> “The point of a library is to preserve, and in order to preserve, a library must own,” Bustillos wrote. When I asked Potash about libraries and their growing digital budgets, he argued that “digital will always be better value,” but he acknowledged that, if current trends continue, “Yes, there is a challenge.”
I'm of two minds about this, because on one hand seeing public libraries give up control and move toward a subscribed model feels wrong, shortsighted, lazy, and a bunch of other bad things. But on the other hand the primary purpose of a public library is not to preserve materials, it's to provide access to them.
These electronic subscription services sure are a handy way to provide access to the most requested materials, so in the short term they're a great option.
But they're a deal with the devil. It's not hard to predict the future here: libraries will become more and more dependent on the subscriptions, which will go up and up in price. Eventually the public library system becomes an inefficient way to redistribute taxes to publishers and distributors.
That's different from today, when, due to the special status libraries have with respect to physical media, they're actually pretty inefficient from the publisher's perspective, but great from the reader's.
The "challenge" will be to get those same protections in place for digital resources before it's too late.
This will sound naive, but going back to first principles, the real root problem seems to be the lack of a true digital "ownership" option. If libraries had an option to choose between digital ownership, vs digital subscriptions, at least they'd retain some foundational level of control over digital media that they bought and own.
I feel that as an tech/media industry, we either lost our way or just intentionally chose this path, where we have generally wrongly equated ownership with DRM. But a basic definition of ownership includes the "legal right to use, possess, and give away a thing"[1]... being able to give away a digital object (i.e. via copying), is in no way incompatible with ownership. It's just that today's class of rights holders prefer to rent-seek via licensing, but that is not an insurmountable problem (i.e. it's hard to imagine that in a post-scarcity Star Trek future, they'd still be dealing with software/media licensing in the same way that we do today).
> the primary purpose of a public library is not to preserve materials, it's to provide access to them
I worked in public libraries for years and almost nobody understands or believes how true this is.
The main metric that libraries (the ones that I worked in) are assessed by, by the city council members who determine their funding, is "circulation" which is how many materials are loaned out to the public.
We have fixed finite stack space and we get rid of as many books as we acquire each year.
As a result, its in the libraries interest to buy way too many copies of all the latest best sellers and popular new releases, so that there will be plenty of copies available to borrowers right while the interest in them is high. Almost all of those will be weeded out less than a year later when demand drops off.
The circulation numbers are so skewed that maintaining a comprehensive back catalogue is a sort of vanity project, not an imperative.
Yes, strictly speaking, an archive or a research library is more likely to be long-term storage than a public library (of course, the division is not clear-cut--and some public libraries have substantial archival research holdings). It's pretty routine for libraries to get rid of materials that aren't being used by anybody anymore. But it does take control over the process, the choice of what to keep and what to give up, away from the libraries to some extent.
I'm of two minds about this, because on one hand seeing public libraries give up control and move toward a subscribed model feels wrong, shortsighted, lazy, and a bunch of other bad things. But on the other hand the primary purpose of a public library is not to preserve materials, it's to provide access to them.
These electronic subscription services sure are a handy way to provide access to the most requested materials, so in the short term they're a great option.
But they're a deal with the devil. It's not hard to predict the future here: libraries will become more and more dependent on the subscriptions, which will go up and up in price. Eventually the public library system becomes an inefficient way to redistribute taxes to publishers and distributors.
That's different from today, when, due to the special status libraries have with respect to physical media, they're actually pretty inefficient from the publisher's perspective, but great from the reader's.
The "challenge" will be to get those same protections in place for digital resources before it's too late.