 started. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Cliff Lynch. I'm the director of the Coalition for Networked Information, and I'll be introducing this session. This is one of the synchronous project briefings that is making up the first week of our two-week Spring 2021 virtual member meeting for CNI. We have a number of synchronous project briefings for you, and I'll just mention that we are relying considerably more heavily on prerecorded on-demand project briefings for this meeting. So we are complimenting synchronous briefings with quite a rich assortment of prerecorded on-demand sessions, which you can find on SCED, and I invite you to enjoy those as your time and interests permit. Next week, we will be doing plenary days on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and I hope you can join us for those. This session, like pretty much all of the sessions for the Spring virtual meeting, is being recorded. The recording will be publicly available at the conclusion of the meeting, and we'll join the collection of videos that CNI has made public based on its meeting presentations. A couple of mechanical things. We have got a chat. Feel free to use it. Feel free to introduce yourself or make comments as we go along. There is a Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen, and you can use that to pose questions at any point during the presentation as they occur to you. Diane Goldenberg-Hart from CNI will join the panelists at the conclusion of the presentations, and we'll field as many of those questions as well as comments in the chat as we can. We also have the ability to turn on people, to enable people to make comments by audio, and if you want to do that during Q&A, please just raise your hand. I think that's all, and there is closed captioning available. Please avail yourself of that if it's helpful for you. I think that's all the mechanical things I want to say. We have just a wonderful panel today, and Chris Freeland from the Internet Archive will introduce it in just a moment. You can see the list of our panelists and their affiliations here. I just want to say a couple of words about the broad topic here. Controlled digital lending has been around for a while. I think it's actually quite an important tool and development, although it's only part of the array of challenges that our libraries face in operating in a digital environment. There's also the born digital material to deal with. Early on before the pandemic, I think I characterize controlled digital lending as something that a lot of people were somewhat uncomfortable with. The pandemic and the need to clearly have libraries operate in the public interest and serving the public through as well as students and faculty in the university setting really drove adoption of this in my mind to the point where it really feels quite widely adopted to me now and increasingly uncontroversial and being viewed as part of the fundamental set of tools and activities. I think it's really timely to have a panel like this taking a look at where libraries and library consortia are in moving along with these practices. So I'm really glad to have our panelists here with us and I look forward to some lively Q&A at the end. And with that, I'll just thank our panelists and thank you for joining us. I'll disappear, shut up and turn it over to Chris. Thanks Cliff. Good morning, good day, good afternoon, everyone. I'm Chris Freeland. I'm the director of the Open Libraries program at the Internet Archive and I want to welcome you to today's session on controlled digital lending for libraries and consortia. As Cliff mentioned, libraries are looking for common sense ways to make their collections available to patrons in the COVID era and really beyond. Controlled digital lending is a long-standing and a widespread library practice in use now by hundreds of libraries for more than 10 years. That has demonstrated its value to libraries and to the communities that we serve while our print collections have largely been unavailable for the past year. There's also a new nonprofit on the scene, Library Futures, that's aiming to help. And so in our session today, you're going to hear from Library Futures and you're also going to hear from CDL experts and from libraries about controlled digital lending, especially as viewed through a consortial lens. What does it mean for a consortium to adopt CDL as part of its service portfolio? So that's what we're going to be exploring in our conversations today. So here's the game plan. We're going to do introductions around the around the table here, let you get to know the folks who are going to be speaking for the next hour or so, a little less than an hour. And we're going to, you'll hear from Ginny, the executive director of Library Futures, we're then going to do some context setting. Each person on the panel is going to give a three minutes or so of the view of CDL for libraries and consortia from their perspective. And then we're going to go into open discussion. We have some questions for facilitation, but please, we'd also like to make this a lively session. So as Cliff indicated at the top, if you have questions, please either use like the Q&A feature to submit your questions or use the chat or if you want to ask them aloud, that would be great as well. Keep it lively. And what we'll do is I'll work, I'll facilitate the conversation and I'll work in the questions from the room into our guided discussion. So I think it should be a good conversation. That's what we're really hoping for today is a conversation among colleagues, among friends in some cases, so that you can hear really how control digital lending is being rationalized and thought about from libraries and consortia. A couple of pro tips. You might want to watch this in speaker view. We'll also go into gallery view for the open discussions when we're all talking on screen, but speaker view would be good in the first half of our presentation, just so you get the person speaking. And then also, as I mentioned, just send your questions as they come up and I'll weave those into the discussion. So let's go into introductions around the room and in no particular order, looking here at my little Brady Bunch window. How about starting with Jenny? Hi, my name is Jenny Rose Halperin. I usually hear pronouns and I am the executive director of Library Futures. Thanks, Jenny. How about over to Charlie? Hi everyone. My name is Charlie Barlow. I'm the executive director of the Boston Library Consortium. Great to be here with you. Thanks, Charlie. How about Jill? Hi, I'm Jill Hearst-Wall. I'm a board member for Library Futures and a consultant, writer, speaker, former academic living in Syracuse, New York. You do it all and do it well. And last but certainly not least, Kyle K. Courtney. Hi, everyone. Yes, Kyle K. Courtney. I am normally, I am the cooperative advisor at Harvard Library but I am on my lunch break today and I'm representing here as co-founder and chair of the board of Library Futures. Happy to be here. Thanks for that, everyone. And so let's turn it over to Jenny and it just occurs to me. Jenny, I think I will have to advance the slide. So just give me the indication of when you want me to advance the next slide. For sure. So I'll keep this brief so that you can all hear from the real CDL experts here and the real folks who really work with consortia. So Library Futures is a new non-profit organization that champions the right to equitable access to knowledge. Chris, can you advance the slide? Our mission is to build a coalition and community that empowers libraries to take control of their digital futures. So what does this look like more practically? Next slide. So Library Futures enables collective action while building power through an advocacy organization. We respond to 21st century needs, operate at the speed of change and level the playing field between publishers and the public. We empower libraries to fulfill their mission to provide non-discriminatory open access to culture for the public good. Together we can change the paradigm. Together we are Library Futures. So we're here for the technology positive future of libraries. We are here to have the conversation, to do the education, to the advocacy and in some cases to even help incubate the technology that support libraries and their access goals. So if you feel like the conversation, like the issues around technology and access impact you, your consortium, or your library in particular, we're here to work together and we'll talk a little bit more about what it means to be a coalition partner of Library Futures in just a moment. So the principles of the organization itself are six, our world is digital, protect the right to lend, libraries must own content not license it, equitable access is the future of libraries, privacy is not for sale, and we are stronger together. So with your support we're looking to build the movement of an activist oriented library group that will push back on publisher created structures and anti-digital practices. These are our load star and if you do decide to come on as a coalition partner, which I hope you do and I hope you're interested in, this is the support that you're signaling. They influence what kind of policy we advocate for, what programs we run and help guide us morally. So we have a proposed set of programs and again all of this is on our website, so I'm going to pass it over in just a moment, including much more fleshed out version of the principles and the programs can also be found on our website as well. So we've only been around live for seven weeks, but we've done some awesome things including a myth busting session on CDL with the internet archive and a end of ownership event. So the authors of the end of ownership came and spoke with fair use week and for fair use week. In April we have a book talk coming up with Joanne McMill the author of lurking which explores users and patrons and libraries with Darius Kazemi who is a technologist and writer who's a really incredible artist and we also have hackathons and all sorts of events and different really exciting things coming up. So please get on our mailing list if you are interested and reach out if you're interested in becoming or even exploring the concept of becoming a coalition partner. Our established first programs will are threefold so they will provide small grants for research, educational programs and activism and community building. That's my very, very brief introduction to library futures and I'll pass it over to Chris. Great, thanks Ginny. I think at the end we'll give more information on more on how people can engage and get involved. So let's go, what we want to do now is have everyone talk, give a three-minute or so kind of context setting for the discussion from your perspective, from your point of view, from your position. What does it mean for, what's the value of control digital lending for libraries and consortia? And I'd like to start with Kyle. Sure, so let's come from 10,000 feet and frame it a little more narrow first. First, just a uniform definition. Control digital lending is a system by which libraries use technology to replicate a library's right to loan. They're legally acquired books in a digital format under controlled conditions. Now the controlled is the aspect of this which is kind of interesting. It's technology, right? Often the same technology that's employed by the publishers when they sell directly to users and libraries are good at control. We have an entire interlibrary loan system which controls the circulation of books and we have for a long time and consortial models do the same thing. This system I think preserves two important functions that exist in the library and publishing and consortial system which first, first and foremost, and this is kind of a myth busting also, publishers and authors continue to receive revenue from the acquisition of the works by the library, right? Libraries are still buying books and loading them whether it's in a consortia or in interlibrary or intralibrary. That's part one of our mission, right? Acquire the works. Part two is the other part. We preserve the ability for libraries to maintain their significant missions which includes both consortial mission and preservation mission to provide equitable access to these materials by adapting our traditional functions of interlibrary known to the modern era, right? Enabling people to access books for general learning, research and intellectual enrichment even though they may not be nearby. So there's an excellent visual of this process called CDL explainer video which we'll send a link out later. But that concept is it's very much part and parcel of the same work that we're doing together as consortia as well. So I just want, it's not a separate discussion. This is how we're, this is a discussion about integrating those same missions and values that CDL exemplifies but now with more partners and isn't that the most exciting and important part of kind of our work here together? So that's my, that's my three minutes, Chris. Thanks, Kyle. I think you, I think you made it in under the, under the wire. I've also here, oh, I think I'd shared that just to the channel as, into the panelist. I'll let me share again to the, a link to that CDL explain video that Kyle mentioned. I'll get that in just a second. But up next, let's hear from Charlie from the executive director of the Boston Library Consortium CDL as, as viewed from a consortium through a consortium over to you, Charlie. Thanks, Chris, and thanks, Kyle, for that excellent explanation. You know, I think that, you know, increasingly we're seeing a number of consortia stepping into the CDL space and that's been really exciting to just be a part of these past few months. I thought it was quite important, I think, at the outset to sort of distinguish between two sort of highly related and parallel but distinct approaches to CDL that consortia are exploring really in this present moment. I think the first relates to the role that a consortium can be playing and guiding local implementation at our member libraries providing that educational component and support, guidance, best practices, consistency. I think that's been really all the more important in this pandemic moment for things like course reserves. And I think then the second though, and Kyle touched a little bit on this is, is the role that CDL can play in resource sharing, sort of CDL until I be loaned if you will. And for the BLC specifically, we like many consortia are fundamentally resource sharing driven and CDL offers a very compelling approach to strengthen and reinforce the resource sharing missions of library consortia. 50 years ago, the BLC was founded on this shared commitment to promote cooperation among our member libraries in making resources more readily available. And that's no less true now than it was back then. And CDL may well be the mechanism that we pursue at scale to do something there. I do think that consortial scale really presents exciting opportunities for us and also a number of challenges as we accelerate the lending of digital material. There's opportunities for centralized repositories of digital materials that we own in print. There's opportunities for centralized digitization. Particularly, I think help with capacity constraints and avoiding duplication of effort among members and so on. And I think to date, a lot of the successful implementations that we've seen have really been limited and constrained, particularly in this pandemic moment around course reserves for local patrons, usually using some kind of hatchwork of technology that doesn't really scale up to that resource sharing enterprise. And at a fundamental level, I think CDL for consortia via into library loan makes great sense. It positions us to share secured scans of print materials in a controlled way versus and alongside the returnable lending that we do. I guess one other thing in the consortial space that's intrigued me lately, and I have to say, I don't have too many thoughtful answers on it, but the role of shared print in the consortial CDL space around retention, particularly thinking about brittle books that otherwise would not be circulating, but perhaps in copyright and of great value to the community. So thank you. Hopefully, I was under three minutes as well for us. We're not timing it. So it's okay. We have ample time for the conversation. We'll go as long as we need. Thanks for that, Charlie. And I'll say this just as a data point. As we talk about controlled digital lending at the Internet Archive and the program that we run, the open libraries program, it's not very long after we start talking with an individual library that they immediately jump to, well, what about resource sharing and what could this mean for the other libraries that I'm involved in? So I think the library community as a whole is thinking along the lines that you're guiding us, Charlie, so that's good. Let's move next to Jill Hearst-Wall. And Jill, I think in our pre-meeting conversation, you were especially interested in looking at controlled digital lending and what it means sort of administratively for a library as it relates to collections and to budgets. I wonder if you could elaborate a bit. Sure. Thank you. So one of the hats I wear is Board President for my local library system. It's a countywide system of 22 libraries. Some have multiple branches. And so that kind of sharing of resources is something I think about frequently. This past year, for all of us, we've been impacted by a pandemic. And it changed how our consortia, how our library systems operate locally. And I'll make this personal. All of our libraries in the county had to shut down some for weeks, some for months because of COVID-19. We had to shift our budgets. And so that budget that we had for collections, some of it might have gotten shifted to something else. Maybe making changes to the library facilities, maybe purchasing more digital resources, maybe doing something else. And that sharing that we're used to do with our collections slowed down. Rather than having things circulate quickly around the system, things took longer. So if I think about a book that might circulate 26 times a year, two weeks at a time, given the seven-day quarantine, that book would circulate, I believe, about 17 times a year. So that slowness, I think some people noticed. Yesterday I had a text message from a friend who said, can't the library get this book from someplace else? That was basically the message. A person was looking for a book and couldn't get it. Can't they go outside the system to get this book? It's like we're in a pandemic. Some of those things that are used to flowing back and forth right now just aren't happening. And so I see controlled digital lending, this lending of materials in a controlled environment, actually helping systems consortia in two ways. First of all, we share resources, we share in some way our budget and controlled digital lending can help us extend what we're doing, what we're sharing. I don't want to correlate to how we spend our money, but I wanted to say it can have a positive impact on how we're spending, how we're building our collections, how we're getting resources out to our patrons. It makes things more widely available. And so being able to share things digitally, whether it's within the system or outside the system is a real benefit, not just for people who can't come into the library right now, which has happened over the last year, but for people whose preferred format is digital. And so I really see this digital lending in a controlled environment as being beneficial for systems. I think as Cliff said in the last year, this has gained steam, gained momentum. I know that there are systems who haven't even thought about this yet, but I think if they consider the impact of the pandemic on their libraries and on their budgets, they will see that controlled digital lending can have a positive effect for them going forward. Chris? Thanks, Jill. I'll take a couple of minutes just to mention the work that I help lead at the Internet Archive, and that's the open libraries program. And so at the Archive, we've been doing controlled digital lending before it was called controlled digital lending. For more than 10 years now, we have been working with libraries in the Boston area, starting to do what was then called digitizing land is now called controlled digital lending. So we have now two million books. The Internet Archive acquires material, we buy books, we get materials donated from libraries that are closing, weeding their collections, and also donations from booksellers like Better World Books. So we have millions of books now in our physical collection. People think of the Internet Archive as a digital library, and that's accurate. And in addition to our digital holdings and our born digital content, we also have millions of books that are sitting in our physical archive that don't circulate. We have digitized those books, and we make them available for anyone around the world who can sign up for an Internet Archive library card to borrow that book one at a time. And then that collection that we've digitized, we offer to libraries to claim and to lend to your patrons as well through our controlled digital lending service through our open libraries program. Since the pandemic certainly moved a lot of people into considering controlled digital lending who hadn't previously, and there were also libraries that were previously in the program and were glad that they were when things started to shut down at this point last year. We just released a blog post that I'll link to last Wednesday from Milton Public Library in Ontario, so Canadian Library, Public Library, that joined the open libraries program in the fall of 2019 just because they wanted more digital books to lend to their patrons, to offer to their patrons. And so when their three branches closed, they were digital, they were up and running in the through the Internet Archive, and so they were able to lend books to their patrons while their physical library was closed. And while in that period of time, a couple of weeks to a couple of months where libraries were really trying to figure out, how do we do this? How do we keep our operations going and stay safe for the public as well as for our own workers? So a lot of libraries were moving towards controlled digital lending at this in about a week or so. A year ago, I started doing almost like two webinars a week talking about controlled digital lending. We now have more than 80 libraries that are participating in the Internet Archive's open libraries program in one form or another, and more than 45 libraries that are contributing their collections to add into our lending accounts so that we have more than the one copy of the physical book that the Internet Archive has acquired and digitized. So I'll provide a link at the end of the session to learn more about the open libraries program if you're interested in maybe getting your feet wet in the controlled digital lending waters. And with that, let's go back to Ginny for some guiding thoughts around controlled digital lending from the library futures perspective. Yeah, everyone has added so much that I think the one thing that comes up for me that I think hasn't been mentioned so is the reasons why digitization and why digital is important and why digital is helpful beyond, you know, can I get the bestseller? Can I get that book from the library? Which while those are super important, digital also provides a wealth of opportunities and a new form of readership in youth and in the print disabled and access is about individual patrons, but it's also about helping people who don't live near a library or who might not be able to access digital materials that are provided by certain distributors because of their location. So I think as an organization that's committed to equitable access to knowledge, we believe strongly that in addition to the sort of larger question around ownership of materials and ownership of digital materials for libraries, that CDL is an incredible tool in the access toolkit and also that the operative word is controlled. You know, I think that sometimes in different situations there's this idea that because you're not doing it through a distributor, because it's not licensed, like it's somehow less controlled, but the way in which controlled digital lending works is the way that, you know, materials have been lent throughout time. If you lend the physical copy, then you can't lend the digital copy. That's the control aspect of it. So I think just the two things that I wanted to add to this conversation are the sort of two prongs of both why is access important. We've seen that a lot around schools and that's something that Library Futures is really interested in is, you know, how, you know, what does it mean when a school has to go remote or a school has a flood or a school has, you know, a disaster and they've already purchased the number of books that they needed for a class or the number of textbooks that they needed for a class and there's no digital option for these students. And even, you know, if a student is print disabled and there's no digital option, I spoke to a public librarian in Boston yesterday, a public school librarian yesterday in Boston, and she said that, frankly, you know, there are 23 librarians, school librarians for 126 public schools in Boston, and that she is only able to do her work because she has a working knowledge of copyright and still her teachers are unable to put up materials on their CMSs, they're unable to share materials, even though the print materials are inaccessible to their students. So there's just no digital option for them. And so many teachers have had to just change their curricula to be public domain materials. And as we think about diversifying curricula, as we think about diversifying our collections, to say that, you know, the only ways in which things can be accessed digitally is either by paying exorbitant licensing fees or confusing licensing fees, and not practicing, you know, what libraries do best, just sharing resources with each other and cooperating, which came up multiple times in the other panelists' conversations. I really think it's a missed opportunity for libraries, and I really think that it's going to hold back the future of digital access, not only for, you know, people who want to read the New Dean Koonst, which is the example I use, but also for anybody who needs digital access for any reason, which is largely youth and the Prince Disabled and, you know, rural people and people who are older and, you know, might want to magnify the print or might want to search within the print. There's so many opportunities that digital provide. And I think that CDL is an incredible tool to help libraries enable that. Jenny, I don't want to put you on the spot, but you mentioned something that sparked a thought. Am I correct in remembering that library futures is gathering stories from teachers and from parents, others who are trying to describe that, how difficult it was to get access to educational materials? You are correct. We would love to hear from you if you're a parent or a teacher and you want to talk about the issues that you had with digital materials or even just accessing materials more generally at the start of the pandemic and going on. Great. And how can people give you those stories? I put my email again in the chat. Great. And we'll also have the emails will be listed here in our slides. I'm also seeing here we've dropped in the link to that control digital lending explained into the slide deck. This deck will be available. I'm also putting out on Twitter. My Twitter handle is at Chris Freeland, just my name. And so at the end of the session, we'll have a link to the slides into all of the calls to action that we're making throughout our conversation today. So at that with that, let's just move into open discussion. And I'm going to stop the share here so that we can all be up in gallery view and just have a conversation. Let me move this back to gallery view. And I'd like to start with Charlie because we want to hear about the sort of the view from a consortium. Sorry. How did the CDL question blossom from within the BLC? How did you have this conversation about control digital lending and really how did it sort of spread throughout the organization? Thanks, Chris. I love this story. And to be clear, we're still very much in the exploratory phase, although I will say we've done an awful lot of exploring these past few weeks and months. But I think as many of you know, I started my position during the pandemic. I've actually yet to step foot in any of the BLC member libraries. So the universe of collaboration for the BLC has been this room. And I think, you know, our CDL exploration has really been an exercise for us and what virtual consortium collaboration can look like to move us forward. So a librarian from one of our member libraries back in the fall reached out to me and asked what would it take for the BLC to consider signing onto the position statement? My first board meeting was coming up. I perhaps naively introduced it to my BLC board that September. And ultimately we actually decided not to sign onto it and instead take some time to really explore the opportunities, the challenges, the pathways that the consortium would really have for CDL. So that was kind of how our CDL working group was born. And there are many other consortia that are either even further along than we are with establishing similar working groups. Others are just at the beginning stages. I'd initially anticipated a pretty small group, maybe six people, quickly blown away by the interest across the member libraries and exploring this. We ended up with a group of about 15 people from 11 of the member libraries. And for weeks after we established the group, I was getting more and more emails. I'd love to join. I'd love to join. It's led us to what we had framed this year as the CDL roadship. So we took the working group kind of on the road around the BLC's various communities and engaged with, I think, more than 100 folks across a six-week period. And we still have a lot more to do. So yeah, I think an exercise in virtual consortial collaboration. We've learned a lot, of course, about CDL, but also about how we can work together to advance specific priorities for the consortium. I'd encourage others to begin those same explorations if they're not already on that path. And you'll never know where what relatively straightforward requests to sign a position statement may take you. So it's been quite the journey these past six months. Were there any surprises along the way in those in those conversations, Charlie, anything that stands out? That's a great question. And I feel like I could talk for a whole hour about it. But I think the advantage of us engaging with so many of the other communities, we worked really hard to have a group that was representative of the different types of libraries within the BLC consortium and the types of roles from board members to AULs, to staff and so on. I think special collections and archives presented something of real interest to us. Of course, that often bypasses sort of the copyright constraints, but presents a whole range of others. So it's broadened our sort of resource sharing ambition still further. And how can we get the collections of the BLC member libraries into the hands of patrons? Maybe using CDL mechanisms, but maybe using other things as well. So it's been very productive in the resource sharing sphere. Yeah, that's great. I'm curious, Kyle, where did consortia fit it all in the original thinking that you and Dave Hansen and others did in describing control digital lending? Yes. So although the, you know, we wrote the paper prior to the pandemic too. So the white paper on control digital lending was written prior to the pandemic, but always on our mind was the advantages that I think clearly exist for social CDL. And since I think it's right in paper, I'm going to talk about it now. That first of all, like huge shout out to the Worcester Public Library, who I, in researching this a year ago, invented the idea of consortial interlibrary loan, apparently, or at least actually put it into action in the early, in the late 19th century. But anyway, this concept of living unionless and, you know, I don't know if I'm on the right call for talking about union lists, but the idea like, here's what we got in one giant place. And then, you know, making it living, meaning like, here's what we got physically. So the concept which tickled my fancy was we're already doing, many of us are already doing offsite consortial storage or something along those where we're partnering to put stuff off site. And that's like critical lesson one in control digital lending, right, is that the physical is no longer available to be checked out, right? You're duplicating, you're saying, here's the physical, I'm going to hide that away. And by the way, I had that away has come in many forms, right, putting in an assault line, offsite storage, grabbing it off the shelves, hiding it in the circulation office, or even I have talked to legal theory about what if we digitize the book and then destroyed the book, right? And there would be no market harm ever, and we just have the digital copy. Now, I'm not talking about book burning here. But legally, this is kind of fascinating to me, because imagine the capacity of a shared physical storage site run by a very large consortia, which we have plenty of them, that could serve as the CDL ILL slash warehouse, right? All of these books in here potentially would meet certain legal criteria for CDL, and then draw upon the scope and the breadth. And this would lead me to something really important. Maybe we shouldn't be deduplicating our collections. D-dupe is the process like you own this, you own this, so I don't need to keep those. Weeding takes on a whole new interesting concept when you apply CDL. Like we have 16 copies in this warehouse, yes, it takes up space, but now we can loan 16 copies instead of weeding that down to two or three, because we thought so there's a shift there. And just to recall, again, I'm here for the legal lens, I'm pretty sure. You know, during the years preceding the copyright law revision in 1976, publishers lobbied pretty hard for strongly worded anti-ILL clauses that would affect consortial interlibrary loan arrangements. Thankfully, libraries certain that such language would prevent normal customary interlibrary loan arrangements lobbied hard for additional language. So I think interlibrary loan consortia inside the model and bothers me consortia don't just exist for interlibrary loan, there's many reasons. But it's an exact, I think it's an excellent example of mission-based collective action, kind of what Jenny was talking about, that serves the users, prevents the undermining of the library and archive mission together, while attempting to counter the enormous imbalance of power in market share that the publishers have, right? So consortial groups that get together exert their interlibrary loan rights, protect the incredible fiscal and legal value we have in sharing our collections, right? And those can be taken out from us via licensing, contract and barcode. So this gives that back to libraries, but I think gives us back in a group setting. I think that's, those are my thoughts at least initially. Kyle, you mentioned interlibrary loan and interlibrary loan has come up several times now already on the call. And I wonder, let's explore interlibrary loan a little bit. So from your point of view, Kyle, where does interlibrary loan fit with controlled digital lending? So they're both special superpowers that libraries get to exert, right? So interlibrary loan is covered under section 108 of the Copyright Act. I can't believe I get to say that out loud at a meeting. But I love section 108. And that's the idea that, yes, there is no necessary risk in books being shared amongst libraries themselves, as long as it's not doing to replace the subscription or something like that. Doing it in such capacity that it replaces the subscription. But obviously, we've built upon that over the decades. We have large consortia that loan amongst themselves, both nationally and internationally. That's that section 108. CDL has a flavor of a very big flavor, I would say, of fair use as well. And with the nice part about these riding together is that if it doesn't fit your interlibrary loan component, you might be able to use it under fair use. Courts have intensified this in the authors' guild versus HathiTrust and Google Books case. Libraries get to you do both. So what we're seeing here is, oh, if the friction of physical loaning, waiting our turn for the library to return the book is the problem, right? I have to physically go to the desk. And as Charlie mentioned, reserves, the life and breath of CDL was in reserves initially. But think about for interlibrary loan, instead of having to wait for two weeks for the thing to arrive at your doorstep, it would be instantaneous via CDL. That idea is that copyright does not protect that friction. That like, I got to wait time. So it serves a purpose of maybe increasing the effectiveness of interlibrary loan. But that's, I mean, that's my opinion. And that's, I think, how it can interplay, I think, well. And so do I have it right in thinking that really CDL and interlibrary loan are distinct library practices that have kind of gotten conflated a little bit in conversations, but really they are distinct and different? I think they can, yeah, I think they have distinct underpinnings, again, these lenses are putting law on everything, underpinnings of law and policy. But at the same time, I think they enhance each other. Conceptually, these are all books we have purchased, and that we are loaning using technology in some way. The control of interlibrary loan is potentially the physical loaning of a whole book. But ILL has been scanning and sending stuff for decades. Jill and I talk about this all the time. We're like, this is not new, right? Digital access to materials is as old as the 1976 act. So again, I think they enhance each other. That's where I think I'm coming from. Yeah, full disclosure, I worked in interlibrary loan when I was an undergraduate in my library. And so, and this was way back in the last century. So we weren't, we were photocopying and faxing materials, but I spent an entire summer like right there at the photocopier, photocopying articles and chapters and making those available. So I mean, that's it's the existing library practice. It's just sort of moving on. Or you were probably wrapping the book with a strap, identifying what consortium that came from. That's exactly right. CDL is the strap, Chris. It's the digital strap on interlibrary loan. Interesting. I guess I don't know what the analog then or the next step is to the right bag that it had to go in to make sure it got to the right place. The green bag went north. And anyway, having flashbacks to the late nineties, mid nineties, actually. Looking at the time, I do want to encourage folks, if you have questions that you'd like any of us to answer, please do, you know, add them in chat or use the Q&A feature. We'll continue with the conversation. Looking at the time, I would like to jump forward just a little bit and ask Ginny and Jill to reflect on, to let's say you've approached control digital lending. You've had your conversations internally, but then how can libraries and consortia bring CDL up within their governance structures? Like what might your board members want to know? Maybe start with Jill. Sure. So as board president, this is an interesting thing for me to think about, right? So how does the staff, the director of the system bring things to the board? And so I think of a few things. First of all, at least in New York State, most library boards, most consortia boards, perhaps don't have library background for system boards in New York State. That is not a requirement. So I do have a library background, but no one else on my board does. So you need to think about how to introduce this topic. And I think we tend to want to rush forward with a new idea. I have a great idea. Let me run into that meeting, present it to them. They're going to say, yes, I'll run back out and I can implement. But that's not going to work because your library board doesn't understand how libraries operate. They hear the terms. They nod politely, perhaps, but they don't understand all the nuances of what all that stuff really means. So they know interlibrary loan, for example. They know collection sharing, but they don't know the details. And so I would advocate that you work with your your staff to bring this topic to the board a little bit slowly. Introduce them to what the practices are now. This is what we do. This is how it happens. Maybe a show and tell, maybe whatever. Then, you know, and again, this may happen over multiple meetings, because they have to understand it. Talk about where the friction is. I like that word, where the friction is in the process, or what the benefit would be to doing something differently. Here's an opportunity. Here's what we're missing. And then introduce this idea of digital lending. And talk about how you're already lending things digitally. So, right, it's not a new concept. So bring it in. You know, this is what we're already doing. Here are some places where we can improve, where things are getting stuck in the system or things aren't moving so quickly. You know, here's a place now we can do something called controlled dental lending. And then talk to them about that. You're going to have to get them comfortable, you know, with this. This is why it might be multiple meetings. You're going to be able to answer questions. You might want to bring in someone else into the conversation, maybe point to another system that's already doing this, maybe have someone else come and speak, use the CDL explainer, whatever it is. But I know from not only my board, but watching other groups, you know, attack something new, that sometimes that board does not move as quickly. That group does not move as quickly as we all hope. And our downfall as library staff people, as information people, broadly speaking, is that we tend to assume that everyone already understands it. And they don't. And so you have to get them to understand and then bring them along in a conversation. Yeah, it's a conversation, right? Not a single discussion. I think that's what Charlie was alluding to at the stop at the top. Jenny, I'm curious if you have additional thoughts or are there resources that library futures has that can sort of help in some of these conversations? Yeah, I mean, I think Jill covered it perfectly. Not much more to add. I think the only thing I would maybe add is to to understand that there is a sort of a perception maybe of risk of taking new risks. And another thing about librarians, I sometimes think that as a profession, we maybe let the perfect be the enemy of the good or the done or the decision. And so I think it's really important that we advocate for practices that we think are going to move our libraries and move our profession and move services to our patrons forward. And for us, I think that part of that is is CDL. And so we're working on resources right now. You will be apprised when we have resources and blog posts. Jill just wrote an excellent blog post about equitable access. We have another blog post coming out about sort of the history of the Macmillan boycott and why it happened and, you know, how can librarians be better advocates within their own institutions for combating what is unfair pricing or embargo behavior? So it's not directly answering your question, Chris. I'm sorry, but we do have resources coming out within the next few months that will cover some many of these issues that Jill presented so beautifully. That's great. Thanks, Jenny. I know, Kyle, you've been involved in a lot of CDL groups. And so if there are places where other people are interested in learning more, sort of, you know, getting more information to take into those board conversations, where where should people go? Yes, in my varied many hats. So there is there is the very important group, controlled digital lending implementers, CDLI, which has a Google sites for their homepage. And I can share that link in a moment. That is a monthly forum in which our community gets together and talks about what we're doing to implement to control digital lending, literally the title of the organization. And this has been fantastic. I did not create this, but I joined wholeheartedly because you want to know about frontline implementation and the scope and the breadth of what our peers are doing to make CDL or whatever they we name it into CDL work at their library systems. This is the place to go. Also, I co-founded a group that's at CDLproject.org called CERC, which stands for Controlled Digital Lending Implementation Resource Consortia CERC. It spells out CERC. Took us a long time to come up with that. And CDLproject basically we're trying to track all the different technology. We have three that we've graded that need to be released at something, but what we did was create a system of grading or going through. This is what these systems provide because as you know, there's kind of the front end of CDL. I really like this. And then there's the back end. Oh, how do I implement this and make sure that I'm lowering risk for my library? So those are two ways to kind of stay on board. And by the way, I think this is the best part of this is it's grassroots. This is not a top-down structure. No one owns CDL. There's no one ring to rule it all. For CDL to survive, groups like consortia, groups like these CDL-related groups get together and talk about it. That's the most powerful aspect of this, which I think is helpful. Yeah. Thanks for that, Kyle. I like to mention with the CDL-I group, like you, the Internet Archive, we learned about those conversations that were happening and we're knocking on the door like, hey, how can we be part of it? And so as a demonstration of how not at the center of those conversations are, we had to ask to join them. So it is a community that is happening and that's beautiful. Like we love seeing that. I think there's there's strength in numbers. As we as we start to wind down here looking at our time, I wanted to offer or ask a question for both Charlie and Jill, maybe to think about is now the right time to consider controlled digital lending? Like there's a lot that's happening and library budgets are in flux and is now the right time? But maybe start with Charlie. What are your thoughts? I think simply, yes, it absolutely is the right time to be having these conversations. You know, I think the pandemic has lifted this up, you know, now more than ever about the opportunities that are available to us through digital lending. I think a challenge that we're sort of waiting on is around sort of maturity of sort of technological infrastructure and things like that to do this kind of work at scale. But I have confidence that it's coming. And if you're not ready right now today, then it will be there when you are. I do want to plug one other group largely focused in the consortial space, really very much sort of inspired and ignited by the CDLI group that's been very focused largely on local implementation was the emergence of a community of practice for consortia, addressing many of these questions, sort of thinking about issues relative to consortial adoption with the goal of making CDL a central component of resource sharing. So you don't have a website, we're not quite as official or unofficial as some of these groups may be. But if you're interested in joining that community, we welcome additional voices from other consortia. It's a very productive group for us in recent months. Charlie, can I ask you, I've been calling that the consortial of consortial group, the super group. Is there a form like a super consortial CDL group? Is there a name? We struggle with acronyms. So way back was cars, the consortial approaches to resource sharing that has now evolved into consortial approaches to CDL. So that doesn't really roll off the tongue. So I welcome any visionary ideas of what to call it. I'm just going to continue to call it the consortial super group then. Perfect. Super group sounds good. How about you, Jill? So I agree that now is a great time to be thinking about it. Depending on your staffing, depending on your budget, depending on the other things you're focusing on, this may not be the right time to jump in. So if your consortia, your system, your whatever, had its budget slashed, had staff furloughed, had staff let go during the pandemic, you may have other things that you need to be thinking about. And so, including staff safety, patron safety, community safety. So focus on those things, maybe put a little note in the back of your head about CDL and what control digital lending can do for you. Start to compile some information, maybe discuss it informally with your staff, begin to think about how you can bring your board on board with it. But for some people, this is not quite the right time. It really depends on what's happening internally with you. And that's okay. As Charlie and Kyle will attest to, it will still be here when you're ready. And it will be more mature, right? More people to follow in this process. So it's a hyper local decision, as with almost all things in libraries. Looking at our time, we just have a couple of minutes left. So I do want to offer any other questions from the audience. Please do send them through chat or through the Q&A. But I would like to put up, as we're waiting for any additional questions, I want to put up a final slide here of how you can take action. So if you've been inspired, if you want to learn more from our session today, again, as I mentioned, we'll be putting these links up through my Twitter feed at Chris Freeland. But the things that we want to leave you with is if you're interested in doing more, join the Library Futures Coalition. We'd also love to have that engagement through the CDLI and throughout the, as Charlie mentioned, the Consortial Approaches Group or the Supergroup. And then, as I mentioned at the top, I'll be doing a webinar at the end of the month, just a couple of weeks. If you're interested in learning more about the Open Libraries Program and how the Internet Archives implementation of control digital lending works. I'm not seeing any additional questions. So maybe in our remaining minute, I would go back to Charlie. This is about consortia. What's the word you want to leave us with? What's the view of CDL from a consortium? Wow, that's a tough one, Chris. Oh, goodness. Let me help. What's inspiring you about control digital lending? Where are you going in your thinking, in your conversations? I don't have a word, but I think really it's around reimagining resource sharing, which is the future of libraries, to be able to democratize access to information for our patrons. It's really exciting. I'll think of a word for next time though. Jill? Yeah. So Charlie sparked something. You may in your consortia be thinking about how you've been sharing materials in the past and noting how things have gotten stuck in the last year. What is it working? As you think now, start to think very creatively about what sharing means in the future. And then look at this as one of those tools, one of those options that you might pursue. I would say don't just think of control digital lending as controlled digital lending. Like it's a thing we want to do, but maybe take this moment to think about lending in total. And then have that drive you forward and drive forward your thinking about control digital lending. Thanks for that. Well, looking at the time, we're just a minute past. I want to thank everyone for your time and attention, and I'll pass it back over to Diane. Thank you. Thanks so much, Chris. And thank you to all of our wonderful panelists. It was a fascinating conversation. And to our attendees, we really appreciate you coming and spending some time with us here at CNI. I'm going to turn off the recording, but if you want to stay back and have a chat with our panelists, make a comment, ask a question, please, I invite you to do so. We'll be happy to enable your microphones and let you chat with them. Otherwise, I'll sign off here and hope that we'll see you back in about a half hour for our next session. If not today, then sometime in the next couple of weeks. Take care, everyone. Bye-bye.