I gave a short presentation for the ALA Midwinter 2015 Print Archive Network Forum delving into the “endangered species” question for monographs. While the talk was light on formulas and specifics, it expands on some of the work from the UCLA scarcity case study that I worked on with Dawn Aveline and Annie Peterson, and continues to argue two main ideas:
One, that we ought to base the print archive network on local/regional efforts, and not attempt to prescribe a national plan. The national work is net-work: a system to monitor for risk and optimize traffic across sub-nets and nodes. We need some national-level mechanism to alert, convene, and coordinate, but a diversity of localized business models and operational approaches in active conversation is the way to develop to good practices and sustainable programs.
Second, that we need to pace the print archiving effort so that we first address the areas of the collection that both have massive overstock and very low incidence of artifactual or para-textual value. This lets us solve the most pressing resource issues while also buying time to develop the right methods for protecting scarcely-held works and identifying specific books that have material culture value.
What follows is not a verbatim transcript and is a little more expansive than the remarks I made at PAN. The live conversation and session timing called for a few cuts and quips, day-of, but here are the slides (PowerPoint Slide Show: ALAMW2015-PAN-Nadal-Compact) and notes I spoke from:
[SLIDE 1]
This morning I want to present a few framing devices for thinking about preservation in the context of collective collections.
I grew up a short walk from here [[CLICK]], surrounded by the immense evergreen forests of Clark County Washington, and now I spend my days here…
[SLIDE 2]
…at ReCAP, surrounded by just shy of 12.5 million books and documents. So, I have spent my whole life around large quantities of cellulose. No surprise, then, that in thinking about collection management, I find it informative to look to frameworks used in sustainable forestry and environmental stewardship. As useful as these frameworks can be, though, using them also invites in some metaphors that have to be handled with care in the literary realm.
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To proceed safely, I’m going to urge the standard backcountry advice: work from a map, but make allowances for the trail itself, and all the various surprises that it brings. Some of those are pleasant diversions, others are signs that it’s time to plot a new course.
[SLIDE 3]
This is the IUCN Red List (http://www.iucnredlist.org/), the most widely used framework for monitoring endangered species status, and you’ll see that it has a series of threat categories, with “Least Concern”, “Near Threatened”, and “Vulnerable”, on the way to “Endangered” and “Critically Endangered”. So there can be a series of inflection points between the time that a species becomes a matter of concern, and the time it becomes endangered.
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There is a “least concern” region for books as well, with adequate supply and even overstock, where we have enough copies to supply our readers and to hedge against probable loss. There is also a threshold for genuine risk, below which we have to take special care to guard against loss, and may not be able to fulfill every request for a book.
From the models we have right now, that green line is probably around 20 or 30 copies, the red line around 8 to 12. To assign really good numbers to those boundaries, we have a lot more work to do, though. We need to work closely with our readers to determine which copies are individually important, and we need to work with mathematicians to develop good risk assessment models.
Whatever those numbers are, when we place them on a chart of our holdings, we’ll see that they fall towards the tail.
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and, when we think of printing over time, they are still on the tail, in is case suggesting that there is higher risk and lower benefit from drawing down in the hand-press period or the long-19th century, the eras when individual copies are more likely show important variation in their material, associative, and paratextual value.
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because libraries grew rapidly after the mid-century mark, there are many indications that our oversupply of holdings and our low risk categories for draw down overlap
[SLIDE 4]
The big area of opportunity is in the mid 20th century to the present, when books were coming into the library directly, and were produced with almost no variation from piece to piece within a print run.
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Focusing on more recent, more widely held monographs as our first order of business also buys us time to develop a more nuanced approach to riskier groups of material.
Here, in fact, is where the endangered species metaphors breaks down. Because books don’t age and die like living organisms, we can take as long as we want or need to deal with endangered books, especially if we’ve put them into good storage environments.
[SLIDE 5->6]
As we figure out how to lump and split our categories of risk, it’s important to pay attention to the groupings for “not evaluated” and “data deficient”.
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The first thing that IUCN does is to gather data through a field survey. For libraries, this means establishing the portions of the monographic collection that are likely to have major impact, groupings like mid-late 20th century publications, works in English and Western European languages, or perhaps certain publishers. We will need other metadata to establish our own taxonomy, of course. I think that FRBR is tremendously important for this. Being able to say whether our goals are to preserve a work, an expression, or a manifestation will have a big impact on which particular Items we keep, and in what quantities we have to keep them. In turn having an expressive metadata model that can manage semantic constructs about why we kept or how we are keeping a particular Item may be important, a reason for Print Archive Networks to keep an eye on RDA. (All this means that we need to cultivate and retain a corps of expert catalogers, and we need to be ready for them to say “I told you so” pretty often.)
Most of that data and metadata is in the future tense right now, though, even as we’re under a lot of pressure to manage collections in ways that are space, time, and cost-effective. Because of this, we have to fall back on working within the large-scale trends that we do know to prevail across our collections. This is something conservation biologists do, as well. Even if the various species present in an area are unknown or uncounted, for an example, an assessment of the habitat may provide important indicators of risk or safety, and suggest actions that can be taken to protect all species in the region, even when their specific threats are not yet know.
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For us, this habitat-based approach aligns well to indicators like rates of ILL loss and regional or consortial usage patterns, where there are preexisting relationships and trusted partners. Conservation has often worked best when it emerges from and makes connections among local efforts, rather than trying to impose a plan out of context.
The other key element in evaluating the safety of the print habitat is registering retention commitments. Here, we need to start making serious effort to get commitments publicized and made at scale. I hope that work on the HathiTrust Monographic Print Archive and the efforts OCLC is making to develop a set of Shared Print offerings will lead to important developments soon
(Post-presentation notes: Tom Teper gave an update later in the session about the HT task force’s work and our intention to have 50% of the monographs in HT supported by a retention commitment within a year of the program’s launch, so something like 3 million retention commitments in the next 24 months or so.)
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Despite the ample opportunity for draw down, there are already titles at risk. It’s worth saying that the metaphor breaks a little here, as well, because libraries are not necessarily the bibliographic wild lands, in fact, we may be more like the zoo. It’s worth remembering that there may be a supply of copies to counteract endangered title status outside of our immediate community, in the secondary market and in the many libraries and private collections not represented in our shared bibliographic utilities.
This points towards an area of activity that would be either new or a substantial overhaul of some areas of library work. Imagine courting donor collections or developing a secondary market acquisitions group to relieve scarcity, or think about how gifts and exchanges might be revitalized as a way to alter the national distribution of materials to ensure faster, more reliable supply for everyone.
[SLIDE 7->8]
So, let us try to tie these threads together with one last analogy. Consider the antelope… with apologies maybe being due to Suzanne Briet and David Foster Wallace
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If we talk about threats against antelope, all of these things are true:
There are twenty-five endangered antelope species. Antelope are at risk from loss of habitat, in part due to competition with grazing cattle, as well as trophy hunting and poaching for the illicit trade in pelts and horns.
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But antelope are not systemically at risk, because antelope are barely a system. They are what is (lovingly, I hope, and at any rate humorously) know as a “wastebasket taxon”. Instead of a strict genetic or taxonomic grouping, antelope are even-toed ungulates that are not domesticated cattle. In this way, monographs look a lot like a wastebasket taxon: “published works that are not serials” that are “intended to be complete in one part” and include literary novels, scholarly monographs, government publications, dissertations and theses, and maybe even an ungulate or two.
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As we shift our metaphor to libraries, similar issues apply. We need to be alert to changes in habitat, but also remember that large-scale changes to the library as a place or institution are an indicator of potential risks, but not themselves evidence of actual threat, let along extinction.
And as with the antelope, even if we want to stop poaching, we probably still want space for our grazing cattle. Here again the metaphor is both useful and dangerous, since analogies to browsing scholars and encroaching research commons, maker spaces, and computer labs all seem possible. Rather than totally commit myself to a faux pas, let me observe that this is a question of the commons, and commons management is eminently possible.
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The work that researchers like Elinor Ostrom and Arun Agrawal have done shows that there is no single panacea, though. Successful commons tend to be locally developed and enacted, and the role of regional or national governance is to support local effort by filling gaps; providing information, including risk alerts; and helping to convene local efforts; but it is not to prescribe solutions from on high.
So, as we do this, we should engage with allied professionals. Hunters, biologists, and hikers all have a stake in environmental stewardship, even if they subscribe to different magazines. Print collections obey Ranganathan’s fifth law all too well, and place tremendous pressures on library resources, resources that are under pressure to serve a lot of important use-cases, print collections only one among the many. Despite that pressure, let’s not forget that the process of print archiving can also be a way to deepen our level of engagement with some of our stakeholders, some of them listed here. Done right, the print archive effort will not only keep distinctive collections, it will specifically identify them for the first time ever, and make them more accessible, while also freeing up a lot of library space, time, and money for the many other services and resources we want to provide to our communities.
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