 It's great to see so many of you here today. Welcome to the Fall Forum, which has been under development for some time. I hope it is stimulating to you and sends you away with not all of your questions answered, but a lot to think about. I first spoke to Charlie Kurtzman some months ago after being alerted to his fascinating work by a program officer at the SSRC. The context for our conversation was my interest in broadening the conversation about foreign acquisitions and support for ARL libraries global collections to include the faculty perspective. In other words, to gain a better understanding of how scholars are using or wanting to use and unable to use foreign information, foreign language collections. What issues of scarcity and other challenges they face? I wanted to connect the dots between academic needs and the provision of global information by ARL libraries. The work that Charlie's done with SSRC and NSF support on scholarly attention to different parts of the world will, I'm sure, provide us with new insights into critical and complex relationship between libraries and scholarship. Let me now introduce our speaker, Charles Kurtzman. He's a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-director of the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations. He is a member of the administrative board of the UNC Libraries and has been associated with that board for most of a decade and this is one reason why I wanted him to be our keynote speaker today because he is very well versed in the world of libraries and I thought he would be the perfect person to do this presentation. He is the author of Missing Martyrs, Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists, 2011, Democracy Denied, 1905 to 1915 published in 2008 and The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran published in 2004. He's the editor of the anthologies Modernist Islam, 1840 to 1940 published in 2002 and Liberal Islam in 1998. He's also the author of dozens of papers and has given many, many presentations. His research on trends in American scholarship and international and area studies has been supported as I mentioned earlier by the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council as well as other agencies. It's a pleasure to introduce him to you today. Thank you. Thank you Deborah and thank you all. I'm honored to be here. I love libraries. I'm a heavy user of libraries and I'm a big believer in collaboration, both scholarly collaboration and library collaboration because I've been such a huge beneficiary of collaboration not only in our neck of the woods between University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Duke University, which I appreciate so much, but also more generally through interlibrary borrowing and other resources. I've been to many of your libraries because whenever I go visit a campus, I look in advance as there's something there that I might want to see in the library that I won't be able to find at my own and so I've stopped in dozens and dozens of libraries around the United States and Canada and always impressed by the ways in which people, libraries are collecting material that you wouldn't expect sometimes at smaller schools that they'll have this great small collection on something and how somebody notices. I just want you to know that somebody notices and appreciates. I'd like to run through the question of globalization with a particular take on it, looking at how American scholarship, particularly in the social sciences although we hope to expand to the humanities as well, has started to pay attention to different regions of the world over the last 50 years since the rise of international and area studies institutionally in the United States. I think this falls under what I was interested to see in this task force memo, falls under the category of scholar behavior, which is in the middle of the page which I like because it makes this sound like chimpanzees or something. That's how we treat our subjects so I'm happy to have you treat us in the same way. It doesn't bother me. This is a map that shows the regions of the world as a percentage inflated or deflated as a percentage of scholarly social science journal coverage over the last 50 years. I'll show you more data, but this is the only map version. We also made an animated version of this that the UNC library, GIS systems librarian worked with me on to show how this has changed over time. The problem was it looked like pulsating blobs and so we really didn't end up using that. Again, I appreciate the librarian help there. You can see that some regions such the United States look bloated because there's disproportionate attention to the United States in scholarship in the social sciences and some regions are shrunk because we really don't pay that much attention to them. I'll go through what I mean by attention in a bit, but first I want to make the case to you that the United States is globalizing. This is obvious. Everybody says it. So I figured how much data do I need to throw at you to document this claim? Well, I started putting together data and it's funny. So we take imports and exports. We think of our economy as being so internationalized and it has doubled imports and exports as a percentage of GDP over the last 50 years. You can tell I'm a sociologist, right? I throw up the charts. First thing we get some data here. Now, it's funny because when in a room full of sociologists, I'm the qualitative historical guy who will bother to learn languages, but when I go to people from humanities and area studies and possibly librarians, I'm the one who knows how to run a statistical package and create a graph. I can't do any of them very well for the home audience, but enough to snow the folks and the other audience who aren't familiar with it. I was surprised that this figure was only at 25%. I would have guessed that the percentage was more. This is goods and services. If we included currency transactions, though, it's way over 100% because trillions of dollars are being exchanged internationally in currency speculation and investment every year. So it's far greater than the GDP. In any case, this is one image of the rise of global flows affecting the United States. Here's another one. The foreign-born population in the United States has also doubled over the last 50 years from five-something, 5% in the 1960s and 70s to over 10% in the 2000s. This is not the only indicator of flows of human beings, of course, but it's a sign that America is not as isolated as it once was. Now, within the educational system, we face challenges to globalize as well. These challenges have been noted. You've got sneak previews I saw before of these slides, so I hope you've already memorized them. I won't have to read them now. This priority of globalizing American education, of meeting the needs of this new era, has been documented over and over and stated as a priority since the late 1950s. So this is the famous Title VI founding act, the National Defense Education Act, that sets up the International and Area Studies Centers, federally funded, that have been the backbone for much of scholarship in the International Area Studies realm ever since then. And I'm very proud to report that a consortium for Middle East studies at Duke and UNC finally won one of these Title VI Center grants last year for the first time, just in time to watch the program be destroyed. I won't read the entire act, which goes on for dozens and dozens of pages, but the pullout quote notes that there is an emergency. This is the Cold War emergency, emergency that requires additional and more adequate educational opportunities, in particular one of the things listed on the bottom line, along with science and mathematics, is modern foreign languages. And that began then, millions of dollars were put behind those words to create the system of national resource centers and foreign language and area studies, fellowships for graduate students that have helped to build the demand for foreign language collections at libraries, as well as many of these centers funding library collections in foreign languages. 1979, there was another major report, a report to the president from the president's commission on foreign language and international studies. So this is 20 years after the founding of these Title VI programs. And they wrote that rather than seeing progress, we are profoundly alarmed by a serious deterioration in the country's language and research capacity, at a time when we need more and more international education. 30 years after that, another report, 2007, from a committee to review the Title VI and Fulbright Hayes International Education programs. Again, sounds a negative note that pervasive lack of knowledge about foreign cultures and foreign languages threatens the security of the United States, as well as our position in the global marketplace. And then sort of I think somebody must have lobbied to have this last phrase and produce an informed citizenry that people should know about the rest of the world as well. It's not just national security and global competitiveness in the marketplace. This seems to me depressing sort of return as though we hadn't had 50 years of federal programs and huge investments on the part of educational institutions at all levels. Let's go to the data on that and it's mixed. Foreign language education, we don't have comparable statistics for international education and a substantive courses, but for foreign language instruction, in secondary schools, we have the National Digest of Education Statistics which shows a rise. The latest data was from 2000 that I could find. A rise though from around 30% of high school students getting some foreign language to over 40% of high school students getting some foreign language instruction. I think that's considerable. When we look at higher education, the Modern Language Association has done this periodic review every several years since 1960 of the foreign language enrollment in colleges and universities. And as you can see in this report, their latest version of this, the enrollment has gone up hugely so that there's now, I think the figure in the small numbers in the upper right is 1,600,000 something students taking a foreign language on a college or university campus in the United States. But if we divide this either by the number of students or by the number of college age Americans, we get a very different picture. I won't show you the one where they divided by the number of enrollments, college enrollments, because it's depressing. The percentage of enrollments has gone down by half since the 1960s. But that's in large part because enrollment has gone up. So what we, I think it's more meaningful. So a lot of students now, I mean, far more students, almost double the numbers of young people go to college than they did 50 years ago. And many of those students are going to schools, community colleges and other schools that don't offer a full array of foreign languages and that don't require foreign language instruction for graduation. So that, I think, is a misleading metric. Instead, let's look at these numbers over the number of people who are of college age. So we take the tertiary enrollment ratio, divide this into that, and it is flat. In other words, in the 1960s, it was around 7% of all college age people were getting some foreign language instruction. And today, it is also around 7%. Notice though, in the middle, in the 1970s, the number went way down. It dropped not by half, but considerably, maybe by a third, down to around 4%. And has gone back up, sort of clawed its way back up. That's an interesting dip, and I'm not sure how to account for that, but I think it's important that where we are is not trying to reclaim something from the 1960s, but rather trying to make up from something from the 1970s. I'm going to focus now on the social sciences. I've just received a grant from the National Science Foundation, that Deborah was kind enough to mention, that talks about to look into how social science has paid attention to different regions of the world. For preliminary research, what got us the grant was hand-coding 15,000 journal articles from the last 50 years, a team of research assistants and myself. We looked only at the title and the abstract, and we asked ourselves, what region of the world is this article about? If it's about any region, some pieces are theoretical, of course. Model building are non-empirical. So we coded the flagship journals of a number of social science professional associations. So the American Sociological Association, my home field. We looked at all the articles from the American Sociological Review from the last 50 years. We did the same for history, economics, political science, geography, and anthropology. And the findings were interesting. So there's, I thought you'd like this, this is sort of a modern art picture. It's all over the board, right? These dots are just everywhere. We coded then this particular chart, what percentage do not focus on the United States? What percentage of the empirical articles do not focus on the United States? Don't worry, I'm not going to ask you to try to interpret this. This is the list of journals, though, at the bottom. And the light blue dots are suddenly going to pop out here if this works. And we'll look at the average. There we go. The average is somewhere around half, just under half, just over half, of all social science articles in these flagship journals. Focus on something outside of the United States. Now I expected to see this go up over time, this ratio. I thought we'd be globalizing in the social sciences. So far we haven't found this. Now for the project we're going to do, we're going to do a huge number of additional journals, not just these top journals, because there's disciplinary differences. For example, the American Historical Review has very few articles on the United States. But that's because in the early 60s, the field broke off and created a new journal, the Journal of American History, that takes a lot of these top class articles that would otherwise have gone into the AHR. And so it depresses the rate. So we want to include more, the same with the American Economics Review. A lot of the international focused articles would have appeared in the Journal of Development Economics, or in other disciplines, other journals, rather. We're also working with the OCLC to examine a scholarly monograph production and what regions of the world are covered in books. And I'm hoping to get data from ProQuest, from dissertation abstracts, to look at what regions of the world have been covered in dissertations over the last 50 years, so that we'll have a broader picture, a more reliable picture, of how scholarship has changed in their global focus over the last 50 years. Now of that half, going back to this particular preliminary data, we asked of the half that doesn't focus on the United States, how much of that is on Western Europe and how much is on the rest? Because a bulk of the non-U.S. stuff is on Western Europe. It appears that about a quarter of all these articles were on Western Europe, leaving a quarter for the rest of the world. Here's the average then of all these journals, over 50 years. The United States is roughly half, as you see, the top blue portion. The next portion in red is Western Europe, and all the other regions of the world are sort of clamoring for attention within that bottom quarter. There are trends, though. So, for example, Eastern Europe, which is in dark green, right under Western Europe, had a slightly larger portion of attention in the Cold War period than it has since then, which is understandable. The Middle East, my main area of study, had almost no attention in these top flagship journals for years and years. And since 9-11, although it's still minuscule in percentage terms, I have other tables I won't bore you with that show that we have doubled our presence in these top journals in the post-9-11 period. It seems that these types of scholarly attention reflects in some ways global affairs, that topics become topical, that they become worthy of disciplinary attention at the highest level, and that these trends, we're thinking, may translate into broader educational trends, having to do with courses that are being offered, having to do with attention to scholarship paid in congressional hearings, another project I'm working on, where we're looking at whether academics are called as experts for congressional hearings on different topics of global concern. How are the libraries doing? Are libraries keeping up? Are libraries globalizing? I don't have great data on this. I'm hoping the OCLC partnership is going to allow us to address this more directly. But let me give you a couple things. One of them comes from your own research report from several years ago, changing global book collection patterns beginning in the early 1980s. And as you see with this chart, which I've just copied and pasted from that report, the number of WorldCat records by world region went up from the early 80s through the 1990s and then declined in the most recent period. Now, I gather that some of this may be an artifact of delays in cataloging. And so material from some regions may be cataloged more slowly. And so a 2006 report might not have had a full number of records already present for certain regions of the world. So I don't know whether, if we did this today, whether we would see the drop as well in that period. But as you all know, during this same period, the number of records from the United States was skyrocketing, publishing. You're collecting so much more material. And I wonder whether the percentages then of this foreign material is actually going down. So I don't have data for all of you. So I looked at my own university's library catalog and if Carol, Hunter is, hello, there you are. I apologize in advance. Yes, I know I warned you this week. I didn't have an easy search screen for place of publication, so I went with language. And of course, this can include British material. It can glued English language material published anywhere in the world. But I was struck that the percentage of English language records has gone up over 50 years. These four major European languages that we collect heavily, Russian, especially Spanish, German and French, have gone down somewhat. And other languages have increased over the last 20 years, but are still somewhat marginal. I think this suggests that there's a challenge here, a challenge that libraries, as well as scholars, need to meet, that there is a world of information out there that we may not be keeping up with as much as we would like. Let me turn to possible solutions having to do with digitization. This is not the only possible solution, but I hope it's relevant to the stuff that you're gonna be discussing here at this conference. Books are becoming digitized at great rate. Now I heard a mention of e-books. In the world that I study, there are no e-books. I mean, I can read the English language, university press stuff about the Middle East, but the stuff produced in the Middle East, it seems to be rarely in the e-book form. However, folks are digitizing things very rapidly. You're all familiar with Google Books, of course. The Internet Archive, which the University of North Carolina has partnered with, as well as perhaps many of you all. The Hattie Trust, which also partners with Google and others in universities, and is making an increasing number of books available digitally. And I wanted to add to this list, one of my main sources for information, the illegal, self-uploaded material available at Scribd and file sharing sites like that. People are digitizing stuff, and they're making it available. And there's tons of listservs telling you where to find the latest cache of materials on whatever topic there is. And it's a form of librarianship, I suppose, that is outside of all copyright control and outside of all the institutional apparatus that you all are professionals in making stuff available to us. And I think that is what people are doing because they can't get the stuff through the legal means, right? I can put in my interlibrary borrowing request, and it will take me two weeks at best to get a book in the mail. But if I look online or email somebody, ask them to digitize it, they'll go and copy it for me somewhere in the world, and I can have the scan the next day. Let's look at eBooks. So I looked at WorldCat, and I just put in a search term, keyword search, asterisk. And then all languages, and got 11 million in an eBook type of material format eBook, and got 11 million records. I put language English, and got six million records. So a majority of things that are called eBooks on WorldCat are in English. German follows, then Chinese, French, and Spanish. I was pleased to see Arabic is in the top 10. Now how does this compare with non-eBook? This is a RetroNem, I guess. You print books, right? It's like snow skiing, which was just skiing until water skiing came along, you know? So let's add all books. I just, instead of clicking eBooks, I went to the super category, all books. And English is only 40% of all book records there, but it's almost 60% of the eBooks. I think it's a feature of WorldCat that there's a lot of German libraries in there. Maybe that's why there's so many German books. And I didn't parse those out, but German comes next. Chinese, then, is over digitized, relative to the number of books in the catalog. Russian is over digitized. Japanese is under digitized. That is, there's only half as many books, eBooks, by percentage, as there are books in the catalog. Now, French is over digitized by this measure as well. But I'm struck, then, that it seems slow to me as somebody working on the Middle East. It just seems slow that there's this rush of digital material, and all my Americanist colleagues in sociology, you don't call them Americanists, you call them sociologists. But they just have all of this material available to them, and I'm going around trying to find illegal uploads in order to, it just doesn't seem fair. Now, there are all sorts of projects, and I won't run through these hopeful projects. The Digital South Asia Library at Chicago, Amil, which is at Yale, the Afghanistan Digital Library at NYU, these are among the efforts, and I apologize if I've left your library's effort out, among the efforts in my area, in Middle East and Islamic studies, to try to make up the gap. They're still really small, right? They're project-based, often, with some sort of startup funds, and they're focusing on particular sub-collections. So the Afghanistan Digital Library is focusing on 1870 to 1930, which is really useful, because that's rare material, and that's foundational material for the emergence of modern Afghanistan. But that doesn't help me if I want to study anything of the last 50 years, right? Simply, they're not collecting that yet, not making it available. Amil's focusing on periodicals from a particular era, also very useful material, but by no means comprehensive. University libraries are not the only ones doing this. There's also organizations in the Middle East that are digitizing. So Biblioteca Alexandrina, the famous library of Alexandria, has been refounded and is creating a magnificent collection and is digitizing it as quickly as they can. Interestingly, I heard that they're sending the material to India to be digitized. Rather than doing it in Egypt. They have this digital assets repository where you can see the materials that have been digitized, or you can see what materials have been digitized. You can't see the actual materials or very much of them. Some of them you can see the older material you can see, and there's another set where you can see 5% of them. But a lot of it you just don't have access to. In fact, when I've been in contact with them, they said, well, please come over. Well, we're happy to show you the digital stuff. You have to sit at a computer in our library. So it's saving them from having to go pull the books and get wear and tear, I suppose, but it doesn't help me sitting here a continent away. Now maybe eventually it will. So it's another platform to build on. They've also been pioneers in dealing with Arabic language material on a digital basis. Another source from Iran is called Nemaayyeh. Nemaayyeh is a database of a huge number of thousands of Iranian periodicals over the last 15 years that they've digitized and then make available as a PDF with keywords that are searchable, not full text that's searchable yet at this point. The University of North Carolina Library is the only one in the United States to have a huge chunk of this database available. So we have over 150 of their CDs. We've loaded them all onto a server and you can access them now at a machine at our reference area and search through them. We've had, I've used them for my research and we've had several graduate students use them for their research and we would love to be able to make this available more widely. Unfortunately Nemaayyeh as the organization in Tehran has gone away from the CD model and they don't want to send us anymore and they want us to subscribe to their service and access it through the internet but we haven't been able to get a clear price structure from them and there's all sorts of technical difficulties we're still dealing with. In any case the dataset exists only we could get access to it. It doesn't include books. It doesn't include daily newspapers which are hugely important in Iran. So it's partial but again it's taken this digitization farther than anybody else has in the Middle East region. Let me briefly talk about four dilemmas that I see. This comes up for international digitization, collection, collaboration. The first has to do with left to right or right to left scripts rather. So Arabic, Persian, Urdu as well as other Asian languages that go from right to left don't always get dealt with automatically in right to left fashion by the folks who are working the scanning machines. So I've put this up here as an example of two things. First of all this is as you may be able to read a University of California book. It's a Thousand and One Nights of Leila O Leila, okay? And I guess what they call the common title is Arabian Nights even though the Arabic title is very clearly a Thousand and One Nights. And it was published in 19, what does it say, 14? It was published by the Catholic press in Beirut. Okay so it's out of copy, right? So the University of California digitized their copy in conjunction with Google. It appeared I accessed it through the Hattie Trust, through UNC's subscription or membership in the Hattie Trust. So we have four major organizations involved in bringing this book to me on my computer at my desk. Unfortunately it was digitized backwards. So they started with the cover, like an English book. And so page 571 was actually the first page of the PDF. And then all the way back to the first page. So we were doing internet archive uploading and we had some Arabic books we wanted to prioritize. And they created an algorithm where if you click Arabic or Persian or other languages, it would flip them around so the internet archive copy would be in the correct direction. But you'd notice when they do the two pages on some of those reading things on screen, they don't always work right with right to left books. The other thing I want to point out, and this has nothing to do with the Middle East, is that books tend to be vertical. Computer screens tend to be horizontal. And so I've put this laid down now. I mean if you may know that this is not the direction it's supposed to be in. Because to inflate the book to the screen size you want, we need to, it just doesn't work with horizontal screens, especially with laptop screens. And I find it very frustrating that those screens are getting more and more horizontal, even though much of what we want to read in academics is vertical. I've now had three versions of a Lenovo tablet laptop that I love, but I've compared the screens and they're literally shrinking the vertical dimension of the screen each time to get it more like a movie dimensions, which doesn't help for reading books. Another feature that is problematic for digitizing material in other languages is optical character recognition. And this is a commercial promo because these folks won the competition I conducted with my graduate research assistants, looking at six OCR programs for Arabic. Okay OCR, I assume you all know but I'll say it anyway, is turning a picture of a page and extracting the text, recognizing the letters in the text. Now the OCR programs for Latin scripts are really good now. But for Arabic, they're not nearly as strong. So we did a competition that was funded by the Carnegie Corporation, who are interested in this for their own projects, and asked these companies to either give us the software or in most cases they wouldn't let us do that and so they took the sample text that we sent them and what they gave us back was crummy. It was really, you couldn't work with it. There were squiggles in it, there were random dots around any in a script like Arabic and Arabic based scripts, dots really matter. It's the difference between different letters. So any spec on the picture or any smudge or anything that might look like a dot throws it off entirely. So these folks went out, they're the best. This newest version that I just got this year is, it's not cheap. The version I got was something like $1,500. And it's not, I didn't get the top level. The top level which is, I forget now $9,000 or something allows you to make searchable PDFs which is what we really were hoping to make but I didn't have a grant that big so we didn't get that. In any case, I'm happy to give them a shout out because I think this is a coming technology. Interestingly, they and the other companies told me when I was talking with them about this that the US government is one of their main clients and one of them focuses on degraded texts such as those found in safe houses in Afghanistan. If I'm the beneficiary, then maybe it's like Tang, right? Finally, I wanna talk about copyright. This is a page from a PDF I use relatively frequently that I stole and violated copyright from. It is The Standard Dictionary from Arabic to English by Hans Ver. Unfortunately, I could only find the third edition which is from the late 60s. There's an updated fourth edition from the 1990s. And it was passed around in my Arabic classes from student to student. It's 500 megabytes so we pass it around on a memory stick. And we all bought the book in paper but it's just so much easier to have it with you all the time. It's not searchable. I tried to OCR it and it was a huge mess because it's got both Arabic and English constantly back and forth in columns but I use it. I mean, it's important to have it. I contacted the copyright owner, Otto Horacevitz, publishers in Germany and offered to make a digital edition with them and maybe we could get a grant or something, do it together and never heard back. So I guess either they're doing it on their own or they're not interested. Copyright issues are huge, of course, for sharing digital material, not just in the Middle East. In fact, for Iranian material, we joke that Iran has not signed all the international conventions on copyright protection and they routinely publish stuff from the West without seeking copyright permission. I mean, they're infamous for doing this. I was in Tehran a dozen years ago and picked up a book, translation of a book by a friend of mine in Persian and thought, oh, I'll get him a copy and emailed him from my hotel that at that point it wasn't made in a hotel internet access. It was from a cafe, an internet cafe. Said, oh, I just picked up your book in Persian. I got you a copy. It was only a dollar or two. And he wrote back, my book's been translated into Persian. No idea. So I feel with Iranian material that it would be symmetrical, at least, if we publish whatever we want of theirs without violating copyright. I don't know if legal authorities would see it that way. But obviously you all are dealing with this as a huge issue. How do you share digital material? As an author, I suppose I should care about copyright protection, but I make so little from my books that I really don't care at all. I would just as soon have it be available to everybody free online. But I gather the publisher doesn't feel that way. And so I'm, I think that these are still up for discussion, up for deliberation. And I would like to see collaboration around this issue where the people who are producing the material and the people who are reading the material, for scholarly material, at least, aren't making any money off of that. You all are delivering it to us. You're not making money off of that. The only people making money off of this are the publishers. Now some of them are nonprofits and they're wonderful organizations and I'm very glad they've published my books. But some of them have been, I think, irresponsible. They raise prices constantly. This is especially true for journals and I don't see why we can't cut them out or at least threaten to minimize their role through collaboration. I'm happy to talk about that further with you, but from my final point, I'm gonna do my promotional bit, my new book. I was just given this logo, so I'll show it to you. I was just talking at Georgetown and they gave me a copy that they don't need anymore, so I'll put this one stand up there. Here, put it, thank you, thank you very much. This just came out from Oxford University Press on why there are so few Muslim terrorists. Did I say tourists? That was weird. Those are probably related in some way, but there hasn't been this explosion of terrorism that we expected to see in the weeks and months after 9-11. I look forward to your conversation, your discussion, and thank you very much for your time. Thank you for listening. Music was provided by Josh Woodward. For more talks from this meeting, please visit www.arl.org.