News

The overarching mission of the University of Michigan Library is to support the research and scholarship of our students and faculty.  As we build our collections, we endeavor to provide the resources that our faculty need for their work.  As we develop and reshape physical spaces in our buildings, we look at how our students work and how we can best accommodate their needs for social, group study, and quiet study areas.  The new Bert's Café in the Shapiro Undergraduate Library and the Library Gallery in the Hatcher Graduate Library are two recent examples of reconfigured space.  Both of these areas have experienced use beyond all expectations since they were opened this past year.

The volume of work that has been digitized from academic libraries is growing rapidly, largely but not exclusively as a result of partnerships with other institutions and with private corporations. Storing these millions of works reliably and accessibly poses new challenges to the library world. There are tremendous advantages, both economic and functional, to developing shared digital repositories. Shared facilities will enhance access to digitized works for both scholarship and teaching and will also improve our ability to store materials securely over the long haul. These considerations have led the University of Michigan, in collaboration with Indiana University and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (comprised of the Big Ten and the University of Chicago) to develop a shared digital repository, called the HathiTrust, with the hope that it will be the first step towards building a universal library for digitized content. Just recently the University of California system and the University of Virginia joined the partnership.

The recent settlement of the lawsuit by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers against Google allows for much greater access to digitized materials and will have an enormous impact on the viability of a universal library. The University of Michigan Library played a significant role in bringing the parties to the table and finding a solution that benefits all involved. This settlement promises to be life changing as the collections in our Library and other academic libraries become more and more accessible to people around the world.

While we look towards a day when our principal method of accessing most library materials will be electronic, we must be committed to preserving original texts and the accessibility of those texts. Once again, there are opportunities for collective efforts on the part of academic libraries. When digital copies are searchable and readable, we will not need to house the original print materials in prime real estate on university campuses. We can keep a limited number of copies of each book in shared locations rather than in each library. This will be a significant financial relief for all parties, while still preserving and enhancing our ability to undertake scholarship. (And, for those of you who like to curl up by the fire with a scholarly monograph, we are developing excellent and economical print-on-demand capabilities.)

There is another area in which Michigan is addressing serious challenges to access. The cost of scholarly journals, especially in science and medicine, has been rising rapidly for the last two decades. Great universities such as ours find themselves in the strange situation of first paying faculty to do the research, then paying faculty to review and edit the work for publication, and finally paying publishers to make the work available through the library. In addition, there are the new costs associated with the digital age. In the days of print, once the Library bought a copy of a journal, we owned it, and we could preserve it and even copy it if that were necessary for preservation. Electronic journals, on the other hand, are generally licensed, and we basically pay rent for the privilege of using these journals. However, we often lose the rights, even to back issues, that we had previously rented, if we do not continue to subscribe.

To help address some of these cost issues, the Library is working to develop more reasonable and sustainable economic models for publishing research findings.  Deep Blue, a repository created to preserve and make accessible our faculty's work in perpetuity, is one step in this direction. The Library is negotiating with major publishers to establish a model that will allow the publishers to profit from research publications yet ensure that these publications get into Deep Blue. One model being discussed would allow for an embargo period—enough time for publishers to make their profit—before the publication is made available through Deep Blue. We face serious challenges due to the combination of profit-oriented publishers of academic work and excessive protections (works now stay in copyright for the life of the author plus seventy years) afforded by copyright law.

Ultimately, it seems likely that copyright law will be organized to serve publishers. Thus, one avenue for academic libraries is to become publishers and to provide scholarly works on more reasonable terms. The University is developing new publishing models under which content is free or available at a low cost and copyrights are retained by the authors. The Library's Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO) was established to experiment with these models. Driven by the goal of disseminating information rather than maximizing profit, SPO is providing opportunities for publishing text books that are available online or by print-on-demand for a small sum. This reduces the need for warehouses full of books and dramatically cuts the costs of publishing. SPO also publishes a number of journals that are either freely accessible or are made available at a very low cost, again helping to change the economics of publishing. One such journal is the Philosopher's Imprint, which has become one of the leading journals in the field, proving that electronic journals can fully substitute for print.

Libraries are undergoing rapid change as the technological environment in which they do their work is changing. Because so much that matters to our mission is taking place outside of the Library, and, indeed, outside of the University, it is essential that we spend time and energy engaged with issues and institutions beyond the campus. In the two years that I have been in the Library, I have learned that Michigan's librarians do this surpassingly well, albeit quietly. It is not like librarians to toot their own horns, but what is happening is too significant to go unnoticed. Our librarians are creating the library of the future locally, nationally, and internationally. Once again, Michigan truly is a Leader and Best!

Paul N. Courant

University Librarian and Dean of Libraries