[Infowarrior] - The Accessibility Paradox

[Richard Forno]

The Accessibility Paradox | Peer to Peer Review
  Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library  
Journal, 10/29/2009

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6704324.html?nid=2673&source=title&rid=1950725787


The book world has been harrumphing about a battle among big box  
stores to sell the season's biggest books at the cheapest price. In  
order to draw customer into their stores, Target and Wal-Mart are  
making ten bestselling author's books available for under ten bucks.  
(Wisconsin is missing all the excitement—they have a law against  
dumping goods below wholesale prices —but Amazon has joined in the  
fray, so Wisconsinites can still go online and pre-order bestsellers  
at low-low prices.)

The American Booksellers Association has even asked the Department of  
Justice to intervene. I'm somewhat bemused to see a Barbara Kingsolver  
book among the discounted books—attention shoppers! Critique of  
corporate greed and US imperialism on sale in aisle three! But I'm  
also taken aback by the horrified response of the book industry. I  
thought the big crisis was that nobody reads. Now it turns out the  
problem is that books are so popular with the masses they're being  
used as bait to draw in shoppers.

Come on, guys, get your story straight! Which is it?

Information wants to be valued

It strikes me that this issue is somewhat parallel to the love-hate  
relationship that many academic librarians have had with the Internet.  
Although our complicated relationship is improving, there are still  
some silly assumptions floating around. Oh no, our reference stats are  
down! Hurrah! People are able to find answers without our help. That's  
awesome! Anybody can publish on the web, unlike scholarly journals  
which are peer-reviewed. Fine, but don't tell me all peer-reviewed  
journal articles are shining examples of reason and academic  
brilliance. A lot of them are finely-sliced research rehashing the  
same findings, or are closely examined and exquisitely detailed  
trivia. Besides, there are plenty of examples of peer review failing  
in spectacular ways—and examples of wonderful peer-reviewed journals  
that were born free online.

But this is my favorite: Unlike information you find on the web, we  
pay for the information in our databases, and you get what you pay  
for. No, actually, with what you pay for you get a lot of junk that  
you don't even want, but you have no choice.

You want this journal? You have to subscribe to this pricey bundle.  
Either that, or you purchase one article at a time for your users,  
something more and more libraries are doing. You spend less, but the  
information never visits the library—it goes straight from the  
publisher to the desk of one user. All the library gets is the bill.  
Apart from failing on its merits, the argument that paid is better  
than free is self-contradicting. We can't tell students that purchased  
information is by definition better than free and, at the same time,  
beg faculty to recognize how broken the current system is and please,  
please, please make their work open access.

Fortunately, most librarians have gotten used to the fact that the  
Internet is a tremendous boon to researchers and that free information  
is a fantastic idea. Sure, we haven't yet reallocated our  
organizational resources to recognize this fact—our staff time is much  
more likely to be devoted to acquiring and messing about with  
purchased information than in making good information from our  
archives, our labs, or the web more easily available. That work is  
"other duties as assigned" or soft-funded special projects that suffer  
from lack of support. But at least we've reached the point where most  
librarians no longer have a kneejerk resistance to Wikipedia or insist  
that information acquired through the library is the only legitimate  
kind. We're even getting past being numbed by the realization that the  
OPAC sucks no matter how much money we spend on it and are exploring  
open source solutions that are better and that cost far less.

But we still worry about our obsolescence. If information is given  
away for free, or if remote users don't realize we paid for it, when  
the traditional work of libraries is shifted to things other than  
buying and organizing physical containers of information, how will we  
justify our existence? Being a purchasing agent for faculty really  
isn't my idea of a fun future, or a sustainable one.

To frame the issue another way: What value will the library have for  
academia if we actually succeed and have an open access future? Will  
the library, like the perfect Communist state, wither away?

We need to separate our value—the way we curate information, champion  
its availability in the face of intolerance of unpopular ideas and  
economic disparity, and create conditions for learning how to find and  
use good information—from the amount of money it takes to acquire  
stuff on the not-so-open market. We need to be quite clear that good  
information is good information, no matter how it's funded. And we  
need to find creative ways to partner with those who add value to  
information and find sustainable models for the editorial work that  
can make good academic work better.

Cheap thrills
The other day at the grocery store I was tickled to see a spinner near  
the checkout lane filled with Little Golden Books. The Pokey Little  
Puppy! Scuffy the Tugboat! They don't cost 35 cents anymore, but for  
under three bucks I could buy the same titles I talked my mother into  
buying me a long time ago. That's cheap! Yet nobody seems to think  
having these inexpensive books in grocery stores cheapens books.

Independent booksellers, quite honestly, are not threatened by ten  
popular books being treated as loss leaders. For years they've been  
disadvantaged by bestseller discounts at chains, discount stores, and  
Amazon; they haven't been able to compete on the sale of bestsellers  
for years, so successful indies have excelled at other things—being a  
community resource, capitalizing on their curatorial skills to fill  
niches, helping people discover books one-on-one. The major trade  
publishers whose business model is built around the Big Book, the out- 
of-the-ballpark hit, have more reason to worry. Their idea of success  
is selling lots of copies of a book to occasional readers rather than  
satisfying the varied tastes of avid readers. If the occasional reader  
thinks ten bucks is all they should pay, then the big-book theory of  
profits crumbles.

But that doesn't mean there is no future for books. In fact, they are  
such a popular draw that they are being used as ammunition in a  
pitched battle for consumers' attention. Surely, that's reason for  
celebration. Somebody will have to publish books because readers  
obviously want them. The economics may shift, but at least the product  
is in demand.

In the same way, we have come to realize that libraries will endure.  
Our professional roles will change, our relationship to our users and  
to the information they seek will evolve, but there is still a demand  
for high quality information and for assistance in learning how to  
make good choices. Creating, curating, and publishing are likely to  
start blending in interesting new ways. The value of what we do will  
still be there. We just have to figure out how to stop equating the  
price tag with our actual worth, roll up our sleeves, and find  
interesting new ways to make good information freely available. Isn't  
that what libraries have always been about?

Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter,  
MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her next  
mystery, Through the Cracks, will be published by Minotaur Books in  
2010.