COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT IN THE AGE DAY OF

G O O G L E

Mark Sandler Collection Development Officer University of Michigan Cornell Janus Conference, October 2005

LEFT BEHIND BY HISTORY

“Hopelessly lost, but making good time.”

Pam Bliss, The Sequential Tart

CHANGE HAPPENS  Buggy Whips  RCA & ATT  Financial Services  Music  Newspapers  Post Office

CLOSER TO HOME  Amazon  ABE and eBay  Print on Demand  E-Books  Books on tape  iPods and PMDs  Books in the aggregate

GETTING CENTERED  Retail  Media  Politics  Food  Sports  Education?

OR NOT

 P2P  Blogs  Self publishing  Independent film

MAIN STREET, USA   The butcher The baker   Hardware Men’s store  Women’s clothing   Kids clothing Shoe Store   Hat shop Toy store   Stationary store Candy store  Book store

LOMAN ON THE TOTEM POLE Delivering the goods  The sales guy  The buyer  Has good taste     Recognizes quality Knows local customer needs Select Negotiate

…ONE FOR ALL

REMINISCENCES FROM THE LIBRARY PERIPHERY 120,000 geographically dispersed libraries serving local users  Selecting  Organizing  Disseminating

AN ELECTRICAL STORM

 Reference  Aggregators  JSTOR  The “big deal”  Corpus collections  Backfiles  Library digital projects

MAKING OF AMERICA  10,000 volumes  American Imprints  1850-1877  Housed in storage  Predominantly brittle  600 dpi TIFFS with dirty OCR searchability  750,000 page views per month

PRINT ON DEMAND

THE LONG TAIL

THE TAIL GROWS LONGER

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally useful and accessible

GOOGLE PRINT “working to digitize the book collections of several major research libraries and make this content searchable through Google ”

THE MICHIGAN PROJECT  Digitize Michigan’s entire stacks collection of 7 million volumes  Excludes special collections, Law, Business Administration,  Excludes material that is fragile, unbound, or folio size.

 Excludes microfilm  Return files to Michigan  600 dpi bitonal TIFFs, with 300dpi jpeg2000 images  Files to include OCR and headers

WHAT IS MICHIGAN DOING IN THE MEANWHILE?

 Commercial acquisitions  Making of America style projects  Text Creation Partnership  Enhancements to DLXS  Institutional Repository  Scholarly Publishing Office

ARE WE STILL BUYING?

  160,000 print volumes Shaw-Shoemaker      Early American Newspapers The Making of Modern Economy The Making of Modern Law STM Backfiles — Elsevier and Wiley Shakespeare   Empire Online Microfilm   Prange Women’s magazines  Spanish Newspapers

ARE WE STILL BUILDING Head, DLPS

Prep and QC (4 FTE) SPO (7 FTE) Digital Imaging: Scanning and Photography (2 FTE) Metadata Specialist (1 FTE OCR (1 FTE ) IR Coordinator (1 FTE) Information Retrieval: Programming (5 FTE) Interface (1 FTE) Collection coordination (1 FTE) Metadata harvesting (1 FTE) Text Creation Partnerships (EEBO, Evans and ECCO) (6 FTE) OXFORD TEAM (4 FTE )

MOA STYLE PROJECTS  Great Lakes  Philippines  Homeopathy  New York City History  Public Papers of the Presidents  Dentistry  The Michigan Daily

TEXT CREATION PARTNERSHIP  11,000 accurately keyboarded and SGML/TEI encoded works completed (about 3,500 per year)  Funding committed to reach 25,000-30,000 across EEBO, Evans, and ECCO (support from over 160 libraries)  $2.00 per volume   Local implementation Library ownership

SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING OFFICE  Outlet for campus publications       Michigan Quarterly Review Philosopher’s Imprint Japanese Studies Monographs International Institute Original Monographs; JEP SPARC  Revenue generating projects   LLMC ACLS History E-Book project

ENOUGH ABOUT ME!

It’s all about ewe

THE OLD COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT

“all collections are local

”  What do we buy?

    Worthy content Durable formats Local use National collecting responsibilities  What do we keep?

  Reformatting Storage

THEY’RE BUILDING A STRIP MALL!

 Approval plans  Resource sharing  Cooperative collection development  Big microfilm collections  Consortia

WAL-MARTS EVERYWHERE!

 Google, Yahoo, EC  Commercial Corpus Collections  Journals new and old  Aggregated news feeds  GPO  Library conversion efforts

WHAT’S LEFT FOR THE LOCAL LIBRARY  Can I compete?

 Should I compete?

 Should I build my own digital library?

 Should I keep my public domain print?

 Will I lose my users, my support, my livelihood?

WHY SHOP LOCAL?

 Speed, convenience, efficiency  Selections reflect distinctive local needs  Browsing is desirable  Personal relationships enhance the shopping experience  Pampering

WHERE HAVE WE BEEN?

 Books in, books out  Books in, books everywhere  Resource sharing  E-resources and e-distribution  Coffee shops and lounges  Libraries as conversion agencies

WHERE ARE WE GOING?

 Boutique acquisitions and services  Enriching and customizing collections  Less warehousing and more marketing  Libraries as publishers  Trusted archives  Communication centers  Facilitating social creation of knowledge

THE NEW COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT  What can we take for free?

 What do we license and link to?

 Quality of content and functionality  Cost and terms can we abide?

 What do we need to own?

  When is on-site print preferred?

When is a local implementation desirable?

 What do we need to build locally?

 Local content  Strengths and branded collections   Special collections Enhanced functionality

REBUILDING OUR VILLAGE  It’s the network stupid!

 Our collections are bigger than ever  Our constituents are everywhere  Communication happens  We can support each other in unprecedented ways, solve problems, and share victories

THE WORK TO BE DONE POST GOOGLE A Library Works Project Administration  Compile communities of content for communities of users (selection)  Develop specialized tools for specialized users  Selectively upgrade important texts, heavily used texts, and texts of enduring research and instructional value  Integrate with other important digital library corpora  Clear rights  Find cooperative approaches for digital and print archiving

TOP TEN REASONS TO DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING •Budgets are bad •There’s too much work •Cooperation is hard •Everything is changing •Publishers are greedy •Users are demanding •Staff skills are scarce •Nobody has time to think •Let others do it •My provost doesn’t get it

DOING NOTHING IS RISKIER THAN CHANGING  Information wants to be free, used and open  It’s all about communication  Invest in cooperation  Rewarding is building something, not buying it  Librarianship is a team sport  We care for the animals (but they don’t run the zoo!)

QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS