BY DAVID EIFLER AND MARGARET PHILLIPS
When universities abruptly shut down in-person instruction in the spring, academic libraries followed suit. Librarians and other university front line workers applauded these decisions that prioritized the health and safety of staff during this unprecedented public health crisis. And libraries continued to fulfill many of their service missions in this new virtual environment through remote consultations and instruction. In most academic libraries, much of the collection, particularly academic journals, had long been digitized and patrons continued to have access to current and deep backfiles (think JSTOR). Access to hundreds of thousands of licensed electronic books were also available to patrons online. And HathiTrust, a not-for-profit partnership of research libraries, provided temporary emergency access to millions of digitized books that universities throughout North America owned in print. Library closures seemed to support the unquestioned narrative of the past two decades to “digitize everything” and the emerging preference for electronic collections over print.
During this crisis, it is important to heed Naomi Klein, author of the Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In a short March 2020 video entitled “Coronavirus Capitalism” Klein quotes Milton Friedman who famously said “only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” Klein continues that, “We either lose a whole lot of ground, get fleeced by elites and pay the price for decades, or we win progressive victories that seemed impossible just a few weeks earlier.” With the coronavirus pandemic and the attendant unfolding economic crisis, academic libraries are clearly in a period of “shock”. While digital collections are an important part of our collections and have helped us survive this moment, we must push back against the digital trend and be wary of the “information capitalism” described by John Buschman in his 2003 work Dismantling the Public Sphere, in which commodification of information is the new norm and the market, not scholarship, determines content availability. It is more imperative than ever that libraries promote the continued stewardship of print collections.
Even before the current crisis, library collection policies advocating for e(lectronic) over p(rint) were an emerging trend, along with the adoption of automated approval plans requiring minimal librarian involvement. During economic contractions, one frequently-invoked justification for “e- over p-“ is the high cost of selecting, owning and maintaining print collections. Staff salaries, shelf-space, lost copies and ongoing preservation are known costs that libraries have borne for centuries. During austere times, however, administrators take advantage of the disaster to accelerate a trend already well underway; in libraries, this means outsourcing costs to publishers and vendors. Allowing acquisition plans to substitute for skilled subject expertise may save money in the short term, but what will we have lost in our ability to shape the collection to meet the unique needs of local scholars?
The popularization of the Internet fostered rapid dissemination of information and held the promise of democratizing scholarship and increasing the diffusion of underrepresented voices. While this did occur, a countervailing trend was the consolidation of information distribution in the hands of Big Tech. Similar oligopolistic consolidation occurred in the academic publishing and distribution industries, where a handful of publishers dominate the market. Corporate consolidation under global giants like Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer has increasingly placed academic libraries at these firm’s economic mercy. And, under the prevailing justification of making everything available electronically, libraries often pay four to five times as much as they would for a print title. This, despite the fact that publishing and distribution costs have declined due to technological advances.
Libraries’ fraught economic relationship with publishers is compounded when these same publishers act as gatekeepers determining who gets published. Scholars representing marginalized voices – frequently from the global south and in languages other than English – lack access to publishers of electronic books. In this way, larger publishers and distributors are responsible for an intellectual homogenization, thus undermining our academic libraries’ ability to connect people with scholarship. University libraries have the capacity to counteract this by reversing the trend and purchasing print in place of electronic monographs.
When our libraries own a print book, we can do with it what we please. We set internal circulation policies, we determine how to lend to those outside of our institutions (including independent scholars, recent graduates or local professionals, like teachers and social workers, who are otherwise restricted from accessing university’s licensed materials), we define preservation policies and we determine when to digitize material. We have no comparable control over electronic works, despite the heroic efforts of the librarians who negotiate our licenses. Consider what would happen to its content if even one large publisher shut down. Ultimately our growing dependence on a decreasing number of conglomerate publishers who promote electronic access narrows the scope and sustainability of our collections.
With the emergent budget crises, university administrators will be eager to reduce library collection budgets. The resilience of libraries — our ability to continue to serve users in the midst of the coronavirus emergency — will be used against us. But libraries should reject the prevailing logic of austerity as a justification for increasing reliance on e-books and the abandonment of print. Instead, let’s leverage this current shock period to promote format redundancy (both print and electronic) to ensure the resilience and long-term sustainability of our collections. This requires rejecting the neoliberal strategies of externalizing collections costs and vendor consolidation and, instead, promoting the democratization of scholarship with print at its core. Why print? Because it’s less expensive. Because print supports our equity goals of promoting the work of emerging viewpoints. Because we own it and can share it as we best see fit. We must act now, during this period of crisis, before it’s too late and we find we’ve forfeited control of our collections to corporate behemoths.
Guest bloggers David Eifler and Margaret Phillips are librarians at the University of California, Berkeley
