Title: Issues in Vendor Library Relations
Author: Bob Nardini
Description: 400 Catalogers - Bob tells us what happened when he spoke before a Library of Congress Working Group.
Link: pdf

Column Editor: Bob Nardini (Group Director, Client Integration and Head
Bibliographer, Coutts Information Services)

The biggest success story of the past ten
years in academic libraries, without
a doubt, has been eBooks. This may
surprise many readers, but when seen in the
right light, there’s no contest.
Nobody knows how many eBooks there are.
It’s hard to find out when a new one becomes
available, and when it does, it might be a new
title and might be an older one. Then, there’s
no consensus on how to budget for them, on
how to buy them, on who should buy them
or who to buy them from, on how much they
cost, or if it’s best to buy one-at-a-time or in
bulk. Then, there’s the option not to buy at all,
but to subscribe instead. Once acquired, the
workflows to receive eBooks, pay for them, and
make them available to users are being made up
on the fly. Nobody’s quite sure if eBooks go out
of print, or if they do, what that means.
None of us even knows how to spell the
word. We go with our own favorite variation
and really, who’s going to call you on it?
How could they? Is it eBooks? Or e-books?
Ebooks? E-books? ebooks? There’s a good
argument in favor of each one. Non-argument,
really, since what is there to argue about? You
could argue, on the other hand, whether or not
these things are books in the first place. Maybe
we’re using the handiest word stem available
only because we don’t have a better one.
There’s always a breakthrough eBook reader
on the horizon, but so far nothing has broken
through. The one thing everyone agrees on is
that nobody wants to read an eBook on a computer
screen; but for the most part now, there’s little other
choice. How readers use eBooks, or even how
eager they are to have eBooks in the first place,
good questions both at the moment. User models
set by the publishers are all over the place.
Preservation is an open question. Cataloging
is a problem. Collection development principles
are, shall we say, nascent. Vendors and publishers
think there’s some money in eBooks, but at this
point have quite a few examples to ponder to the
contrary.
Today’s infrastructure for eBook commerce
resembles the infrastructure of one of those fastgrowing
exurban Sun Belt areas where before your
eyes you can see the world being remade every
day, remade with little to no help from professional
planning or even from zoning. Where does that
new highway lead to, does anyone know?
Despite all barriers to buying them, librarians
buy eBooks anyway. In fact it would be hard to
find an academic library without eBooks in the
collection. One way or another, whether due to a
netLibrary buy, a publisher deal, a collection of
historical texts, a consortial bargain, or something
else, eBooks are everywhere. They are a huge
success, nearly miraculous.
Imagine where they’d be if we’d had it all
figured out by now.
As it is, even in libraries who know it’s full
steam ahead with eBooks for them — in fact especially
for these libraries — the next problem is,
who in the library buys them?
Serials librarian and serials vendor may find
themselves conspiring to capture the deal, and they
may be up against book vendor and monographs
acquisitions librarian down the hall trying to devise
an angle of their own. Upstairs an assistant director
looking to deepen ties with a consortium is on
the phone with the director of that group. Another
assistant director, meanwhile, favors a publisher
who is offering a strong science package. Most
selectors are looking for the smallest possible
package of eBooks, since they have enough to do
in the first place, and the head of public services
leans toward the platform taught in BI all term
long anyway.
Who gets to buy the eBooks is a function, of
course, of who they are bought from. Or is it the reverse?
Hard to tell, it’s a real chicken and egg. The
one sure thing is that there’s hardly a library vendor
rep of any kind out there today who doesn’t have a
PowerPoint on the laptop ready to fire up and present
their eBook offering to any and all librarians
with the time to watch and listen. The night-before
routine is the same for all these reps. Open the
laptop, find the folder, find the file, change the first
slide, and let the eBook bullets roll, whether book
vendor, serial vendor, database vendor, aggregator,
publisher, or consortial staff member. There must
be a lot of librarians that could give a pretty good
rendering of a pitch themselves, having seen the
show so regularly.
If who gets to buy the eBooks, and who to
buy them from, are thorny questions, another is
the matter of budgeting for eBooks. Are eBooks
an ongoing commitment, that is, a serial? Or are
eBooks a one-off purchase, that is, are they
books? Or are they really an “electronic resource?”
The book budget has been raided
to pay for serials so routinely for so long
it’s always a temptation to pay for them that
way, especially since they might be books
anyhow. But there seems to be a bedrock
level of support for print books that many
libraries reached some time ago, and a good
deal of resistance to dynamiting down any
further. Then there’s the serials budget,
where libraries have learned the hard way
over a generation what can happen when an
ongoing commitment gets locked into the
budget. Thus, less than universal buy-in
to concede that eBooks are a serial. That
leaves electronic resources, a budget line
growing by leaps and bounds, and maybe
a happy home for the eBooks, although the
monographs and serials librarians might not
see things in that light.
Finally, there’s the weight of print. Print
has a literal weight, of course. You can pick
up a printed book, hold it, carry it, put it in
your bag, make a stack of books on your
desk. A big stack, on some desks, books
as bookends even. Get together a little pile
of as many as half-dozen or so and you can
feel the weight of print. To carry them, you
will need a bag of some sort. Books are
substantial and they’re also, on occasion,
handsome, sometimes quite beautiful, to
see and to hold. The look and the feel is
different, new books, old books, books
in between, there’s even a certain smell,
sometimes slightly intoxicating, that comes
with the stages of a book’s life and that may
— as we know from a famous book — leave
the reader awash in memory.
If a stack of books on a desk — the titles
themselves, the way they are arranged, the
signs of use or disuse — say something about
the interests, and intellectual weight, and even
personality of the desk occupant, row upon
row, floor upon floor of shelved books do that
for a library. Now we’re talking about cultural
weight. Print books, heavily used or seldom
used, no matter, will have a constituency on
campus. Other than some librarians, eBooks
will not. You can’t see them (well OK, log on
and you can, in a sense), hold them, smell them,
carry them. No one has formative memories
of eBooks. No one devotes rooms to them at
home, no one lines an office with them, no
one collects them, authors don’t sign them,
bookstores don’t display them, at bedtime no
parents read them to kids — eBooks have no
cultural weight at all.
Why is it then, with so much going against
them, have eBooks made their way into nearly
every library collection? And why does everyone
feel we’ve reached — now that thanks to
a more recent famous book we have the right
phrase — a tipping point for eBooks?
Well, for one thing you might say that
librarians gave print books a chance and they
didn’t work. Research libraries in this country
have stockpiled print books for decades
and now what? The heart of the university?
That’s what librarians used to say all the time,
and the books were a large part of the claim.
Now, new buildings are designed in ways to
keep the books out of view. Some directors
take a greater interest in remote storage
facilities than they do collection development.
And they have to: Where
to put all those books that just might
circulate one day? It’s true that print
books will always have a constituency;
but equally true that today there are a
lot of people on campus, some in high
places, who would certainly not notice,
would likely not care, and might even
be delighted if some massive interlibrary
loan malfunction emptied the
library of every last volume.
Always the very first criticism
of eBooks is that nobody
wants to read one from beginning
to end. True enough,
but somehow it’s never mentioned,
to balance the score,
that as a rule nobody wants
to read an academic library’s
print books cover-to-cover,
either. That’s not to say the
books (some of them) aren’t
used. But, as opposed to
what goes on in public libraries,
scholars and students are
much more likely, having
checked out a book, to scan
it, size it up, read a chapter or
two maybe, check a reference, verify a
fact, look at the bibliography, try to find
some dimly recalled passage.
For these purposes, anyway, eBooks
equal or better their print forebears.
Especially when you haven’t
visited the library lately and might
prefer to do your work from home or
office or dorm, or while sitting in a
café. Even for other uses, where print
is superior, superior still to have eBook
available too, for subsequent scanning,
checking, verifying, finding.
And speaking of cafes, remember
all that cultural weight of the print
books? How will the books weigh in
on that scale after we have a solid generation
or so of students accustomed
to walking into a library building and
the only books in sight are the ones the
people sitting around drinking coffee
have with them at the moment? And
for whom the digitization of every
book in the world will not seem an
astounding vision, but the way things
always were, about as remarkable as
color television? The amazing thing
for this cohort will more likely be to
hear that the print originals for these
online works are all still around,
somewhere.
And, that there used to be some
doubt, and even debate, about the
eBooks.