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Lit mag costs: several more reality checks

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Invariably, when I write about libraries dropping subscriptions to print literary magazines, at least one person says, “but there are other costs associated with serials management!” Yes, I do know that; I’ve lived it as a practitioner/pinch-hitting copy cataloger/administrator/geek-type/budget maven in a variety of libraries.

A few quick responses to the usual comments:

1. Let’s get some perspective on “cost.” I downloaded the spreadsheets for 2005-2006 research library statistics from and ran some quick averages.

  • Average total annual expenditures for the ARLs: $30 million
  • Average spent on serial subscriptions: $6.2 million
  • Average spent on staff: $14 million (surprised me it was so low; shows how much is spent on collections in ARLs — a lot of that driven by the absurdly rising cost of serials)

So when we’re talking about dropping subscriptions to a handful or two of literary magazines, the cost savings are pointless, like changing to single-ply toilet paper on a nuclear submarine.

2. If you’re comparing two journals toe-to-toe, and one costs $25,000 a year and the other costs $44 a year, the cost of binding, shelf space, and human management becomes close to immaterial.

3. Libraries have plenty of fiscal snake pits, such as retaining huge print government depository collections for material that’s online; reordering microforms used once in a blue moon; and for some libraries, cataloging — particularly all the hours spent “enhancing” existing records with little or no proof that this leads to better retrieval. (I explained to one Muggle that you don’t “catalog” every single new issue, and that in most cases libraries simply use a shared record, anyway… and then there’s check-in, a little hard to explain.) Oh, the list goes on! Many libraries are getting better about this, but the money spent on print reference materials no longer used: such a waste. Hand me a library budget and a red pen, and I’ll find the money to keep those journals.

4. There are many, many journals it’s a waste to retain in print. Literary magazines are not one of them.

5. I cautiously agree (with the caveat I haven’t checked this thoroughly) that it’s true that libraries are not the majority subscribers to most literary journals, but — the needs of humanities departments aside — from a preservation perspective, libraries are a crucial, absolutely necessary subscriber base. (This is true for both print and digital resources, as I have pointed out while advocating for LOCKSS and other digital preservation strategies.)

Libraries are about the cultural record. If WorldCat is to be believed, only 12 libraries subscribe to White Crane, but that’s an important 12. (Mathematically, six is the threshold for a LOCKSS network, so I’m assuming something similar for print holdings.) Holdings in personal households are not adequate for ensuring materials are available for future generations; it is we, as librarians, who have the special responsibility to preserve and protect the cultural record.

I have raised this point in several talks I’ve given (including one for ASERL that was a complete bomb, and a couple more that went over much better), where I say that collection building (print or digital) is memory work, or travail de memoire — and that this work is particularly crucial to who we are as a profession. It is what Andrew Abbott would call our “heartland.”

A lot of that work needs to change if we are going to be able to survive. We can’t manually catalog every single new book or serial or intellectual work that will ever be created; it’s a process that doesn’t scale, and isn’t necessary. We need to let machines help us do our work. We also have to be willing to change our systems so we aren’t maintaining all these individual data silos. It doesn’t make sense any more; it’s an expensive holdover, and it keeps our data off the network, where it can’t be discovered. We have to get away from old-fashioned record-centric formats for bibliographic data. Do we trust OCLC? I don’t know. But in the words of a wise person, we need to trust someone.

In any event, we should get righteous with ourselves and dump the tasks, materials, and habits that weigh us down — but stay true to our roots and build our collections, print and digital, that make us who we are.

Filed in Get a Grip, Librarianship, Writing | | Comments (3)

ALA’s virtual members and their real obstacles

Friday, October 19, 2007

When it comes to modernizing ALA, I’m like Charlie Brown with the football. I cannot help myself, even though I’m now on my fourth committee/task force/whatevah dedicated to “electronic participation.”

So I’m working on a very, very early draft of a survey for ALA members and I pull up Ye Olde ALA Policy Manual for a definition of “virtual member” (which is not to be confused with an imaginary you-know-what).

The first thing I notice is that a “virtual member” is defined by what this person can’t do: help establish a quorum, or vote, or be more than 1/3 of the membership of any committee. Then I see the negative, scolding language: failure, acceptable explanation, grounds for removal... language more suitable for reform school than for defining activities in a professional association. It seems that the point of these rules is to ensure people get to the conferences and that committees aren’t overrun by people who might get things done virtually.

Imagine if the metric for committees was based around work products! That, of course, will never happen — but at least we can work toward a model of engagement that isn’t so heavily skewed toward the meatware experience.

Anyone for a rewrite? (Emphasis mine.)

4.5 Requirements for Committee Service

With the exception of virtual members, members of all ALA and unit committees are expected to attend all meetings. Failure to attend two consecutive meetings or groups of meetings (defined as all meetings of a committee that take place at one Midwinter Meeting or Annual Conference) without an explanation acceptable to the committee chair constitutes grounds for removal upon request by the chair to and approval of the appropriate appointing official or governing board.

6.16 Virtual Members

  1. Definition of Virtual Members:
    Virtual members of committees or task forces have the right to attend meetings, participate in debate, and make motions. Virtual members are not counted in determining the quorum nor do they have the right to vote.
  2. Appointment of Virtual Members to Standing Committees of the Association:
    Virtual members of standing committees of the Association are appointed in accord with the provisions of the ALA Bylaws, Article VIII, sec. 2(a)(i). Inclusion of virtual members on a standing Committee of the Association requires the recommendation of the Committee on Organization and the approval of Council. No more than one third of the membership on a standing committee may be virtual members.
  3. Appointment of Virtual Members to Standing Committees of Council:
    Virtual members of Committees of the Council are appointed in accord with the provisions of the ALA Bylaws, Article VIII, sec. 2(b). Inclusion of virtual members on a Committee of the Council requires the recommendation of the Committee on Organization and the approval of the Council. No more than one third of the membership of a Council committee may be virtual members.
  4. Appointment of Virtual Members to Committees of Round Tables and Divisions:
    Virtual members of division or round table committees are appointed in accord with each respective division’s or round table’s appointment procedures for committee members. No more than one third of the membership of a round table or division committee may be virtual members.
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Williamsburg Regional Library Staff Day Presentation

Friday, October 19, 2007

I put the slides on Google after two uploads to slideshare.net failed abysmally.  (My talk was also greatly enriched by two slides I stole, one from Andrew Pace and the other from Darlene Fichter. Thanks ;-)  )

This was a great experience. I haven’t done a pure “2.0” talk in over a year, which meant I was forced to rethink the whole topic, and part of the pleasure of this talk was that the library wasn’t at a cold start; they have a blog, Blogging for a Good Book, that is an impressive effort (and a good read, too!). That allowed me to spend more time talking about tying services into strategic plans, sustainability, marketing, new services, measurement, and new technologies that might or might not catch on. One phrase I repeated as often as I could came from Jeremy Frumkin: “one click to find, one click to get.”

I broke my 2.0 technologies into 2.0 Classic, Catalog 2.0, 2.0 Nouveau, and 2.0 Dubious. Some highlights of my talk included the del.icio.us collection by the Assumption College for Sisters (go, sisters, go!); the 30-second QandANJ commercial (one of the very few library videos on YouTube focused on users); TwitterLit, Debra Hamel’s book-focused Twitter feed; Kankakee Public Library’s front-page-linked blogs and feeds; and the display of the Williamsburg network on Facebook (part of my “find your users and learn more about them” discussion, which also featured Technorati, Feedburner, and Google Blog Search).

For a demonstration of virtual reference with Meebo-Me, Skokie Public Library came through magnificently. The crowd was visibly impressed, and the live interaction made my talk much fresher. Thanks, Toby and team!

(I became controversial while showing Danbury’s catalog, when I said LibraryThing for Libraries “kicked Novelist‘s butt” — I didn’t know several librarians there contribute to Novelist. That was a fun couple of minutes! My take on Novelist is that it was a great thing once upon a time — at least if you exclusively read fiction — but it has been OBT’d, that is, Overcome By Technology. Still, I encouraged the people who felt differently to write about Novelist versus LibraryThing. A thoughtful, spirited comparison of the two services would be useful.)

The structure of the event was interesting. I spoke for an hour, then the staff broke into small groups and designed 2.0 services, then I skimmed the reports, discussed common themes, and spoke again. I finished early, and that puzzled me; much later I realized I rushed through the staff service designs because I was worried about time… yet we really had plenty of time to discuss them, especially if I had ginned up the presence of mind to turn my laptop into an ad-hoc smartboard and key in some take-aways from the worksheets. I’d do this again, but find a way to get the suggestions “informated” — perhaps have each session have a “secretary” who keyed ideas into a wiki so we could review and discuss them collectively.

I was such a pampered speaker… Genevieve, my “handler” (and one-time Wonewok roommate) took time from her manic staff-day-prep schedule and scooped me up from the Richmond airport, drove me along lovely canopy backroads, squired me through the libraries in her system, indulged me with wonderful seafood (best she-crab soup I’ve ever had, and she made sure the waiter offered me sherry), put me up in a nice, quiet hotel, ensured that the technology was exactly what I needed, let me relax in a bookstore for an hour, treated me to a pile of magazines, and got me back to the airport safe and sound. Thanks, WRL!

Filed in Library 2.0, Talks and Tours | | Comments (9)

Do you use Meebo-me or AIM for reference?

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

If you are using Meebo-me or AOL instant messaging for reference at Your Place Of Work, and you will have your chat window open as of 8 a.m. ET this Thursday, October 18, and would be willing if I popped in sometime between 8 and 10 a.m… well, I would be most graceful, that’s what.

I’m doing a 2.0 talk at Williamsburg Regional Library this Thursday (oh hai genevieve kbyethx!) and it would be fun to show Meebo and/or AIM in action.

Filed in Talks and Tours | | Comments (20)

Honesty is as honesty does

Monday, October 15, 2007

In the past six months I’ve left a job because it wasn’t a good fit and stopped writing for a publication to pursue other interests. Yet after reading Walt Crawford’s post about honesty, I feel it oddly necessary to say, no, really: in my case, in this situation, that’s just how things went down. He wasn’t talking about me — it was just an uncanny coincidence that the wording and examples were so similar — and I shouldn’t worry about it, but his post did make me think.

Walt frames his post as a discussion about honesty, but it could also be framed around our comfort levels with disclosure, because there’s one more crucial option beyond being honest or dishonest. It’s not necessary to lie; you don’t have to say anything at all.

We don’t owe it to anyone else to underscore when we’ve really screwed up or what our skeeziest qualities are. I buy jeans that flatter me, rather than buying jeans that make it obvious that I am not only short but longwaisted in an odd troll-doll way, and I appreciate how turtlenecks cover up those lines in my neck. I think of this minor editing as one woman’s modest contribution to the global mise en scene.

I remember reviewing a cover letter written by a new librarian who listed why she wasn’t qualified for the job she was applying for. “No, no, NO!” I told her. Oy! Everyone has limitations, but if you want a job, start by telling the employer what you can offer them. Best foot forward is not a lie.

Yes, I tell you when I get turned down by a writing retreat center, or when I have three more rejections, but that’s par for the course; if I’m not getting rejected, I’m not sending stuff to good places, and as for that writing center — well, all I can say is they just don’t know what they’re missing. (I also did not win the Nobel Prize, but Doris Lessing, as she points out, is very old, so I completely understand.)

But the wheels of life are made smoother by strategic omissions, such as “What a baby!” and “Everyone raves about your book!” If you want to state quite simply, “I am no longer at Elysian University, and I’m looking for work,” that’s all right. If you want to share, that’s all right, too. Though set it aside for a bit, if you can; time has a way of making setbacks taste less bitter. In an essay I’m revising, “Falling In,” I set the immortal words of one military training instructor to free verse:

The Screaming

You don’t get it toGETHer

Yer ass gon’ be on ROLLerskates

Right outta LACKland

— Sergeant Santera, Lackland AFB, August, 1983

I can laugh now, but at the time, the idea of getting tossed from Basic Training terrified me; I had already failed in other parts of my life, and I was one of the many lost souls looking for what felt like a last chance.

Sometimes a little less honesty is a good long-range strategy. More than a few times librarian friends have asked me to review letters of resignation. I always encourage them to let it all hang out; to say exactly what they think; to list every significant thing wrong with their workplace and their boss… and then to take that letter home and hide it away, and write a polite note thanking the library for the opportunity to learn and grow, and so on and so forth. (The impolite letter can be very helpful when the shine wears off your new job; pull it out and remind yourself that your FPOW wasn’t perfect, either.)

To start with, whether or not you list them on your forms, your former bosses are your next reference. It’s really a small profession, once you boil it down to people with your skills in your specialty and your time in grade and preferred geographical locations. Be smart.

Not only that, but sometimes you are wrong and they are right. I look back at disputes and differences with former employers, and much as it stings to admit it, with benefit of experience, in some cases I can see their point. I imagine I’ve tried the patience of many a boss who decided to take a deep breath and focus on my strengths. So a little papering-over is not only smart, but sometimes kind, in a collective let’s-take-care-of-one-another way.

Oh, and it gets better — because that issue of “fitness” is key as well. We make choices based on “fit” all the time. (What’s matchmaking about, after all?) Most of us, reviewing job opportunities, consciously or unconsciously toss 95% of them in the reject pile. All of us have the potential to do many things, but we have to pick carefully. That’s my classic half-century lesson: at 50, I’m aware that time is a non-renewable resource.

If you don’t like your job, leave open the possibility that just maybe, you’re unhappy because you aren’t where you should be. I left the military over “fit.” I was competent, I had a good career path ahead of me, and it just wasn’t right. I left a PhD program, walking away from a fellowship, over “fit.” And this year I left a job over “fit,” even though I felt competent in the position, was learning a lot, made good money, and liked many of the people I worked with.

(At this point every gay or transgendered person reading this post is nodding in recognition, because we know the short-term cost, but the long-term gain, of living life by our own equations of the heart.)

Most of us have a lot of guilt buttons about employment, and deciding that you’re leaving for no other reason than your happiness can be tough; yet in every case, when I had made the decision to leave, the 800-pound-elephant got off my back. [Mixed metaphor! That would be small, by elephantine standards] But sometimes, you don’t realize why you were so unhappy until long after that elephant has lumbered away… so leave open the possibility that “It’s not you, it’s me” is not just a comfortable social fiction, but the hardcore truth.

And the hardcore truth may set you free; but whether you should share it with several billion of your closest friends is a call only you can make.

Filed in Librarianship | | Comments (13)

Training and Tornadoes

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Not too long ago I saw a sign in a store that asked (or at least I recall it asking), “Do you know what to do if a tornado is coming your way?”

My gut response was “Scream and faint.” Then, while pushing the cart around the store (randomly, so that I had to criss-cross the meat aisle several times, where I saw steaks that cost more than new bras), I thought to myself, so what would I do if a tornado was beelining toward me?

I was raised in earthquake country, where the disaster paradigm embraces serendipity and inevitability. In California, it’s all rehearse, rehearse, rehearse: strap down that bookcase, take note of the windows bound to implode, put the water and granola bars in the trunk (so if you’re wedged in between two spans of the Bay Bridge for several days, you can at least nosh away your worries). When it happens, oh mama, it happens: the earth crumbles beneath you; the seven-foot bookcase lands on your head; the bridge collapses.

So it’s strange to live in an area where you have at least a wedge of opportunity to improvise. Hurricanes are long, slow events, beginning with watching CNN for several days and racing around town to replenish your disaster vittles and then, worst case, following highways out of down marked with green symbols that I first thought had something to do with environmentalism and turned out to mean “this way to get out of Dodge.” (Unless you are like Joshua Clark of “Heart like Water” and you decide to hang around during the storm, which turns out to be a bad idea, though he did get a book out of it.)

So based on hurricanes — a sort of wind/air disaster — I concluded that if a tornado were coming my way I should run outside and — what, exactly? Dash into the woods? Get into my car and try to out-drive it?

It turns out that what I should do is either climb into our sturdy under-house crawl-space (if at home) or nip into the nearest restroom (if at work). Initially the work instructions said “appropriate restroom,” but it turned out “appropriate” did not really mean “based on the gender you most closely associate with at the moment when tornado is announced” (or even “restroom closest to your assigned office,” this being a rather flexible workplace on that point as well) but “restroom you can get to fastest when the guys with two-way radios are running and shouting.” So the instructions were forthwith clarified, and I was edified.

What this all means is that I both agree and disagree with Dorothea, who over on Caveat Lector in her “Training Wheels Culture” post grumbled quite credibly about professionals who pull out their real or metaphorical union cards and insist on “training” to learn anything; professionals who will not tinker and explore and learn on their own.

I know who she’s talking about. I knew who she was talking about back in 1992, before she was even a Liberrian, when I was training librarians on the Internet and not only did many of them not explore on their own but there were classes where I literally (if gently) placed librarians’ hands on keyboards and made them type. (I suppose now I’d be charged with harassment.)

It’s frustrating, exasperating, and depressing, even more so because Dorothea isn’t talking about librarians learning how to launch a space shuttle, program in assembler language, or cure HIV; we’re talking piddly stuff, for the most part.

But I did hear a gentle “ding” when she wrote, “I am consistently boggled by people asking me for training on DSpace’s deposit interface.”

I can think of quite a few interfaces that are massively non-intuitive. Moodle is muddled; Webjunction is disjunctured; I’ve seen “digital library” products that made me yearn for the good old days, when we rolled up papyrus and stuffed it in pigeonholes. Don’t get me started about OPACs.

Also, as with my inability to divine basic tornado common-sense, sometimes people are earnestly well-intentioned but differently-abled. Dorothea: you can help, or you can turn the page. (No, you can’t pull the Darwin card. After all, I was smart enough to attend the meeting that explained what to do in a tornado.)

I’ve also had training that caused a great bubble of light to appear over my head, wafting me out of the sublunary world of chaos and into the sweet order of knowledge. Or in any event, I had a MySQL class a couple years ago that kicked butt, and several more technical classes (including Siderean‘s excellent product training) that had me shouting, “I SEE the LIGHT!” and oh by the way, quite a few graduate level classes over the years that were “training” for various brain-muscles, and some Microsoft certification that proved extremely helpful, once upon a server.

It’s possible that the people asking Dorothea for training are Artful Dodgers, using “I need training” as the excuse for not learning and exploring. But it could also mean other things — such as (and I don’t know this) that DSpace is to digital libraries as Moodle is to courseware. And it also doesn’t mean there isn’t a role for good training, however that’s defined: hands-on instruction, online classes, conference programs, and the like. In fact, when I started as a librarian, it shocked me how few resources we dedicated to keeping skills current, so much so that the second article every published under my byline was a Library Journal article, “Train for the Top Gun.”

Still, I Know What She Means. I genuflect again in the direction of MPOW, which is remarkably free of such refuseniks. Dorothea’s post explains why I just can’t work in a library again. Life is too freakin’ short.

Filed in Hot Tech | | Comments (7)

Our exhilarating new mix and match, slice and dice world

Thursday, October 11, 2007

My online presentation, “Death to Jargon,” went pretty good today, for a first-time-talk, though at one point I began stammering and I realized it was because I was talking to over fifty people I couldn’t see or hear. So I went inward and focused on the topic, as if I were presenting to myself, and that smoothed things out. The talk will be online later, I am assured.

But what grabbed me most about today was a talk with Jeremy Frumkin about LibraryFind (and about barbecue in Tallahassee, his four-month-old baby, and food in Oregon). It’s not just that LibraryFind is a “kewl app” — though LibraryFind, which ties together catalog records, database articles, and other stuff and presents it through a very nice user-tested interface, is plenty kewl enough — but after the call ended I realized how excited I was by the options we have in LibraryLand — many designed and built by library developers.

Want to hoist your library out of its institutional silo and get your data on the Web? (After all, as Mae West said, who wants to be in an institutional silo?) You could pick an open-source ILS (library back-end, for the functions) such as Evergreen, in live deployment in hundreds of libraries in Georgia, and version 1.2 just deployed. Or look into eXtensible Catalog (in development at the University of Rochester). Then give either a single integrated front end — one-stop-shopping for your users: books, articles, more — with open-source LibraryFind or OCLC’s “unified finding aid,” WorldCat Local.

If you pick WorldCat Local, a single search can take your users global–one search goes infinitely beyond the local library, with the promise of fulfillment from many different libraries. If you pick LibraryFind, you’re searching your own silos — for now — but Evergreen is so robust it could be 200-plus silos (as it is in Georgia), and LibraryFind is built to leverage OpenURL more effectively than any other unified finding product.

We, as a profession, could even build out own “silo” — a kind of librarian-built “Free OCLC.” (The Free-C?) Both Evergreen and eXtensible Catalog are designed in part on the premise that the only good data is Web-readable data which can be harvested by protocols such as OAI, placed in a central catalog, and made available for all to use. (Since I’m hungry, I’ll describe OAI as a humongous straw that can suck in all kinds of data, like those straws used with pearl tea.)

(Yes, I know OAI is the “initiative,” and OAI-PMH is the protocol, but everyone says “OAI,” so don’t rag me about that.)

Then again, over at the Internet Archive we have the Open Library project: a web page for every book! But wait, there’s more: the inimitable Tim Spalding of LibraryThing announced yesterday that LT had debuted “social cataloging,” where plain ol’ LT users can enrich record fields.

None of these initiatives are “free” as in “free beer”; they are all free kittens, in need of care and feeding. (Companies such as Equinox and LibLime have sprung up to provide third-party maintenance.) All of them exist because some organization or person (or both) put up cash or sweat equity. Some, like eXtensible Catalog — which just got second-year grant funding — are still a gleam in someone’s eye; some, like LibraryFind, are still very, very new, though undergoing rapid development. All need strong sustainability models to keep going.

But they’re all much different than the model we’ve been using for over a hundred years, where the cards — and then the records — were stuffed into local catalogs, and they’re also different from the model of the last several decades, where the brass ring was the super-secret code, and the support and development were where everyone economized.

Everything is different. That may even mean we’re different. And if so — then vive la difference!

Filed in Hot Tech, Librarianship | | Comments (2)

My Bloglines collection of blogs about writing and writers

Thursday, October 11, 2007

These are blogs I more or less follow. . There are many more… this is what I can handle right now.

Filed in Uncategorized, Writing, Writing for the Web | | Comments (9)

Angela Sets Up a LOCKSS Box

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

We’ve long needed a video on how easy it is to set up LOCKSS –software for digital preservation, called Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe. (I wrote about LOCKSS for Library Journal this summer.) Angela Slaughter of Indiana University pounced on this idea and has produced a video everyone should watch.

Around these parts, for hurricane prep we stock up on water, packaged food, and instant coffee.  Simple stuff, but without it, riding out a storm could be rough. (Especially the coffee. Oh, and to heat it up? The gas grill. Though I’m tempted to buy some Starbucks “shots” in case the grill runs out of propane, because it’s one thing to be hungry and another to be out of coffee.)

LOCKSS is that simple. Get a checklist, write down what Angela shows you on the screen, download LOCKSS, and get going. Start a local LOCKSS network. Talk up digital preservation with your colleagues.  Start having those discussions!

Filed in Digital Preservation | Tagged , | Comments (1)

The statue on the green: the fate of small literary journals

Sunday, October 7, 2007

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 New York City about the fate of small print-based literary journals. This grew out of writer Kevin Prufer’s plaint that his library had dropped subscriptions to several such journals, followed by my guest post to Critical Mass discussing the fate of these journals and the disservice that is done to the international canon when librarians drop subscriptions to literary journals with the justification that they are “online.”

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 New York offered some excellent advocacy tips, and I would only add “follow the money.” Librarian Susan Thomas of Susan Thomas of the Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY waved the flag of common sense with her suggestions that writing and humanities departments “[l]obby the librarians. And lobby the provost, the dean of humanities, the vice president, the president. Ask them to keep literary magazines and small press publications on the shelves.” But in that “lobbying” all of us should note that the average cost of one chemistry journal— $3,429—would fund approximately 100 subscriptions to literary journals.

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.”

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.

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