ACQNET v6n002 (January 3, 1996) URL = http://www.infomotions.com/serials/acqnet/acqnet-v6n002 ISSN: 1057-5308 *************** ACQNET, Vol. 6, No. 2, January 3, 1996 ======================================== (1) FROM: Ron Ray SUBJECT: Charleston '95: Part 1 (277 lines) ---------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 06 Dec 1995 15:57:00 -0800 From: Ron L. Ray (Univ. of the Pacific) Subject: Charleston '95: Part 1 How Do You Justify the Charleston Conference to Your Travel Funding Authorities? : An Essay on Charleston 1995. It's a never a problem to justify attendance at Charleston to yourself; charming city, saturated with history, enticing sightseeing and tours nearby, great shopping (this year the vogue in storefront windows was T-shirts mocking the hapless Shannon Faulkner), delectable restaurants, some fine bookstores and antique shops, balmy weather even as the first snowstorms are buffeting midwest and northern climes. At the conference proper, you rub shoulders with movers, shakers, and big names in our profession, as well as meet humble, interesting new colleagues, find yourself absorbed by lively discussions on a stimulating mix of topics, enjoy great receptions in stately buildings with a bar hosted by renowned beer authority Steve Johnson, and bask in the charm, graciousness, and wit of Katina Strauch and her southern drawl. What's to justify? When I worked at an eastern institution that scrimped on travel funding, it was never an issue for me to pay for much of Charleston out of my own pocket. It was definitely worth it and the charms of Charleston rendered it a vacation and professional trip rolled in one. Now I'm on the west coast, at an institution where I can draw on more generous travel funding, but still have to present the soundest justification for expensive cross-continent travel. And my justification basis has been seriously eroded by my proximity to the Feather River Institute; a Johnny-come-lately, down-scaled version of the Charleston Conference (if such a thing is conceivable without the city of Charleston). How do I justify to my colleagues spending days and a sizeable chunk of library funding on a national acquisitions-related conference across the country, when I practically get to go to one free in my own back yard? The report of the conference that follows sums up how my university's expenditure to send me to Charleston is paying back dividends. (I didn't stretch the tolerance of my library dean by asking to attend the Charleston pre-conferences. I invite ACQNET subscribers who did to post summaries for the benefit of the rest of us.) I kicked off my Charleston '95 by cheating and attending the newcomers' breakfast. Having attended the '89 Charleston Conference and been on the program of the '91 & '92 conferences, I was really stretching the newcomer bit, but I reasoned, "Hey, if they're all newcomers to Charleston, how will they know I'm not?" And Katina hadn't posted any bouncers near the breakfast food to evict familiar faces. So I enjoyed a free breakfast and made a point of asking someone loudly where the restrooms were so it would appear I was a newcomer, unfamiliar with the terrain. Judy Webster (Univ. of Tennessee), one of the Conference Coordinators, introduced newcomers (of which there appeared to be nearly 100 - out of 430 attendees) to the history and institutionalized forms of the Charleston Conference, celebrating its 15th year. Charleston has become more than a conference; it's something of a highly-ritualized pilgrimage for veterans. Katina and her coordinating crew are always cooking up something new, but there are just certain things you expect at Charleston or else you become a little disoriented: Chuck Hamaker has to take serials publishers to task at least during the conference, Lyman Newlin has to refer to the audience as "all these youngsters" and you know he means the people with grey hair as well; Clifford Lynch has to breeze up to the podium near the end looking like he just got to the conference riding a Harley non-stop across the country from California; Richard Abel has to lament the usurpation of library budgets by serials literature. Wait, see I did get disoriented; I just double-checked my conference notes - Richard Abel wasn't even at Charleston this year! You see how all this ritual activity could be a little bewildering to a newcomer, so the breakfast was a good idea. At the breakfast Webster explained that even though it started out as an acquisitions conference lo those 15 years ago, the Charleston program has since outstripped its own subtitle, "...Issues in Book and Serial Acquisition." It isn't really just about acquisitions anymore. The "lively lunches" are still reserved for acquisitions topics, but the conference program is moving into topics concerning the information industry. Michael Gorman was on the program, for instance. (And that presented me with justification problems too. How could I justify traveling to Charleston to hear Gorman promote his new book, when he hails from just down the road in Fresno and I could hear him stump his book at any number of California library conferences at a fraction of the Charleston cost? The same for Clifford Lynch.) Webster admitted that although the Charleston program was shifting from acquisitions to the information industry, what that really meant was they didn't exactly know where they're going. She enjoined the audience to view Charleston, like the info industry itself, as a "work-in-progress." Three keynote addresses made up the first morning's program. Laura Gasaway (UNC-Chapel Hill School of Law Library) led off with an up-to-date look at critical copyright issues facing universities today. Can the fair use doctrine be applied fairly in the electronic age? As far as libraries are concerned, fair use should mean 1) their patrons are able to browse electronic documents without incurring per-use charges, 2) libraries can produce electronic copies of copyrighted works (no longer on the market) for preservation purposes, 3) within CONTU guidelines (5-uses rule), libraries can engage in electronic ILL, and 4) libraries can establish electronic course reserves services. Universities for their part expect 1) a classroom exemption to copyright restrictions, 2) the creation and use of multimedia materials, 3) to engage in distance learning, and 4) to digitize university-owned slide and image collections. Gasaway reviewed the extent to which these expectations are supported or at risk in the white paper released this September by the Department of Commerce, "Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure: The Report of the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights". [I went looking for this document after returning from Charleston; you can find it on the web: http://www.uspto.gov/web/ipnii. But I recommend visiting it on ARL's web site: http://arl.cni.org/info.hmtl -- where it's placed in the context of relevant position papers and commentary from library and university perspectives.] For instance, regarding electronic course reserves: libraries are allowed a first-time use without permission of the copyright holder; subsequent uses will require royalty payments; libraries can make reserves available over the campus network, but must restrict them to students enrolled in the specific courses; bibliographic access is rendered unattractive, i.e. identified only by professor's name, the course number and name; documents are on reserve only one semester; documents include the copyright notice: "No further transmission or distribution of this material permitted." For faculty preparing multimedia works where it would be impossible to obtain the numerous copyright permissions (for film clips, etc.), the guidelines allow use of works individually owned by the school, but viewing must be limited to classroom-enrolled students. The paper doesn't adequately address strong university interest in distance learning or educational broadcasting. Guidelines infer that reception of information containing copyrighted material must be in a classroom or that delivery of course reserves must not extend beyond the local campus network. Gasaway's explication of the September white paper tracked significant changes from the prior green paper. It appears that in areas of conflict between copyright holders and universities and libraries, the copyright holders are gaining the upper hand. Statements about public rights and interests were washed out of the document as it went from green to white. She summed up the white paper as having an emphasis on licensing rather than fair use, and warned of outright dangers, such as a library being liable if one of its users violates copyright since, in providing licensed services, the library could be viewed as having a business relationship with the user. The second keynote address came from Michael Mellinger of DRA. He began by reviewing some of the omnipresent hype inundating us from the information industry. Much of the hype is offering us the future, not the now. And much of it - asynchronous transfer mode, client/server architecture/object oriented systems - consists of new, updated names for old concepts. Mellinger lamented the emphasis on "HOW we get there" rather than "WHAT we're going to do" when we're there. GUI (graphical user interface) in his mind is like a Ferrari without the engine; graphical interfaces often interfere with powerful search engines. Then Mellinger asked the audience to think of Z39.50 differently. He advocated Z39.50 as the library world's best hope for establishing standards, integration, and interoperability between systems. Yes, he admitted, Z39.50 is complicated, but so are libraries. Z39.50 should be a foundation, not an end; the WWW has eclipsed the attention of many, but the WWW doesn't offer the transparency and interoperability that are primary goals of Z39.50. In an anecdote about the Web, Mellinger told of a query that any library reference desk should be able to answer in 5 minutes: "Who ran on the ticket with Nixon in 1960?" Using Web servers, several hours were spent trying to find the answer to that question, apparently to no avail, though the answer could be found in mere minutes using standard printed reference sources. Mellinger appeared before us penitent for his part in promoting the hype on library systems, and stated that vendors have been doing a disservice by the "Next Big Thing" approach to selling library systems. He advocated that systems development now be evolutionary, not revolutionary. Just as libraries have been developing interdependency through consortia and resource sharing, so must their automated systems become more interoperable, and the standards development that Z39.50 promises is an effective vehicle for it. Lastly he advocated greater involvement by librarians in standards development. Getting library systems to share data with campus systems in real time, say on circulation charges, requires the development of interoperability standards; vendors can't drive this development, users must. Third keynoter, Lisa Freeman (Univ. of Minnesota Press), delivered a sort of "state of the university press book publisher" address. If you've been feeling sort of down about the state of the university library or its inadequate funding, you could take comfort from Freeman's remarks that you're in the library and not in the press on your campus. The biggest problem for university presses is not information technology initiatives or anything so glamorous as that. Rather it's the lack of support from the university for needs as basic to a press as distribution or marketing. On average, university presses now receive only 7% of their income from parent institutions. University of Minnesota Press is down to virtually no parental support. And this reduced support is just one dismal facet of the picture: research and academic library purchases of university press monographs are often down to 300-400 copies per title, and that level of sales is too low to cover costs; independent booksellers, many who would stock university press titles, are becoming less significant than big bookstore chains, which are less likely to stock titles that aren't offered with the big discounts of trade titles. With computerized inventory control in bookstores, books that don't sell quickly are returned to the publisher more frequently and sooner. University presses are responding to these pressures by offering more regional books to increase sales outside their traditional markets and by capitalizing on available technology in the editing process to reduce production costs. And most controversially, university presses are acting more like commercial publishers by venturing outside their mission to offer more lucrative trade books. With reduced institutional support, university presses are caught in the conundrum of turning down more manuscripts that won't sell well and by doing so, undercutting their own raison d'etre. Success and survival now appears to be based on publishing fewer of what university presses were designed to publish. Furthermore, to the extent they behave like commercial publishers university presses risk their non-profit status being challenged by the IRS. Freeman is very uneasy about university presses selling their birthright for survival. The functions of a university press are not becoming any less vital, even if the euphoric promises of a new technological infrastructure for scholarly communication can be delivered. She reviewed three important functions: 1) Selection: the gatekeeping, as well as the encouraging of potential authors. The prestige accorded work published by a university press is still reflected in promotion and tenure reviews. 2) Refinement: by editing, proofing, and design, university presses work to render good ideas into print. 3) Marketing and promotion: targeting books to the right audiences and making it easier for consumers to find books. Freeman questioned the claims that information technology will reduce costs and deliver faster, better access to scholarly information, particularly where monographic literature is concerned. Broad access to the technology is not there yet. She cited the circumstance that some university faculty are still with nothing more advanced in their offices than rotary phones. As far as the promised faster access, most of what publishing consists of takes place before delivery to a printer. Eliminating printing would only shave off 6-8 weeks off the process, whereas publishers might work 2-3 years with an author to bring a monograph into being. She believes the predicted cost savings of technology are better characterized as cost shifts. Maintaining parallel print and electronic publishing structures for the near term will be quite expensive. Lastly, with their institutional funding at low ebb, university presses have less capital available to them for experimenting with technological initiatives. Numerous other issues are as yet unresolved, despite years now of enthusiasm in some quarters for a shift to electronic scholarly publication. There are no models for access charges (though we're closer to this in the journal realm). Whose responsibility is it to establish and maintain hypertext links, the author's or the publisher's? Mechanisms designed to protect copyright could infringe upon privacy. Additionally, the humanistic disciplines face greater difficulties than the scientific/technical with the electronic model: "Books are not data sets." The importance lent to the expression and presentation of ideas in the humanities is a different matter than the transmission of facts and information in the STM disciplines. Also, the notion that university departments and professional organizations could use developing technology to circumvent time and costs in the current publishing structure is fraught with fallacy. Non-profit publishing is not equivalent to cost-free publishing. Most importantly, scholarly presses must remain politically independent; the authorities who make publishing decisions should not be same authorities who influence tenure decisions. Two changes in particular are important to remedy the deteriorating state of affairs. First, as Freeman sees it, too many books are being published, and this is due largely to a failure of the promotion and tenure process to emphasize quality over quantity. Secondly, university presses have been too removed from the campus infrastructure and development. She advocated an integrated view of scholarly communication wherein the university would allocate its resources to reinforce the whole system, not simply reduce support to their presses, and then pay for that out of their library budgets in higher prices for monographs. ****** END OF FILE ****** ACQNET, Vol. 6, No. 2 ****** END OF FILE ******