College & Research Libraries released a pre-print of From Stacks to the Web: the Transformation of Academic Library Collecting by David W. Lewis, dean of the Indiana University-Perdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) University Library.

Lewis predicts that the academic library world will radically restructure itself in the next eight years. He forecasts that by 2020, effectively all content delivery will have become digital (with print on demand for the few paper diehards). Academic libraries will pack up their open stacks into a few centralized print depositories for preservation and loans. Open access will be the dominant model for journals, many university presses will have gone under, and the rest will have reorganized into broader units that include libraries.

These coming changes, Lewis argued, require a transformation of how academic libraries collect. They will need to reduce print collections of material available digitally and move from an item-by-item book selection model to patron driven acquisitions and subscriptions. “The most important attribute of digital content from a collections stand point is that you don’t have to own an item before a user wants it,” the abstract said.

Though IUPUI is not currently using patron-driven acquisitions, Lewis told LJ it participated in a consortium to do so several years ago, and said, “I am convinced it will be either cheaper or deliver more use or both” once the model is more worked out. “The key to success will be to develop an understanding of demand and how to control costs,” Lewis said.  “It is not clear whether you are better off using this model primarily to buy portions of the long tail, or to purchase core items. Publishers […] are going to have to adapt to the new reality that libraries are going to find ways to purchase only what their users really need and that will mean lower sales.”

Lewis’ paper also calls for libraries to continue to support the open access model and restrain, if not reduce, spending on subscription journals. Especially, he said, they should abandon the “big deal” subscription package. “Our general strategy with journals is to try to maintain, but not increase, the dollars we allocate for journal purchases.  This of course reduces the amount of purchased subscription content we acquire, but it has not been all that difficult.  Faculty understand that prices are out of control, and while they don’t enjoy it, they are prepared to make cuts when required,” said Lewis.

Both for books and for journals, “building collections of published materials will decline in significance,” the abstract continued. By 2025 libraries’ collection development might decline by as much as half, to be replaced by curating unique, primarily digital content produced on, or of special interest to, the campus.

Lewis gave LJ an example of such curation on his own campus. “The IUPUI University Library has a special concern for philanthropy.  This supports a unique campus center, the IU Center on Philanthropy,” he said. The library has a print library on the topic and very strong special collections.  We have a variety of electronic resources.”

Finally, he says the academic library world must develop new mechanisms to fund national infrastructure, as these Web-scale enterprises take on an increasing role in preserving and providing the content that is not unique to a particular campus.

In addition to the library, the 58,000-square-foot building will house the writing center, academic support, learning resources center, the offices of online learning, and a café. “Most of the Learning Commons, however, is designated for student use with a projected 300 additional study spaces available to students,” Dr. Tim Schlak, Northwestern’s library director, told LJ. Floor plansare available online.

Exterior Learning Commons concept image

The library will house a 200,000-volume book and multimedia collection. A movable shelving-on-rails system will double storage space for the collection, but Schlak says the library doesn’t plan to increase the size of the collection to fill it. “We plan to cull the collection to a significant degree prior to the move-in,” he said. “We will redress gaps in the collection that the systematic review of ongoing weeding is uncovering once we are in the new building.”

The move in, which will make the collection inaccessible for two weeks, will be scheduled for late summer to minimize inconvenience to students. Northwestern has not yet decided what use to make of the library’s current building once the move is complete.

More than $11 million has been raised toward the Learning Commons project’s $15 million goal, including a $2 million gift in April by Jack and Mary DeWitt of Holland, MI. A life insurance gift of $306,000 from a private donor was also designated for the learning commons, as was a $100,000 grant from the Roy J. Carver Foundation.

The learning commons is the largest component of the college’s $55 million Imagine Campaign, which was launched in September. Over $37 million in gifts and pledges have been made to the campaign as a whole so far.

 Mashable is a great source of information on Pinterest to get you going, including this beginner’s guide and list of top brands using e.  Pinterest is growing at a rate that’s outpacing Google+….I think because it is so visually rich and a lot more fun than Google+.

At Columbus Metropolitan Library we’re using Pinterest to pin book covers in order to showcase our collection. We’re also use it to showcase historic photographs (especially since Columbus is now celebrating our bicentennial.) Pinterest works great to give visibility to our gallery shows and a host of other things.  Here’s a snapshot at how we’re pinning books:

 Some libraries on Pinterest include:

• NYPL
• Westerville
• Muncie Public Library
• Awesome Library, Kitsap, WA
• Fullerton Public Library
• Northeast Kansas Library System
• Clermont County Public Library
• Omaha Public Library
• BookExpo and NoveList are also on there.

So check it out. Once you get the hang of it you’ll love how it can visualize so much of what you have to offer the public!

In Syracuse, NY, a collaborative project to build the mini-braries was launched by residents, the iSchool, the College of Visual and Performing Arts, and the Office of Community Engagement and Economic Development. The group created a design based on repurposed public telephones, and opened their first in early February.

For those who don’t have a whole design school at their disposal, the Little Free Library project offers libraries for purchase as well as plans for building your own. And for those who want to help but don’t have a place to put a library, the project also accepts donations to help defray the costs of others’ libraries. A Google map tracks all the Little Free Libraries in place so far.

The Corner Library in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

For a more urban take on the micro-library there’s The Corner Libraries, which began in New Haven, CT, and has had test installations around New York. Now the project is “working on installing a bunch of libraries more permanently, which means complying with all city regulations on news racks, starting in downtown Manhattan and hopefully spreading throughout the world,” founder Colin McMullan said on his website. Possible locations, he told LJ, include Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the Flatiron/Chelsea neighborhood (in collaboration with people from the Center for Book Arts), and Storrs, CT (with Norman Stevens, founder of the Molesworth Institute and head librarian Emeritus of the University of Connecticut).

McMullan builds the libraries from scraps as a volunteer, making them essentially free. “Which is fine but maybe not that sustainable,” he said. “I’m interested in the pay it forward” model that the Little Free Library uses, he says. He hopes to work with the Little Free Library in the future. Unlike the Little Free Libraries, the Corner Libraries are locked; patrons who inquire are given a library card and the combination. The collections are seeded by volunteer librarians, who check them daily, and built up by patrons, and McMullen encourages people to donate objects that mean a lot to them or that they had a hand in creating. The collection of the Williamsburg Corner Library can be seen on Tumblr.

If that’s not ambitious enough, Brooklyn artists Julia Marchesi and Leon Reid IV are building The Hundred Story House. The 6-foot-high brownstone will be located in Cobble Hill Park, where it will house (of course) 100 books. Marchesi plans to donate the first 100 books from her own collection, according to New York’s Daily News. The project is being funded through crowdsourcing site Kickstarter. At press time, $8,296 of the project’s $13,000 goal had been pledged, with 10 days to go until the March 2nd deadline.

This month, the library’s board of trustees approved the start of schematic designs by architecture firm Foster + Partners. The library also launched what it called “a citywide public dialogue” about the library’s plan for the future (a far cry from the secrecy a Nation writer ascribed to the library last December.) Originally projected to be completed by 2014, the revised reopening might take place in 2017 or 2018, estimated library spokesperson Angela Montefinise.

Conceptual Design, Gottesman Exhibition Hall. Courtesy of Dbox for Foster + Partners

The plan was originally announced in 2008, when Schwarzman donated $100 million toward the renovation. It is expected to cost about $300 million for the 42nd St. renovation. The renovation’s goals are to better preserve research materials, consolidate locations, open an additional 20,000 square feet to the public (compared to all the consolidated locations put together), enhance the research process for scholars, and save money over time.

Specifically, the Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL) and the Mid-Manhattan Library, which houses a circulating collection, would be folded into the Schwarzman building and both the SIBL and Mid-Manhattan buildings would be sold. The Donnell branch on West 53rd Street, which closed in 2008, was sold in July 2011, according to the New York Times. Montefinise told LJ that Donnell sold for $59 million, which will go toward redoing the 42nd St. building. (An earlier deal for the property went south due to the economic downturn, which also delayed the sale of Mid-Manhattan.)

The NYPL estimates that the number of visitors to the building would triple as a result of the consolidation. (To accommodate all those extra visitors, the library would stay open till 11 p.m. some nights.)

Proposed additions include more computers and more dedicated spaces for up to 500 NYPL-affiliated writers and scholars, doubling the current capacity. To make room for these improvements and the circulating collection, which will move from Mid-Manhattan, two to three million of the five million research collections volumes currently housed in the building could be moved off-site, joining the 3.5 million materials already stored off-site.

The library forecasts that at least 1.5 million research volumes will remain on-site, chosen on the basis of which categories are used most often, along with 40,000 linear feet of manuscripts, 250,000 prints, 450,000 maps, close to one million photos, and more. The items stored off-site would be available within 24 hours, and some materials could be requested for online delivery.

The physical transformation is intended to be part and parcel of a larger plan to provide new, needed services at all branches, not just 42^nd Street. The total expenditure may come to as much as $1 billion, though plans have been scrapped for two new branches, one in Upper Manhattan and one on Staten Island, that would have cost $40 million each.

Though the city is barred from contracting with LSSI until April 9, it can still contract with a public agency or choose to run the library itself before then. Dale Redfield, acting deputy director, Ventura County Library, told LJ that in addition to LSSI, the city received responds to its request for proposals from the Thousand Oaks Library, the Simi Valley Public Library Foundation, and the County of Ventura: the decision will be made by the end of April.

The City Council approved a resolution in December to withdraw from the 13-library Ventura County system  before state legislation that would make it harder for them to do so took effect on January 1. The county is expected to continue to run the library through June.

However, Wharry and SEIU, which represents the library’s approximately 24 employee, argue that the withdrawal amounted to a legislative act. A legislative act requires an ordinance that takes 30 days to go into effect, rather than an administrative act, which can be made with a resolution and enforced immediately.

Those 30 days would bring Simi Valley within the scope of the new state law, which requires cities to show cost savings before privatizing, and bans any loss of jobs or benefits for existing library staff.

“Doing it as a resolution instead of an ordinance puts a limit on public feedback. It is questionable whether the public could do a referendum or an appeal,” Jesse Luna, spokesperson for the union, said, explaining its objections. The union initially presented the city with a writ asking it to reconsider, and filed the lawsuit once the city decided to press on with the resolution method. The county is also named in the suit.

Simi Valley Mayor Bob Huber directed an inquiry to the office of City Attorney Tracy Noonan as to why a resolution was chosen instead of an ordinance because of the ongoing litigation. As of press time, the city attorney’s office had not yet responded to LJ‘s request for comment.

One factor that might make it harder for the city to show cost savings if the plaintiffs win their case is real estate: the city leases the library building from the county. So long as the county runs the library, the lease only costs Simi a nominal $1 per year. However if the city switches to another operator, the annual cost will be $60,000. The county subsidizes the Simi Valley library with $300,000, according to the Ventura County Star, and that would be lost to the city as well.

According to Redfield, “The RFP requires that the existing staff be interviewed to stay,” he said. “The RFP also asks for a projected budget for increasing hours from 55 per week to 60.  There is no mention of a relocation of the library,” despite the increased cost of occupancy if the county isn’t selected.

If the county is not the chosen vendor, beginning July 1, Simi Valley’s existing staff would be shifted to vacancies in the county system in order of seniority. “Those who don’t fill the vacancies or are bumped because of low seniority will be let go but placed on a one year rehire list,” Redfield continued.

When it comes to public reaction to the city’s decision, “During the four public hearing with the City of Simi Valley I would say that 80 percent of the public did not want any change,” Redfield estimated. As to the reaction to the completed privatization of nearby Moorpark and Camarillo, both run by LSSI, “It’s a mixed bag on the public response,” said Redfield. “We hear from some patrons that our interlibrary request system is superior but I don’t have any hard statistics.”

I couldn’t help but think that this is the same problem facing libraries. How can we grab the public’s interest despite the one-click availability of information? How can we compete with the seductive voice of Siri?

I revisited these questions and more at the Salzburg Global Seminar program “Libraries and Museums in an Era of Participatory Culture” (ow.ly/8GfJ4), held October 19–23, 2011, and cosponsored by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Representatives from over 20 countries gathered for five intensive days of discussion and deliberations about the future of cultural institutions in a time of hyperconnected social ­participation.

Building collections and seeking ways to engage the public and promote curiosity challenge us all. The seminar gave me a newfound appreciation for the work of museum professionals and cultural institutions. The era of participatory culture demands that cultural and information professionals play an active, visible role in our communities. My takeaways were many.

More access

Breaking down barriers remains a goal for all. Transparency and access can lead to demonstrating the value of our institutions to the public. Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, described dropping admission fees to encourage visits, resulting in an increase. Walls between visitors and museum staff became windows that curators could open to talk directly with the public. “Everything we do should be measured by the benefit [to] the public,” he said. What fees might libraries drop? What walls could become windows into the operation of the library?

Preserving a community’s digital heritage is the work of both libraries and museums, but involving the community in these efforts is imperative as we move forward. Gathering histories via various media, scanning documents and objects for sharing online, and other activities are an important consideration for future services. A library in Colombia made it a service priority to invite people to bring in their documents and photos for digitization, adding Creative Commons licenses to the materials. A museum in India gave people an opportunity to display their personal collections in museum space. Folks could even cocurate their objects with museum staff.

Where learning occurs

These participatory spaces are where learning will occur. Pablo Andrade, studies department manager BiblioRedes, Directorate of Libraries, Archives, and Museums (DIBAM), Santiago, Chile, described the thriving virtual community created for residents of Chile. A key phrase impressed me in a video (ow.ly/8Gf8D) about the project: “all of them communicating every day in the community of local content.” Not only are participants creating, curating, and sharing, but they are exchanging knowledge without curriculum and administrators.

Truly, the world has become flatter. Understanding and empathy among cross-cultural partners in a technological environment is key to success. Technology doesn’t solve our problems, but it can be a conduit to making change and promoting progress. Noha Adly, deputy head, Information and Technology Sector, Bibliotheca Alexandria, Egypt, illustrated this concept when she described the fast-growing digital collection her library was amassing around the Egyptian revolution: 2.8 million tweets, 90,000 videos, 230,000 images, 18,000 Facebook pages.

When a guest becomes a host

Finally, I also took away the knowledge that my own emphasis on humanism and the heart in my teaching is an important part of what comes next. All of the talks and group reports at the seminar shared that common thread. Words such as civility, sharing, and caring were used throughout the program. Across our communities and across cultures, understanding, empathy, and kindness matter in everything we do. Technology extends human reach but participation requires engaged participants who feel welcome, comfortable and valued. Serhan Ada, head of the Cultural Management Program of Istanbul Biligi University, summed it up well in a final comment: “Participation occurs when someone welcomed as a guest feels as though they have become a host.”

That’s an important consideration in our evolution as cultural institutions: How will we open the door and invite everyone inside to participate?

“The collection will include some actual games but the focus will be more on capturing websites that embody gaming culture,” said Miki Lentin, head of communications for The British Library. These will include maps drawn by gamers, reviews, pictures and stories which develop game narratives, as well as resources that discuss the cultural and societal impact of computer games.

The collection is managed by the Library’s digital curation and preservation staff, according to The Independent.

“In addition to direct access to the websites, plans are underway to develop analytical access tools for the UK Web Archive,” Lentin told LJ. “We already provide an NGram search that can be run on the collection as a whole. This and other analytical access tools will be further developed over the next few years.”

The Library is working with the National Videogame Archive on the project. The Archive is a joint venture between Nottingham Trent University, Bath Spa University and the National Media Museum in Bradford.

While the library’s collection will be U.K. focused, Lentin said a comparable U.S. resource can be found at the How They Got Game initiative at Stanford University, led by Henry Lowood.

Libraries that ban all sex offenders from using their facilities should take note: it could be overturned in court.

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver last month affirmed an earlier ruling by New Mexico federal district court that found the city of Albuquerque’s 2008 law, which banned all sex offenders from libraries, unconstitutional.

The ban was challenged in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico on behalf of a sex offender identified as John Doe.

“People have a First Amendment right to receive information in public and the government needs to explicitly justify its actions if it’s going to infringe on such a fundamental right,” the ACLU New Mexico executive director Peter Simonson said in a statement.

While the appeals court was “sympathetic to the city’s desire to ensure that its libraries provide a safe, welcoming environment for its patrons, especially children,” the city did not provide any evidence or justification for its ban and did not provide any “alternative channels” for offenders to receive information at public libraries.

However the ruling said Albuquerque’s goal of restricting sex offenders from libraries could be achieved through a revised ordinance.

Albuquerque’s ban was put in place by former Mayor Martin Chavez after officials noticed more sex offenders frequented the main library branch – especially the computer section – when students from a nearby Catholic school went there after school, said Greg Wheeler, the assistant city attorney who litigated the case.

The ban was modified in May 2010 by Mayor Richard Berry after the lawsuit, so that sex offenders were restricted to use of the main library from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Thursdays and Saturdays, times when fewer children used the library, Wheeler said. In addition, sex offenders need to check in with library security guards and are banned from the children’s section.

There have been no complaints other than the lawsuit, or incidents in which children or parents have been approached by sex offenders, Wheeler said.

Wheeler said the city will not appeal the circuit court decision, and that he believed it upholds the current use policy for sex offenders. “If it’s narrowly tailored, it will survive,” he said of a library ban.

Brendan Egan, the attorney who handled the case for the ACLU of New Mexico, said they were happy their client’s rights were vindicated by the courts.

“You want to give anybody a chance for rehabilitation,” Egan said. “You have to leave some access to the library open. If a sex offender wants to do something meaningful, it negates their ability to check out a book on auto mechanics, or accounting, and limits their ability to improve themselves.”

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals covers several western states, including Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Utah and Wyoming.

One takeaway from the Albuquerque case “is absolute bans do not pass constitutional muster,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the American Library Association’s deputy director for the Office for Intellectual Freedom.

Caldwell-Stone noted that the court opinion could provide grounds for lawsuits to contest sex offenders library bans in other states.

While the ALA does not have an official policy on the topic, Caldwell-Stone said they are generally supportive of laws with a “reasonable time, place and manner restriction.”

Caldwell-Stone noted that some libraries with bans, such as those in Massachusetts, makes a distinction among levels of sex offenses and only limits individuals with more serious charges.

“As far as we’re concerned, there are sex offenders who are not violent offenders or predators – the teen who was sexting, or was involved with someone younger – and aren’t identified as predators,” she said.

According to Caldwell-Stone, other issues for lawmakers to keep in mind are that public libraries need to be supportive of rehabilitating adult criminals and “there needs to be a reasonable alternative for people who need access to library services.”

Caldwell-Stone said her office does not know of any other library bans that are being challenged, but her office will continue to track this issue in the future.

No one affected by the local library bans has approached the ACLU of Massachusetts, spokesman Christopher Ott wrote in an e-mail.

However, the ACLU believes such library bans are not particularly because most sexual offenses against children are committed by people who know the child. ”The best way to protect the public is to educate parents and children about how to recognize inappropriate behaviors by any adults, not just strangers,” Ott wrote.

Iowa passed a state-wide ban in 2009 that prohibits people convicted of a sex offense against a minor from being on library property without written permission from the library administrator, from loitering within 300 feet of library property, and from working or volunteering in a library.

Mandy Easter, a law librarian for Iowa Library Services/State Library, wrote in an email that there do not appear to be any challenges against the law in the Iowa Court of Appeals or the Iowa Supreme Court.

Easter wrote “both sex offenders and their attorneys are currently reluctant to ‘test the waters’ again.  Perhaps this federal court decision will give them the argument(s) they need to take another chance.”

Library bans for sex offenders vary across the country and sometimes they can be hard to enforce, said Jennifer Ekblaw, a law librarian at Boston University who wrote a paper on the issue for the Indiana Law Review.

Instead of completely prohibiting library use, Ekblaw said libraries should consider putting in more security measures, such as hiring more guards, installing cameras to monitor more isolated sections of the library or using a filtering program to limit sex offenders’ access to websites that might violate their parole.

“I think that would be a better approach because that would protect anyone in the library, whether they have any offenses or not, and protect people from any other safety hazard,” Ekblaw said.

Knox County, TN, enacted a ban in September 2011.

“Why are publishers being mean to my library?”
The fact that one giant publishing conglomerate after another has basically said that, in a digital age, public libraries are a bad idea has given the industry a bit of a PR problem. Until recently, the public mostly blamed their local public library when ebooks weren’t available, or were hard to download. They are now becoming aware that publishers actually want a system that cuts public libraries out completely.

Publishers can waffle all they want about the virtues of friction and developing alternatives that protect their business model; in reality, they are saying to the public, “Unless you are prepared to become our customer, we don’t want you touching our books. If that means literary culture shrinks to include only consumers—we’re okay with that. Culture is our intellectual property now, and we will set the terms for who gets access to it.”

I realize that to a large extent libraries are collateral damage in a skirmish between six corporations and a seventh, Amazon—but as they battle for power it has become abundantly clear that (as Steve Lawson, a librarian at Colorado College, Colorado Springs, pointed out this week in a brilliant and blunt blog post) they care about customers, not readers. Corporations that happen to publish books have no interest in the fate of culture at large, because they can’t monetize that which is public.

The RWA effect
Academic librarians have said for decades that the price of journals is unsustainable and damaging, but it seemed like a problem too mired in its own picayune academic context to be fixable. Publishers know that the majority of scholars who give them content, review it, and provide editorial work for free don’t care how much the finished product costs and aren’t interested in changing a system that so far works for them. This has been a “library problem” for most scholars, and what libraries have done to solve the problem has in many ways made it worse. We have used our money as duct tape to hold a broken system together and protect our users from its long-term consequences.

In shifting our resources from developing shareable long-term assets to buying and using up massive amounts of duct tape, we’ve abandoned future library users in order to keep our current clientele happy. Somewhere along the line, we decided that good customer service trumps every other library value. That could be connected to the fact that some of our more vocal faculty are bullies and we have been intimidated by them. But it’s mostly because it’s one value that works for both libraries and for corporations. We care about service. And that works out swell for big publishers.

Enough is enough
But big publishers of all kinds have been pushing their luck, and their behavior in the past few weeks has made the general public more aware of what we all stand to lose. The extent of fierce resistance to SOPA/PIPA among the general public caught the industries behind those bills by surprise. They were also surprised by scholars’ outrage over the audacity of the Research Works Act, when it became clear that the publishers’ assertion of rights over scholarly work isn’t just the fine print in a convenient terms-of-service agreement; publishers claimed to play such a significant role that they believe published research truly is their work. That was like poking sleeping scholars with a sharpened stick.

This attempted enclosure of common knowledge and culture is the natural outcome of neoliberal social engineering. This is what happens when it is assumed that what benefits corporations will automatically align nicely with what’s good for society. Right now, people are seeing what the future looks like:  knowledge and the arts will be something that people both produce and consume but cannot own, and so cannot share. Access will be metered by the corporations that own the distribution system and control what happens to these “products” they didn’t create. This isn’t going down well.

But this is exactly what scientist John Ziman warned about in a Nature article years ago: public knowledge is being transformed into intellectual property. Though he was writing about science, this has also happened to the arts. The corporations got a little too pushy in trying to encode these trends into public law, and finally the public is becoming aware of the implications of this massive transfer of our culture into private hands.

Time to walk the walk

All of this leads me to wonder why on earth librarians continue to perpetuate the very system that we have been scolding scholars about for years. Many of our scholarly journals are published by the very corporations that supported the Research Works Act and which will continue to do what they can to maximize profits, which means making research in librarianship unavailable to many. Either we believe in open access, or we’re okay with the enclosure of knowledge. To preach open access without practicing it is baffling to me.

I’ve already signed the Elsevier boycott—not a tough choice, as I have not even considered publishing in one of their journals for years. I have also decided that I won’t sign a contract in the future with any book publisher that withholds ebooks from public libraries, which is a bit tougher. My previous publisher is in that category, and they have a take-it-or-leave-it approach to contracts. But I have to live with myself.

I challenge academic librarians to be as brave as the principled academics who are willing to make a sacrifice for the greater good by signing the Elsevier boycott. This would mean not writing, reviewing, or providing editorial services for some pretty significant journals in our field, including the following:

• Journal of Academic Librarianship—published by Elsevier (36 percent profit reported in 2011)
• Library Collections, Acquisitions, and Technical Services—published by Elsevier
• Serials Review—published by Elsevier
• Cataloging and Classification Quarterly—published by Taylor & Francis/Informa (32 percent profit reported in the first half of 2011)
• College & Undergraduate Libraries—published by Taylor & Francis
• Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology—published by John Wiley & Sons (42.5 percent profit reported in 2011)

These are only a handful of the many LIS journals published by these corporations. Some of my friends are on these journals’ editorial boards, and I realize I am putting them on the spot. But it seems to me there’s more integrity in raising this issue with my friends and colleagues rather than simply calling out scholars who I don’t know writing in fields that are not mine. I urge us as librarians to step back and think about the implications of voluntarily entrusting our scholarship to these corporations.

It’s not that the corporations are bad. It’s just that their interests have proven not to align well with the values of our profession and the results have been disastrous for our libraries.

To paraphrase distinguished mathematician Timothy Gowers, the moral issues here are among librarians, rather than between librarians and particular publishers. If you publish in journals owned by corporations that you feel are inhibiting the flow of knowledge, you are making it easier for these corporations to take action that harms libraries and their missions, so you shouldn’t.