 column – you can’t. You can set it up so that it’s possible, but most people don’t. They just do what they’ve always done, which is a crappy reason for doing anything. Which is one of the few points from thae article that I take positively.
Not to say, that I’m negative on the rest, but this is not news. I’m from New Zealand and I remember going to Information Online (the old Online Ondisk) in 2001 in Sydney and being amazed at how far behind us the visiting Americans and the resident Australians seemed to be in their thinking. The keynote, Mary Ellen Bates, was urging librarians to get rid of their buns and market themselves as information professionals. Wha? We’d already been doing that for 5-10 years.
Libraries do change, get over it. TV didn’t replace movies or stage shows, though both had to adapt. The Internet won’t replace libraries either, though librarians who cannot adapt may become an endangered species.
I’m lazy but I’m also cheap. I use Abebooks every couple of months but I’ll walk across campus if I know the book’s going to be there for free.
But my point is that it can often be cheaper to buy the book rather than ILL it. I haven’t spent as much as $5 per book through Amazon–for titles my library (which I have to drive to, even in my low-mileage Civic that’s still money) wants $7.50 to ILL. Which means if I need to use them again, it’s another $7.50.
we were discussing this in my library yesterday. We need to provide print to people’s desks, either by scanning it and sending it or actually delivering the book to their desks. its a service people will expect.
that said, you are ignoring the shipping costs of buying books…but I am quibbling.
No, I’m not; I have been buying used/whatever paperbacks on Amazon that INCLUDING shipping are under $5. Usually shipping is 3/4 of the cost of the book! I’m not saying you could plan a service like this on that assumption, but as a user that’s been my deciding point for when I buy. Last week it was my deciding point when for under $5 I could order a book and receive it faster than I could get to the library.
Presumably the user would hand-carry the book to the item, though a mailer option at media rate would be a very interesting addition. Pop the book in an envelope, mail it to the library…
I don’t why this gets so little play, but the City of Boulder decided to fund the postal shipping of books to library users, to cut down on parking and traffic issues in downtown Boulder. I left Boulder in 2001, and the mailing of books was common then, I’m not sure when it started. Depending oon your location, seems like there are wonderful economic reasons to agitate for this sort of change in your libraries as well….
I totally understand your point about shipping. On the other hand, I have never been able to get such cheap shipping or books for the ones I want and prefer to interlibrary loan. Some people would also never buy something for only $5 online (I am one) and would sooner trust my library with a small transaction. That person should also be able to get desktop access (or door to door). There’s a spectrum of “tipping points”. For some people it might be netflix, for example. What I am in agreement here is that libraries must be more flexible!
The “long tail” economics of delivering versus storing are intriguing. It’s not just a question of shipping: it’s the question of what you buy just-in-case and what you buy just-in-time; it’s also a question of spending on service rather than storage. It always got me in trouble, but in assessing the economics of pool collections in upstate NY (pool collections are book collections moved from library to library to expand their holdings), I speculated that we spent far more to process, store, and transport materials than we would have if we had simply bought preprocessed paperbacks mailed directly to the libraries with instructions to keep or discard when the books stopped circulating.