T. Scott

Matters of Taste

It's always a dilemma when I come to DC -- where do I want to eat on that first evening?  I've been coming here a couple of times a year since I moved away back in '87, so I have lots of favorites that I like to go back to, but it's also become such a restaurant town that there's always new places that sound extremely inviting.  So what to do?

This morning I see that a previous occupant of my hotel room has helpfully checked a number of establishments off in the Official Visitor's Guide -- Hooter's in Chinatown, Haagen-Dazs downtown, Brickskeller Down Home Saloon, Gifford's Ice Cream & Candy Co., Haagen-Dazs again (in Penn Quarter, this time), and Ben's Chili Bowl.  Somehow, I don't foresee myself crossing paths with him (the first choice inclines me to believe that it's a "he").

Of course, I could have gone into any of the billion sites that now enable people to comment on their experiences at local restaurants.  Zagat's, for example, would have told me that Al Tiramisu has "great food and atmosphere" with "attentive service", while simultaneously being "overrated" with "food that is completely bland" and a menu that is "average".  From "yelp" I would've found out that Bistrot du Coin (another of my favorites, and the place I finally ended up) has "mediocre food," "very good French country cooking," "top-notch mussels," "colorful and fun waitstaff," and "incredibly rude waiters."  Sigh.  The wisdom of the crowds, I guess.

All of those opinions are valid, I hasten to add.  They're just not particularly useful, because everybody is going to a restaurant for different reasons, everyone's experiences and expectations are different, and without knowing more of that background, I have no way of knowing how their experiences might inform my own.  What an experienced professional restaurant critic does is attempt to provide context and background and consistency in their opinions.  You may not agree with them all the time, but they'll give you a baseline against which you can measure your own tastes and interests.

I'm here in DC to participate in a Library Advisory panel for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this afternoon.  There are ten people in the group -- nine librarians and a consultant -- from quite a variety of settings.  In preparation for the meeting, we've received a series of questions gathered under four topical headings:  Trends in Use and Accessibility of Scholarly Content, Transitioning from Print Subscriptions to Online Site Licenses, Copyright Ownership and Open Access, and Usage-Based Pricing/Collaborative Consortia Based Pricing.  The questions are the kind that you'd expect to hear from a reasonably progressive scholarly publisher and accurately reflect the kinds of struggles publishers are engaged in these days as they try to plot their future.

It's not likely, of course, that we'll be able to give them consensus opinions, any more than the diners at any local restaurant are going to agree on the menu's hits and misses.  But the conversation will no doubt be lively and I am as eager to hear the differing views of my colleagues as I presume that the PNAS folks are.  I do hope, though, that we can provide enough context and background for our opinions for them to be useful.

Implementing the NIH Public Access Policy

I've been having casual conversations for over a year with our VP for Research about what we'd need to do when the NIH policy eventually became mandatory.  (Despite the fact that neither of us are big fans of the policy -- him much less so than me -- we both considered it inevitable that this would be the case.  And I should emphasize again that opposition to the policy is not equivalent to opposition to open access).  One of the great advantages of being at this institution is that the key leaders on the research side are very savvy about what is happening in scholarly publishing.  I cringe a bit every time I hear librarians talking about the need to get out there and educate the faculty -- no doubt there are many who are ignorant about the changes afoot (perhaps even as many as there are librarians ignorant of the economics), but in all of our institutions there are many individuals who've been deeply involved with publishing for years and to think that one needs to "educate" them can be a serious political misstep.  We may not always agree with their conclusions, but that doesn't mean they don't have a clear understanding of the facts and the issues.

At any rate, when the time came, it was fairly easy to bring a small group together to talk through the implications and start to set up some processes.  So on Monday a joint letter from the two of us went out to all the faculty here laying out the basics.  Rhetorically, the approach that we're taking is to try to make it clear that this is a federal requirement, not one more thing that our Grants Office has cooked up to make the lives of PIs more difficult, and that the Research office and the library will be working together to provide information and support to help investigators comply. 

We'll be training a few people in our content management area to do the 3rd-party deposit for those who prefer to have us handle that, but we'll also do training and hand-holding for investigators so they understand how to use the NIHMS themselves.  I've done a cursory search and it looks like we average around 600 NIH-supported articles a year.  I don't know how many of those are in the journals that automatically take care of the deposit, but it doesn't appear from this that the workload is going to be overwhelming.   If the NIH estimate of 10 minutes per article is accurate, even if we were doing the deposit for everything it'd only be about two hours a week or so. 

I think much of what we'll be doing is simply answering questions, keeping track of journal policies, helping people deal with the copyright issues, etc.  We'll work with the research folks to set up a system for monitoring compliance.   It all seems like a logical extension of many of the other things that we do and, of course, there's a significant political benefit on campus for us in being able to step in proactively and help the research office deal with what is, on the day-to-day level, one more federally-imposed headache that they now have to cope with.

On the AAHSL discussion list, people have been sharing what they're doing at their institutions.  It ranges widely and it is clear that different institutions have been at very different stages of readiness for this.    There's been some good information coming out from SPARC  & ARL on the rights issues involved, but still very little from anywhere (that I've seen, at least) about the practical aspects of setting up systems to do 3rd party deposit, oversee compliance, and help investigators cope with the PMCID issues.  Despite my ambivalence about the policy itself, it really is a golden opportunity for librarians to engage in some new issues and show another way in which they can add value.  I'm having fun with it.

ASA Meeting in London

The presentation that I ended up delivering to kick off the ASA annual conference last Monday focused on four themes:  most important was the need to develop flexibility in licensing terms so that it becomes easier to provide consistent support to people in interinstitutional collaborative research teams -- something that is become far more prevalent.  I also talked about usability, findability and branding, and part of the point that I was trying to make is that these issues are critical for all of us within the broader scholarly communication community -- librarians, publishers, intermediaries, researchers, faculty -- and that they cannot be solved by any one group in isolation from the others.  The need to work much more closely with each other has never been greater.  Or so I claim, at least -- a theme that I've been trumpeting in one form or another for a couple of years now.  With a bit of luck and hard work, the Joint AAHSL/publisher liaison task force that is just getting underway will provide a mechanism for doing some of that.  Getting to conferences together is useful, but we need to do more than just give presentations to each other a few times a year.

I was glad to be the first speaker, since that meant I could quickly get over my jitters and enjoy the rest of the meeting.  Lots of good stuff (I did skip out on part of the afternoon session so I could walk over to the Tate Modern).  I found the sessions on consumer magazines to be particularly interesting since that's the sector that I have the least experience with -- a whole different set of challenges in that market from what we face on the academic side of things.  The ebooks discussion was quite good as well (and Mark Carden turned out to be one of the best presenters of the entire conference), although I'm still not persuaded that "ebooks" are really anything other than a brief transitional stage to more fluid forms of online content.

This was my fifth trip to London so much of it felt familiar.  In addition to the Tate Modern, we stopped into the British Museum, but we really didn't do very much touristy stuff.  Had a great time wandering on Denmark Street, where there are eight guitar stores along a single block, and we had some fine meals in pubs and some excellent meals in restaurants -- from Italian to Persian to Indian to Chinese.  And we did a lot of walking, just soaking in the atmosphere, watching the people, looking at the architecture, and loving being in a city where you can turn a corner and come across a little shop like The Silver Mousetrap, where the sign proudly proclaims, "Established 1690".

BtheA had arranged things so that we could play at the reception on Tuesday night in honor of his installation as CILIP President.  Half the band was able to be there and we did a half hour set, proving to those of his friends who've heard rumors for years about the Bearded Pigs that he actually is a fine guitar player!  It was great fun.  I invited everybody to join us in Chicago in May.

And, as always, when I leave the confines of the United States I am reminded that despite the incredible size and marvelous diversity of my native country, we are still in some ways a very insular and parochial people.  It would be better for the world at large if more of us did more traveling and spent more time listening, with humility, to what people in the rest of the world have to say.  We still have so very much that we need to learn.

A Moment's Thought...

On Monday I'll be doing a talk for the annual meeting of the Association of Subscription Agents in London.  I last spoke to that group four years ago and quite enjoyed it, so I'm looking forward to seeing them again.   The audience is a mix of people who work for agents and people who work in publishing and, unlike some of my more rabid colleagues, I find that most of those folks are fine, dedicated people who believe that they're working for a social good.  This is even the case with those who (gasp!) are opposed to open access (or rather, opposed to some of the mandates or to the moralistic tone of much of the debate -- I've actually met no one in publishing who is opposed, on principle, to the notion of providing broader and easier access to scholarly material).

But then, that's part of the issue, isn't it?  I spend time actually talking with them and trying to get to know them as people.  It's much harder to demonize someone after spending an evening in the pub with them.  You may still disagree vociferously, and you don't necessarily personally like each and every one of them, but you may find that the disagreements are honest and they aren't the evil, lying, money-grubbing bastards that they're portrayed to be.  This doesn't mean that you can't still sincerely believe them to be wrong.

My disgust with the open access movement came about when the level of rhetoric on the blogs reached such a pitch that people were making crude and utterly unfair accusations about the moral character of people that I happen to know.  The self-righteousness of many of the open access advocates, who seemed completely unaware of their own rhetorical spins and flourishes was a real disappointment, even though in my idealism I still share many of the goals.

But the problem, I'm afraid, is inherent in the nature of internet communication.  It is so easy (and emotionally satisfying, apparently) to accuse a whole group of being rotten liars when you can do so from the solitude of your own computer and never really be called to account for what you say.   Unlike my friend Marcus, I don't believe that there's much chance of developing mechanisms for strong and effective conversation on blogs (although I do admire his idealism).  The noise ratio will always be too high.  Substantive conversation requires actually listening, paying attention to the arguments of the other, bringing real facts into play, and always being aware of the possibility that you yourself may be wrong.  As my friend Lonnie used to say (paraphrasing Housman), "A moment's thought would have shown him the error of his ways, but thought is difficult, and a moment is a long time."   I'm not saying that I think it never happens -- but pick any 100 comment threads at random and you're not going to find very much of it.

Nonetheless, I'm happy to see the blogging guidelines that have been developed by MLA's Task Force on Social Networking.    The principles are pretty straightforward and commonsense -- but then, what one might think of as "common sense" is sometimes in pretty short supply.

If I was writing guidelines (which I'm not) I'd add one:  when you're getting ready to unleash the full force of your rhetorical armamentarium against someone or some group, ask yourself if you'd be willing to say the same thing to that someone's face.

But oh, how boring the blogosphere would become...

The Harvard Vote

I'm inclined to think that the Harvard vote may be more significant than the passage of the NIH policy.  That it is driven by the faculty rather than being imposed from the outside is a very positive sign.   Most important, however, is that a major university is taking a significant step towards managing its own scholarly production.   It is ironic in the extreme that one of the unintended consequences of the NIH policy may be a strengthening of the dominance of the commercial publishers at the expense of the society publishers.  A non-librarian colleague who works with a lot of the biomedical societies tells me that there has been a noticeable uptick in bids from the commercial guys to buy up the publishing programs of some of the societies.  In addition to the very favorable financial terms that they can offer, they are now suggesting that they can eliminate the headaches of dealing with the NIH policy.  It's got to be pretty tempting to the executive directors of those societies.

On the discussion list that SPARC recently set up to discuss authors' rights, there's been a bit of dismay at the PR that Springer is putting out encouraging authors to take advantage of their Open Choice option.  The Springer press release ends this way:

The cost of Open Choice is - as stated on the NIH web site - a permissible cost in your grant so please take care to budget for it.

Publishing with open access in Springer journals completely takes away any worries you might have about complying with the new NIH rules for grantees when it comes to publishing your research results. We look forward to the submission of your next paper.

Best regards,

Your Springer Open Choice Team

What could be easier? 

And Elsevier has built a nice revenue stream from the HHMI and Wellcome Trust mandates.

I don't fault the commercial publishers at all -- they're being creative and taking advantage of the changing terrain as best they can.    But I continue to worry about the small publishers and the societies and continue to believe that it was a grave error on the part of the open access movement not to seek alliances there.  The societies, after all, are a part of academia and, for many of our faculty, a more significant professional home than the university that they are a part of.  If the Harvard vote represents a movement on the part of faculty toward taking more control of their own scholarly production, then that's a very good thing.

Editing and Peer Review

During the six years that I was the editor of the Journal of the Medical Library Association it was rare in the extreme that we published an article exactly as submitted.  When I started, I suppose I thought of peer review as strictly a search for error, an opinion as to whether or not the piece should be published.  I came to understand that the reality is far more subtle and complex.

Marcus suggests that librarian journals should evolve into blogs, arguing, in part, that peer review should be a post-publication process rather than a "pre-publication process that sometimes drags out for many months."   Although there is something appealing about this idea, when I think about the actual articles that I was involved in editing, I'm not at all sure that this would be a good thing.

As editor, I considered my responsibilities to be not just to select the most appropriate work for each issue of the JMLA, but to work with each author to present their work and ideas as successfully as possible.  And I began to see the peer review process as just the first step.  Often (perhaps usually) the reviewers (we always had three reviews) disagreed among themselves as to what the major issues or necessary revisions were.  Sometimes they flat out contradicted each other, and part of my role was to sort through those differences and give the author the best advice I could.  Frequently, the writing was simply poor and there were many cases in which it became clear to me as I worked my way through the article that the paragraph that the author had written actually said nearly the opposite of what they intended to say.  Or the article would be full of extraneous and repetitive material that simply got in the way of a busy reader actually getting to the meat of the work.  I believe that most of the articles that we published were more effective in connecting with an audience than they would have been without the pre-publication review and editing.

I'm not at all sure that it would be a service to the library community if all of those articles that I read through in their first iterations had simply been posted to a blog and opened up for comment.  The few experiments that have been done in the last couple of years with post-publication review have not been overwhelmingly successful, the ArXiv experience notwithstanding (extrapolating from the experience of a small, tightly knit, fairly homogeneous scientific community that writes largely in formulas to a much more diverse, narrative literature is a stretch, I think).

Certainly, the lag between completion of an article and its availability to a wide audience needs to be shortened, but this is a matter of efficiency, not a fundamental aspect of "traditional" journal publishing.  The major scientific journals have typically reduced this time lag to a few weeks and there's no structural reason that can't be done with the library literature -- it's a matter of the resources that you're willing to devote to tackling the problem.  Marcus suggests that this could be accomplished by "a carefully designed and managed blog."  The devil is in the details, and I wonder if that careful design and management would result in something that looks more like a typical journal or more like a typical blog. 

I'm not one who is terribly impressed by the "wisdom of crowds" (a concept that seems to be especially dubious during the US election season).   I've rarely seen anything approaching substantive discussion and analysis take place in a comment thread, and the longer the thread, the more worthless it typically is.   Rather than providing vibrant post-publication review, I'm afraid that posting unedited articles for comment would result in much good work being buried and ignored.

But the terrain continues to evolve rapidly, and the opposition of blogs to traditional journals is probably a false distinction.  The traditional journal is rapidly morphing into something else, while adopting features that we associate with blogs (the ability to provide rapid responses being the most obvious).    The underlying architecture of blog software is also developing rapidly and trying to accurately characterize the qualities that define a blog would likely become a contentious debate.   

Marcus is pushing the right questions, and everyone involved in scholarly publishing, at whatever level, should be thinking creatively about how to make the communication and discussion of projects and ideas more effective.  But it isn't a matter of journals vs blogs.  The most effective modes of communication that we develop over the next decade will adopt features that we associate with each, but will be fundamentally different from either.

Measuring Progress Toward Open Access

In his Open Access News blog, Peter Suber comments on my post from last Friday, and says that he's puzzled by my last paragraph in which I say that the policy "achieves few (if any) of the initial goals of the movement."  He points out that the mandate is a major advance for the movement, and I don't disagree with that.  But I think my comment still stands.  Making an advance is not the same as achieving the goals.

Certainly people became involved with the open access movement for different reasons and, perhaps, having different priorities, so I'm not sure that it actually makes sense to talk about the "initial goals of the movement".  But when I referred to initial goals I was thinking about some of the early definitions that focused on immediate availability of the published version of the article, with no subscription barriers and the ability to reuse the material for any purpose -- these, it seems to me, are the principles inherent in the original BBB declarations.  In addition, many of the early OA advocates talked about a complete revolution in how scholarly publishing is funded and some openly called for a complete end to the subscription based system, claiming that publishers had a moral  responsibility to "free" their literature.  Many librarians viewed OA as a means of eliminating or reducing what many saw as unfair  pricing policies.   This was the rhetoric that freaked out so many of the publishers.

NIH was careful to call its proposal "public access" to distinguish it from "open access" as understood in the way that I've just described it.  The policy does not provide immediate access, it does not provide access to the final version, it does not automatically provide for reuse in any format, and it does not appear to have dramatically weakened the existing system of scholarly publishing.

As Suber says, it does indeed make a great number of articles freely available after an embargo period, but I wouldn't call that one of the initial goals of the movement.  (And, it is also important to note that of the 80,000 articles per year that will be affected, many of them would have been made freely available after six months or a year anyway because they are published in society journals that already have such policies in place.  I haven't seen an analysis that shows what portion of the 80,000 would not have become available under existing journal policies).

Suber suggests, in the January 2 issue of SOAN, that one of the next goals should be shrinking the embargo period.  However, proponents of the NIH policy pointed out frequently that publishers should not be concerned about the policy's impact on subscriptions because of the embargo.  They claimed that the argument of the publishers that the policy threatened the viability of their journals was just a smokescreen because there was no evidence that libraries would engage in wholesale cancellations as long as the embargo was in place.  If OA advocates now set their sights on eliminating the embargo, aren't they opening themselves up to the charge of arguing in bad faith?  Wouldn't that justify the publishers' concerns that OA advocates were not being honest, but were merely using the NIH policy as an important stepping-stone on the way towards immediate open access?

Making the NIH public access policy mandatory is indeed a huge achievement, and those people who have worked very hard to get there should be rightfully pleased with their success.  But what comes next?   And will the arguments that will be used to advocate for the next set of goals be consistent with the arguments that were used to defend and advocate for the NIH policy?

Who Are These People?

The more I looked into it, the more discouraged I got.

The subject line to the email read: The Journal of Leadership, Management and Organizational Studies invites you to join its Advisory Board.  Naturally, I was intrigued.

But the email itself turned out to be boilerplate from an outfit calling itself "Scientific Journals International."  It leads,

SJI (the parent company of The Journal of Leadership, Management and Organizational Studies) has assembled the most prestigious and extensive Editorial and Advisory Board in the world, representing scholars from Yale, Oxford, Harvard, Cambridge, MIT, Columbia and hundreds of universities from around the world.

And indeed, the editorial advisory board listing is long, with people from prestigious universities with impressive titles -- an Associate Vice-Chancellor from UT-Austin, a Research Scientist from Berkeley, an Associate VP from the University of Florida, an Associate Provost at Tufts and another Associate Provost from Rice -- thirty-seven individuals altogether.

The managerial advisory board is similarly impressive and the editorial review board listing for the different disciplines (SJI "publishes" journals across all fields) contains hundreds of names.

My first clue that something was amiss comes in the 2nd paragraph of the email:

The volunteer Advisory Board provides advice and guidance for the ongoing development of SJI. The members receive periodic emails about the developments of various SJI journals.  There are no regular responsibilities for the Advisory Board members.  Occasionally, you will receive an email that requests your input on new ideas, decisions or changes in the policies, procedures and guidelines of SJI.  If you feel that the issue is not in your area of interest (since SJI publishes journals in all disciplines), or if you do not have the time, you can simply disregard the message. 

What a deal!  List my membership on the advisory board on my CV, and then ignore all of the messages that I get from them.

Nowhere on the website could I find any indication of who is actually behind these journals.  There's a business address in St. Cloud, Minnesota, but no one is named.

I starting looking into the various journals -- there are many.  Turns out that very few of them have actually published any articles.  Click on a journal title and most of them will say: "Coming soon..."  As soon as they get some submissions, I suppose.

So what's the scam?  Open access, I'm sorry to say.   The opening page reeks of a high-minded dedication to assisting  "researchers, writers and artists to cope with the publish or perish reality in the academia."  They promise rapid turnaround and quick peer review.

Of course, they have to charge a processing fee.  The section on "Why We Charge A Processing Fee," which can be found under the submission guidelines for each journal is perhaps the most interesting part of the entire site.  It includes a summary of the "open access movement" and a very helpful listing of the various granting agencies that allow use of funds to cover article processing charges.  They point out that their processing charge is much lower than what various other open access publishers charge -- just $99.95 (add $99.95 for each additional author).   Somehow, I don't think they're viewing this as an incentive to limit the number of authors per paper.

Oh, and they're also looking for investors.  Just click on the helpful link.

It's got to be the open access movement's worst nightmare, living proof of the most hysterical charges leveled by the most rabid opponents.  Do the people who have signed on to these advisory boards think that they're supporting open access by lending credence to this?  I suppose I can give a break to some non-US junior scientist who hasn't gotten proper mentoring on publishing norms, but somebody with an Associate Provost title?!

Oh, I suppose I could be completely mistaken -- it could be that the people hidden behind the curtain are idealists who actually believe everything they say on their home page, that their peer review process is as rigorous as any of the prestigious journals in the fields that they cover, and that the papers being published are splendid contributions to science that any journal would be proud to have.

And that they're just too humble to put their own names on the masthead.  They'd rather that the credit goes to all of those paragons of academic virtue who've signed on to their volunteer advisory boards.

Debating OA at the Charleston Conference

I'm looking forward to my debate with Rick Anderson at the Charleston Conference in another few weeks.  We did a session at the North Carolina Serials Conference a couple of years ago and it was great fun.  Rick is one of the most creative thinkers in libraryland these days, he's got an entertaining style, and he's very quick on his feet.  I'd be happy to hear him speak on any topic in any venue, so when he contacted me early in the summer to see if I wanted to reprise our NC debate in Charleston I was quick to agree.

We titled the session, "Open Access: Good for Society, Bad for Libraries?" and sent in this abstract:

Resolved: As open access becomes more widespread, and more scholarly material becomes available either in open access journals or institutional repositories, libraries will become more marginalized in higher education institutions as funds formerly devoted to collections are diverted to other institutional priorities.

It's intended to be hyperbolic, of course, and in reality I don't think there's a tremendous difference in Rick's and my actual views on the issues.  But that's kinda the fun of doing this sort of a debate -- you can push a particular proposition further than you might otherwise and perhaps in doing so unearth some ways of looking at the issues that might otherwise remain unexplored.

As the inveterate librarian optimist, I think that expanding OA presents some great opportunities for librarians, but there are plenty of potential hazards along the way.   It's been a disappointment that there's been so little substantive discussion (at least that I've seen) about the possible consequences for libraries. 

One of the last manuscripts that I read as editor of the JMLA was an article by Karen Albert, Open access: implications for scholarly publishing and medical libraries, which was subsequently accepted and published by my successor.  It's a good survey of the state of the open access debate as of two years ago (it was submitted in August 2005) and I have no doubt that I would have taken it as well, but I might have negotiated a slight change in title because it doesn't really have much to say about "implications for medical libraries."

What Rick and I will try to do, in what I hope will be an entertaining and lively fashion, is explore some of those potential consequences, good and bad.  One thing that I am pretty sure of is that those librarians who see their primary role as building collections may want to consider signing on to the PRISM principles, 'cause they're in trouble.  In an OA world, "collection development" is an anachronism.

Of course, I've long maintained that building collections is simply a means to a greater end for librarians, so this doesn't trouble me much.  Nonetheless, the reality in many of our institutions is that the people who control the funds see the collection building function as primary as well, and it is going to be very tough to convince them that they need to continue to fund our other activities, and that we have critical contributions to make beyond purchasing or licensing content.

And it just occurred to me that I don't think that Rick and I have sorted out who is taking the pro and who is taking the con position in our debate.  I'd better give him a call....

Valuing Librarians

I was on the phone with a colleague.  She's been doing some consulting at a local hospital, and was getting ready to make a pitch to some of the senior administrators to try to persuade them that they needed to hire a full-time librarian.  But she's trying to figure out how to make sense of the rapid changes that are happening all around. 

"Should I tell them about this open source publishing?  What is the impact of that going to be?"

"Open access," I gently correct her.  "Open source relates to software development.  'Open access' is an umbrella term for a wide variety of experiments having to do with making scholarly content available without a subscription.  You're not going to be able to explain it to these administrators in five minutes.  Just tell them that the situation continues to be extremely complex and that most high-quality information continues to be very expensive."

"And what about publishers shifting to relying on advertising?  Is that the way things are going?"  She's referring to Elsevier's experiment with OncologyStat.

"Another experiment.  Certain segments of publishing have always relied heavily on advertising revenue, " I remind her.  "I suspect that this will be effective in some disciplines and genres.   But whether it  represents a major trend remains to be seen."

But she keeps asking,  "Where is this all going?" 

Damned if I know.

"Here's what I would tell them, if I were in your place,"  I say.  "Tell them that the publishing landscape is more complex than it has ever been before.  Tell them that increasingly there is good quality information that their health professionals need that is available for free, but it is mixed up on the internet with tons of junk.  Tell them that most of what they need is still expensive and it is not at all clear how quickly that's going to change.  Point out that there has been an explosion of different types of resources -- point of care tools, online textbooks, evidence-based databases -- that we're not just talking about online journals.  Tell them that if they're going to make cost-effective use of the time and energy and talents of their health professionals, that now, more than ever, they need a professional librarian to help make sense of this increasingly complex information space.  They don't need somebody to manage the library -- they need someone to help make sure that their health professionals have the best information available, in the right place, at the right time, in the most cost-efficient way.  Tell them that in this highly competitive health industry that they're operating in, they can't afford not to have that kind of a person on their team."

The demise of Times-Select is leading librarians to ask similar questions to that of my colleague.  Over on liblicense, Bernie Sloan says, "...if this sort of trend continues will it gradually begin to marginalize the library, bit by bit? In other words, if more information becomes available freely will that lead people to think they need the library less?"

Of course it will.  But that's been happening bit by bit for years now.  People do need "the library" less. 

But they need librarians more than ever. 

One of my gripes with the Library 2.0 crowd is that they're not radical enough.  For all of the chatter about embracing change and embracing the users and becoming more participative and making use of social software and social networks -- all of which I entirely agree with, by the way -- the focus is still firmly on the success of "the library."  How do we make the library relevant, how do we make it a cool destination, how do we make sure that people are using those resources, etc., etc., etc....   If we were really focused on what the people in our communities need, we'd quit talking about "the library" altogether.

At my institution, we're going to spend some $5 million in the upcoming fiscal year on library resources (all formats), so I don't mean to suggest that collection development isn't still a core part of our mission.  We're getting ready to spend some $8 million renovating the general campus library, so I don't mean to suggest that the building, and the services, are unimportant.  But they are clearly less important than they used to be.

One of the most intriguing things that we're doing here is helping to revise the medical school curriculum.  One of our associate directors is leading the development of the information management theme, where topics ranging from how best to use pubmed, to properly analyzing evidence-based medicine resources, to evaluating what you find with a Google or Ask.com search, to finding the best consumer-oriented information for your patients, will be tightly integrated throughout all four years of medical school.  It's the most extensive involvement of librarians with overall med school curriculum development that I'm aware of.   And, I should mention, that activity doesn't take place in our building -- our librarians are over in the medical school, participating in curriculum meetings, teaching in the lecture halls, holding office hours in the student lounges.  That's where we belong.

Physicians are drowning in information.  A recent post at Shelved in the W's highlights the dire situation that they're in.  While librarians worry about the health of their libraries, I'm worrying about the health of the patients that are being served by physicians who have only the faintest notion of how to construct even the simplest search. 

I don't give a damn what our medical students think about "the library," but I sure as hell think it's our responsibility to get them out of med school with a decent set of information management skills.

As I was talking to my colleague on the phone about the advice she should give to those hospital administrators, and was describing the kind of dynamic savvy librarian that would really make a difference over there, I was also offering up a silent prayer that they could find somebody like that.  Oh, they're out there -- but we don't have nearly enough of them to tackle the job at hand.

We need better librarians, not better libraries.