 And just for your all amusement about technology, I'm holding in my hand a Dell power supply. And the reason I'm holding it is because just a few minutes ago, it gave off a loud snap noise and a curl of smoke came up from it. So it has been unplugged. It is being consigned to history and I will replace it soon. I'm using the friends borrowed computer right now. So I hope this is all working. And I have the top of the hour. So let's begin. Let me welcome you. Let me welcome everyone to this week's Future Transform. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm your host on the forums creator and I'm your cat herder for the next hour of conversation. And I'm delighted to see you all here today. We have a couple of wonderful guests on a great topic and I'm really looking forward to it. Our topic has to do digitization and book scanning and the role of libraries, companies and nonprofits in trying to build new platforms for a kind of universal library. And the form of this topic comes in a great new book called Along Came Google, which is a history of focusing on Google's book digitization project. And along the way, we get to learn a lot about other digitization projects, some of which might be famous, some of which you might not know. Along with that, you get to find out the role of higher education and what roles university libraries as well as university leadership played in shaping them. And we get to learn about where this is headed next since courts managed to more or less block Google book scanning project. Where will this go? Will we have a future digital library of Alexandria? Now, to join us in this conversation and to share their thoughts of the two authors of this book, I'd like to bring them up one after the other. One of them is Deanna Markham, who is at Ithaca SNR. She's a senior advisor there. And the other is Roger Schoenfeld, who is a program director from Library, Scarlet Communication and Museums, also at Ithaca. Fair warning, not only these two people, both my friends, but they're also wonderful, wonderful folks. So I'm going to start off by grabbing Roger and hauling up on stage. And Roger, by the way, is also part of my hair club for men. You'll see what I mean in just a second. Roger, welcome. It's so nice to be here. Thank you, Brian. It's good to see you. It's good to see you. Are you in the office right now? Yeah, I came into the office today and this is me having a haircut just a few days ago. I was going to complain about that. You dwindled. You shrunk. It's good to see you. Roger, just I introduce you in all kinds of ways, as you know, and sometimes enjoy. But the way we do things here in the forum is to ask you to introduce yourself by describing what you're going to be working on for the next year. What are the big projects and issues that are going to be top of mind for you? So at Ithaca SNR, we are going to be working on a couple of things that we're really, really excited about. One is a series of projects for underserved learning communities, which includes higher education for incarcerated individuals and student basic needs as well. So we're doing a lot of work that falls into that category that we're incredibly excited about. It's going to have just a huge impact. And then on a totally different direction, doing some really interesting work on research integrity and the way that misinformation and disinformation is affecting all of us. As you know, Brian, a topic of shared interest for both of us, I believe. And for many people here, by the way, Roger is a frequent contributor blogger at the awesome scholarly kitchen blog. And I recommend checking out every one of his posts because he also very, very thoughtful considerations on that. Those are two very different but still related and powerful courses of action. I'm glad to hear it. Now they've got you on stage, Roger. Let me add your colleague, your co-conspirator, Deanna Markham. Hang on one second. Let me see if I can get her up on the screen. And hello, Deanna. Hello, Brian and Roger. Hello. It's so good to see you. You're not in New York right now, are you? No, I'm in Maryland. Very good. That's where I live. Very good. So now we have the East Coast more or less covered here between DC, Maryland and New York. Yes. Deanna, you have such a fantastic and illustrious career and I keep bragging about you to people. What are you going to be working on for the next few months? What's top of mind? Are you going to be following along with either of these projects that Roger just described? Or are you going to be pursuing? I'll follow along. I'm not so involved anymore. I'm pretty much retired. But my upcoming project is to work with the Council on Independent Colleges on their open educational resources. Oh, excellent. Project. Excellent. I'd love to hear how that goes. That's very good. The CIC does great work. How many colleges in their membership? Hundreds anyway. It's huge. It's a wonderful group. This is great. Friends, if you're new to the forum, welcome. What I'd like to do is just ask our authors a couple of quick questions to get the ball rolling. But then the ball is in your court. We'd love to hear your thoughts and your questions. And you could put them to Roger and Deanna or both. Phil, thank you very much for the quick answer. Phil, that's from the CIC. So just to begin with, reading your book is a terrific cut through so much of history. For me, everything from the Library of Alexandria to Brewster Cale, the questions of copyright, to questions of book scanning. I guess one question I'd like to ask is, is the Google project doomed? I mean, did the court just put a stake through its heart? Is Google books stuck right now? It seems to be. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Do you have another opinion, Roger? No. I think the reality is that the transformative opportunity that many of us were looking forward to from being able to really unlock access to this wealth of cultural and historical information, just it didn't come to pass in the way that many of us had hoped. And that said, it's had some incredibly powerful benefits along the way. And I'm sure we can talk about those also. But ultimately, the most transformational vision, it failed. Yeah. That's, in so many ways, heartbreaking. It is heartbreaking. Not all, in part because there's no real replacement. There's no competitor at scale. But I... No one else has the resources. I mean, the individual libraries don't. And they had tried to do some small digitization projects. Right. And started with some of them, but nothing like Google. And so it's... The book is a very sad, sad story in many ways. Well, some of the history covers is pretty sad. Yes. So, I mean, this is where... I mean, there's a lot of copyright policy that we can talk about, which might kill some people in the audience just from the generative. But the key thing was that a copyright suit stopped it in its tracks. Let me ask the academic question. And this builds on what you both said. What does this mean for higher education institutionally? I mean, in your book, you show how my great alma mater, the University of Michigan, contributed mightily to this project, that quite a few other universities play different roles, including Stanford by graduating, a couple of the computer scientists who went on to make Google. But what is this... How does this connect with higher education now? Well, one of the ways that it connects is not so much substantively. We can certainly talk about the substantive need for these collections and the value that they have. But I think there's also a connection in terms of the way that universities can collaborate with one another for larger public goods, to advance larger public goods, and some of the limitations of those collaborations, some of the needs for outside catalysts sometimes to get them kicked off. And I think there's some very, very interesting elements in all of that. Diana, I'm sorry, you were going to say something else. No. It's interesting to see how often library collaboration has failed in the past. And I finally concluded that's because libraries just don't have the money to participate at scale the way that a project like the Google Project. But I also give such high praise to the University of Michigan for what it's done and the leadership that the provost played and how important he was in making all of this happen. And we need more people like that taking leadership roles and insisting on help from colleagues. So this is a powerful lesson learned that we must have a limitation of where higher education can collaborate and what it requires and the importance of visionary leadership. Yes. I have one more question, friends, and then the floor is yours. What about some of the other projects that are out there now? I mean, for example, Brewster Cale's Internet Archive has been digitizing all kinds of stuff and making it available. We've got the public library, Digital Public Library of America, which I'm not quite sure what it's doing right now after Dan Cove, but it's doing something. And we have all kinds of libraries who are digitized different things. And then we have Amazon, which went off and created this enormous e-book, World Ecosystem of its own. And then we've got pirates like, you know, Syub who have there. I mean, so where do we stand? We don't have a single library of Alexandria. We've got a whole bunch of branch libraries that are all independent. Well, my opinion, Brian, is that libraries are not really well positioned to collaborate with each other. And so I think we'll have a lot of individual projects. A lot of libraries have digitized parts of their collections and made them available. But there is no single place that's bringing all this together to create a national digital library, which I think we all hope for. And of course, Brian, in the way that you just sort of articulated all the different contributors, it's not just that there isn't a single digital library. Brian is exactly right about that. But you can also see, you know, an array of both commercial and corporate interests that play an increasing role in mediating access to all of this information. So one of the consequences of having all those branch libraries, right, as you put it, is that we rely on services like Google to help us figure out which libraries to use. And I think there are some issues there around how that switching network actually works and in whose interests it's operated that are part of the consequences of some of these, you know, of the reality you've pointed to. Yeah. No, that's a good point. That new layer, that new intermediary layer is vital. I want to circle back to that. But I do want to open the floor, friends, to any questions for our guests if you'd like to ask about the details of the story of the rise and fall of Google Books, if you'd like to ask about some of the other projects that are out there, like whatever happened to Microsoft or a lot of money in that direction. If you'd like to ask about the specific roles of libraries and also academia in general, this is the great place to ask. So again, just either click the raise, it may be even easier than that. On the screen you should see a kind of teal-colored podium. If you just press that, you will suddenly appear on stage. It's even easier than being beamed on board in Star Trek. We had a quick question from Kay Hampshire. I just want to read this out loud. Can you expand on what makes it difficult for libraries to collaborate? Well, again, my opinion, individual libraries have their own goals. They're trying to make certain things happen and they focus first on those and then if they have specific projects that require collaboration, they can join forces with other libraries. The biggest problem for libraries is budget and I think that's why we don't see so many big projects undertaken by a collaboration of libraries because it's just too hard to pull that money out of other things and make it available for collaboration. There's no doubt that there are those resources. I'm sorry, I got some getting some feedback now. Can you hear me okay? Yeah, we're getting an echo. Is it your earbuds there? Who knows? No, it's good now. There are those resource issues that Deanna was pointing to without any question at all. But I think we've also seen some cases where it's challenging for libraries to determine what the alignment with their parent institutions is and how that mediates in different directions that they may want to pursue. And so I think, especially for academic libraries, you have cases where one institutional strategy pulls in one direction and another institutional strategy pulls in another direction. So there's also I think some structural impediments that one of the things that was so interesting about the Google project was that to Deanna's point there were so many efforts to digitize collections before this particular project started. And the fact that there was an outside catalyst that kind of had a bit of a startup mindset and said we're just going to move forward, we're moving forward with this with whoever's willing to do it with us was a very different, it was the resources to be sure, but it was also a different kind of mindset that was less about can we get consensus across a community about something and more can we just find a few willing contributors to move forward. And I think that was a different kind of collaboration than we've sometimes looked at in the past. Yeah, indeed. And I think we were all a bit surprised when the announcement about the first five libraries were involved with Google. It caught us off guard. We hadn't been having those conversations with one another. That was for me actually a point of moment that there was a lack of transparency that some of those things are done in the dark. Yes. And I think these are really, really great points. Thank you, Kay, for the really direct and elegant question. We have more questions coming in before I get a chance to ask any more. And this is actually a comment from the splendid Phil Katz. And Phil says, I would be interested to be hearing more about the split between digitization of materials and discovery tools. Sometimes we seem to operate more in tandem than other times. So I don't know if I'm going to be speaking exactly to your comment here, Phil, but I mean we're certainly, you know, there's been an array of different digitization and born digital collections that have been created over the course of time, whether it be through Google, Microsoft, et cetera, these digitization partnerships, the Digital Library Federation, individual institutions that have pursued digitization, institutional repository issues, our colleagues at JSTOR, a whole wide array of efforts to create digital collections. And of course the primary publishers, not least. And discovery has, in the way that I conceptualize it anyway, has tended to come from a set of platforms and tools that have tried to provide a starting point that cuts across as many of those content sources as possible. So you could look at, you know, Google, Google Scholar as a sort of discovery service. You could certainly look at some of the discovery services that libraries have long provided, whether it be through their catalogs or their abstracting and indexing services or these new sort of broader discovery services that they sometimes provide. So I sort of, I tend to see them as separate categories, but of course every one of those collections also has a search engine attached to it. So you're right, and the distinction is always a little bit gray for that reason and probably for others as well. Do you want to jump in? Yeah, I was just going to say, welcome to American capitalism. That explains a lot of it. And one of the things I realized in writing the book is the number of times small groups of people got together to do something, but there wasn't an effort to engage the entire community until I get more momentum behind some of these projects. So we have a lot of individual projects that are very valuable but supported by relatively few people. Yeah, that's one of the, another point in a series of moments in your book is people kind of have great ideas and they're not getting uptake. Phil, thank you for that really good probe and thank you both for the very good answers. Again, if you're new to the forum, these are the ways that the Q&A box can really work. We have a question from Lee Nichols at Western Carolina and Lee asks, is there an advantage to multiple overlapping digitization projects? Redundancy is good sometimes, but there may be others. Well, let me just tell you again my opinion. Redundancy is fine and it is sometimes very important, but I think for major projects that involve libraries getting resources out to the public, that requires more thought, more discipline and I'm not so sure that redundancy is what's needed, but mobilization of resources to get things out to people. That's a good question. I would think of redundancy and tools like lots of copies keep stuff safe. And we have a question from our longtime friend Charles Finley at Northeastern who asks, how does a library maintain ongoing access to digital archives over time? Who can maintain access with different operating systems and types of storage? There's a growing preservation infrastructure that has come into being in recent years. For example, with respect to the collections that have been digitized through the Google project we cover in the book there's an organization called HathiTrust that has been preserving and making accessible. Those materials, many libraries have chosen to become members of HathiTrust and it's a community-supported initiative. For e-journals there's initiatives like the one you mentioned, Brian, the clocks initiative as well as the Portico initiative. The Internet Archive has a role to play. So there are some of these kind of community-supported services. Our colleague Oya Rieger is finishing up a project looking at a set of services that university libraries but also potentially archives or museums may use to digitally preserve their own digitized or born digital collections locally. So there's a whole category of tools and systems like those. Some of them are community-supported, open source in some cases. Some of them are commercially provided. So there's an array of tools like that as well. I'm getting a sense of an emerging landscape from the conversation here. Out of one, many. By the way, Roger mentioned HathiTrust. You should on your screen on the bottom left have a kind of gold-colored button that will let you click to that if you like. I'm fascinated by HathiTrust by the way. Can you both see a little bit about its origin because it kind of spun out of the Google Book scanning project in an interesting way. So I'll start at the end and we'll want to add to it. So it's actually a really interesting story because the folks at the university, then at the University of Michigan, who were most involved in the early digitization work soon realized that there would be benefits if the libraries could control a digital copy themselves and not just rely on Google to be the steward of the digitized version. This sounds like an obvious move in retrospect, but at the time it was not so obvious, at least I don't think it was so obvious, that the libraries would get a copy of the digitized scans immediately. So having begun to realize that the volume of the megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes of material that they would be getting would go beyond their current storage abilities, they soon began thinking about what would a storage solution look like, what would a preservation solution look like. They initially approached the Mellon Foundation, which is what at least at the time anyone in this space did. The first thing you did was when you went to Mellon. You called Don Waters, you went to Mellon, and for a variety of reasons, Mellon didn't end up supporting Hottie Trust. And it's a really interesting story. We provide some details in the book. And as a result, there was no catalyst where someone could say, I have a Mellon grant to do this, which is how a lot of collaborations at the time, God Star, I have an IMLS grant. I have a Mellon grant to do this. And so everyone is sort of a crete onto that vision. So there was actually a need for that kind of leadership that Deanna was describing. And Deanna, maybe you should kind of take it from there. Well, I think this too comes from the provost at Michigan who had a vision of how it might all work. And he articulated that vision extremely well, I think. And consequently, he was able to get other people to join in in developing Hottie Trust. I think their biggest early decision was, what should we call it? And they searched long and hard to come up with Hottie Trust, I'm sure, but the elephant is a great memory symbol. I think leadership is, again, the answer. And someone who had a vision and someone who was willing to keep working on it and seeing it through and talking to lots of people and including lots of people. I think he has certainly earned my respect. It's a great effort. Just over the past year, I literally can't think of how many different e-books I've been reading of Hottie Trust from Russian literature to science. It's a great project. So here's a plug. In the Future Transform, we always try and give you something nice and exciting to take away. We have more questions that have come in. One from Katie Herzog, another librarian, and she asks a classic question. Could you speak to access versus ownership in terms of digital content and the concept of library collection development? I think she put that in quotes in order to draw attention to how collection development is problematic now. Kate, please let me know if I'm mangling your question beyond recognition. What is this difference between access and ownership now? Well, I think we've all learned in the digital world that what we own is extremely limited. We have ways of getting access to things, but I don't know. I think the libraries are simply not the institutions they once were and they were building individual collections for faculty and students. Now it's more likely that they work with others to figure out how more access can be provided. And I just think that's the way things will go. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think Hottie Trust is actually an interesting illustration for the purposes of this question because the easiest option for the libraries and the option that they take in almost every other case is, as Deanna says, is to say, we'll just rely on access. And I can tell stories, it'll probably go too far in the weeds right now, but I can tell stories about, I'll say mistakes that I think libraries are making due to financial expediency today where they're forgoing ownership-like models in exchange just for access in a way that will come back to bite them in three or five years from now. But Hottie Trust is an interesting exception because as Deanna was saying before, the libraries, the leaders that the Michigan provost and others at the time who saw the need for the libraries to control a digital copy of the files. It's a really interesting thing because what is ownership really mean in a digital environment where everyone can have their own copy of anything? But so for the purposes of the digital, what I think is interesting about the Hottie Trust example is it shows that it's not so much that the libraries needed to own it and that Google shouldn't therefore own it also. Everyone can have a digital copy. The benefit to the community of the fact that the libraries, that the university community retained a copy was that they could push the boundaries on access in the ways that they felt met their values and their risk tolerance. So the examples are, for example, for print disabled users, Hottie Trust was in a very early stage of its development, said we're going to take much more accessibility-focused perspective than Google would ever think to take. And more recently, during the pandemic, it really opened up access to these collections to staff and faculty members and students from their member libraries in a way that was only possible because they actually had control of the digital files. And I think that's an interesting... I wish there was an opportunity for libraries to reflect on what that means and not that the University of Michigan itself or Berkeley or Harvard or whoever needs to have a copy of their own, but somehow the fact that the community has that stewardship role and the opportunity to push the boundaries with it really has made a big difference, I would argue. Yes, I think so. This is fascinating because this is a great point and there's almost an oscillation happening between owning something and not owning something. And Lisa Hinchliffe just asked a really good question about the difference between Hottie Trust as a collection rather than as a platform. And she said that you were just speaking to that in a sense, Roger. And I'm wondering if both of you could just press on this a little bit further. What would happen if we thought of Hottie Trust more as a platform and less of a collection? Where else might that take us? Does that lead to a kind of... every library having a shadow archive of its own or do we get more and more loading of content on the Hottie Trust? Where might that add us? I think it's a really interesting question. I don't see Hottie Trust principally as a collection. So I don't know if maybe I said something inadvertently or maybe others have conceptualized it that way. But I absolutely agree that it's a platform. It's a service. I'm reluctant to say a business, but it's an organization. And where that takes us is an interesting question. I think we've already seen some of the approaches that they've taken with access. We've seen some of the approaches they've taken with research thinking about text and data mining, for example. So yeah, I'd love to hear others' ideas. Or Deanna, you may have thoughts there. One thing that bothers me about Hottie Trust and it's only one thing because I think they do great work. But it's still a membership organization. You pay a fee to join Hottie Trust. And ultimately, if we're moving toward a digital national library, what's in the Hottie Trust is a huge part of that. And yet, right now, it's open to members. And that worries me. Like a subscription library? Yeah. For me, one of the fascinating parts of the narrative you unfold in this book is that you had that mission, the Boston Public Library, open to all, free to all. But also, you had the role of so many oligarchs. Paul Allen doing this, the heads of Google doing this, and then you had major mega companies doing things. And you have these unusual nonprofits in between organizations like Hottie Trust, but like Internet Archive. It was a nice snapshot of our time of how things have transitioned. Friends, we're coming with the last 20 minutes and I want to make sure that everyone gets a chance to ask their questions. You already see how you can do that with a Q&A box and people seem to be completely not shy at all in the chat box. We have a puckish question. That's how I characterize it from Charles Findlay in the chat box. He asks, won't NFTs influence the whole publishing industry for all media? So NFTs are non-fungible tokens. You see what we call them NFTs. And they are basically single instances of digital content that are backed up by the blockchain. So he wants you to think of NFTs in this context. Roger, Deanna, you want to give that a try? I have nothing whatsoever to add to this. I really don't know, Charles. I'm sorry, I'm sure we're in disappointment. We've had several sessions about blockchain technology in the past, and we really should do one on NFTs if it doesn't lend us to get banned in different countries or black bulb in different ways. Speaking of wonderful friends of the program, we have Roxanne Risken who asks a different question. And let me share this one. Are you seeing libraries act more assertively in digitizing microform, microfiche, and physical assets for preservation access, meaning addressing accessibility issues that these media have by design? Well, I think you're right, Roxanne. The pandemic has so upset general ways of working, and people are not working in libraries. They're working from home, and they're not digitizing as far as I know. I haven't heard of any library taking on digitization of microfiche or microfilm, and we have a lot of it in big libraries. We have huge amounts of microfilm and microfiche that will need to be digitized, and yet I don't see a lot of hope right now. And I'd like to... I just think the other problems that libraries face are too overwhelming, and they're working on those and not on some of the obvious things that we'd like them to work on. Is there a role for governments in this? I don't want to inject politics in this. I'm just thinking on the public side. For the Department of Education, for example, or an especially ambitious state government like California or Washington, have any governments had a powerful leadership role in this? I was only going to say some of the European governments took a real interest in digitization generally following the Google announcement, the Google digitization announcement, not least out of a concern that this was basically going to favor English language materials. The French first and foremost were deeply concerned about what this meant for the future of the French language. It was a very interesting moment of both anxiety and influence in some really interesting ways. I don't know that there's much going on at the state level in the U.S. I do think that accessibility issues, just to come back to, I believe it was Roxanne's question, I do think that accessibility issues have been one of the substantial drivers of libraries in the digitization process. Not the only one, but certainly an important one. I think that's just worth pressing on because as important as those issues are, there's a broader strategic context in which all of this works that I think Diana rightfully has been really emphasizing. It's a great question and thank you. Thank you, Roxanne, as always for a great question. Thank you both for a really, really good answer. This does bring us towards a question that was asked some time ago, and I did want to lose sight of it. This is from Sharon Alker who asked, what are the most important concepts we have learned from the successes of the Google Books project? And Sharon, as you just bought your book. So thank you, Sharon. On behalf of... What are the successes that we can learn from? Well, we've learned that if a company, in this case Google, sets its mind to do something, it can do it. And we had so many small digitization projects going on in libraries when Google made its announcement, but they didn't have enough resources to make it a big project. And I think these times we have to think bigger. Bigger than Google. Please go ahead, Roger. Yeah, I was just going to... I think that's right, thinking bigger. And thinking with more agility and speed, I think are also words that I would add. I think that there are a few other... I don't know if these are successes exactly... I mean, I think one success is leadership. We've talked about that a number of times. And so just to put that in this context, I do think that the other... The other success here is to really think about some of the ways that... It's not just what couldn't be done... I don't see this just as some of the ways that the library community could have done things better or we wish they were different than they are or that they had some more potential. But I also see this as a success on one basic level of a commercial partnership. And for all of the ways in which we wish more had come out of it, the libraries got all the collections, all the materials that are in... The most basic level. The libraries got all the materials that are in Hottie Trust and the ability to use those for free. I mean, that's a pretty great success. And at the same time, for those of us who care, to my introduction at the beginning, for those of us who care about having validated high quality information available online, there were millions of public domain books that are now populating Google search results that never would have been there otherwise. So I think the fact of the matter is that there are some really great outcomes of this and those outcomes were possible precisely because of a commercial partnership that admittedly a lot of us have some implicit reservations about. And you have... There's a great footnote early on the book where you describe the nascent field of Google studies. And I shouldn't say nascent because you go back 10-plus years and it's scholarly books in this topic. You know, Siva, Vaitha, and Natha, and, for example, Doris, I know Zubal's work. But yeah, that's a really, really good point. A successful, productive result. And we still have the results. The snippets are still there. Yeah, it's still there. And the other result that I think is important is that we saw what technology could do in a way that we hadn't seen before. And that has been important and it's helped a lot of libraries move ahead. Well, their breakthroughs in terms of scanning everything from the hardware on up. There's a fun science fiction novel from around 2005 called Rainbow's End. I think it was a parody of a Google book scanning project. That's interesting. Yeah, a giant company goes through, I think it's UCSD, and they go through its library and they have a tool that will gait in the books and then slice the pages up and float them in air and then scan them as they drift with lasers. And I thought I was the only person laughing delightfully when I read that passage. We have more questions coming in. This is one that comes from Caroline Coward, who has one of the great jobs, by the way. She's a librarian at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. Just everything is good about that sentence. She asked about controlled digital lending, which is a different thing. The giant public library was supposed to be one which would be uncontrolled digital lending. But what about controlled digital lending? Where does that stand now? Well, it's something that we've been paying a lot of attention to. Frankly, even since we finished the book, I think we're seeing... For those who don't know, it's possibly a term that's not familiar to everyone. Controlled digital lending is basically where a library will essentially buy or own a print book and sequester that print book and while that print book is sequestered can make available a digitized version even if they haven't bought or licensed the digitized version, just digitized it themselves. So that's controlled digital lending, as I understand it. Power has powered the Hottie Trust emergency temporary access program. There's a version of controlled digital lending that the Internet Archive has been using for some time. I think there are really interesting questions about whether controlled digital lending is a reason for libraries to keep their print books and not just de-accession them all in favor of the digital. There's a really interesting piece in the scholarly kitchen a few weeks ago by a group of individuals from the Boston Library Consortium who are thinking about how to build infrastructure at a consortial level, if I understand it correctly, so that potentially one library can sequester a book and another library can lend it. So I think there's a lot of really exciting things going on right now. Now all of this is, again, as I understand it, untested by the courts and I'm not exactly certain how that may turn out. So that's going to be very interesting to see. I believe the litigation against the Internet Archive is probably going to help answer that question. And Brewster, to his credit, was doing this a long time ago. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. He's a major, I mean leadership. He's a major. Yes. Hello, Carolyn. Greetings to the West Coast. Can you hear me? Yes. Excellent. No, I had a follow-on question and I don't know if this is answerable or not. Controlled digital lending is also a response to current copyright law. We're trying to play by the rules. We're trying to be good soldiers and good stewards. And it is governed, as you say, copy by copy by copy. It really depends on the owning library, what kind of rights they're extending to their user population and it can get really murky, really fast. And so my question is, what changes to current copyright law need to occur to kind of catch up with where we are in the 21st century? I mean, I'm not talking about egalitarian. I'm just talking about to make it functional so that we can serve our user population. Yeah. Great question. I know that the Library of Congress has put together a group to revamp copyright law. And I think it's extremely important. All of the laws that we're now living under were written before digital technology. And that makes it very important to try to interpret. I mean, just, you're constantly trying to say, now let's see, what will really work and what won't work and what are we able to do? And I know that's really hard on libraries. We're going to avoid diving deeply into the minute details of the 1976 copyright law, which, I mean, there's a lot to it. And I think your book, by the way, does a very elegant job of giving us just enough to understand where fair use comes from and how that was claimed and how that was ruled against. Carolyn, this is a major, major issue. It is. Thank you. Thank you. We have time for one more question. And this is, and I want to ask one last one myself. This is an optimistic question from Roger, I'm sorry, Robert, who asks, in the beginning, many were critical, they were skeptical about whether the idealism around the project from the leadership would survive the next generation of leaders and shareholders. Weren't they proven right? Did the idealism of this not survive? Or do we still have some flames of idealism flickering away? What do you think, Deanna? I was going to ask you to say that. Well, I have to admit I'm not as involved in individual libraries as I used to be. I don't know what the tone is like when they're having these discussions, but I will say from results, we haven't seen so many. And that always worries me. And I don't know who the leaders are right now who are taking stances and making speeches and talking to other librarians about it. I just, I don't know. And I think, and I, you know, it's so interesting. I think that some of the places where that, I don't know, I think I'm having trouble with the term idealism. I guess I'd be more comfortable with the word like, or with a phrase like transformative potential, something like that, strategic transformation. I think what we haven't seen is the degree of strategic transformation that the leaders working on this 10 and 15 years ago gave us reason to hope we would have seen it by now. And I think that where we still see a flicker of that, it's, for example, in the Big Ten Academic Alliance, where they, they say, and I'm not sure what we're going to see happen tangibly, but they say they're going to create a single big collection shared across those dozen or 15 institutions. Will that come to pass? What will that actually look like? Will it result in transformation and access and dramatic reduction in cost and opportunity to, you know, innovate in scholarship? That's what we're all looking to see. And we haven't seen that yet. And part of it is because people just can't meet right now. And that has taken a real toll on progress. Well, that's, that really has slowed our ability to work together too much. I think we have a question that came in from Twitter, from P.F. Anderson, who's at the University of Michigan, by the way, who wants to know about the potential downstream costs of the loss or shrinkage of print collections. So as, as libraries shift more and more of the materials from print analog to digital, what are some of the downstream costs that we should be concerned about? I think we talked a little bit about the shift in the librarian's role from owning to kind of stewarding access. Any other costs that we should keep in mind? Well, I think we've, I don't think we've seen a huge shift in print book collections as a result of this initiative. I think if you look comparatively at the amount of journal backfiles that have been deaccessioned as a result of digitization, I'm not aware that a similar scale of transformation has taken place in book collections. And, you know, maybe that's for the best in the sense that to the discussion we had earlier about control digital lending, maybe everyone is going to want to save copies of those print books so that the digital versions, the digitized versions can be lent out over the, over the course of time. It's a, it's a curious, curious, curious dynamic. That's, that's for sure. Thank you. Thank you. Well, we have a few more notes are coming in in the chat. Lisa Hincheliff thinks the focus is on transforming scholarly journal publishing to open access. Alan Bell speaks about Ontario as a jurisdiction where digital collections are built collaboratively for the 21st century and gives us a link to scholars portal.info. Thank you. I guess as the, as the futurist today, I wanted to ask a question to ask you all to look ahead of about 10 years and where this, where this might go. Are you thinking, for example, might we see more and more intermediary levels of tools that, like Google Scholar, for example, become more and more important? Might we see non-US sources really step up in terms of digitization? I'm thinking, for example, about the Chinese government or about the European Union, minus Britain. Or might we, as the climate crisis gets more and more terrifying, might it become something like a digital library equivalent of the Svalbard seed library as a way of storing humanity's scholarship against the coming darkness? I mean, where do you think this might be headed in the next 10 years? Well, my view is the users will determine what libraries do. They're coming equipped as digital scholars. They don't know anything about using this print book. I just think users will determine a lot of what libraries do, because they have to. They do. So what's users we should be paying careful attention to? I think so. Thank you. Roger, do you want to take a look? Oh, I think that's extremely well said by Diana. I think that users and user behaviors, the kinds of consumer behaviors that we see in other parts of the digital world, the research practices, the instructional practices, the ways that the university ecosystem is changing as a result of student demographic changing instructional modalities. All of that is going to drive enormous shifts in libraries and library collections and digital access. So I just couldn't agree more with Diana about that. Well, thank you. That's a very lower Q&A, democratic way of thinking about it, which I approve. Unfortunately, and somehow we are out of time. We have shot past the top of the hour again in your very capable hands. What's the best way for people to keep up with the two of you? Should they go to the Ethica SNR website? Or Roger, should we just stalk you more on scholarly questions? Twitter, email, I'm happy to hear from people or engage with people any way they want. Very good. Roger is connected to everything. You'll be fine. Keeping up with me is probably best done by email. Very good. Very good. Well, the one thing I want to say before we go is to thank you both. This is an important and fruitful and by the way, delightful to read book. Thank you both for your powerful contribution and thank you both for spending an hour talking with us about it. Thank you so much for having us. We really appreciate that. My pleasure. Both of you take care and be safe on the East Coast. Don't go away, friends. We have just a couple of notes about where we're headed next. Thank you, by the way, for all of your comments and questions. This was a very, very instructive time. We have sessions coming up in enrollment disability, eco-media literacy, the climate crisis, research universities, and more on libraries. Just go to forum.futureeducation.us to learn more. If you'd like to keep talking about these questions, everything from deaccessioning to controlled digital lending to what happens to the Internet Archive, try out my blog, granalexander.org, or go to the hashtag F-T-T-E on Twitter, and we'd like to keep the conversation going. If you'd like to go back into our previous session, some of which have touched on everything from libraries to scanning to copyright, just go to tinyorail.com.fdfarchive. In the meantime, as the fall semester here in the Northern Hemisphere gets colder and darker, it's wonderful to spend so much time with all of you, with all of your illuminations. Please keep up the great work. Above all, stay safe, and we'll talk to you next time online. Bye-bye.