RE: E-Reserves question

[Sandy Thatcher <sandy.thatcher@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Let me reply in this way. I'm not questioning whether librarians are 
faced with hard decisions, but I am questioning the overall 
priorities of universities that allocate more to assistant football 
coaches than to academics. (Yes, i do think coaches' salaries are out 
of control. If you knew how much I've written about intercollegiate 
athletic reform, you would not have raised that question.) That is 
not anything librarians can change, of course. But I do question why 
libraries should be burdened with the responsibility for paying for a 
license that covers the entire university--administrative copying, 
copying for coursepacks, etc.--when only e-reserves are the direct 
responsibility of libraries. I'll bet that at some universities this 
expense is taken from a more general administrative budget and not 
imposed on the library solely, or ;perhaps covered by a student fee. 
Am I wrong about that? I needled Peter about university presses 
because he specifically mentioned university presses as the target 
for cutting, whereas we all know that monographs are published by a 
lot of commercial publishers also. So, I wondered, why target 
university presses for cutting?

Sandy Thatcher


At 12:06 PM +0000 9/6/11, Kevin Smith wrote:
> 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


--
Sanford G. Thatcher
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