Thing is, sometimes I think we don’t know what business we’re in.
A couple weeks ago, while I was in the cornfields discussing library software, the National Book Critics Circle had a panel discussion in
It’s seventh-grade English all over again to observe that form is content, but apparently it’s a point worth repeating.
As I have noted before, full-text databases are marvelous, even indispensable research tools, but they are not an acceptable substitute for print literary journals. Online databases generally suck in some but never everything in a journal, and they extrude its content in half-right, disembodied, grossly fleckerized electronic format, ignoring the journal’s integrity of place (each journal issue has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and everything in that issue is there for a reason) and time (an issue is an ensemble performance, with a cast of poems, essays, short stories, reviews, and artwork that appear all at once; the journal’s serial nature is part of its whatness).
For a print literary journal, that integrity is key. I’m intimate with that integrity. I was a serial junky from childhood, when nothing made me happier than a fresh stack of Highlights and Consumer Reports, and for years I have read more serials than monographs—um, in Muggle-speak, I read more journals than books.
So I know that an issue of a journal is its own special experience, from its cover to its fonts to the arrangement of its pieces, with the editors’ loving attention to pull quotes, widow lines, and the like. The audiences for these journals—writers, readers, readers who want to be writers, professors, lecturers, and all fellow travelers—seek and even crave the formalism of the genre, perhaps because in a world that at times feels disembodied and fleckerized even when we are fully in it, the corporeal trueness of a journal is comforting.
A librarian first and foremost understands appropriate formats. Print is print, and digital is digital. To take a print object and make a digital copy is to create a surrogate object of the original, not to duplicate it with fidelity. As noted in my post on Critical Mass, you can’t replace the statue on the campus green with a microfiche of the statue; it’s not the same.
The surrogate copy may have its purposes; in some cases it may wildly improve on the original (as with some scientific content which is better off searchable); it may even be interesting in its own unexpected ways. But the original has meaning and purpose in itself, just as a slice of cake has meaning and purpose, and cannot be replaced by a picture of a cake and a food pill.
Writers (and some librarians) also know that journals also have a tremendous amount of incidental information. I have spent many hours researching advertising, photos, and notes in journals in order to recreate a time and a place, as I did for my essay “David, Just as he was†published this summer in White Crane. That incidental information is both part of the pleasure experience of a small literary journal and part of the stuff making up its whatness.
By small literary journal I mean both readership–Pleiades and The Missouri Review and Tin House are wonderful, but you won’t find them on most newsstands or for that matter in most public libraries—and, even more so, price. When Prufer asked why his library had stopped subscribing to journals, a librarian told him that funding was the issue. I’ve danced around the money issue before, but since librarians use that as a reason to stop subscriptions to literary journals, I need to tackle this head-on.
A comment to the blog post summarizing the NBCC panel discussion noted that science journal subscriptions can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and some academic libraries buy buckets and buckets and buckets of them. A Library Journal article from earlier this year demonstrates that average subscription costs for scientific journals are ten times the average cost of journals in the humanities (approximately $1000 to $100)—and that’s taking a very broad swath through the humanities, where some of the peer-reviewed titles extract more than their fair share of the budget, and not focusing on the literary journals.
Most literary journals run about $20 – $50 a pop per year–enough to give casual readers pause, as Stephen King recently observed, but far less than the titles that librarians are talking about when they say serials are expensive. A fairly comprehensive subscription to the Canon could be had for a couple thou a year, which is chump change against the scale of most academic serial budgets. I haven’t run the numbers, but I’m confident you could go hog wild and subscribe to everything on the newpages.com list of print literary mags and still spend less than you would for one of the top ten high-priced journals at Williams College.
God forbid I should ever suggest a university should deprive its scholars of access to a $25,000 journal on brain research, but it is worth observing that $25,000 could buy 568 subscriptions to ZZYZVA, or 694 subscriptions to The Sun, or 836 subscriptions to Tin House, or 1,041 subscriptions to The Missouri Review, or 1,136 subscriptions to White Crane. Plus—though admittedly I’ve never seen Brain Research—I’m guessing the artwork in the lit mags is prettier, and the poetry has to be for-sure better.
The panel in
It bothers me that we even need to make these points — and I worry that it’s just conference-panel-talk, where we all tsk, tsk and move along, move along.
Sometimes I think we librarians are so busy doing scholarly communication and gaming and blogging and getting NCIP to connect the hip-bone to the thigh-bone and on Dasher and Prancer and Donner and Vixen that we forget some basic stuff. Like how every issue of a journal has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and how the ink and paper smell when you crack the spine of a new issue and bury your face in the middle, and what it feels like to let your purse drop on the floor and slide into a chair and read Sascha Feinstein’s poem, “Shook Up,†and have that double shock of a good poem seeping into your mind as your eyes are feasting on the font, the order of words, and the faint orange margin lines on page 66 of the Spring, 2007 Missouri Review, so that even a lunk such as I, with my tragically unmusical ear, can almost grasp the beauty of this experience.
We think that if we can get a vendor to take parts of a thing, and jam those parts into a new format, and then stuff the sausage in a database, and link to it through our website, then our work on that boring subject is done, and we can go back to scheming about how we can get to the next fancy-schmancy conference to hear the same talks by the same pundits we heard at the last fancy-schmancy conference.
Because we have forgotten, if we ever knew, what it meant to slog across the lawn at the end of a long day and pull open the mailbox and have the sun come out shining all over our brain because there it was, the latest issue, with pages rough or smooth, deckled or razor-sharp, fragrant with fresh ink, just waiting for our touch.
And we have forgotten, if we ever knew, about the outlaw sensation of reading the best parts of a journal first, fanning the pages back and forth to shop, like running a finger across the back of a layer cake to get a heap of icing to lick while no one is looking. (Not that I have ever done either dastardly deed.)
Or perhaps we’re a little embarrassed by the topic, as if to advocate on behalf of something as humble as a $40 print literary journal read by that small rag-tag band wandering in from the English department meant we were low-tech and square. As if advocating for the statue on the green meant we were of a kind with the librarians who have mulishly resisted all good uses of technology, and our peers could now condescend to us for not “getting it.â€
I do not exactly live on the Web, but I spend an unholy amount of time visiting its condos. So as a reader, a writer, and a true-blue digital librarian, I know I’m correct on this issue: ignore me or condescend to me, but when someone says a database is “just as good†as a print literary journal, I immediately see that emperor sashaying buck-naked down the street, his dangly bits swaying in the breeze.
Frankly, it irritates me, like a poppyseed caught in my bridgework, that I can’t get enough interest on this issue in LibraryLand.
Oh yeah, so true (yawn), too bad about that (yawn), tough about those journals, but I’m…
a) Running off to a conference on cataloging in Second Life
b) Working on my Farsi translation of Dance, Dance, Revolution
c) Drafting the NISO standard for Library 3.0
Then there was that sparkly young thing who said none of this mattered because We’re All Going Electronic Anyway, which is what I suspect everyone is thinking. Well, that takes care of that, then!
Yes, of course, we’re moving to a networked future. I read online literary journals (which, of course, are ignored by most commercial aggregators, since they aren’t a source of revenue). Hell, I even write for them. By gum, I’ve been known to blog.
But I’ve said it before about another, not-too-distant issue: as librarians, it’s not our job to engage in social engineering, and it is our business to advocate for our users; as that great librarian Marvin Scilken said thousands of times in his long career, the bottom line is service. If a community is best served by print literary journals–at least for now, and to a reader, now is what matters–then it’s our job to go to bat for them. That may mean pausing long enough to learn just what it is we’re delivering, but that’s our job, too.
Isn’t blaming scholarly communications activists for the diminishment in subscriptions to literary journals on the one hand and burgeoning STM journal prices on the other rather like cutting off your nose to spite your face?
Remember us? We’re the ones trying to come up with a workable response to big-pig publishers so that libraries can reclaim their STM journal budgets!
But you don’t discuss the big point — Universities aren’t about education or research. They are about money and generating revenue. Instead of state institutions being there for the public good of the state, they are seen as a leech on a struggling budget. The engineers and life scientists (*not* high energy physics anymore!) bring in the money, so they get the goods. Tough luck for social sciences and humanities.
(IMHO only)
Oh and no one pays those numbers for Science Direct titles, as far as I know, but they do have good shock value.
Dorothea, have I stopped beating my wife? I am not “blaming” scholarly communication “activists” because libraries are unthinkingly dropping subscriptions to small print literary journals. I do draw a parallel I see useful, but leave it at that.
(“Scholarly communication” is on my list of academic jargon, by the way; and I’m mulling over the term “activist.” Like a judge? 😉 )
Christina, good point, though I’d take it farther and say universities are too often not about producing people who can think, write, and even chew gum, all at once. They are about sports and science; writing students and librarians to the rear of the bus. please. (An interesting point about writing programs: they have stepped in to fill a void created when “English” became a field of study that was about anything except how to read and how to write.)
Still, librarians can play a role here by advocating to save these small journals, a role which begins with understanding why they are important. It’s so little, comparatively, to retain them (yes, even with shelf space and binding and the total cost of ownership), and it’s preserving not just a few paper-based titles but a complex ecology of readers, writers, and teachers. Knowing librarians, I believe that when our eyes are opened on this issue–as mine were–we quickly become the frontline “activists” (ding!).
I’m not sure I have an argument for or against here… The issue really becomes one of discoverability, but that, too, could be overcome if there was enough interest to do so.
What I’m reminded of, however, is how musicians were boycotting putting their music in the iTunes music store because it destroyed the concept of ‘album’.
Similar concept.
Ross, I do appreciate that point, and I agree change happens. But writers aren’t boycotting full-text databases… and many are writing online. I just don’t think it’s right to shove the small lit journals out of existence when we don’t have “iTunes,” we have these vast information trash barges. With iTunes, at least you get cover art!
Point taken!
I have to agree that there is room for ambivalence within all our positions – a few months back, I reviewed the website of my favourite litjournal, HEAT, which I lOOOVE getting in my letterbox. Just LOVE it to death. Have given it pride of place in a recent shelving shuffle. But had to give the website black marks for not using content teasers to sell subscriptions – bad website, but fabulous hard-copy publishers. It’s not like I’m asking them to create a surrogate, though – I want people to buy the real thing.
Karen, I think you make a very important point here — there is often a significant difference between a hard copy publication (particularly journals) and the electronic version available from publishers or aggregators.
My favourite example is ALA’s Library Technology Reports. In library jargon, this serial is (usually) published as a monographic series, with each issue written by a single author, focusing on a particular topic. I no longer have access to a hard copy in my library, and every aggregator I’ve come across who provides LTR presents each issue as a series of individual articles. This means that to read an entire issue (which is usually what I want to do), I need to download many individual pdfs, which takes time and is then fiddly to read. I suspect some aggregators might also see my downloading an entire issue as an indication of ‘systematic downloading’, not trying to read the entire issue as intended.
[…] 541 course for 2007, and in a nice example of serendipity, Karen G. Schneider has written about print publications and their electronic counterparts in her blog, Free Range Librarian. She makes some interesting comments about context and reading, […]
[…] models will not replace the need for print journals (The Free Range Librarian recently had a good post about the need for small literary journals to continue to publish in print – reading them online is […]
Brenda, I recently had to download an LTR in its entirety, chapter by chapter. Then I printed it out… basically recreating a print document…. because it’s not comfortable to read PDFs on-screen. This was very much the microfiche on the college commons.
[…] October 16th, 2007 Yes, BREVITY is a digital journal, but we still love our print brethren. An interesting post on the fate of paper journals at Free Range Librarian: […]
Not for or against…just thought I’d mention that, when you are looking at the cost you also need to look at the staff time and materials involved in purchasing, cataloging, receiving, shelving, and circulating multiple subscriptions to physical journals as a opposed to the databases.
[…] when I write about libraries dropping subscriptions to print literary magazines, at least one person says, […]
[…] ready for prime time just yet (they’re getting there) and sometimes, gosh darn it, we just like print better (and still need […]
[…] to a hurricane of bureaucratic tsuris surrounding what I do and what I’d like to do, to yet another in the long string of accusations from various parts of constituting Part Of The Problem, to spending much too much time getting video ripped and conference posters printed, […]