0.1 Sustainability: the elephant in the room  (Page 2/12)

Let’s do a little recollecting. Until about twenty-five years ago, that scholastic network functioned reasonably well. But a number of causes began to undermine its operations. The emergence of digital technology was not the only one, but it proved to be decisive.

For obvious reasons, research libraries were the first of these agents to engage practically with the new information technologies. While the adaptation has created serious problems for these libraries, the event has also restored an awareness of their indispensable educational position. I well remember years ago—it was the late 1970s—having a conversation with Stanley Fish about our academic work. We were both on the faculty of John Hopkins at the time. I was complaining to Stanley about certain weaknesses I was finding in the holdings of the Hopkins library. “It’s not a problem for me,” he said. “What I do, I can do without any library at all.” Of course I knew exactly why he said that and why it was true. But I had to reply: “What I do, I can’t do without a library.”

For the research library, digital technology has been both a problem and a boon. When digital scholarship in the humanities thrives at a university these days, the library is almost always a key player, and often the center and driving force. The digital transformation of the library has caught everyone’s attention. The faculties take notice now when the library announces it is buying or subscribing to (or not buying or subscribing to) a certain database, or when it drops journals or doesn’t buy certain books.

For academic publishing, on the other hand, digitization and the accompanying market changes have brought a largely unmitigated crisis that has yet to run its course.

As we all by this time know, the very existence of many university presses and specialized journals has become uncertain. As academic presses cut back their lists, scholars—especially young scholars—have difficulty publishing their work. This serious problem has engaged the attention of our communities for some years, though our practical responses so far have not been impressive. At least as distressing is the almost total neglect of the problem of in-copyright scholarly publications—the backlists of university press monographs and the many journals with specialized subjects and audiences. The ACLS-sponsored Humanities E-Book project is one response but its approach is decidedly random. Google Books has already digitized a vast number of these works but few are accessible to the scholarly community, and when the Google Book Settlement is finally achieved, no one knows how these works will be accessible. The digital migration of this very special library of scholarship is a clear and pressing need, but virtually no programmatic efforts have been made to address it.

In the meantime, commercial vendors have been quick off the mark to offer various kinds of digital packages to academic libraries. Until the coming of the Google Book initiative, these were specialized collections and invariably expensive, and only recently have vendors of these materials given serious thought to how users might access them for integrated online search and analysis. They were also created without effective scholarly input at the design stage, or later at the use end where these materials might be—from a scholar’s point of view should be—augmented and repurposed.