RE: E-Reserves question

[Kevin Smith <kevin.l.smith@xxxxxxxx>]

What seems most remarkable about this diatribe is that you, Sandy, do not seem
to feel that the salary of an assistant football coach is exorbitant.

Seriously, what is really immature is the facile assumption that librarians
are in a position to decide between buying monographs and hiring another
football coach.  Just to be clear, we are not in a position to supplement our
collections allocations from the athletic budget.  Even the people who usually
give us those allocations, the chief academic officers, are not able to make
that call.  They too have to live within the budget priorities set by Boards
of Trustees.  You can complain all you like about those priorities, but please
do not accuse us of immaturity for trying to make responsible decisions with
the money entrusted to us.

Peter is absolutely right.  If we are forced to purchase an annual blanket
license, there is no place for that money to come from except our collection
budgets.  I have several times been part of specific discussions on this
point, and have always been convinced that as it now stands the annual license
is too much money for too little coverage, and its cost would seriously impair
our ability to buy other materials.  It is not that we want to "punish"
university presses, but they are one of the few sets of vendors with whom we
can adjust incremental expenses.  You have to get over yourself and look at
the wider world we inhabit, where choices like this are not optional.

So-called "big deals" have many problems, but they provide a large amount of
access to our users, and that is our bottom line.  In fact, the annual license
would function a lot like another big deal -- it would be a substantial drain
on our resources and a price we could not control over time -- yet it would
not provide us any access to new materials.  Instead, it would inevitably
elbow out some purchases of new scholarship.

You posed a rhetorical question about priorities -- football over scholarship.
I want to ask you a question that is not at all rhetorical, but one librarians
face all the time.  Would you, as the former director of a university press,
prefer that we buy an annual campus license even if it means not buying new
monographs that you publish?  Do you really believe that is the best outcome
for scholarship?

Kevin L. Smith, M.L.S., J.D.
Director of Scholarly Communications
Duke University, Perkins Library
P.O. Box 90193
Durham, NC 27708
919-668-4451
kevin.l.smith@xxxxxxxx

-----Original Message-----
From: Sandy Thatcher [mailto:sandy.thatcher@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, September 05, 2011 8:34 PM
To: Peter B. Hirtle; digital-copyright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: digital-copyright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: E-Reserves question

I am curious to know what you consider "exorbitant." The blanket license that
the CCC offers would cost most universities in Div. 1 less than the annual
salary of an assistant football coach.  Do universities consider football more
important than providing course materials? (Don't answer that question!)

One can't reduce expenditures on the big deals?  What is sacred about big
deals? Already they have been discontinued at a number of universities.

So, an adverse decision in the GSU case will lead librarians to take revenge
on university presses by cancelling monograph purchases?
That's certainly a mature attitude.


At 11:50 AM -0400 9/5/11, Peter B. Hirtle wrote:
>As Sandy well knows, there have been no court decisions regarding reserves
>either before or after the 1976 Act, so it would be difficult to conclude
what
>constitutes "fair use" or even what the consensus regarding fair use may
have
>been. The Georgia State case will provide some guidance on the matter.
Until
>then, it would be dangerous to assume that court decisions based on
commercial
>use of material or taking place in a commercial setting apply to educational
>institutions.  The ALA statement on ereserves that I cited in my message is
>the best current guidance libraries have on fair use in a reserves setting.
>
>On the GSU case, I am optimistic that the court will follow the plain letter
>of the law.  A decision that encouraged libraries to pay exorbitant
permission
>fees to the CCC would be disastrous for most academic publishing.  In many
>universities, permission fees would come from the acquisition budget.  Since
>one can't reduce expenditures on the "big deals," that money would come from
>the money spent for monographics.  At Cornell, we narrowly avoided dropping
a
>third of the university presses from our approval plan last year; a decision
>in favor of the AAP and CCC would most certainly mean that we would no
longer
>acquire titles from those publishers.
>
>Peter Hirtle