 Scholarship and scholarly resources in the 21st century. Remarks by Paul DeGood at the ARL-CNI Fall Forum, October 2011. Convened by Tom Leonard. Nice to feel this energy. It's particularly surprising to me to feel this energy because I can see people out there, like myself, I'm Tom Leonard, I'm the University Librarian from Berkeley. But there are many others out there who have been on Planet Marriott talking about collections for a solid week, and it's quite an experience. One of the early tweets in these conversations warned us to beware of bike shedding. Bike shedding turns out to be a very good English word, though I had to look it out. And it's the danger of paying attention to small matters while a large structure is unexamined. And this morning we are in no danger of bike shedding because my colleague from Berkeley, Paul DeGood, will never let that happen. Paul is a professor in the School of Information at Berkeley. He's also a research professor in the School of Business Management at Queen Mary University of London. As all of you know, well, many of his accomplishments, but I think all of you know that he is a co-author with John Seely Brown of The Social Life of Information. Paul has also written prize-winning articles on the history of trademarks, something he's now in Washington actively engaged in, researching. And also widely cited articles on the community of practice and the future of education. Before turning to academic life, Paul worked on a Silicon Valley Research Center of Legend, Xerox Park, and he founded and ran a small reprint publishing company. I didn't know that he also managed a London book shop and worked in book production with New York publishers. He truly covers the landscape. Paul, welcome to Planet Maria. Thank you, Tom, for those very kind words, that kind introduction. And thank you to the ARAlpha for this opportunity to come and speak. It's a great pleasure, but I have to say it's a daunting pleasure. One of the aspects I think of coming from the School of Information, which is a kind of field with no boundaries, is that you find yourself regularly talking to audiences where the audience knows more about what you're trying to talk about than you do. And that's a pretty intimidating experience, and I think it'll be true again today. So I shall probably wander all over the place in an attempt to evade your expertise while seeming, as it were, to address it. So I should see if I can pull that one off. I thought that in some ways I should try to establish some credentials, at least the thing to say, obviously, is, well, I used the library. So mine is as it were, a view from across the counter. I actually had an encounter with Tom about a week ago. I was coming out of the stacks. I was carrying a book I had checked out, and I was walking towards the Bancroft collection to introduce a student to that room. And it seemed to me it was clearly such a set up on my part that Tom would never believe it was coincidence. Faculty in the library, borrowing books, you know, but it was genuine. But I also thought, well, I should try some other way to establish credentials. So I dug in my desk and filled the screen of my, or the scanner, the bed of my scanner, with all the library cards that I had amassed of late on them. I got, I think there's some 25 on there, and there's about half a dozen that I couldn't get on at the time. So I thought, well, maybe that'll give me some sense of credentials. But on the other hand, coming, as it were, from the other side of the counter, I don't want to pretend, although I know the theme today is collaboration, that there necessarily is this cozy relationship. Well, you know there isn't a cozy relationship between scholars and librarians. And although there are clearly incidents that raise that, I mean, I think there are sort of structural tensions that are worth drawing attention to as well. One, I was, I counted kind of unintentionally a few years ago when I was teaching in Denmark and I had an interview with one of the senior members of the Danish National Library. And he was telling me about some of the stuff that they had been digitizing of late. And I sort of not thinking, just began a sentence and saying, and what about, and he slammed the table and he said, you, you scholars, you're just like the readers of pornography, he said. It's more, more, more and never enough. So I retreated gracefully as gracefully as I could for that position, but I now think of myself as this wide-eyed pornographic hunter. Whenever I go into the library and particularly the digital collections. I think there's another one too. I came up a little yesterday as I was talking to the, listening to the introductory talk yesterday. And that is that there is a way in which as scholars, we get our credentials by finding stuff that nobody has ever come upon before. And that's terribly important for the advancement of scholarship. But then of course what we do is we turn to the librarians and say, why haven't you been collecting this stuff all this time? And again, there's clearly a tension between the two to put that demand that what for us as a new discovery should for libraries be held at and they should hang on to it. The, so tensions I want to talk about today a little more too, are what I see as sort of competing narratives. I think in the world of information at large, and I think this comes over to the library and particularly to the libraries I'll talk about as it looks at digitization projects of one fort or another. There is the great Stuart Brand quotation that information wants to be free. Now he also said soon after that information wants to be expensive and boy do we know that on certain occasions. But I think actually that the other side that perhaps needs thinking about as well is actually the one that information often needs to be constrained. That is the idea that we can just pull the constraints away and let the information out which underlies a lot of thinking. I think is a problematic one. I think along with that question then of the notion of constraints being actually it's always problematic to say constraints are important. Again it brings me back to my pornography role I suppose. But the notion in some sense that we can and this came from working for a long time with engineers that constraints and resources are things that are easily separable. And so when engineers come to a project what they really want to do is remove the constraints and enhance the resources. And I think one of the strange things about information is that many of the constraints we manage to turn in social practice into resources and that's what makes making this division as I'll try to make there a part. So I had no idea really how many slides I'm going to get through today but I'll see but if I do this as sort of the map of the territory I've stolen some titles of books that are in many ways I think are indicative and wonderful books. They're not addressing this field. Polanyi is the great transformation. And clearly if we're worried about collections in the 21st century it's partly because we feel we've gone through a great transformation. But on the other side scholarship I think looks in many ways at itself as part of the great tradition that now on reader will F.R. Lee this book. And those two clearly are intention. I taught once many years ago to high school in England Shrewsbury High School which had been around for about 600 years and Darwin had gone there, Philip Sidney had gone there, whoever had gone there was a TV place. But whenever you suggested something new at a faculty meeting someone would sit up and say well we haven't done that for 500 years why should we do it now? Which was a showstopper that you could never have. So the great tradition in there and then the third is to sort of well what does this discussion bear on libraries and because it's always important to flatter your audience I will say what about the great libraries then. So to go through that the great transformation then is because we're in the age of information and everything we'd like to think has changed. The wonderful advertisement by IBM in Fortune in 1977 saying you know the information it's the age, name of the age we live in and from that came the sort of Stuart Brand stuff about information wants to be free and even more we get things now. I mean the idea that information is capable of freedom is an interesting question. The idea that information has wants is even a stranger in a way but then you get Kevin Kelly coming along and saying we're now subservient to what technology wants. And Kevin Kelly if you know him loves to have these kind of logarithmic scales that just go off the charts and then you sort of get at the bottom sort of human culture and scholarship pegging around in a linear relation and how do these two come together as part of the question. Out of that then we get this sort of sense that information is constrained by these technologies and is just dying to burst out and those of you who know Kilgore's book The Evolution of the Book and of course Kilgore was the founder of OCLC he's one of yours as it were writes this influential book which has this sort of path up in the top you know we go from clay to parchment to codex to printing and we're going to end up with the electronic book and this is simply a linear passage all to do with our search for information or information's determination to free itself from constraints and I still think many people do see the e-book and digitization as part of a simple linear account like this that gives way in some ways to what I think of as the mountain view when Google came along in some ways to digitize the books it saw it saw itself as engaged in the kind of active liberation it was storming the Bastille in many ways they said to me we went to libraries because that's where the information is we're going to let it out it's Bastille Day and referred to things like books or libraries as the artificial impediments that stop us from getting to information and it's a nice story and of course what you then get is the stuff that's born digital in a way is born free it has no constraints at all and the old stuff we want to put on a similar fitting to the new it's a notion I think of information that I like to call with apologies to John Irving the world is calling to grep that is that everything should be easily accessible to run searches over and all that scholars do in a way is just search around among this stuff for patterns of one sort or another I shouldn't pass on by the way in case anybody has not seen this morning times I'm going to talk about grep and unit sadly Dennis Ritchie who died yesterday in Texas at a thing that deserves acknowledgement so this idea I think that we live with very widely that there is this kind of emancipation also leads to this notion of an information explosion the School of Information at Berkeley I think pulled off a remarkable coup when the former librarian Peter Lyman and Hal Varian who founded the school wrote this sort of pamphlet for how much information which measured the amount of information in the world and now nobody can really talk about amounts of information without citing this book which is always great for the publicity of your school if it comes from it and it again sort of said look there's really nothing between the bite and the exabyte and the petabyte that it's simply the world is made up of information and we can count it it had a sort of interesting effect in some ways I don't know if any of you have seen the Wikipedia list of unusual measurements but there among them of course is the Library of Congress it's now simply a measure of information you say oh this is now 25 times the amount of information in the Library of Congress and libraries are simply going to get left as a residual unit of measurement people will scratch their head and say oh I wonder what that was all about another part of this world I think is that with this liberation we've had a social liberation and this has I think a very different view of collaboration in many ways from rather an intentional and collective act to just lots of individual people having their behavior coordinated through technology and so open source technology has been used as the software has been used as the paradigm for this lots of people writing stuff together and it's just emerging wonderfully as Linux or whatever crowdsourcing web 2.0 and the canonical books of this system of crowds and the crowd is much more intelligent than the individual scholar or whatever Yokai Benkler on the wealth of networks playing of Adam Smith and Clay Shurkey on here comes everybody with his strong idea that nobody is going to read books ever again war and peace it's past and one more part of that story I think then is about academia and that really is the school's time is up Bill Bowman called academia part of the stagnant services and if you're looking at these wildly exponential growth curbs of technology you don't really want to be a stagnant service left behind so there we are and more and more you get these stories I mean Phoenix in some way with the beginning of saying we're going to burst out from these old constraints we don't need them anymore Khan Academy for those of you who come upon it is now hugely hugely successful on the web simply as one figure posting lots and lots of how-to videos on YouTube Sanford you'll probably have read about recently has opened an AI course to just anybody who wants to take it online and MacArthur a more extraordinary one it sort of makes me feel remember my days and the Boy Scouts wants to kind of award badges to people who somehow have done some meritocratic learning but haven't done it through an institution of higher education so don't have a degree so MacArthur will give you a little sort of shoulder badge that you've done that but all these are ways of saying that these old institutions which includes libraries of course but I'm also thinking of my world which includes scholarship are passed because the new world of information is with us and the question then I suppose is for you obviously where does the library fit into this and the options in some way are well we can go with the dynamic technologically driven world or we can stay with you stagnant scholars who seem unable to get out of the mud and your choices and I feel that sort of tension when I deal with libraries in some way is librarians sometimes seem to me to be thinking of themselves almost as technologies if not in service of technology so I'd like at the risk of repetition in some ways to go through much of that a second time but maybe temper the story a little and so well what does this look like if you take the view rather of the great transformation is this inevitable and ineluctable and necessary change and so well there's some ways in which telling that story is kind of problematic one that interests me for many different reasons is in fact this phrase the age of information which IBM picked up in 1977 comes up in fact in 1778 when this strange man suddenly refers to his age as the age of information now why? what writers need to think that we're the age of information I mean it's interesting it's not long after four years after Donaldson versus Beckett there is a huge change in the nature of copyright and the nature of publication he was one of the great publishers of collections the editor of Elegant Extracts which is a book that some of you will know hugely hugely influential which compile a lot he was a great proponent and got into a great deal of trouble for supporting the the French Revolution not a good thing to do in England a few years after this he was also a great supporter of education for all particularly women's education he was a very forward looking man but yet he looks at the age of information and he is unlike many I think are after today it's a trouble by it in some ways and what's interesting about the argument that he's making here well all books are great they seem to be everywhere everybody has access to information that's why he calls it the information but perhaps that's not quite enough and oddly here for all who's looking forward he's actually echoing a the thought in some ways of Socrates way back in the set to contemplate the invention of writing and there's not so much that he despises writing but he says there's something about interpersonal human communication that is lacking and Knox kind of echoes this argument again as he comes up with this phrase the age of information so we're not the first to think of ourselves in this way and there are some ways in which this kind of caution is worth remembering well one of the more extraordinary for me ways of looking is to consider this idea of just counting information and saying boy that tells us so much and we know it's quite extraordinary not only how much information there is in the Library of Congress but how much there is in the world and there have since the first study of this there have been about five and there's one underway at the moment and they come up with yet more well what they usually come up with is new units of measurement the petabyte the terribly exabyte and on and on but the intriguing thing in the room he'll shudder at the memory probably is that we at Berkeley actually I ask as part of a class the students who come in and read this and full of it I actually say okay count how much information there is in this room and go home and count how much there is in your apartment how much information do you have on you and you discover it's an impossible task so on the ground it sounds like something we can add up but in fact it almost has no meaning and the other question is if you work out if you can say well we'll count every we'll simply count how much it how many bytes you produce when you digitize a book and therefore we know how many bytes there are in this particular book it's again a question where does it get you I put the scales out there some of you those of you who remember perhaps reading the frogs will remember that Aristophanes has this great scene where he weighs the works of Escalus versus Euripides because he can think of no other way to compare their work and it's just how can we judge these two great writers well we'll just weigh their works one against the other and this has some of that logic and yet we find it very plausible and it drives us in many ways again revisiting Kilgore's story and it's this great evolutionary story and as he said in the quotations I put up earlier it's about us wanting to get that information or these different technologies that get in the way of it and we go through from stone department of the codex but in fact if you look at the history of that it's an extraordinary different story China is the first to produce paper and it takes 1500 years to get to western Europe which we think of as the great center of learning in the world whereas if we look at the codex western Europe is very early to get to the codex which Kilgore sees so important and the Chinese are surprisingly late and when they do they come in with the sutra codex and if we put that next to printing the Chinese are then at first with printing and western Europe is surprisingly late although we like to think that we invent it and our excuse is of course well no because we invented typography but in fact we were almost rather late to invent typography so if you want to tell a linear about how these technologies are simply driven by information and they unfold with the technological logic it simply doesn't work but it's a my story with which to comfort ourselves and that brings me then to one of the several issues that I want to talk about in that day today and that is the nature of the book because in part we're trying to say I was talking yesterday I live with large bundles of e-books that I travel with in different forms but one thing that has become a sort of center of a battle in which you either have to be for or against and you're either going to move with the world or stay locked in the past the first quotation is from Nicholas Carr who sort of puts the old world view there and says you know I can't even read anymore because of these new technologies they're so distracting they break up my mind the old linear reading of the text is gone and there's the terrible sort of voice of the past that we're losing and new librarians who are digitizing things are the fault on the other hand you know there's James Glick who is not here actually directly arguing against Carr in fact in some ways I think Sub Rosa this article that was in The Times he was arguing against Robert Danton in fact I think because he talks about books that have marginalia and he's wonderfully scornful and says well we can digitize all that too and it's clear that you know what the sort of Carr position is is one of sentimentality and fetishization and it really isn't something that we should take seriously at all so those I think are the sort of two positions I think it's a highly problematic position and it's one that makes me in some ways particularly upset with the way in which we've taken on the world of e-books on the outside of the British Library at some time it may still be there at the moment with the Samuel Johnson quotation knowledges of two kinds we know a subject to ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it there he is again he's a part of that age of information in the late 18th century it's a great quotation sounds wonderful in fact there's a scene in which some of you may know in which he says that it's actually a sort of remarkable one he's in a library and Boswell and one other person watch him and he turns up to the books and Johnson in a way that librarians know comes up grabs a book off the shelf and immediately turns to the back of the book and then he sort of looks inside and around and hands it up and down and turns around and he actually when they ask him about this why on earth are you doing that why don't you sit down in the book and read from the beginning to the end and he said well when we inquire to any subject the first thing we have to do is now and this is actually what scholars do all the time I mean the first thing we do is look in the index to see if we're there if that fails we have a quick check through the bibliography in case somebody misindexed us we we read books in part by sticking a finger in one place not library books we don't put stickies in library books of course a finger in another place looking in the back moving from one part to another most never do we move in a linear fashion from the front to the back of the book and yet how have we designed most of the technologies how do we do most of our scanning so we move from the front as if we were to read like a good romance novel reader from the front to the back waiting for the punch line in the end and in fact as you heard yes there's many books actually go from the back to the front and that confuses us even more so I actually think that the romanticization of the book is not I hope though you may not by now think differently simply people like me getting nostalgic it's actually the technologists who have an idea that this what books are like and how they should be used but they don't read books and I think that hence gets me to think that among the great sentimentalists of our time indeed has been Google with dare I say your support I spoke to what I should say as a senior member of Google just before they announced the Google books agreement with the five libraries as the then was and he said to me look we're going to scan these books isn't it great and I said well that's extraordinary X which ones are you going to do and he said we're going to do them all and I kind of knew then that the thing was faded because nobody would go I mean there are many good things about what Google did they went in there so naively they did what others would never have done because that but on the other hand they did it in a way which I think has been enormously damaging to digitization to libraries and to our understanding of how books are used I had to debate a senior member of the Google book team of the American Historical Association last year and he wanted among other things to insist that people at Google love books and he said I was reading a book on the plane as I came down he was talking to historians and he wanted to say he said those great phrases like you are our power users we believe in you and he said and I was reading a book on the plane coming down here and he pulled out of his pocket it wasn't actually that book but it was how to improve your golf swing and I held my head in my hands and I thought I mean the fact that he thought that would impress the audience that he understood books was remarkable beyond all measure and so to go very quickly through some of you have seen my colleague Jeff Numburg's piece on Google's digitization he didn't actually call it a disaster for scholars he called it a metadata disaster he gave it in front of a large number of people from Google who were not very happy some of you have read I mean wonderful things in the collection Madame Bovery written by Henry James I particularly like this one Thomas Brown's burial that was the young gardening books the merchant of Venice's foreign language studies the the autographed edition of Willa Catherine by Bruce Rogers it was The Mosaic Navigator by Sigmund Freud these were not pasties these were not made up this was part of the Google collection one that I'm particularly fond of that announced that I wrote the Portuguese version of the social life of information in 1899 I look young for my age I assure you my Portuguese has gone down a little since then many of you will know this stuff and in fact what was intriguing was that while Jeff and by extension I were attacked and vilified by many people people at Google actually thanked him and they made they said a million changes almost immediately as a result of errors that he brought out in their system other responses a 19th century scholar referring to me he said this was a kind of bibliographic fastidious and I thought that's really great to know that Henry James didn't write Madame Bovary as fastidious Danny Sullivan who some of you may know who runs a very influential blog called searchenginewatch.com which is the major commenter on Google from outside and he got into a puzzle with me online talking about some of these problems and he said look if I want to go skiing in Mammoth ski resort in California I just go to Google books and it will tell me what the average snowfall for that month is and I get a words worth phrase was it for this came to mind was it for this we scan the great research libraries of America and and the other was an extraordinary thing from Google which we got again and again it's the library's fault you guys did it it wasn't us and we pointed out to them again and again nobody in the libraries put the bisect categories in there but the libraries got the blame but in some ways what disturbed me more were the responses we got from librarians Jeff and I by a while the widely read librarian blogger were accused of ranting for talking like this about Google when Jeff finished speaking the first person actually to stand up was senior California librarian not I assure you Tom who said you know they can find books other ways and I thought gosh if you actually think that the reason for digitization is just to have another catalog to find books in the library if you don't understand that the whole reason that scanning is so important to scholars it'll give us an entirely different resource for research but one which needs to have good metadata to be reliable at all you really don't understand very much about why this is such an important project and we care about it so much and it seemed to me it went back to that very I mean Google has always changed how it characterizes the library but an early goal of the project which I have up there the library project's aim is simple to make it easier for people to find relevant books well that's not why we want a digital version of the library what research is really about and that misunderstanding one that again made me particularly angry and came from librarians was the claim that librarians make such cataloging errors too and with that I saw several senior librarians I think luckily none are in this room basically throw their staff as we say under a bus and in order not to appear in public I felt to be seen to be criticizing Google they were willing to say well we do that too and I thought that to be honest was thoroughly miserable and shameful librarians make amazing cataloging errors I come upon them all the time but they're not in the same league they they have a level of sophistication to your errors that I can only admire and so therefore to sort of make this specious comparison in order it seemed to me not to be seen to be technologically right or not to be seen to be opposed to what was going on was again horrifying and again showed to me some distance between librarianship and scholarship one that also intrigued me in some ways one of the trickiest ones to counter when you see those Kevin Kelly graphs of logarithmic explosion it will improve don't complain now because it will be better tomorrow and for sure it is it is getting better but I in fact have had the sort of good fortune since it actually first came out to be monitoring one particular book I had written an article about the project Gutenberg version of Tristram Shandy and I went to google books to see you know assuming well it's going to do it so much better and google books was a rewarding disaster and the nice thing is that five years on it still is splendidly disastrous on it in part because it doesn't know how to handle multi-volume works because it doesn't have anything other than the individual unit of the codex this is just the standard set of search results if you look at them more closely I probably can't read them on my screen now some of them are splendidly bad I like the one it says if you've ever wanted to find out more about the nature of Judaism or explain it to a friend this is the book now Stern is a very batty author but you can bet like hell that's not in that book but what in fact is more worrying about this and I think more serious is that if you look at the second one the Moby edition which is there 99 cents readily available for all oh sorry I forgot of course the other thing you get with google and it searches of course when you put this search in as I did yesterday you discovered that there's one million plus copies of Tristram Shandy this is what I was called the google lie and then you wind four pages on and you just go no actually there's 40 hits in the search they just thought look rather good on the first page to have a bigger number but if you actually go to the second edition here the first one up it's volume one they don't tell you how many volumes there are how you can find the other volumes etc etc but more intriguing for me in a way is that if you take the second edition it has this wonderful mishmash of the chapter outline on the contents page and also when it comes to the opening Greek quotation it says very nicely two lines in Greek and the reason that it does that of course is because it's actually a scan of the project Gutenberg edition and the project Gutenberg edition was taken from one of the most wonderfully defective 19th century editions of Tristram Shandy and google has now made that higher up as one of the first books that you will find something that you librarians have spent a lifetime putting in the further reaches of the library so only scholars can find is now the almost the first edition that anybody will stumble upon as an innocent reader another example which I always like is his Newt Hampson the Nobel Prize winner here's his book Pan about this sort of sexually tormented sailor and this is where he first meets the woman who's going to torment him and when she comes my heart knows all and no longer beats like a heart that rings as a bell I lay my hand on her tie my shoestring she says with flush cheeks the sun dips down and the sea rises again a touching scene no doubt and that's how you will find it on google books except that if you actually read the book by penguin it says and when she comes my heart understands all and no longer beats it peels and she is naked under her dress oh we forgot that it's just somehow editorial problem and I lay my hand on her tie my shoelace she says with flaming cheeks and a little later she whispers directly against my mouth against my lips oh you're not tying my shoelace sweetheart you're not tying not tying my it's a rather different book I would say but it's not the book that you actually find if you go straight down google books and look for a readable edition because there's a little explanation of the first US edition by Worcester was badlerized and here's this book about sexual neurosis from which all the sexual scenes have been removed and that through google books and the library project with your cooperation is now the first available example of this Nobel Prize winner so and it's not simply what's available now on google books because of course these books are now all being taken by various concerns wrapped in different ways and sold on the Kindle so in fact if you look at the Kindle edition of Tristram Shandy there are about seven different editions of the project Gutenberg via google books edition which is the obvious thing to buy for 99 cents so librarians and scholars having spent two generations three generations taking the worst editions and putting them as far as possible from the public reach have now turned round and said let's make these the most accessible editions for anybody looking at it. Scholarship worries a little some of you may have seen for instance the nice editorial in yesterday's New York Times talking about the British Library app saying what a wonderful thing it is the contents of the digital library but in fact if you look at what the librarians said about that it was just basically this shelf of books that nobody was looking at down in the basement of the British Library and they were the easiest to digitize so just as google went to all your repositories and put all those books that nobody was reading so the British Library is doing this again and getting applause from the New York Times but it doesn't seem to me to be the way to think about turning our libraries into digital account I just very quickly used to say that I'm now sort of coming in one way to google's aid some of you may have seen Tom said I'm working on trademarks that google is released not long ago all the pertinent and trademark information and it's a wonderful thing for me I wrote to google and said for once I'm really grateful for you Dan thanks for doing this and three weeks later I had to write back and say no I'm not it's a stunning mess of the first 30,000 trademarks up 7,000 are missing without any account of why there are errors, there are typos it's just a horrid, horrid, horrid and basically it was a kind of agreement with the trademark office to kind of raise its public profile public information we should release it but it goes in competition with all the private vendors who've been selling this stuff for so long and again there's a sort of sense that this is liberation and it's not one of the things that, well now let me as I'm running out of time pass on let me pass on from that too so one thing I want to say that I think is going on here as we think of this world of liberation is that we have this nice linear account because I should go back just one slide but in fact if you look for instance at Yochai Benklers because of these new great open network accounts an open source is not this nice egalitarian world it's tyrannical in the extreme, Linus Torvalds is the kind of old emperor that reigns over Lenox and in fact if you look at the exchanges and the battles and the people who threaten to take guns to each other over different things it's a very different world from that cozy world we like to expect the other thing about open source too of course is that it can crash if you do something wrong it'll fail ain't quite so true in some of the other world he uses the idea of Paul Ginsberg's server and says it's just open who talk to people at Cornell and they say, hang on this is no free and easy low cost way to provide new journals, it's very complex but we can idealize it once again Wikipedia I think is interesting it began with this great open attitude that anybody could edit and that came apart fairly early on and Wikimedia is now turning it back into much more of a top down organized systematized approach as indeed with Google Books where it seems to me that Hattie Trust has come along and is starting to give some adult supervision to one otherwise it was highly problematic now I can go very quickly through this but I just want to say that this in fact I think is a very long and old tradition if we look at the law journal Richard Posner has an article saying we're at the end of the law journal well in fact in the 1930s they said it was the end of the law journal and tried to end it in 1810 they said it was the end of the law journal and tried to end it and said anybody can edit law reports but slowly over time they said no there's a problem we need some structure we need some discipline here we can always laugh at Sarah Palin here was the New York Times Sarah Palin saying I don't need no medical degree to talk about medicine I just know what's right and wrong but in fact in the 19th century America disbanded most of its medical accreditation societies Washington D.C. did in 1850 with Thompsonian medicine you didn't need a degree but it goes through these moods of saying these institutional accreditation are problematic you see it again in the early days of science the Royal Society sets itself up as Thomas Spratt says for any man in a way to contribute the greater things are produced the free way than the formal the shift I think is nicely shown in the philosophical transactions this is the first edition of the philosophical transactions with wonderful articles on the very odd relation of a monstrous calf sucking stuff in and saying it's like a blog let's see what it's like but before too long you start to say no you have to have a bunch of initials after your name you have to have accreditation and authority and Newton starts throwing out a whole bunch of people who he doesn't want in there I think very nicely sort of summed up by the wife of boss experience and not authority is enough it's this battle between experience and authority in the 18th century between reason and authority and we know that institutions get corrupt and we try to throw them out and then occasionally we say hang on we actually may need them back in again because life without institutions is problematic it's the world I think of scholarship we spend a lot of time consensus building and then we break down the consensus but then we need to come back again and build those institutional consensus mechanisms back in again we need to know about reliability about authority just as we occasionally need to rebel against them all so together very quickly I've gone through all that because I actually think that that's an overlooked role that the library plays in many ways is to instantiate that institutional authority it's actually there physically building those great round reading rooms including the one in Washington there was a world in which things were inside and things were excluded there were things we had as library contents and things that are not and so to sum up quickly what I want to say about my view of the library from the other side of the counter is one is to borrow a phrase from Don Waters who said to me long ago look what Mellon is interested in is scholarship not libraries and scholarship is the important endeavor here if I may beat my little chest which I see you as collaborators in it seems to me to be very important to say and it's institutions therefore and not technology and to see yourself therefore is looking like information technology and driven by that rather than by institutional imperatives for all their corruption and backsliding I think therefore to argue a little against what you're talking about you have to think of the world of selections and not collections that that's really what's going on here and we select some things and other things we refuse to collect quantity and although we talk about global I think the local is enormously important and it's competition and not just collaboration that is I think that we're going to end up before too long with a kind of common stock which will be available to everybody better done by Google than Google books but that will mean as I mentioned yesterday about special collections that the distinction of particular libraries will be in some way what we can think of as their value added to the process rather than simply offering yourself as transponders in the system that just passes things from one to the other and survival will come very much I think from that I will go through all this because I'm running out of time but I think the question of is it in the library will be a shifting judgment it should no longer be a judgment on the library as the library adequate it should be a judgment on the particular work or collection is it worthy of being in the library I think that's a kind of different decision from my point of view let me pass over all that so that I can wrap up if I can there was a lifetime of research in that slide what I want to say is that one of the intriguing things about what we think I heard about the food chain yesterday the library supply chain is it supply chains are not little worlds necessary of cooperation they're worlds of extraordinary competition the example I had back there for instance was the PC supply chain where you saw Intel battling with Microsoft battling with Dell all of whom were meant to cooperate with one another but only one of which was really going to draw profits from that plane and it was going to draw the profits by subordinating the others and putting its own name first which is brilliant about the Intel inside logo and I think that in some ways you're caught in a world like that now particularly with the world of journal publishers it's interesting that my students seem less and less to know what journal an article comes from they know it's an article but I think libraries in some way have to start putting themselves forward as saying our name is on that so to sum up very quickly I think that libraries of the 21st century as a world of institutional identity have to cultivate identity for the university for the scholars but to do that it actually has to cultivate its own identity so if Tom will forgive me this I see in some sense that there is an identity to be given forth in this area so I was coming across the country about three years ago and four years ago and I was meant to be teaching but I unfortunately was caught up in the airport and was on a plane at the time so I gingerly picked up the telephone that they used to have in the back of the seat and began to blather down the phone line over a loud speaker to a classroom somewhere actually in Washington D.C. I think it was and when I put the phone back on the hook the man in the seat next to me telling me I thought what's he going to say he listened to all his nonsense and he said so that's what the view from 50,000 feet is all about if mine has seemed like that or more I do apologize but thank you very much Thank you for listening Music was provided by Josh Woodward For more talks from this meeting please visit www.arl.org