As publishing moves swiftly into ebooks, and much of our clientele is moving that way as well (I admit that this trend is neither fully-engaged yet and may never reduce print to zero), libraries must move as well. Increasingly, we may no longer be purchasing anything. We will likely be licensing access to large swathes of digital content.
This means that the days of one-by-one selection will be well and truly over. Sure, the rise of approval plans and other such collection development tools largely made that type of selection old hat for many libraries, but with the move to digital it seems both inevitable and undeniable.
This also means that collection development librarians, or those who report to them, will increasingly be required to become license managers. New skills such as the ability to parse turgid legal terms of use will be required. Knowledge of ebook formats, delivery platforms, digital rights management regimes, and all kinds of other esoterica will become/are becoming the sine qua non of collection development librarians.
Are we ready for it? Are library schools teaching these skills? Are there any in-service training options for new skills like contract negotiation? My hunch is “no,” and that worries me. But if I’m wrong, and believe me it won’t be the first time, call me out in a comment below. Otherwise, color me concerned.
No related posts.
I discuss DRM and ebook formats in my intro-to-tech course at UW-Madison SLIS. I talked quite a bit about licensing and what the move to ebooks may mean for both publishers and libraries in the “topics in coll dev” course I taught last spring for Illinois’s GSLIS.
I am only one person, and not a lawyer at that. But I do what I can.
“New skills such as the ability to parse turgid legal terms of use will be required” should apply to people of the entire e-book-value chain, from 1) publishers, 2) aggregators, 3) librarians working with electronic resources, collection management, systems, web services, ILL, etc., 4) legal and IT teams of an institution, 5) other stakeholders at consortium level, etc.
“The ability to parse turgid legal terms of use” can be enhanced if 1) the format of term of use agreement is standardized and customizable to special cases; 2) the metrics to measure usage and others are standardized and designed to provide meaningful insights to all stakeholders in an integrated manner; 3) baseline copyright training and other license-related trainings made available to librarians, e.g. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/copyrightforlibrarians/Main_Page
Because of the nature of the disciplines we work with, academic medical libraries are well along on that track. At my library we haven’t bought any print in several years and we are evolving very different models of what managing content is all about. The first class on licensing that I went to was well over a decade ago (a workshop at the annual meeting of the AAHSL directors). Steven MacCall (LJ library educator of the year this year)at UA addresses licensing issues (and other e-related matters) in his medical libraries course. That being said, it surprises me somewhat that many of the issues that we’re dealing with regarding e-books (atrocious term, by the way) are the same issues that we were dealing with when journals started going digital. You’d think we’d have learned something.
Contract negotiations is definitely an important skill today. So is statistical analysis, which most librarians approach like a deer in the headlights. And as digital services rise, troubleshooting skills need to be developed also. This is an area I see lots of librarians having trouble with as we move to providing content in new formats. It’s a growing problem.
Also, if we are really going to support these services as core to the library mission and not as a secondary service, budgets really need to be reconsidered. I know from experience that library administrators have a hard time allocating part of their “materials” line to purchase digital content… somehow the lack of a physical medium is really a stumbling block for many librarians in conceptualizing the service model.
Dorothea, Thanks, it’s good to know that at least some SLIS faculty are emphasizing the new regime.
[...] Roy Tennant, Library Collection Development = Licensing, [...]
I am glad you have raised the issue of license negotiations, and the question of whether contemporary LIS programs are teaching (perhaps even requiring) such skills. I have raised this consistently on Copycense and in my Information Today column over the past several years, to the point where I am just tired of raising the issue anymore. Perhaps your input will push the issue forward.
Interestingly, though, you did not mention copyright education in LIS programs. License terms and conditions are based upon a negotiated (or, too often, not negotiated) allocation of rights between a publisher (or its agent) and a library. The vast majority of the rights that parties negotiate in a content license are based upon copyright. Therefore, no one can properly teach or implement content or e-book license negotiations without a fundamental understanding of copyright law, its rights allocations, and the applicable exceptions that would allow a specific use without requiring payment or permission.
Therefore, both copyright and licensing should be required courses in any serious LIS program. The schools’ failure to make these courses a requirement in 2011 is nothing short of ridiculous.